Clifford Berryman, Washington Star, February 16, 1938
In anticipation of our March online forum with Barbara Melosh on visualizing the Great Depression—and in light of our current economic situation—I thought I’d post some observations about how some of the New Deal’s policies were viewed by mainstream editorial cartoonists. If nothing else, the record of 1930s political cartooning offers a useful lesson about the hazards of using visual evidence to teach history.
As far as most newspaper and magazine political cartoonists were concerned, New Deal programs such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) were wrong-headed if not outright threats to the American republic. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have won most of the votes, but most newspaper and magazine publishers were wealthy Republicans who opposed him. As a result, the political cartoons in their publications also opposed Roosevelt. Based on the record of political cartoons of the era such as the Washington Star’s 1938 “The Fuehrer Wallace†(above)—which depicts Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as Adolf Hitler saluting goosestepping ranks of American farmers—the New Deal’s policies were highly unpopular.
A few important cartoonists were consistent supporters of the New Deal’s social and economic programs, such as Daniel R. Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Collier’s Weekly, and Clarence D. Batchelor in the New York Daily News. But as Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan commented in their comprehensive 1968 study of American political cartoons, The Ungentlemanly Art, “The great majority of cartoonists—perhaps reflecting the great majority of their publishers—were hostile to the New Deal.†Some of the nation’s most revered political cartoonists were numbered among the administration’s many pictorial detractors; Jay N. (“Dingâ€) Darling of the New York Herald Tribune and Des Moines Register, for example, served on the Republican platform committee at the 1932 national convention, and the Washington Star’s Clifford Berryman created the fascist-saluting Henry Wallace.
Often acerbic, sometimes vicious, always exuberant in denunciation, the political cartoonists’ interpretation of the New Deal’s achievements and failures registered the frustrations of the conservative bastion of newspaper publishing in an era characterized by government activism and social reform. “Never had cartoonists and public opinion been on such separate tracks,†Hess and Kaplan concluded, “and never had each so little effect on the other.â€
2 Comments
As always, it’s interesting to note the correlation between media ownership and what most people likely perceive as just another innocuous form of popular entertainment. I’m struck by the (admittedly subjective) observation that political cartoons, while fascinating what they reveal about historical attitudes and opinions, are often too laden with ideology to be very “funny,†whether liberal or conservative in viewpoint. Allan Holtz makes the point on his blog that the “Little Lefty†strip, was “far too earnest and idealistic to really… let loose,†while the work of many conservative cartoonists (then as now) is marked more by anger and bitterness than by any real attempt at humor (see the Onion’s weekly strip spoofing conservative political cartoons). That said, it seems to me that the best political cartoons combine a high level of artistry (I’m thinking of the lush, often full-page Puck and Thomas Nast cartoons of the nineteenth century, despite their sometimes objectionable content) with humor that offers a surprising or insightful take on a political event or situation rather than simply a rehash of ossified ideologies or a pictorial representation of the cartoonists’ prejudices. I’d be gratified to know where I can find some examples of what people consider to be really excellent political cartoons, either contemporary or historical.
Sean’s comment about humor and what comprises a good versus not-so-good political cartoon hits the nail on the head. I am of the school of thought that, with significant exceptions, the trend of political cartoons since the turn of the twentieth century has teetered toward conformity, complacency, and a fairly limited conceptual and visual repertoire. I know that will seem a gross generalization, but it needs to be understood, in contrast to the nineteenth century, in the context of political cartoons becoming adjuncts of the daily press and, therefore, for the most part in thrall to the whims and prejudices of newspaper publishers–or the very conservative predelictions of the syndicates that, by the early part of the last century, were distributing mainstream cartoonists. So, while among twentieth-century cartoonists there are certainly some wonderful draftsmen (and they were mostly men, since the few women political cartoonists who saw their work get into print were limited to the subject of suffrage–and once the 19th Amendemnt was ratified, they lost their jobs), the really great work can be found among the dissenters who tended to work in the radical and alternative press. The Vietnam War did mark a change among mainstream cartoonists with some–such as the great Bill Mauldin, whose WW II “Up Front” cartoons remain brilliant expressions of viewpoints from within the ranks–creating work critical of administration policy and differing from the positions of their newspapers. And we saw important innovations in the field, notably Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” which broke out of the single-panel mold of editorial cartooning. In any case, this is only to suggest how Sean’s comment opens up an interesting area of inquiry.