This Week's Sneak Peek

Anticipation...

The 1917 Chicago Auto Show

Sedanback Saturday looks back 100 years ago this weekend to the Chicago Auto Show of 1917, as greeted by Frank King's "The Rectangle" feature covering page 1 of section 7 of the Sunday Chicago Tribune.

Detail of "The Rectangle" by Frank King in Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1917

I've chopped his cartoon up into pieces in order to make them somewhat readable on line; those of you reading on computers and tablets can beclickify these images to embiggenate them. Those of you reading on your phones are just crazy. I'm not chopping the cartoon up that small.

Detail of "The Rectangle" by Frank King in Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1917

To refresh your memory, Wisconsin native Frank King (1883-1969) started working at the Chicago Tribune in 1909 for the salary of 50 cents a week. He is best known for "Gasoline Alley," the comic strip that grew out of this weekly "The Rectangle" feature. At this point, he was also drawing a full-page Sunday morning color comic, "Bobby Make-Believe," which I've featured in these Saturday retrospectives before. He'd been drawing cartoons about the Chicago Auto Show since at least 1912.

Detail of "The Rectangle" by Frank King in Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1917

You'll notice that this January 28, 1917 cartoon, dealing almost entirely with the subject of automobiles, has no foreshadowing of "Gasoline Alley" in it. The characters Walter W. Wallet and his neighbors Bill, Doc and Avery wouldn't make their first appearance in "The Rectangle" until November 24, 1918. On the other hand, the Little Pet Peeve and Our Own Movies were regular features of the Rectangle.

Detail of "The Rectangle" by Frank King in Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1917

I had to look up Lillian "Dimples" Walker (1887-1975), a film actress of the silent era. She had the title roles in The Kid and Kitty MacCay and Sally in a Hurry, three of her many films out around the time of this cartoon. After 1919, her film career slowed down drastically; her last film was Enlighten Thy Daughter in 1934. What she might have to do with the auto show I have no idea. Perhaps she made an appearance there.

And finally, in the lower right corner of the cartoon, King offers this tempting real estate give-away:

Detail of "The Rectangle" by Frank O. King in Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1917

Q Toon: Pussy Hats Galore

Perhaps you wonder why I have someone at the Women's March on Washington protesting Donald Joffrey Trump hiding his tax returns, instead of some traditional women's issue.

Yes, it was a women's march we witnessed on all seven continents last Saturday, but marchers represented many concerns. After all, the Dakota pipeline, immigration and global climate change don't just affect men, you know. I know personally at least one protester who did in fact carry a sign raising the issue of Donald Joffrey Trump evading taxes.

(If only there were some form he could release to prove he is not a tax cheat!)

I had been toying around with the sentiment expressed on this woman's protest sign, trying to come up with a setting in which to present it, when on Sunday morning, KellyAnne Conway gave me what I thought would make the perfect capper to it.

There's so much lag time between Sunday and Thursday! What was once a clever idea has turned into a cliché. Every cartoonist published cartoons with the administration's new term for its baldfaced lies on Monday morning; the internet memes were already flooding social media feeds before the NFL conference championship kickoffs.

(On the other hand, I remarked on "alternate realities" here over a month ago.)

It shouldn't be long until I find some obscure LGBT issue to draw about all to myself. When I do, hands off my idea, everybody else!

Velie 6

Things found while looking for other things department:

This was an ad in the Chicago Tribune in January, 1917 hyping the Chicago Auto Show. I don't think this ad would pass the standards and practices department of today's newspaper, at least without putting a wet bikini on the lady on the right. And probably replacing the gentleman on the right with another buxom bimbo. Or Matthew McConaughey.

The Velie 6 was a six-cylinder car manufactured out of Moline; Willard Velie, a grandson of John Deere, founded the Velie Motor Vehicle Company (originally the Velie Carriage Company) in 1902. Velie branched out into aircraft construction in 1927, which apparently overextended the company just as the world economy was just about to take a nosedive.

Velie's son, Willard Jr., was not able to keep the auto and aircraft companies solvent after Willard Sr.'s death in 1928; Willard Jr. died the following year. The Velie companies were sold off; Deere bought the automobile company. The Official Velie Register currently lists 221 Velie cars and trucks still in existence.

We'll have some more on the Chicago Auto Show of 1917 here on Saturday.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Hell hath no fury like it.

Passing of the Torch

It's Solemnly Swearback Saturday here at Bergetoons, and at the risk of presuming to put my own juvenalia alongside some excellent examples from the past, I'd like to share a few historical cartoons about this nation's peaceful transfer of executive power.

Inauguration cartoons afford the opportunity to fill the frame with caricatures. As with this bit of wishful thinking, they don't have to be drawn at the time the White House is changing hands; I drew this in June of 1980, before the Democratic National Convention had officially renominated incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Of course, John Anderson fell way short of becoming the 40th President of the United States. Instead it was that guy partly hidden behind Chief Justice Warren Burger; so come January, I updated a famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Arno.

Arno's original cartoon of Herbert Hoover riding glumly beside a beaming Franklin Roosevelt, like John Darling's outhouse cartoon, became famous in spite of its not being published. Drawn for the New Yorker magazine cover, it was pulled by the editors after the assassination attempt on FDR that killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak on February 15, 1933. (FDR was the last president whose inauguration date was March 4; the 20th Amendment to the Constitution moving the date to January 20 was ratified between his election and inauguration, and went into effect in 1937.)

Steve Brodner recently posted this tour de force by the outstanding caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) of celebrities who performed at Lyndon Baines Johnson's 1965 inauguration gala:

LBJ Inaugural Guests by Al Hirschfeld, 1965

I'm seeing Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Carol Channing, Barbara Streisand, Julie Andrews, Carol Burnett, Alfred Hitchcock, Johnny Carson, Ann-Margaret, Woody Allen and Harry Belafonte, and wondering what exactly Alfred Hitchcock performed. I also presume that Nina is in the drawing at least half a dozen times.

When I was growing up, I had a 16-volume set of a History of the United States that was generously illustrated with editorial cartoons. Included was this fascinating depiction of Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural by Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), a Mexican caricaturist and muralist who was, by the way, one of Hirschfeld's influences.

"The Inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt" by Miguel Covarrubias in Vanity Fair, March/April, 1933

On the dais with FDR are Eleanor Roosevelt; FDR's first Vice President, John Nance Garner; outgoing President Herbert Hoover and his wife; and outgoing Vice President Charles Curtis. Holding the laurel wreath is a figure who should be familiar to followers of these Saturday posts over the past year: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes. Yes, the same one who resigned from the court to run for president against Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

Smoking a cigar directly below Hughes is another unsuccessful presidential candidate, Alfred Smith (1928); John Davis, who ran on the top of the ticket in 1924 with FDR as his running mate, is the bland-faced man with white hair, glasses and  rounded collar below the middle pillar.

Indeed, almost everybody in the cartoon is a real person; even the guy in the lower right corner with his back to us is identified as J. P. Morgan. I certainly can't argue with that.

I'll close with perhaps my favorite cartoon about Inauguration Day. Even though neither you nor I are quite old enough to remember Calvin Coolidge, I think the humor still comes through Gluyas Williams's (1888-1982) cartoon. It's a truism in cartooning circles that great art never saved a mediocre idea; but it definitely elevates a good one.

"Crisis In Washington" by Gluyas Williams in Life, February 15, 1929

There are many, many more cartoons I could have included here — Mike Peterson ran a large selection from Warren Harding's inauguration yesterday — and I hope to run more in four years to celebrate yet another peaceful transfer of executive power.

Q Toon: Cover-Up at Justice

Donald Joffrey Trump's incoming cabinet is so overloaded with secretaries dedicated to the opposition of whatever it is their department is supposed to protect, it's hard to know where to focus first.

Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos is determined to build the best private school system anywhere and to make the public schools pay for it. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has made a career of suing to stop the agency from protecting the environment. Labor Secretary-designate Andrew Pudzer is devoted to the Republican theory of boosting the economy by depressing workers' wages.

And then there is Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Trump's choice to head the Department of Justice. Sessions, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate in 1986 over allegations of racist comments, has been a voice against the rights of African Americans, Latino immigrants, and LGBT citizens throughout his Senate career, and a champion of voter suppression.

My cartoon this week alludes to the well-publicized decision by John Ashcroft, George W. Bush's first Attorney General, to cover two statues in the Department of Justice's Great Hall. Spirit of Justice and Majesty of Law are a pair of ten-foot-tall art deco aluminum figures on either side of a podium at the front of the hall; Spirit of Justice is a woman, both arms raised, wearing a toga casually draped over one breast and her opposite hip. Majesty of Law is a man, left arm raised, right arm holding a lit torch, with a small towel protecting his modesty.

Installed in the 1930's, the statues have been a source of irritation for Attorneys General for decades. Titillated news photographers elbowed each other in order to get the angle with Spirit of Justice behind Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese when he released a 1986 report on the deleterious effects of pornography. Meese's successor, Dick Thornburgh, started the practice of renting drapes to cover the statues during formal events; Ashcroft's decision to cover the statues at all times was reversed by his successor, Alberto Gonzalez.