Q Toon: A Familiar Target

My apologies for such a verbose cartoon this week. I might not have needed to include the explanation that the Republicans in the cartoon are discussing a response to the mass shooting of children attending mass at a Catholic private school in Minneapolis last week.

Except for the possibility that there would be another mass shooting by the time this cartoon reached the newsstands.

Right-wing media and politicians quickly latched onto reports that the gunman was an MtF transgender person. (I do not know the shooter's preferred pronouns; I will use feminine ones to refer to her, but use the word "gunman" as if it were gender-neutral.) Firing hundreds of rounds through the stained glass windows into Annunciation Catholic Church, the shooter then took her own life.

What relevance, if any, the gunman's gender identity had to do with the shooting one can only speculate, so speculate the right-wing media promptly did. 

What is clear is that she was a former student of the Catholic school, and that her mother once worked at the parish. The shooter left behind a some sort of  manifesto and numerous threats on line, including threats to do exactly what she did. 

“This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message,” according to the killer's manifesto. “The message is there is no message.” 

The shooter's previous online posts evince a festering hatred of virtually everybody and everything — with the exception of mass murderers. Them she admired.

But transgender persons are Republicans' go-to scapegoat for murders these days (at least when the killer is white). Trumpster Obergruppenführer Sebastian Gorka was on CNN over the weekend pushing inflated numbers for transgender shooters in these mass shootings, mischaracterizing some specific gunmen as trans to do so.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) used the occasion to call on the state of Minnesota to repeal its transgender refuge law (which affords protections to caregivers and persons undergoing transgender therapy who might be threatened to extradition to a state where transgender therapy is illegal). Congressloon Emmer failed to explain how that law is relevant to the Annunciation shootings; the gunman did not flee to Minnesota from some red state Cisberry R.F.D. 

By the way, do you remember the white guy who assassinated a Minnesota legislator and her husband? Slimy Don Jr. went on TV to point the blame at transgender community despite the killer having publicly railed against the  LGBTQ+ community — transgender persons in particular. 

Well, at least Republicans haven't gotten around to blaming transgender people for measles outbreaks and forest fires. Those are still the fault of midichlorians and Jewish space lasers, last time I checked.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I was a bit miffed by how last week's cartoon looked on my phone.

Many of my cartoons consist of four equally-sized panels, but there were five panels of different sizes last week. If you were reading it on a desktop computer, each panel should have shown up equally tall; on my phone, however, they were equally wide. 

I stack the cartoon panels for this blog instead of displaying each cartoon as a single graphic solely for the benefit of those of you who visit here by phone, which seems to be how most people interact with the internet these days. I'm just trying to save phone readers the bother of pinching and expanding. 

We aim to please.

So it was disappointing to see the top panel of my cartoon scrunched down so that folks had to pinch and expand it anyway.

It's even embarrassing, since Blogger tells me I have an uptick in usual readership in the last couple of weeks. (For reasons I can only guess at, the second most frequent referrer to my blog after Google has been a fast food burger chain's website.) To those of you who aren't webcrawlers, welcome. Heck, welcome, you webcrawlers, too. Have it your way.

I'll be back to the four equally-sized panel format this week.

Labor Daze

In honor of the last holiday weekend of the summer, today's Graphical History Tour celebrates Labor Day, 1925.

"His Day" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, Sept. 7, 1925

The holiday fell on September 7 that year, so most of today's cartoons were published on that date. We start with this cartoon by the young man filling in for Jay Norwood Darling during Ding's illness. Old Man Work here graciously permits Organized Labor to join The Public on their way to some picnic grounds.

"Labor Day" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Sept. 7, 1925

John McCutcheon's Uncle Sam wishes American Labor a sixteen hour day of rest and recreation.

Come those other eight hours, I presume, American Labor was expected to get right back to work.

These first two cartoons do point out that Labor Day was finally a chance for Dad to get out and enjoy some time with his family. Paid vacation was not a thing for most workers a century ago; the "family summer vacation" typically was just for Mom and the kids. Dad stayed behind to keep punching the clock at work every day.

"The Spirit of Confidence" by Dean O'Dell in Dayton Daily News, Sept. 7, 1925

Dean O'Dell's Uncle Sam and American Labor engage in some discreet petting while the heady fumes of prosperity and peace waft from picturesque smokestacks.

"The Giant of Progress" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Star, Sept. 7, 1925

I'm wondering at what point Tom Foley or his editorial page editor decided that his cartoon needed to be printed as a mirror image of the original drawing. Foley did not customarily sign his cartoons backward; the "LABOR" stone looks to me like something scratched onto the cartoon at the last minute.

"Rare Consistency" by John M. Baer for Labor, ca. Sept. 4, 1925

John Baer has appeared before in these Graphical History Tours in his connection to the Nonpartisan League movement of the 1910's, which had sent him to Congress from North Dakota from 1917 to 1921. After his defeat for reelection in 1920, he literally returned to the drawing board, cartooning for Labor, the newspaper of the National Railroad Union.

In "Rare Consistency" (a title possibly added by the editors of Oklahoma Leader, who routinely pasted text onto the cartoons they printed), Baer highlights the hypocrisy of industrial associations and trusts warning farmers, laborers, and soldiers against collectively organizing. 

"Well, Here's Hoping" by Bill Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 31, 1925

As Labor Day approached, the threat of a strike by anthracite coal miners loomed. Most homes and businesses were heated by coal in those days, so an interruption of the coal supply in the fall and winter was liable to have serious consequences for much of the country.

"Modest Demands" by O. "Zim" Zimmerman for Daily Worker, Chicago, Sept. 9, 1925

Drawing for the communist Daily Worker, Zimmerman laid out the United Mine Workers' demands: a nationwide contract with higher wages for fewer hours, and unemployment pay to come out of corporate profits. 

"It Does Look Like It" by Winsor McCay for Star Company, ca. Sept. 1, 1925

By Labor Day, negotiations between the UMW, led by John Lewis, and management, headed by operators' scale negotiating committee chair W.W. Inglis, had been dragging on for weeks, with no apparent progress to report.

"Hard Hard-Boiled" by Harry Westerman in Ohio State Journal, ca. Sept. 1, 1925

Harry Westerman's Uncle Sam displays a sterner attitude toward hard coal miners (and their mine operators) than Dean O'Dell's did toward American Labor in general. 

"We're With You" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Public Ledger, ca Sep. 5, 1925

Most editorial cartoonists placed blame for the possible strike on both labor and management; I'm sure nearly everybody was aware of what a dirty and dangerous job coal mining was and is. Bill Sykes's cartoon , however, comes as close as any I've seen to blaming the union workers.

It is difficult to read the animals' labels in Sykes's cartoon: the bird is labeled "Waste," and the wolf is labeled "Want."

"The Man Who Used to March on Labor Day" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 7, 1925

Returning to the holiday, Daniel Fitzpatrick's Labor Day cartoon raises more questions than it answers. Is the man who used to march on Labor Day driving alone or in a parade? Is he a really big guy, or is he driving the first subcompact vehicle?

"No One Has a Good Word to Say for Work" by Manuel Rosenberg in Cincinnati Post, Sept. 7, 1925

And finally, Manuel Rosenberg leaves us with some deep thoughts about justification through work.

I hope you are able to enjoy an escape from work this weekend, yet, where applicable, still have a good word to say about getting back to the job on Tuesday.

Q Toon: Catching Up

It is finally time to extricate Leo the Liberal from Trumplinka Concentration Camp and extrajudicial expulsion to Shitholistan, so I've decided that his partner, MAGA Max, finally checked his phone messages and discovered that Leo was waiting for him at the Ottawa airport.

How they will explain returning to the United States without any luggage I leave to your own imagination.

Having recently traveled by car through southern Ontario, I can report that passing into Canada at Niagara Falls was a breeze, whereas coming back into the U.S. at Port Huron entailed a twenty-minute traffic jam at customs. The questioning at either border was friendly and non-problematic; we did see one car directed aside for further examination, but of course, we have no idea why.

But while a real human being who was returned from unjust banishment to a Salvadorian concentration camp is now being threatened with expulsion to Uganda, I'm going to let Leo fall between the cracks of Trump's lawless deportation purges. Probably.

The stumbling block I had to surmount for this cartoon (besides the Canadian flight attendants union strike) was Max's dialogue in the second and third panels. It doesn't quite sound like something a MAGAzoid would say.

But for the past several months, Trumpian fascism has affected Max directly. Now that it no longer does, Max, like the rest of the MAGA flock who used to see threats to democracy and the Constitution everywhere, will go back to blind Trump l'oeilty.

In 2020, Trump's blustering, blundering response to the COVID-19 pandemic was something that affected all of us directly, and helped convince a majority of the U.S. electorate that he had to go. 

Four years later, few of us were still directly affected by COVID-19; the pandemic seemed manageable. So a majority of the U.S. electorate decided, hey, what the heck, better to elect a manifestly corrupt, lying, self-absorbed, dim-witted, venal, seditious convicted felon who nearly got us all killed, than that Black woman.

This Week's Sneak Peek

While drawing my cartoon last night, I decided to catch up on some of the late night talk shows that I had missed while My Better Half and I were on vacation earlier this month.

When I called up On Demand list for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on our Spectrum cable TV service, I discovered that the most recent episode was June 9. That was one of the the last Late Shows before Colbert went on a vacation, came back with a mustache, and got canceled by Paramount-CBS as a favor to the Despotic Trump Regime. None of the July and August episodes were available.

I'm not sure what Spectrum is up to; the other episodes available are not the immediately previous ones, as has usually been the case with The Late Show and every other program.

Is this a new Spectrum policy? Artificial Intelligence imagining what episodes I might prefer? Are the rest of his shows available only by subscription to Paramount-Plus? Or is CBS censoring Colbert now that they've cancelled his show?

Have we always been at war with Eastasia?

Ding Ding Ding: Late Breaking Correction

"The Comeback" by Ed LeCocq for Des Moines Register, ca. April 26, 1925

In a recent Graphical History Tour of editorial cartoons eulogizing Fighting Bob LaFollette, I had wondered why I couldn't find an example by the Des Moines Register's Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling, a frequent LaFollette critic. Nor could I find a cartoon by him during the Scopes Monkey Trial and the subsequent passing of William Jennings Bryan. Instead, the Register had been running cartoons by Edward C. LeCocq.

I can now report that Darling was laid low for several months in 1925 with peritonitis, according to updates on the Register front page in March and April.

The University of Iowa library identifies the above LeCocq cartoon as having appeared in the Register on Sunday, April 26, 1925, which is the date on the clipping from a Tribune somewhere. I'm not finding it in the Register on that date or any other that month.

Darling's last cartoon before taking sick appeared on March 23, 1925. For a few weeks thereafter, the Register had no editorial cartoon on its front page; its March 24 front page included a boxed notice that "Due to the illness of Jay N. Darling (Ding), the cartoons will be omitted temporarily from the first page of The Register."

After a few weeks, the Register front page sported a few syndicated cartoons by Winsor McCay and Rollin Kirby. It ran the first of LeCocq's cartoons on April 19; he was soon drawing daily editorial cartoons for the front page for the rest of the year.

"If You Don't Think the World Moves, Just Try Stopping for a Year" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, April 5, 1926

Darling finally returned to the Register's front page on April 5, 1926, along with his editor's report that

Jay N. Darling, "Ding," returns to the Register's front page this morning with the first cartoon he has drawn after more than a year's absence. Mr. Darling has completely recovered his health, following the serious illness with peritonitis with which he was stricken March 19, 1925. Ed LeCocq, the young cartoonist who substituted for Mr. Darling, will draw cartoons for the Evening Tribune.

(Side note: the Des Moines Evening Tribune-News would not have been the source of the cartoon at the top of this post; it did not publish on Sundays.)

Bereaved, Bothered, and Bewildered

This week’s Graphical History Tour sets the calendar back 100 Augusts ago to find two political parties in mourning.

"Leaderless" by Fred Morgan in Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 2, 1925

The deaths of William Jennings Bryan and Robert LaFollette had left voids in their respective political parties. Three-time Democratic presidential nominee Bryan had been replaced as his party's standard bearer, but still wielded considerable influence; badly divided Democrats had named his brother their vice presidential candidate in 1924 to secure his support for the ticket.

"Which Will Capture Democracy" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Aug. 3, 1925

The major factions in the Democratic Party were Bryan's western populists and the more conservative Wall Street and Tammany Hall New Yorkers. I find it telling that McCutcheon overlooks Southerners in this cartoon.

McCutcheon's liberal and conservative labels here did not quite mean the same values that they do today. The western liberals were agrarian, nationalist, and open to the support of the Ku Klux Klan. The conservative wing of the party supported Wall Street interests, favored laissez-faire capitalism and the gold standard. Support of and opposition to Prohibition, international agreements, immigration, and tariffs cut across both wings of the party.

"The Wisconsin Wild Waves" by Clifford Berryman in Washington [DC] Evening Star, Aug. 19, 1925

Meanwhile, Wisconsin scheduled a special election to fill Fighting Bob LaFollette's seat in the U.S. Senate. His 30-year-old son Robert LaFollette, Jr., was heavily favored over his Republican rivals in the September 15 primary. (The leading Democratic candidate failed to get enough votes in the primary to qualify for the general election two weeks later and was forced to run as an Independent.)

"Help Aplenty" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Public Ledger, ca. Aug. 21, 1925

Elsewhere, the Progressive movement was hard-pressed to find a new leader. The Iowa Republican Party joined with the state's Democrats to challenge Progressive Republican Senator Smith W. Brookhart's narrow 1924 election victory over Daniel Steck; the Senate Committee on Elections and Privileges would ultimately side with Steck, and the full Senate would then vote to unseat Brookhart.

"I'll Never Quit You Entirely" by Clifford Berryman in Washington [DC] Evening Star, Aug. 18, 1925

Another potential leader of the Progressive Party was Senator George Norris, a very independent-minded Republican from Nebraska. But he quashed speculation that he could succeed LaFollette as a leader of any Third Party, vowing to remain a Republican — which didn't stop him from endorsing the Democratic Party presidential nominees in 1928 and 1932. 

Giving the lie to Berryman's cartoon, Norris did switch to the Democratic Party in 1934 and won re-election to the Senate one more time. Running six years later as an Independent, he came in second to the Republican candidate.

By the way, Norris left two lasting legacies in state and national politics. As a state legislator, he successfully championed changing Nebraska's legislature from bicameral to unicameral (the only such legislature in the country). As Senator, he wrote the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, which moved the presidential inauguration date up from March 4 to January 20.

"It Pays to Stay on a Main Traveled Road" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, Aug. 5, 1925

The Progressive Party also lost vital support as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) announced that it would thenceforth devote its political capital to wooing the two established political parties. Under Samuel Gompers, the AFL had purged socialists and communists from local union leadership positions, and would now distance itself from the Progressive Party — Bill Sykes, above, was following the major party line by labeling progressivism "radicalism" — as well.

"Thou, Too, Brutus" by Jesse Cargill for King Features Syndicate, ca. Aug. 6, 1925

With no national leader in Washington and rejected by its most viable source of support, the Progressive Party could not survive. That left Americans with the same two political parties they had to choose from since the Civil War.

"Rehearsing for the Next Big Show" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Aug. 18, 1925