This Week's Sneak Peek

This story is moving slower than a soap opera.

But I promise there will be no amnesia or evil twin.

Eyes on Julies

It's sabbath time again, so strap on your dust masks and join our Graphical History Tour as we rummage through my old cartoon files. What cherished treasures shall we find from Julies (that is the plural of July, isn't it?) of ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago?

for Q Syndicate, July, 2015

Ten Julies ago, the sovereign state of Texas spared no expense to monitor a U.S. military exercise named Jade Helm. A Russian disinformation campaign was apparently responsible for convincing Lone Star politicians that Jade Helm was part of some nefarious scheme by the Obama administration to round up political dissidents and ... I dunno, ship them off to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, I suppose.

Weeks before the exercise began, [Gov. Greg] Abbott wrote a letter to the State Guard asking them to keep an eye on the operation so “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”

Undeterred by embarrassment over his overreaction to a routine military training exercise, Gov. Abbott and the Texas State Guard have been keeping a close eye on the current round-up of political dissidents, and the infringement of safety, constitutional rights, private property rights, and civil liberties in Texas and elsewhere.

Ain't sneakin' a dang thing past them folks, pardner.

Insert here your own tasteless flooding remark that gets you cancelled by the vast right-wing conspiracy.

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Digging back another ten years to July, 2005:

for Q Syndicate, July, 2005

Dancing up a storm, four-year-old Jack Roberts upstaged his father's nomination to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in July, 2005. With a Republican majority in the Senate sure to confirm the President George Dubya Bush nominee, right-wing judicial activists also rejoiced.

He was replacing the far-right William Rehnquist, nominated to the Court by Richard Nixon and elevated to Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan, so Roberts's nomination wasn't exactly a tear-out-your-hair-the-sky-is-falling moment for liberal interests.

As Circuit Court of Appeals Judge in 2003, John Roberts had pooh-poohed concerns over what he called "a hapless toad" in a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service by a San Diego real estate developer whose planned housing development included breeding grounds of the arroyo southwestern toad. Roberts, dissenting from the Court of Appeals finding, agreed with the developer's argument that the toads had no connection to any economic or interstate activity and had no commercial value, so their protection was unrelated to interstate commerce and thus unconstitutional.

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in InStep, Milwaukee, July 20, 1995

This was my first cartoon in one of Wisconsin's LGBTQ+ newspapers. I didn't start drawing regularly for InStep ("Wisconsin's LesBiGay Newsmagazine") until a year later, so I wasn't yet listed as a columnist or contributor on the masthead.

Jesse Helms, for those of you too young to remember, was a virulently antigay Republican Senator from North Carolina. His racist and homophobic campaign ads cemented his national reputation as the Senate's leading culture warrior. He authored an amendment, passed with President Reagan's full support, to the 1987 AIDS appropriation bill, prohibiting the use of federal funding for any HIV/AIDS educational materials that would "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities" served to exacerbate the spread of the disease.

He stubbornly opposed all federal spending on HIV/AIDS research in each and every budget cycle (hence my cartoon) throughout his Senate tenure. He retired in January, 2003, died in 2008, and I'm not sorry that he's gone.

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As it happens, I cannot find a single cartoon that I drew the entire month of July, 1985.

It's not for want of cartoonable news stories. At the time, I had discovered that while the local university newspaper was only too happy to have my editorial cartoons, daily newspapers around the country were, shall we say, a bit more discriminating in their tastes. With the UW-Parkside Ranger on summer hiatus, the impetus to keep drawing (particularly while maintaining a second-shift job that had nothing to do with publishing) just wasn't as urgent.

Since I have nothing of my own to show for the month, I'll close instead with a July, 1985 cartoon by Steve Benson, who succumbed this week to a devastating stroke that he suffered soon after retiring from the edtooning biz last year.

"Could You Describe Your Feelings" by Steve Benson in Arizona Republic, July, 1985

Benson, a grandson of former Agriculture Secretary cum Mormon Church President Ezra Taft Benson, started out his career during the Carter administration as a conservative. But by the time I met him, at the 2015 convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, he had gone fully left-wing libertarian, proselytizing atheist, and rabble rouser. 

At the 2015 AAEC convention panel "Free Speech or Hate Speech?" Per the October 2015 edition of AAEC's Notebook: "Steve Benson arose to pose the question he was asked by one of his editors. If he were to do a Muhammad cartoon, he would be putting himself at risk—but also every other staff member of his newspaper (Arizona Republic). By what right was he entitled to endanger everyone around him?" I remember it as having been a much longer question.

By all accounts, he held strong opinions, and wasn't the least bit shy about sharing them at length. His conversion from right to left and from religious to atheist must have been a seismic shock to those who lived and worked closely with him.

I was not one of them. I wish I had had the opportunity to get to know him better, but by the time I finally made it to another AAEC convention, he had stopped attending them — permanently, as it turned out. I don't know why.

Maybe it's not exactly appropriate to wish Rest In Peace to someone who rejected the whole idea of any sort of afterlife, but... well... So long. Peace out.

And thanks for giving us hope that not all conservatives are lost souls.

Q Toon: Where the Decisions Are Made

The story so far: I introduced the characters Leo and Max to stand in for the sharp political division in this country. Leo is the liberal: woke, environmentally conscious, and fully vaccinated. Max, on the other hand, is full-on MAGA and even has his very own presidential pardon for taking part in the January 6 Trumpster insurrection at the Capitol.

In February, I decided that Leo got himself swept up in an ICE raid while volunteering at a food bank. At the time, it seemed likely that he would end up stranded on a tarmac in some random Latin American country among a plane load of braceros, roofers, hotel maids, short order cooks, guitarrónistas, and Operation Enduring Freedom veterans.

The Trump regime’s depths of depravity, however, are more abysmal than anything I imagined in February. Venezuelan immigrants and refugees have been sentenced with no due process to die in a sweltering concentration camp in El Salvador. 

Afghani women and men who assisted our soldiers in their country before Trump pulled the rug out from under our allies there are being sent back for certain persecution and probable stoning to death by the Taliban.

Misappropriated FEMA funds have been purloined for the hasty construction of Florida’s flood-prone-and-that's-hardly-the-worst-of-it Alligator Gulag. 

The Trump team is now shanghaiing people to South Sudan, a country perpetually in the midst of civil war.

All this ethnic cleansing is the wet dream come true of white supremacist ghoul Stephen Miller, aided and abetted by Trump's cabinet of martinets, lickspittles, and wackadoodles, a Congress dominated by knuckle-dragging yahoos, and a right-wing Supreme Court that has ruled that under any Republican President, civil rights aren't worth the paper the Constitution is written on.

When last we saw Leo in Trumplinka Prison, a faceless ICE gestapo trooper was grilling him about a tattoo of Max's initials, which they misread as the Salvadorian street gang "MS13." So WTF am I to do with Leo now? 

Maybe he'll be freed by an AI Marco Rubio imposter. Unless that comes too close making light of our descent into lawless dictatorship.

But how else can I get back to having Leo and Max argue about Big Bonkerful Abomnibus Bills, Zohran Mamdani, and Eau de Trump No. 5™?

This Week's Sneak Peek

It's high time to get back to this story line:

In Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I remarked that William Jennings Bryan's and his supporters' opposition to U.S. imperialism was not entirely altruistic.

The Democrats' 1900 campaign platform "condemn[ed] and denounce[ed] McKinley's Philippine policy for having "involved the Republic in an unnecessary war," and bemoaned the loss of U.S. soldiers' lives. All well and good; then the platform explained that Filipinos were unfit to be Americans:

The Filipinos cannot be citizens without endangering our civilization; they cannot be subjects without imperiling our form of government; and as we are not willing to surrender our civilization nor to convert the Republic into an empire, we favor an immediate declaration of the nation's purpose to give the Filipinos, first, a stable form of government; second, independence; and third, protection from outside interference, such as has been given for nearly a century to the republics of Central and South America. ...

We are not opposed to territorial expansion when it takes in desirable territory which can be erected into States in the Union, and whose people are willing and fit to become American citizens. We favor trade expansion by every peaceful and legitimate means. But we are unalterably opposed to seizing or purchasing distant islands to be governed outside the Constitution, and whose people can never become citizens.

True, Filipinos were also unwilling to become U.S. subjects. But there are reasons why Democrats today do not venerate the memory of three-time presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan.

Happy Fifth of Fourth

It's the Fifth of July and most of us still have all ten fingers, so in celebration of this extra long Independence Weekend, the Graphical History Tour sets the dial back five fourths of a century ago to July 4, 1900.

"Independence Day" by C.E. Toles in St. Paul Globe, July 4, 1900

We kick things off with an illustration by a cartoonist Allan Holtz called "the mysterious master." The highly stylized signature is a challenge to read; a researcher at the Library of Congress has concluded that the cartoonist was T.E. Coles, syndicated by the International Syndicate of Baltimore, but I lean toward those who have identified him as Claude Eldridge Toles, 1875-1901.

So, apparently, does Mr. Holtz, and that's plenty good enough for me.

I found this in the St. Paul Globe, where his work was featured regularly. Toles, however, lived his entire, brief life in New York state. (Any relation to the now retired Buffalo News and Washington Post cartoonist?)

"That Recent Trip to Lincoln, Neb." by R.C. Bowman in Minneapolis Tribune, July 4, 1900

My posts featuring historical cartoons began with examples from the Minneapolis Tribune's book of Rowland C. Bowman's editorial cartoons for the year 1900 ― a book left to me by my Aunt Barbara Jensen and since donated to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum because I do not have a climate-controlled room suitable to preserve it. The book included several cartoons mocking Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, but not this one.

Bryan received the Democratic Party's nomination (for a second time) in Kansas City, Missouri on Independence Day, 1900, having already accepted the presidential nomination of the Populist Party. The Prairie Populist from Nebraska was not a favorite of the Eastern Establishment; but David Hill, a former New York Governor and Senator, had endorsed Bryan in 1896, partly due to his own rivalry with fellow New Yorker President Grover Cleveland. 

"Creating Business for the (Political) Undertaker" by Carter Simons in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 3, 1900

Hill is in the forefront of this Independence Eve Brooklyn Eagle cartoon (the Eagle did not publish on July 4), next to Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker. Hill was in serious contention for the Democrats' vice presidential nomination in 1900, but that went to Adlai Stevenson of Illinois instead.

Bryan had campaigned in 1896 on a platform of free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1, a position then popular in the rural west but strongly opposed by Cleveland and the "Gold Democrats." The "free silver" issue had lost some of its appeal by 1900, however, thanks in part to the Klondike gold rush.  

"Watching the Pinwheel Spin" by Leon Barritt in New York Tribune, July 4, 1900

In the meantime, the U.S. had taken possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines after winning the Spanish-American War. Bryan's new issue was anti-imperialism. The 19th Century "manifest destiny" of pushing the nation's borders all the way to the Pacific was one thing; becoming a colonial power on the other side of the globe (with new territories moreover populated by dark-skinned Catholics and heathens!) was another thing entirely.

"The Chicago Platform Applied in St. Louis" by John S. Pughe in Puck, New York, July 4, 1900

The major news and satirical magazines of the day, Harper's Weekly, Puck and Judge, were united in their opposition to Mr. Bryan. Pughe depicts Bryan cheering on the strike by St. Louis streetcar workers, begun in May and lasting until September, in which clashes between strikers on one side and scabs and law enforcement on the other resulted in 14 deaths and hundreds of injuries.

"The Hardest Thing He Ever Had to Swallow" by Wm. A. Rogers in Harper's Weekly, New York, July 7, 1900

Democrats accused the McKinley administration of being in the thrall of oil, sugar, copper, steel, and railroad barons — the "trusts" — and Republicans in turn claimed that Tammany Hall, and by extension the Democratic Party, was beholden to the Ice Trust. 

The Ice Trust had nothing to do with Immigrant Capture and Expulsion; rather, this was about American Ice Company's monopoly of the supply of frozen water in New York City. What rival ice suppliers the company, founded in 1899 by Charles W. Morse, couldn't buy out, it drove out of business by smashing their deliveries, or getting Tammany Hall to revoke their dock privileges. 

After one year in business, monopoly achieved, American Ice Company doubled its prices to consumers, who relied on delivered ice for food refrigeration. Public outcry and media pressure forced the company to relent, and also exposed that Croker and other Tammany Hall figures had significant investments in American Ice.

"Trade Follows the Flag" by Eugene "Zim" Zimmerman in Judge, New York, July 7, 1900

Mocking the establishment Democrats falling in line behind Bryan, "Zim" Zimmerman skewers both Bryan's 1896 campaign platform of free silver and his 1900 campaign message against U.S. imperialism. The saying "Trade follows the flag" dates to 1870 or earlier, with the meaning that colonialism expands the colonizer's commercial opportunities.

"The Temptation" by Felix Mahony in Washington Evening Star, July 4, 1900

At last some political cartoons that acknowledge Independence Day! 

"An Old-Fashioned Fourth" by Tubman K. Hedrick in St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 4, 1900

To Bryan's supposed chagrin, Hedrick in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat enthusiastically introduced the Republicans' vice-presidential nominee, New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, nominated at the Republicans' convention the week before the Democrats'.

Republicans risked ebullient, colorful Roosevelt overshadowing staid, businesslike McKinley at the head of their ticket. (You might draw a more recent comparison with John McCain picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.) For much of U.S. history, the vice presidency was a post from which its occupants were seldom heard from again; it didn't quite work out according to plan this time.

"Kansas City's Favorite Son" by Taylor in Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1900

At this point, you might be asking whether there were any editorial cartoonists not attacking William Jennings Bryan. (Was Taylor caricaturing the Prairie Populist in this cartoon, or complaining about Kansas City's summer weather?)

The great Homer Davenport gained fame lambasting Bryan's Republican opponent, President William McKinley, and his financial backer from Ohio, Mark Hanna, so I went hunting for his work during the Democratic National Convention. I haven't been able to find any of the Hearst or Hearst-supplied newspapers that ran Davenport's cartoons that week, unfortunately.

No caption, by Robert Edgren in San Francisco Herald & Examiner, July 4, 1900

Instead, here's one by another Hearst cartoonist, drawing Mark Hanna in a  dollar-sign suitcoat, copying a Davenport trademark. 

An October 19, 1902 article in the Times-Democrat of New Orleans quoting visiting New York Herald cartoonist J.C. Fireman identified Edgren as a New York Journal cartoonist "in the same class as Davenport. He also adopts the sledgehammer style, and, being the champion hammer thrower of the world, it comes natural to him to 'knock' in his cartoons."

"Willie and His Papa" by Frederick Burr Opper in New York Journal, ca. July 4, 1900

Hearst cartoonist Frederick Opper was more of a jester than hammer thrower, but no less partisan. Instead of the dollar sign suitcoat, Opper here put Hanna in a dress, as wife of McKinley's Papa, "The Trusts." I presume that the water pail President McKinley has to carry in the cartoon is a reference to his campaign slogan of "the full dinner pail."

"A Man After My Own Heart" by May in Times-Democrat, New Orleans, July 4, 1900

I've got one cartoon specifically in support of William Jennings Bryan, and I'm afraid that I haven't been able to positively identify the cartoonist. May (certainly not Ole May, unlikely Thomas May) slapped a photograph into his cartoon of the Man After Uncle Sam's Own Heart rather than attempting to caricature him. But at least he acknowledged the holiday.

"Darned If I Can Have Any Fun on Fourth of July with These Things On" by E.T. Richards in Life, New York, July 5, 1900

Picturing the United States' new identity as a colonial power, E.T. Richards fit Uncle Sam in a crown and ermine robes, accompanied by a distressed Columbia and a mortified American eagle. Given the present regime's goose-stepping into fascist autocracy, I know how they feel.

In the background, I presume that is President McKinley dressed like Napoleon while his companion lights firecrackers tied to the dog Filipino's tail — a cruel and apparently common Independence Day pastime among nasty fin de siècle boys.

"Hurrah for the 4th" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Call, July 4, 1900

That's more than enough politics for today, so let's wrap things up with an ode to the holiday by San Francisco's Gustavo Bronstrup. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

America! It was nice while it lasted.

Q Toon: Parental Rights and Wrongs

The Supreme Court wrapped up its work for the litigation season at the end of June, its 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority handing down a thoroughly predictable series of rulings in support of Trumpster goodthink.

Of interest and disappointment to the LGBTQ+ community, the Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor in favor of a group of parents who demanded to exempt their children from exposure to LGBTQ+ history and literature. The Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Catholic litigants had sued the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board to provide alternative curricula for their children. 

The dispute stems from the county school board’s 2022 approval of books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, tells the story of a little girl’s reaction to her uncle’s same-sex wedding; another book, Pride Puppy, describes a puppy that becomes lost during a Pride parade. 

The county initially allowed parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. When the county removed that option in 2023, several parents went to federal court.

Writing for the majority, Dubya-appointed Justice Samuel Alito “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right ‘to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children.’”

Clinton nominee Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, countered that the Court's grant of a parental right to veto LGBTQ+-positive public school curriculum materials on religious grounds could mean that “books on evolution and interfaith marriage, and history may be next.”

It's easy to imagine that today's Court majority would have no problem with that.

Meanwhile, the Supremes declined to rule whether parental rights exist outside of their religious rights. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court ruled Tennessee's SB1 (the number indicating it was the state senate's most urgent business this session) banning medical care for transgender minors, even against the wishes of patient, parents, and medical professionals.

No, parents: you and your transgender child have no say in the child's health care. That is up to the State. No opt-out for you.

The plaintiffs had tried to argue that Skrmetti was about gender discrimination: e.g., a minor the state identifies as male could be prescribed hormone blockers, but a minor the state identifies as female cannot. Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that argument, because the second patient is being discriminated against for being transgender, not for being female, and that's okay.

Influence of Skrmetti has already begun to spread to other transgender concerns. The Seventh Circuit vacated its prior rulin g against anti-trans bathroom policies in public schools. The Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have been instructed to review two decisions involving Medicaid exclusions for gender-affirming medical care, one involving public teachers health insurance plans, and one involving birth certificate policies.

If nobody can come up with a religious liberty argument in favor of transgender medical care, health insurance coverage, and lavatory use, perhaps, my cartoon character suggests, someone could at least raise a faith-based objection to the State mandating who The Lord Your God is.

But I suspect the theocrats on the Court would find some excuse to find reason to infringe that particular religious exercise.

Canada Eve's Sneak Peek

Ahem. I meant to post this on Monday, and apparently I never got around to it. My apologies.