This Week's Sneak Peek

I'm planning to Spice things up a little this week.

Stay tooned.

What Shall We Do with Roosevelt

Heartsick Americans were tortured this week by photos of former President Barack Obama kite surfing with Richard Branson off the British Virgin Islands and having such a wonderful old time, exercising smile muscles that we almost forgot he has. As one of the youngest former presidents this country has ever seen, he may have a very long retirement ahead. What shall he do?

T.E. Powers addressed this issue for another relatively youthful ex-president, Theodore Roosevelt, in a cartoon feature that appeared in the Chicago Examiner on Sunday, February 11, 1917 under this headline:

Syd Hoff tells us that William Randolph Hearst recruited Thomas E. Powers (1870-1939) to draw editorial cartoons for his newspapers during the circulation wars with Joseph Pulitzer, a job which Powers held for nearly 40 years. Powers's obituary describes him as a favorite of Teddy Roosevelt, the subject of this multi-panel spread.

From the obituary:

Mr. Powers first attracted the attention of Theodore Roosevelt when he pictured the President threatening tall, silk-hatted figures labeled "The Trusts" with the then famous "big stick." His satirical thrusts at "grafting politicians" or others whose right to public office he challenged, however, usually were tempered with broad humor.

I should note that silk-hatted figures representing trusts were a well-established staple of editorial cartoons well before Mr. Powers came along.

Powers was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, his family moving to Kansas City "before I was old enough to appreciate the product on which the 'fame' of that fair city rests," as he told Editor and Publisher in 1906. His cartooning career began at the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Herald before heading to New York. In addition to editorial cartoons, he also created half a dozen comic page strips, and is credited with drawing the first American newspaper color comic.

"The leak" in this next selection refers to the leak then under investigation of President Wilson's Christmastime peace proposal to stock and commodities brokers (see the Gibb cartoon here).

The bottom panel of this next section has Roosevelt sailing up the River of Doubt, or Rio da Dúvida, a tributary of the Amazon renamed after the former president, who led an expedition in the area with the famed Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon in 1913-14. Upon his return, Roosevelt wrote in Through the Brazilian Wilderness of battling rapids and waterfalls to find the previously uncharted river's headwaters.

I have not been able to find what exactly inspired this cartoon — presumably some comment by former President William Howard Taft, judging from the newspaper headline. Roosevelt and Taft were publicly criticizing each other in January over the League to Enforce Peace (cf. one of the Harry Murphy cartoons last week); Taft was a founding member of the League and spoke in support of President Wilson's foreign policy, whereas Roosevelt attacked both.

When the Chicago Examiner published this cartoon, Roosevelt had been out of office for eight years, but not out of the public arena. He had run for President on the Progressive ticket four years after leaving office, and made a run for the Republican nomination another four years after that. Only 58 years old in 1917, he was just three years older than Barack Obama is today.

As it turned out, however, Roosevelt would only live two more years. His death had nothing to do with the assassin's bullet still in his body since 1912, or the debilitating asthma he had overcome as a child. He died in his sleep on January 5, 1919 of a blood clot that got into his lungs.

The Vice President, Thomas Marshall, is quoted as saying "Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."

Q Toon: HAL No

16 years after the disaster that took the crew of Discovery One, and the dishonest media still refuse to cover the story. Sad! Stop all obelisks from entering U.S. until we find out what's going on!

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week, Dr. Bowman is subject to some extreme vetting.

Unrestricted Submarine Warfare

As we step back one century again for Seekriegback Saturday, we are entering a momentous month in world history.

"The Homing Pigeon" by William "Jack" Farr in New York Evening Herald, January 28, 1917

When last we checked in, proposals to bring World War I to an end were shriveling up like the leaves of a Christmas poinsettia. The U.S. wanted a return to the status quo ante, plus a League of Nations to replace the complicated web of alliances that had obliged one European nation after another to declare war on the others for reasons that had nothing to do with the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke. Germany wanted instead to ratify its gains on the battlefield, while the Entente of Russia, France and Great Britain preferred to punish Germany for its belligerence.

"The World's Two Great Comedians" by Lluis Bagaria for El Sol, Madrid, January, 1917

Since talk of peace was going nowhere, the German government declared "unrestricted submarine warfare" on February 1, 1917: a resumption of its U-boat blockade of Great Britain. The Kaiser warned that ships from any country, including neutral nations, would be attacked and sunk without warning anywhere within hundreds of miles of the British and French coasts.

"Well, Count, We Did Our Best" by W. A. Rogers in New York World, February, 1917

The British had a naval blockade of Germany, too, which as we've shown before, rankled those Americans who wished only to have transatlantic commerce and communications continue unimpeded regardless of European hostilities. The operative difference to U.S. public opinion now was that the Entente powers had not sunk any ships with Americans on them, operating under what were called prize or cruiser rules. Under these rules, British forces would board ships and place their crews in "a place of safety" before sinking the ship, unless the ship displayed "a persistent refusal to stop."

"The Last Straw" by Robert W. "Sat" Satterfield in Cleveland News, Ohio, February, 1917

As John Darling notes below, the German announcement was made with the full realization that the U.S. would be brought into the war because of it.

"Nobody But Himself to Blame" by Jay N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, February, 1917

Europe's war had been raging at a stalemate for over two years, but, save for some very old veterans of the Civil War, Americans' only experience with war was of the relatively quick and easy victory over Spain twenty years earlier.

"And When It Falls 'Twill Fall on Him" by William Hanny in St. Joseph News Press, February 2, 1917

Even at Hearst's newspapers, resistance against the move toward war was waning. Here's Harry Murphy's cartoon on the day unrestricted submarine warfare was announced...

"I Feel Safer on My Own Side" by Harry Murphy in Chicago Examiner, February 1, 1917

...and five days later, as ships were being dispatched to Davy Jones's locker:

"I Want Real Preparedness" by Harry Murphy in Chicago Examiner, February 6, 1917

From this point on, jingoism fills the inkwells of nearly every cartoonist in America. The only ones still advocating against U.S. entry into the war were the socialists at The Masses.

"Peace Only with Honor" by Boardman Robinson in The Masses, February, 1917

Q Toon: 404 File Not Found

Many in the LGBTQ community were concerned when the LGBTQ page disappeared from the official White House web site.

There have been conflicting signals from the Donald Joffrey Trump administration on LGBTQ issues: there has been a uniform hostility among Trump cabinet appointees to LGBTQ concerns; and we can probably assume that the fellow he has appointed to fill Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court believes that if the Founding Fathers weren't prescient enough to include LGBTQ rights in the Constitution, those rights do not exist.

On the other hand, the administration assures us that it has no intention of revoking President Obama's executive order protecting LGBT government and government contractor employees. “President Donald J. Trump is determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community,” according to the White House statement.

Yet establishing a right to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens is one of the most important issues to Trump's supporters on the so-called religious right. It strains credulity to think that they are going to be content with leaving anything in place that protects the rights of the LGBTQ community in any way.

Meanwhile, the White House appears to have no plans to name a liaison to the LGBTQ community. Even the imagined office in my cartoon may be more than we could hope for.

I Remember Mama

When speculation was circulating that Donald Joffrey Trump would name Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill Judge Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court, my first thought was to wonder if he were any relation to Anne Gorsuch Burford, Director of the Environmental Protection Agency in the first years of the Reagan administration.

As it turns out, he is her son.

A minion of Interior Secretary James Watt, Anne Gorsuch turned the mission of the EPA on its head, aiming to protect corporate profits at the expense of the environment. From her obituary in the Washington Post in 2004:

Her 22-month tenure was one of the most controversial of the early Reagan administration. A firm believer that the federal government, and specifically the EPA, was too big, too wasteful and too restrictive of business, Ms. Burford cut her agency's budget by 22 percent. She boasted that she reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.

Republicans and Democrats alike accused Ms. Burford of dismantling her agency rather than directing it to aggressively protect the environment. They pointed to budget cuts for research and enforcement, to steep declines in the number of cases filed against polluters, to efforts to relax portions of the Clean Air Act, to an acceleration of federal approvals for the spraying of restricted pesticides and more. Her agency tried to set aside a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean due east of the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships would burn toxic wastes at 1,200 degrees centigrade.

We cartoonists were no kinder to her than we were to Watt. I drew these cartoons in February and March, 1983, as scandal exploded around Ms. Gorsuch and her agency.

Charged with mishandling of the agency's $1.6 billion "superfund" for handling toxic waste, Gorsuch refused to turn over records to Congress and was found in contempt of Congress. There was also a scandal over promising a small New Mexico oil refinery that it could ignore existing limits on lead in gasoline because loosening of the regulations was planned. The regulations weren't loosened after all, and the company ended up having to pay huge fines.

To explain a couple things in my cartoons: between the first and the second, Gorsuch married Robert Burford, whereupon she took his last name. (That's not him in the bed, by the way; it's a generic industrialist character.) The woman hanging outside the windows is newly resigned Superfund administrator Rita Lavelle, who would be convicted in 1984 of lying to Congress about the superfund scandal.

I wasn't the only cartoonist to reach for the prostitution metaphor to depict Gorsuch Burford's handling of the EPA, but there were other allusions made by better cartoonists than me. Pat Oliphant depicted her as Maleficent from Disney's Snow White. Riffing on Ghostbusters, Jim Borgman portrayed her as an ectoplasmic spectre. Herb Block drew her as a jackbooted prison guard. After her resignation, Herblock drew Reagan and an aide tossing her into a smoking volcano labeled "Administration Environmental Scandals", with a slip labeled "Lavelle" nearby, as the aide tells the President, "We've given it two of our finest maidens!"

On a less personal level, Jeff MacNelly's response to the scandal was to depict the EPA as a garbage truck with all its garbage in the driver's cabin.

Reagan later appointed Gorsuch Burford to be chair of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, a post she dismissed as a "nothing-burger." The House and the Senate passed resolutions urging on President Reagan to withdraw the appointment; in the end, Gorsuch Burford decided not to accept the position.

In her 1986 book, Are You Tough Enough, Gorsuch Burford complained: "When congressional criticism about the EPA began to touch the presidency, Mr. Reagan solved his problem by jettisoning me and my people, people whose only 'crime' was loyal service, following orders. I was not the first to receive his special brand of benevolent neglect, a form of conveniently looking the other way, while his staff continues to do some very dirty work."

I brought Gorsuch Burford back one more time for a cartoon marking the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1989. She's behind Reagan in the supporting cast between Robert Bork and James Watt.