Curtain Call at the European Theatre

Graphical History Tour steps back eighty years to the aftermath of V-E Day as seen by American editorial cartoonists. (If you're interested in their immediate responses to the Allies' victory in Europe, we visited them on their 75th anniversary.)

"Down Through the Third Reich's Thousand Years" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., May 22, 1945

As the Allies closed in on Berlin, their discovery of Nazi Germany's extermination camps for Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and communists shocked and horrified Western readers. Descriptions in newspapers and on radio of emaciated prisoners and mass graves would soon be followed by graphic photographs in magazines such as Life and Time.

The Russian photojournalism magazine Ogonek had published photos of German atrocities much earlier, but had been dismissed in the West as Soviet propaganda.

"The Same Old Dagger Trick" by Hugh McM. Hutton in Philadelphia Inquirer, May 31, 1945

Hitler came to power capitalizing on the "stabbed in the back" myth created to explain Germany's defeat in World War I. Militarists, nationalists, monarchists, and populists blamed Jews, communists, liberals, and homosexuals for having conspired with the enemy, wittingly or unwittingly, to weaken the spirit of the German people.

Hugh Hutton was not alone in anticipating a repeat of such excuses from the German high command. The trials of German war criminals were meant to demonstrate to the German people the culpability of their political, military, and law enforcement leaders down to the soldiers and petty officers below them.

"I'm No War Criminal" by Fred Ellis in Daily Worker, New York, May 13, 1945

Fred Ellis, in the communist Daily Worker, lent no credence to German militarist protests that they had nothing to do with their fascist politicians. His was a view shared by most citizens of Allied nations.

"When a Feller Needs a Friend" by Burt Thomas in Detroit News, ca. May 28, 1945

The caption to Burt Thomas's cartoon riffs on a well-known cartoon series by Clare Briggs. Here the Big Three have their separate ideas on how to raise the Post-war World.

Uncle Sam represents the U.S. in Thomas's cartoon, and John Bull represents Great Britain, whereas the U.S.S.R. is personified by its actual head of state, Joseph Stalin. The U.S.A. had a brand new president, Franklin Roosevelt having died a month earlier; and Britain's wartime coalition government was heading for overdue elections.

"The Bear's Revenge" by Harold “Tom” Carlisle in Des Moines Register, ca. May 19, 1945 

One could still find positive cartoons of Stalin in the American press such as this one by Harold Carlisle, acknowledging that the war could not have been won without the Soviet Union's participation, and the heavy cost its citizens paid repelling the German invasion of their country. 

If Carlisle's style looks suspiciously like that of John "Ding" Darling, it is likely because Carlisle worked under Darling as inker, and was here filling in while Darling took a day off.

"The Liberator" by Joseph Parrish in Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1945

Taking a decidedly dimmer view of our sometime ally in the war, Joseph Parrish notes that on the Soviet Union's way to Berlin, Stalin had installed puppet governments in the Baltic states. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia would be absorbed into the U.S.S.R., while Poland would retain its independence, if only in name.

My source for this Parrish cartoon was in grayscale, but it appears to me that the Chicago Tribune took to printing its front page editorial cartoon in full color sometime in 1943, until dropping the front page cartoon in 1970. I've re-colored the flags held by the Baltic nations, but I didn't want to venture guesses on the clothing and shadows.

"Hard on a Nervous Old Girl" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, May 21, 1945

The Entente Powers had promised Austria-Hungary's Adriatic coast to Italy as inducement to get Italy to join their side in World War I. The Treaty of Versailles awarded the city of Trieste to Italy, which was less than the Italian government wanted.

Since Italy was on the losing side of World War II, the question of whether Italy should have to give up any territory in Europe arose. The late President Woodrow Wilson's position that borders should reflect the populations within them (rather than what regent had inherited what property) had gained followers since World War I, but Trieste and environs were populated by both Italians and Slavs. Drawing ethnically considered borders there would have required exacting precision.

(Europeans were much more careless about drawing borders in Africa and the Mideast. That's another story entirely.)

"The Phoenix" by Roy Justus in Minneapolis Star-Journal, May 17, 1945

I would like to have included a cartoon about Norway's arrest on May 10 and subsequent trial of its Minister President, Nazi collaborationist Vidkun Quisling. After all, his name entered the English language as a spineless traitor. 

This Syttende mai cartoon by Roy Justus, whose Minnesota readers might have appreciated the date, will have to do — although surely there must be an appropriate allusion to Norse rather than Greek mythology.

"It's Time We Got Started on a New Model" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Daily Star, May 24, 1945

Turning back to those British elections: it was generally expected that Winston Churchill would not remain Prime Minister, and would have to turn the government over to Labour leader Clement Atlee.

"It's Going to Be Hard to Explain" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, May 27, 1945

Even if Americans didn't understand why Britons would be so ungrateful.

Or how cricket is played.

"Same Old Monkey Wrench" by Harold Talburt, May 21, 1945

Turning to domestic politics here in the United States, Republicans in Congress wanted to return to the Smoot-Hawley brand of tariff policies that had precipitated the Great Depression. Protectionist tariffs were central to Republican administrations from the end of the Civil War and onward, popular with Wall Street, but controversial in the Midwest, West, and South.

Woodrow Wilson, facilitated by the 16th Amendment making federal income taxation constitutional, drastically reduced tariffs, only for Republicans to raise them again in the 1920's. FDR policies then focused on a mix of income taxes on the upper class and deficit spending, first to lift the nation out of the Great Depression, and later to finance the war effort.

"The Shape of Things" by Cal Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 31, 1945

Lastly, to get hyper-domestic about things, Cal Alley wondered what the future would hold for Rosie and her fellow riveters.

Q Toon: Leering Eye for the Meme Guy

Hey, I'm not a fan of editorial cartoons based on internet memes, but sometimes you have to go where the readership is. The days when one could reference Shakespeare and Schiller are sadly gone.

LGBTQ+ Pride festivals this year are likely to be more modest than revelers may have become accustomed to.

Knuckling under to the Blatantly Corrupt Trump Regime's policy of Conformity, Inequity, and Exclusion, erstwhile sponsors such as Mastercard, Skyy Vodka, Target, and Pepsi have decided to cancel their support in 2025. Anheuser-Busch ended its 30-year relationship with hometown St. Louis's Pride festival and others'; Comcast sent its regrets to San Francisco, contributing to a $300,000 shortfall in corporate support there. 

“I find it very difficult to believe this is about the economic context,” Fabrice Houdart, executive director of the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors, told the New York Times. “One thing that is striking about the conversations I have had over the past few months is there are a lot of companies saying, ‘I won’t engage on anything LGBT-related because I don’t want to find myself being a target.’”

Some folks see this as an opportunity to get away from the over-commercialized, homogenized versions of what used to be a celebration of queerness and activism — although, like complaining about Memorial Day Weekend becoming devoted to grilling out and drinking beer, that ship may have sailed.

In Lieu of This Week's Sneak Peek

There were an unusually high number of hits on last Saturday's blog post for some reason. I can't tell whether I've suddenly gained a lot of fans of my work for University of Wisconsin student newspapers decades ago, or if conspiracy fabulists are still interested in Jade Helm.

Or perhaps there were a lot of wedding musicians searching for the music and lyrics to "Somewhere/There's A Place for Us."

I provide music at weddings from time to time, and I once had to accompany a singer on "Somewhere" and some popular song from the 1960's (I forget which — "Wedding Song/There Is Love" or something like that), and my mother had happened to give me a book of wedding tunes which she had found at a resale shop or rummage sale.

The two songs needed for this wedding — and only those two songs — had been torn out of the book.

Well, anyway.

This week's cartoon is a strictly visual one, and I don't see a corner of the cartoon I can clip here without giving the whole idea away. So, since I wasn't inspired by most of the Memorial Day cartoons I found in 1925 to come up with a Graphical History Tour post on the topic on Saturday, here's one that is worth bringing back, given the present regime's cuts to veterans' services.

"Why Not Flowers for the Living" by Winsor McCay, May 30, 1925

Hold My Hand And I'll Take You There

Welcome aboard today's Graphical History Tour, offering a self-serving selection of my own cartoons from Mays in years ending in -five.

Since Grifter-in-Chief Donald Frequent Flyer Trump has just returned from the Arabian peninsula with his very own private pleasure dome in the sky, our first stop is deep in the heart of Texas, twenty years ago:

for Q Syndicate, May, 2005

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah visited President George W. Bush at his Crawford Ranch (in April, actually), and Americans were taken aback seeing our president holding the crown prince's hand as they walked to Casa de Dubya.

This was less than four years after 9/11, and it was well known that several of the terrorists who took over the planes were Saudi nationals. But the Bush administration had committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and needed acquiescence of the other powers in the region.

It Abdullah, who reigned as the Saudi King from August, 2005 until his death in January of 2015, is an uncle of the present Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., May 2, 1985

Skipping back another twenty years: West Wing staffers regard meetings with foreign heads of state as an opportunity to burnish a president's stature as a world leader. But even carefully planned events can misfire.

President Ronald Reagan had come under criticism after a meeting of the G-7 in West Germany. To mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl persuaded Reagan aides to schedule a side trip to a cemetery in Bitburg where some 2,000 German soldiers were buried. Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff made a preliminary visit to the cemetery in February, where he failed to notice 49 grave markers for members of the Waffen-SS.

Politicians and Jewish leaders in Europe and the U.S. urged Reagan to cancel the Bitburg trip; instead the White House added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Reagan's itinerary. A spokesman for children of Holocaust survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, spoke for those not mollified: “By entering Bitburg, [Reagan and Kohl] desecrate the memory of all those who were murdered by the SS, and of all those whom they pretended to commemorate here at Belsen.”

By the way, the "584" marker by my signature was my mistake. May is kind of late to still be writing the previous year on cartoons, checks, and other documents — especially since I didn't have old age as an excuse forty years ago.

Let's come forward to 1995 and some domestic issues:

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, May 4, 1995

Politicians have been telling us for more than thirty years that Medicare and Social Security are heading to hell in a handbasket. The Republican plan has been to get rid of them entirely without getting rid of them at all — basically by making the benefits from them smaller and smaller and more difficult to get.

At the same time, they stoke seniors' resentment of paying taxes for schools well after their own children have walked away with diplomas funded by senior citizens of earlier generations.

for bergetoons.blogspot.com, the internet, May, 2015

Jumping ahead to May of 2015, we return to the Lone Star State, where conspiracy fabulists were all hot and bothered about a U.S. Army training exercise called "Jade Helm" — which apparently enlisted Walmart basements in a secret government plot to overthrow the government of Texas. Accordingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor and report the nefarious activities of them darn Yankees.

At the same time, the Texas legislature passed a law preventing localities from regulating fracking, but what is really at issue here is this: Governor Abbott has had ten fracking years to get to the bottom of this "Jade Helm" conspiracy, most of them with the full backing and support of Republicans and Qanoncompoops in charge of the federal government.

And somehow he has failed to reveal anything about the Jade Helm Conspiracy.

Which can only mean one thing: Texas Governor Greg Abbott is himself part of the Jade Helm Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Texas!

More on this story as it continues failing to develop.

Q Toon: Spell Check

My biggest regret after drawing this cartoon is that I didn't include enough diversity in it.

I had already scrapped an initial sketch because I had started making the characters too large in the space — I probably wouldn't have been able to fit more than half a dozen people into the cartoon. Drawing characters too small, on the other hand, would have presented the problem of how to fill the space vertically (either by depicting the crowd from above, or positioned on, say, parade floats), as well as perhaps doubling how long it would take to grayscalify and colorize the versions sent to Q Syndicate. (In order to attend a family funeral Monday morning, I was up until 2:00 a.m. adding gray tones to the grayscale version, and back at it at 5:30 a.m. adding color to the CMYK/RGB versions.)

So if you are disappointed that my cartoon doesn't include any same-sex parents, twinks, bears, drag kings, Republicans, or left-handed Polynesian furries, well, so am I.

On the other hand, how do you know that none of the people in this cartoon is a Republican?

Our community is under attack, and not just in red states, but nationwide, from a hostile federal government. They are concentrating their fire right now on transgender persons, but make no mistake: they are coming for all of us.

Equity and inclusivity are more vital these days than ever. Now is no time to abandon any segment of our LGBTQ+ alphabet soup. We must hang together, as the saying goes, or hang separately. Only by cherishing, celebrating, and defending our diversity will we save ourselves.

After all, without DEI, PRIDE is just PR.

This Week's Sneak Peek

That statement from the White House expressing sadness at Former President Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis cannot possibly be, as the media keep reporting it, from Donald Trump.

The only thing he'd be unhappy with is the prospect of someday having to sit through another funeral where nobody thanks him for being everybody's favorite president.

Monkey Business

Hey, Graphical History Tourists! Today’s Silverback Saturday post is about something you’ve actually heard about!

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, and nobody a century ago was more delighted than the nation’s editorial cartoonists.

"Grandpa on Trial" by Douglas Rodgers in Sacramento Bee, May 19, 1925

The trial pitted William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic Party nominee for President and a favorite subject for editorial cartoonists, against Clarence Darrow, a high-profile labor lawyer famous for his defense of thrill murderers Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb in "the trial of the century" one year previous.

Bryan would not be at home in today's Democratic Party: a staunch advocate for Prohibition and of blurring the separation of church and state, he had waged a national campaign against the teaching of evolution.

"He Thinks He's the Defendant on Trial" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 31, 1925

In March, the Tennessee legislature had passed the "Butler Act," named for State Representative John Washington Butler, a farmer and head of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. The Butler Act  outlawed the teaching of the theory of evolution, or "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." in public schools, colleges, and universities receiving state funding.

"Fe, Fi, Fo, Fist..." by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 21, 1925

Bryan publicly thanked Tennessee Governor Austin Peay for signing the Butler Act into law, saying, "The Christian parents of the state owe you a debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis."

"Damming the Streamlet and Loosing the Torrent" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, May 22, 1925

(In an unfortunate editing decision, LeCocq's cartoon happened to run immediately alongside a headline about a boy fatally drowned after falling from a dam.)

"He Put Us on the Map" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, May 25, 1925

The trial of John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science and math teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was not a case of the state singling out and persecuting a principled teacher minding his own business. 

Scopes was in fact recruited by the publicity-seeking manager of a financially struggling coal and iron company in Dayton, the county superintendent of schools, and an attorney to test the new law on the grounds that state law also required teaching from a textbook, Civic Biology: Presented in Problems by George William Hunter. Hunter's book explained and endorsed the theory of evolution; a biology teacher could therefore be in violation of Tennessee law whether he taught the theory of evolution or not.

"Listening In" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, May/June, 1925

Charges were filed against Scopes on May 5, but there is actually some doubt as to whether he ever actually taught students the theory of evolution in the first place. He coached three students to testify in preliminary proceedings that he had, and he was formally indicted on May 25. 

"At Work" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, May 12, 1925

We here at Graphical History Tour Central promise to keep you updated on this broken news a century after it develops.

In the meantime, gratuler med syttende mai!

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