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December 14, 2007
A Breezy New History of the Medium Hits The Book Shelves
By R. C. Harvey
The Art of Ill Will, a aptly singeing title, purports to be “The Story of American Political Cartoons” (264 9x9-inch pages; hardback, NYU Press, about $30), and it is that, but it is more of a genial bus tour than a boots-on-the ground expedition. Its author, Donald Dewey, begins with admirable acumen:
“Editorial cartoons honed their political blades on technologies, opportunities, and pressures of the nineteenth century mass media. Had nothing of the kind existed before? Of course it had,” he concludes, at once dispatching as inconsequential the usual historian's preoccupation with who was first.
Citing the Egyptians cited by Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan in The Ungentlemanly Art, Dewey goes on: “There are limits to citing such precedents. Intriguing as they might be, for example, the contentions about [Egyptian tomb paintings] resemble the enchanted history that has claimed the sands around the pyramids as the first primitive baseball diamond and Babylonians as the first vaudeville comics: research dreaming after relevance.”
The book is worth acquiring if for no other reason than to have that last phrase handy. But Dewey's casual if not disparaging attitude about history infects the rest of the proceedings.
He notes the importance of the advent of lithography in advancing the influence of editorial cartoons by making them more readily available through mass media. And then he says: “Appropriately enough, the revolutionary surface printing method, which allowed for more detailed reproductions in a fraction of the time required previously, was effectively based on the mutual antagonism of oil and water.” Another tidy turn of phrase?“the mutual antagonism of oil and water”?but how lithography works or why it is less time-consuming than some previous method of printing images Dewey neglects entirely to tell us.
In assaying the arrival of the newspaper editorial cartoon, he contends that “it wasn't until 1867 that a significant publisher, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., of the New York Evening Telegram, printed editorial cartoons on a regular basis.” How regular? How often? Dunno: Dewey doesn't say. What's more, I have a vague recollection that another New York paper started publishing political cartoons some years before?albeit only once a week.
Dewey also appears to give advertisers an influential role in dictating editorial attitudes much earlier than I would suppose, given that advertisers were not numerous in the early years of American newspaper journalism. Moreover, the earliest successful newspapers were essentially the house organs of political parties; politicians, not advertisers, would dictate content.
Elsewhere in the same 73-page Introduction (nearly a third of the book), Dewey says Thomas Nast's “satirical imagination was processed by razor blades.” Dunno what that is intended to mean. Did Nast, literally, use razor blades to draw or to embellish his drawings? Maybe. Or is this a figure of speech about Nast's nasty disposition? Can't say.
Like others who have gone down this path before, Dewey assumes that Walt McDougall's famous cartoon depicting the influence of monied interests on 1884 Presidential candidate James C. Blaine, “The Royal Feast of Belshazzar Blaine and the Money Kings,” was the cartoon that inaugurated a daily front-page political cartoon in the New York World, setting a fashion that established the editoon in daily newspapers.
This cartoon, Dewey contends, was rejected earlier in the day by the humor magazine Puck. McDougall himself retails the story in his autobiography. According to him, he had picked up his rejected cartoon at the Puck office but, since he was on the way to watch a baseball game, he didn't relish carrying the thing around with him. By chance, he was, at about this moment, passing the premises of the World, and on a whim, he turned into the building, thinking he'd submit the cartoon to the newspaper. At the last minute, however, he lost his nerve and thrust the cartoon into the hands of an elevator operator, telling him to give it to the editor to print if he wanted, free.
McDougall then went off to the baseball game, thinking no more about his cartoon until he saw it on the front page of the World the next day.
But the cartoon in question was not, according to Charles Press in his 1981 history, The Political Cartoon, the Belshazzar Blaine cartoon, which was published on October 30, 1884. By that time, Press says, cartoons by McDougall had been appearing in the World regularly, perhaps daily, “for four or five months.” His first World cartoon, the one that had been rejected by Puck, was published in June, according to Press. We don't know, apparently, its subject?that is, no historian of the genre has taken the trouble to paw through ancient editions of the World to find it. I haven't. And apparently Dewey hasn't either.
I could be wrong: maybe Dewey's right and Press is wrong. But I think it unlikely. The Belshazzar Blaine cartoon was not McDougall's solo work: in rendering at the festive board the likenesses of such financial dignitaries as Jay Gould, Jacob Astor and Andrew Carnegie, McDougall surrendered the drawing to Russian portraitist Valerian Gribayedoff, newly arrived on these shores. Judging from McDougall's recitation, the rejected Puck cartoon was his own work. He probably wouldn't have been likely to give it away to the World?letting the editor run it for free?if it incorporated other artists' work.
The collaboration represented by the Belshazzar Blaine cartoon is indicative of newspaper staff endeavor, not of a freelance cartoonist peddling his efforts to humor magazines. McDougall's anecdote clearly involves a cartoon that's not the Belshazzar Blaine cartoon. In short, based upon such circumstantial evidence, it seems to me, then, that Press is right and Dewey isn't.
Dewey seems to have done no original research in assembling this volume: he is, in effect, summarizing numerous other books he's read on the subject. Nothing wrong with that. I do the same. That's perfectly respectable, but Dewey's verbal dexterity leads him into deeper waters than he has prepared himself adequately to wade through.
His text, however, is lively and reasonably informed even if not nit-picky accurate. For the general reader, the book is a useful survey of the history of the genre. The Introductory essay is accompanied by a few much too tiny illustrations, but they are all repeated in the latter section of the book, the illustration part, at a satisfying full-page dimension, so not much is lost?except the value of illustrations being proximate to the text discussing them.
While the Introduction is chronological, the illustration section is thematically organized?Wars and Foreign Relations; Ethnic, Racial and Religious Issues; Local and Domestic Politics; Business and Labor?but the selection brings us up to present times with cartoons about the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Mess-o-patomia. Some of the classic masterpieces of the genre are included, and several of the cartoonists represented are not usually visible in such anthologies?Dr. Seuss, for instance, and M.A. Woolf, more remembered for urban waif comedy than political clout, and suffragette cartoonist Laura Foster.
Many of the profession's usual celebrated cartoons are included: Robert Minor's “Army Medical Examiner” of 1915, depicting the “perfect soldier,” a headless hulk (in its essence, the “perfect editorial cartoon”); Art Young's “Having Their Fling” (1917); Clarence Batchelor's rendering of War as a prostitute, inviting European Youth into her lair, saying, “I used to know your daddy”; Thomas Nast's “Let Us Prey”; Rollin Kirby's Mr. Dry; Ted Rall's “Terror Widows”; Herblock's picture of Nixon emerging from a sewer; Bill Mauldin's weeping Lincoln. A goodly survey, as I said.
The Introduction ends with Dewey's rather jaundiced, and therefore entirely welcome, view of the present-day predicament of the profession?not the impending and much heralded demise of the political cartoon so much as the genre's feeble or non-existent impact. Again conducting his discussion in shimmering but sometimes baffling gyrations, Dewey seems to wonder if the political cartoonist has lost sight of his role in American politics. He hopes an emerging generation of editoonists are politically and artistically savvy enough to do the heavy lifting even if they move “only one odd reader every once in awhile beyond the social attitudes he brought to the newsstand. Otherwise,” Dewey concludes glumly albeit wittily, “the history of cartooning is doomed to be nothing more than the history of cartooning.”
Walt McDougall, by the way, got a staff job out of his rejected Puck cartoon. Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, was so delighted with the cartoon that he offered the cartoonist a steady job on the paper. Said Pulitzer: “We have found the fellow who can make pictures for newspapers! Young man, we printed the entire edition of thirty thousand copies of the World without stopping the press to clean the cut, and that's never happened in this country before.”
McDougall refrained from telling him what he thought of the reproduction: it looked, he wrote, “like the crab's eyebrow without the proper reduction in size to refine its coarse lines.”
I can't imagine why the condition of the cut, the engraving, was such a signal matter to Pulitzer. His later remark seems more to the point for a newspaper publisher: “[McDougall] draws circulation?that's enough!”
Whatever the case, he hired the young cartoonist, and McDougall stayed on for sixteen years: “Daily editorial cartooning as a profession was born,” Press concluded.