reviews
Georgia Barnhill reviews the most recent broad historical survey of American political cartoons.
The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons by Donald Dewey. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Donald Dewey, an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction books, ranging from biographies of James Stewart and Marcello Mastroianni to books on baseball, has written a book that aspires to provide a lively look at American political cartoons from the colonial era to the present. However, I believe that the subtitle of his book should be changed to “A History of American Political Cartoons” since the cartoons that make up the contents of his book derive from the library of The Granger Company, a stock photography house in New York. Given the limits of the pictorial sources at his disposal in this collaboration between New York University Press and The Granger Collection, Dewey’s purview is confined in the same way that a catalogue of an exhibition is defined by the items on display. In spite of this limitation, The Art of Ill Will is a welcome addition to the literature on American political caricature because of the number and quality of the illustrations, particularly since the majority of them date from the period 1876 to the present, an era not as well represented in earlier publications on the subject.
The introduction discusses various aspects of political cartoons more or less chronologically. There are several divisions in this extended discussion: Politics, Caricatures, Symbols, Words, Stereotypes, Influence, Expansions, Prohibitions, New Deals, Cold Wars, New Societies, and Images. Most of the commentary is very much to the point and will be of interest to the general reader. This extended introduction is followed by the plates to the book, arranged topically: Presidents; Wars and Foreign Relations; Ethnic, Racial, and Ethnic Issues; Local and Domestic Politics; and Business and Labor. Each section of plates is prefaced by a brief introduction to the overall subject and each illustration has a brief descriptive caption. The weakest section deals with issues of race. There should be, but isn’t, an analysis of political prints relating to African Americans from the 1820s through the nineteenth century.
Since the author is a general non-fiction writer, it should not be surprising that errors have crept into his text. I am not a specialist in late nineteenth- or twentieth-century American history, so I will limit my comments to the period I know best. For example, in the discussion of Benjamin Franklin’s Join or Die cartoon of the segmented rattle snake, Dewey notes correctly that Franklin divided the snake into eight parts, but then suggests that there was one segment for each colony. Franklin created this emblem at the time of the Albany Congress held in June and July 1754. He arranged the New England colonies into one segment that he labeled N.E. for New England and Dewey ignores that Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island each had their own governments. Nor is Georgia among the segments, presumably because it was not represented at the Congress. A later political print, The Providential Detection is given the publication date of 1796 in the introductory text and 1800 in the caption to the reproduction. In his comments on a political satire by David Claypoole Johnston, A Foot-Race, describing the 1824 presidential campaign, Dewey mentions candidates John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson in the description of the print. In fact, also in the running in October 1824 was Henry Clay. The latter is shown in the print at the far right dropping out, exhausted. Another problem in this book is that the correct titles of the cartoons are not always provided. For example, Johnston’s A Foot-Race here bears the title Presidential Campaign.
Given that the full titles of prints are not always provided, nor are the names of periodicals in which many of the illustrations originally appeared, readers in search of the original materials will be frustrated. Indeed, since the illustrations in the book derive from The Granger Collection, information about the libraries holding the originals is nowhere to be found. Another problem is that there is no list of the book’s illustrations, nor are there references to the page numbers of the illustrations in the introduction. Therefore, it is difficult to find the illustrations that the author writes about, particularly since the index does not include the titles. There is no separate bibliography and Dewey did not consult some of the standard references on political prints. In short, this volume has some problems that limit its use as a scholarly reference work. However, the reproductions of the prints are excellent and much of the commentary is useful.
Georgia B. Barnhill is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts and Director of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. She has written and lectured on the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American prints and illustrations for many years. Her most recent book is the Bibliography on American Prints from the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries (2006).
