Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too.
And this is Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 that's it. It's the and um edition.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is about uh editorial cartoons, aka political cartoons.

Speaker 2 They are one and the same. They

Speaker 2 usually appear traditionally in the editorial section or the opinion section of newspapers. So that's why you can call them either.

Speaker 2 And this is a profession

Speaker 2 that appears to be dying out if you look at the number of editorial cartoonists that are like full-time staff at major newspapers. Right.

Speaker 2 Because there used to be more than 2,000 about 100 years ago. Now there's less than 20.

Speaker 2 And Dave, you know, helped us with this and found that stat. And I think we were both initially like, oh, my God, they're all going away.

Speaker 2 Not necessarily true. Those are full-time staffers on newspapers.
Newspapers are in trouble. So that's a big reason why.
We'll get to that.

Speaker 2 But there are still plenty of editorial cartoonists and political cartoonists mainly working online.

Speaker 3 Right. Yeah.
And for syndication companies, like you can work for a syndicate and they'll distribute it to newspapers that want to run your political cartoon, just like with comics.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's, I won't say like

Speaker 2 we're at peak, the golden age of it, but it's, it's still alive and well and just sort of a different form.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I've seen the golden age referred to as in the 19th century. And I'm like,

Speaker 3 these people didn't live through the 80s.

Speaker 3 That was the golden age, baby.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. I saw, if I had a dime for every like,

Speaker 2 cartoonish drawing of Tip O'Neill or Ronald Reagan I saw growing up as a kid, right? I didn't even, like, who are are these people?

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, that's a really great point that

Speaker 3 they editorial cartoons are like of the moment, sometimes like of the day, where they like they'll still make sense later that week, but they're not hitting because something already changed or moved on.

Speaker 3 And they don't as such, it's very rare that an editorial cartoon

Speaker 3 can still like land the way it originally did.

Speaker 3 That means that whatever it was talking about was so historic that people decades on know what the what like the ins and outs of it that the political cartoon is referring to.

Speaker 3 But for the most part, it's like daily minutiae of ongoing politics and government. And if you just go back like 10 or 15 years, it's like I forgot John Boehner even existed

Speaker 3 until I went back and looked at some of the old political cartoons. And it's so important at the time.
But, you know, all these years on, it does not matter what that political cartoon was saying.

Speaker 3 At the time, it was.

Speaker 2 And that's a huge point about those things that's why michael dukakis drove a tank i remember that who's michael dukakis yep i remember and kitty funny stuff uh oh yeah his wife kitty that's right uh and uh dan quayle spells potato wrong like it's so funny to kind of think about the greatest political hits of our childhood yep yeah it's it's really far away chuck Yeah, but like you said, it's sort of like greatest hits.

Speaker 2 You can look back at some Nixon Watergate political political cartoons and totally get it and they land.

Speaker 2 But they're not always funny. And that's the whole point of this, or not the whole point, but it's satire.

Speaker 2 Satire can be super, super funny, like if you read The Onion or something like that, or a well-made satirical film or television show.

Speaker 2 But it's a different kind of humor.

Speaker 2 A lot of times satire isn't necessarily laugh out loud stuff because the point of satire usually is to influence what somebody thinks about something through, in this case, an image.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 One of the explanations I saw for satire is that it uses like a surface-level presentation of a point to point out that the counterpoint is actually the more sensible thing.

Speaker 2 I can, if I thought about that and saw it written down, I could probably figure out exactly.

Speaker 3 Okay, I've got one for you. Alexander Pope said, Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.

Speaker 3 No, still nothing. Okay, go watch the movie Soul Plane or Brian's song, and you will know what I'm talking about with satire.

Speaker 3 Brian's song.

Speaker 2 You know, they used to use that in crying studies. That's the one thing I remember about Brian's song was when I was a kid, I saw a news report where they were like, this new movie is so sad.

Speaker 2 And it showed people like in a room watching Brian's song with these little tear gutters strapped to their face.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And just like bawling at that movie.

Speaker 3 And I'm sure the political cartoon of the day about that

Speaker 3 had people crying and somebody said, are they watching Brian's song? And the guy says, no, they just found out Ronald Reagan was re-elected governor.

Speaker 2 Well, we also, you and I are, as we said on record many times before, grew up as adherents to Mad Magazine.

Speaker 2 And they didn't, I mean, they did political cartoons, essentially. It just wasn't for a newspaper, but there was plenty of that stuff in there.

Speaker 3 Nice point.

Speaker 3 One of the other things about political cartoons is

Speaker 3 they present an opinion. They do it in a way that's humorous, that's recognizable.
You don't have to know how to read, which was for a long time the point of political cartoons.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's presented in a way so that it takes everything you know. It makes assumptions about what you know, but usually they're pretty good at that.

Speaker 3 And it takes everything you know and can turn it on its head. It can point out the folly, the ridiculousness of usually governments, politicians, policies, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 But sometimes it's aimed unfairly at groups of people.

Speaker 3 The other point about it is that the actual types of art it uses have been shown to neurologically

Speaker 3 hit us different than say like a photograph.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like when you draw a caricature of someone or exaggerate, exaggerate.

Speaker 3 That was beautiful.

Speaker 2 The three-year-old, if you exaggerate something.

Speaker 3 Wait, hold on.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 You can't do it as well as you.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's pretty good.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's has more of a, like, neurologically more of an impact than an actual photograph of somebody doing something even ridiculous.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's called a super normal stimulus or a super stimuli, which is, it, it just hits your brain that much harder.

Speaker 3 And so the caricature, like, it's just something people just figured out over time, building little by little to create like the optimal political cartoon, which apparently popped up around the 1950s.

Speaker 2 Well, or if you go to, you know, a theme park or the streets of Paris or something, and you see a caricature artist parked next to the realistic, like I'll do a realistic pencil sketch of you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You got like one person. over there.
You got 10 people in line trying to get a big old fathead version of themselves.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because they want to be super stimulated.

Speaker 2 Can I amend one thing that you said? You said that they use humor.

Speaker 2 Almost always that's the case, but some of my favorite political cartoons over the years, sometimes they'll have just the really brutally gut-punchy sad ones

Speaker 2 that are very, very effective, you know. Hilarious.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, they definitely,

Speaker 3 it doesn't always have to be humor. You're right, for sure.

Speaker 2 But what it always has to do is prove some kind of a point. There's never a political cartoon that's like, oh, this is just funny or something because that's a comic strip or that's family circus.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 3 So I say we go back, way back to

Speaker 3 potentially the origin of political cartoons, which were religious in nature, because back in the 16th century, when Martin Luther was trying to reform the Catholic Church and ended up just kind of spinning off his own jam,

Speaker 3 Religion was politics. They were interchangeable.
It was one and the same. So when he started

Speaker 3 printing woodcut cartoons that were really unflattering depictions of the Pope and the bishops and the cardinals who aid the pope,

Speaker 3 he was making a political statement. And so some people say that some of these prints from like way back in 1545, there's one called The Birth and Origin of the Pope,

Speaker 3 that this was essentially the first political cartoon ever printed. Because that's another thing, too.
You have to have a mass medium to spread this idea.

Speaker 3 And so this was shortly after the printing press was invented. And almost off the bat, Martin Luther was among the people who were using it to make political statements using cartoons.

Speaker 2 That's right. And if you're at home saying, like, I bet he did that because so many people couldn't read yet, you're exactly right.

Speaker 2 The printing press was brand new, and that changed literacy for the world, basically. But right after it was invented, a lot of people still couldn't read.

Speaker 2 And so he knew that if he wanted to hit his target audience in the right way,

Speaker 2 the birth and origin of the pope was a good way to do it. We'll describe a few of these that are sort of easy to picture.

Speaker 2 We're not going to get in the weeds, I think, kind of describing in detail pictures on an audio show. But this one is very simple.
It was the Pope and the Cardinals

Speaker 2 being pooped out by a she-devil.

Speaker 3 And then, yeah, and then nursed by other she-devils. Medusa's breastfeeding.
It looks like a bishop in one part of this.

Speaker 3 It's really something. And

Speaker 3 that was,

Speaker 3 I think I said 1545.

Speaker 3 And then nothing happened for 200 years.

Speaker 3 And then a guy came along named William Hogarth. And those of you who really, really, really pay attention to the stuff we say

Speaker 3 might

Speaker 3 find that that name rings a bell and that would be because we talked about William Hogarth in our gin episode that's right there was a political cartoon he drew about you know drunks basically

Speaker 2 living at the corner of Beer Street and Gin Lane and that was Hogarth who's considered the grandfather of political cartoons he was a serious painter but then he got into making fun of rich folks in London

Speaker 3 yes for sure and he also, it was a social commentary. So it was satire.
It was exaggerated. That's another kind of key part of political cartoons.

Speaker 3 And it made a point about, in this case, society rather than politics.

Speaker 3 And so as a result, William Hogarth is considered the grandfather of political cartoons.

Speaker 3 He was not making political cartoons, but he definitely set out some of the points on the table that would later be picked up actually fairly quickly

Speaker 3 by printers, publishers, and cartoonists, among whom was Benjamin Franklin, who started, he ran what's considered the first American political cartoon back in 1754.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that was only a couple of decades after Hogarth, man, Hogarth,

Speaker 2 Hogwarts,

Speaker 2 his earliest work. So it was sort of in the same era.
And as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, Benjamin Franklin ran a newspaper,

Speaker 2 the Philadelphia Gazette. And it was a cartoon.

Speaker 2 It was a cut-up rattlesnake with each section of the snake

Speaker 2 being a colony. Like, you know, New York had the abbreviation of the colony, and it said join or die.

Speaker 2 And it was, you know, to try and rally people to unify against France in the lead up to the French and Indian War.

Speaker 2 And he is credited as, even though he probably didn't draw this thing, he ran it, he is credited for making making the rattlesnake a popular symbol for the colonies of the United States, well, not United States yet, the colonies.

Speaker 3 That's all I need to say. And that's a pretty famous image that cut up snake as far as the U.S.
is concerned.

Speaker 3 But that was almost like a little sidestep for political cartoons because, again, nothing happened for a good 50 years. And then along came James Gilray.

Speaker 3 He is considered the father of political cartoons. He was drawing satirical images to lampoon and point out the folly of

Speaker 3 people in charge. In this case,

Speaker 3 King George III was his favorite his favorite target because he was British. He was also anti-colonial too.

Speaker 3 And so there was one very famous one that he did that depicts the prime minister at the time, William Pitt, with Napoleon carving up the world.

Speaker 2 To eat.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's in the form of a plum pudding, also known as plum poutine.

Speaker 3 And Pitt and Napoleon are sitting at a table carving it up, just greedily eating the rest of the world.

Speaker 3 And apparently Napoleon was well aware of James Gilray because he had a pretty great quote, didn't he?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 I used to do a good Napoleon. I'm not going to try, though.

Speaker 2 He said that Gilray did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down.

Speaker 2 And if you look at this cartoon, it's...

Speaker 2 It really sort of looks like what we know as a modern political editorial cartoon. It's really, really cool looking.
It looks great. The art is great.
But it just, it sort of has that look.

Speaker 2 It seems like one of the, or probably the first person who was making these cartoons that look like what we have today.

Speaker 3 Right. That's why Gilbray is considered the father of the whole thing.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 3 And he came around, I think that the Plum Pudding in Danger was the name of the one we were just talking about. That was in 1805.

Speaker 3 And at the same time, magazines started being established and founded around this time that were dedicated to satire. So

Speaker 3 the form, the art form of political cartoons and political satirical magazines came together at the very beginning of the 19th century, not just in Britain, but France.

Speaker 3 Turns out France is basically the spears point

Speaker 3 of satire. Yeah.
Did not know that, but it's the truth, everybody.

Speaker 2 I remember when the Charlie Hebdo stuff came out, and we're going to talk about that toward in the Act III here, but that's when I sort of learned how, you know, astute and on point their satire had been for a long, long time.

Speaker 2 I didn't know that previously. Right.
Yeah. Doesn't seem like a very French thing, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 Maybe it is. I didn't either.
But there was a guy from the early 19th century, I think, named Honoré Daumiere.

Speaker 3 And Daumiere

Speaker 3 actually got in trouble. I think he actually went to prison for

Speaker 3 his political cartoons, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, in the 1830s, the French government sort of relaxed their laws against censorship. And so he had a little bit more leeway, I guess, to operate.

Speaker 2 And initially, in 1831, he was threatened with a 6,000 franc fine. In 1831, that's, I don't know what the conversion is, but that's got to be a lot of dough.

Speaker 3 It's $45,000 US dollars today, which you'd think it'd be way more, but that's what. Did you really do that? I found a Swedish currency converter, historic historic currency converter.

Speaker 2 So, inflation and currency conversions.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 Amazing. And that's why you're Josh Clark.

Speaker 3 I didn't make this restrict. I just used it.

Speaker 2 6,000 franc fine. He drew a caricature of King Louis Felipe

Speaker 2 with a pear for a head.

Speaker 2 And then when he was threatened with this fine, he put out a possibly one of the first or the first multi-panel cartoon, a four-panel cartoon showing the metamorphosis from this king going like he's the king as a caricature, and now he looks a little more like a pear, a little more like a pear, and then he just has a pear for a head.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And the whole point was, come on, like the guy looks like a pear, and it's ridiculous that you would try to fine me $6,000 for pointing out something so obvious.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I guess he avoided that fine

Speaker 3 at the time.

Speaker 3 But afterward, he's like, okay, I really need to get in trouble. So I'm going to create one called Gargantua.
And this one was way worse than saying the king looks like he has a pear for a head.

Speaker 3 This was the king, giant, like gorging himself on taxes that were being fed directly to him by the poor people. He's sitting on his throne and then he's pooping out

Speaker 3 like tax breaks and

Speaker 3 special treatment for the wealthy friends of his. And that one got him in trouble.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a good cartoon.

Speaker 2 It's like it's a ramp from the ground straight up to this giant's mouth with people in their wheelbarrows just like walking up and getting in his mouth and being pooped out as

Speaker 2 spoils.

Speaker 3 It's a great, great piece of art too. Yeah.
Not just the political version of it or political aspect. It's beautiful as far as art goes.

Speaker 2 But that got him six months in the Huscal,

Speaker 2 but they let him out and he started working again. King Philippe was asked about this and kind of like, why are you cracking down on this?

Speaker 2 But people can have a pamphlet printed with words that are very critical of you. And he said, a pamphlet is no more than a violation of opinion.
A caricature amounts to an act of violence.

Speaker 3 You started out with almost a French accent there for a second.

Speaker 2 I debated it, then I came back, and then it was British for a hot second, and then it was just regal, generally regal.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It really did evolve that quickly, too.

Speaker 3 Failed.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, King Louis-Philippe put his finger on something that there's something special or something different about a political cartoon that is way different

Speaker 3 than, say, a news article or even a photograph.

Speaker 3 You know, you can make the point, the news article for centuries and centuries could only be read by a select number of people.

Speaker 3 Everybody could get a political cartoon, but there's something more than that, too.

Speaker 3 There's just something about a political cartoon that people who've been taken down by political cartoons have been able to put their finger on and said,

Speaker 3 this is way worse than just writing about me for some reason.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that tracks too, even to like, if you think about in like high school, if a teacher caught you writing like a note to your friend that said, you know, Mr. Clark is such a jerk.

Speaker 2 I think that would be taken different than if someone drew a picture of Mr. Clark like bent over being paddled by a line of students or something, you know?

Speaker 3 Don't you think? Yeah. No, don't you think that's a good thing?

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 it'd be equal unless you put like stink lines coming off of me. And then it'd be really hurtful.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. Stink lines.
Who's the first person to do the stink lines?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I'll bet it was a political cartoonist who wasn't that great.

Speaker 2 Should we take a break?

Speaker 3 Yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about one of the more famous political cartoonists of all time, Thomas Nast.

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Speaker 2 All right, we're back. Josh promised talk of Thomas Nast.

Speaker 2 He's the the most famous American political cartoonist, probably, very influential cartoonist of the 19th century. And that's, you know, early on, you were like, what? What was going on back then?

Speaker 2 Well, the Civil War was going on back then, and he was a German immigrant who drew for Harper's Weekly when Harper's Weekly was really growing in their readership with a lot of pro-union political cartoons.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 There was one that I think kind of tracks with what you were saying that's not at all funny, but it's super poignant.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 Called Compromise with the South.

Speaker 3 The Democrats had run on a platform that the Civil War had been a failure up to this point for the 1864 election when Lincoln was standing for re-election, and that we should basically work with the South to just forget about the Civil War and end this.

Speaker 3 And Thomas Ness didn't like that one bit. So, this Compromise with the South image shows an

Speaker 3 amputee Union soldier soldier standing on a crutch, shaking hands with his head bowed, shaking hands with a triumphant Confederate officer who's got Jefferson Davis. Is it Jefferson Davis?

Speaker 3 He's got like his boot standing one foot on a

Speaker 3 Union soldier's grave. And Columbia, who represents the United States, is weeping at that grave.

Speaker 3 And then also poignantly, there's a Union soldier, an African-American Union soldier, and his wife, who are now on the southern side, and they're shackled

Speaker 3 back to being slaves.

Speaker 2 It's a gut punch, man.

Speaker 3 It is.

Speaker 3 It's a really good example of a political cartoon that isn't funny, but really gets the point across. And apparently it had a huge impact on America, especially the Union, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, some people say that had a lot to do with Lincoln getting re-elected.

Speaker 2 Lincoln referred to Thomas Nast at one point as our best recruiting agent.

Speaker 2 And in the 1868 election, Ulysses S. Grant credited his win to the sword of Sheridan and the pencil of Nast.

Speaker 2 I had never heard of Columbia,

Speaker 2 but you'll see in a lot of these political cartoons, Columbia as a representation of America was used a lot. And I think this is just a guess.

Speaker 2 I didn't look it up, but it seems like Lady Liberty, Statue of Liberty, has sort of replaced.

Speaker 2 Columbia as far as the cartoon ship goes, because anytime there's like a sort of one of the sad gut punch ones, it's some shameful thing America has done and like Lady Liberty is crying somewhere or something like that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think Uncle Sam also displaced Columbia as well. And Thomas Nast is the one who

Speaker 3 popularized the current image of Uncle Sam with his hat and

Speaker 3 all that. That was Thomas Nast as well.
He had a huge, huge impact as a political cartoonist.

Speaker 2 Well, he did the, he was the guy who came up with the

Speaker 2 elephant and the donkey for the two political parties.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 And also popularized our current conception, American conception of Santa Claus.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because remember, German immigrants are the ones who really brought Christmas to the United States. And Thomas Nest was a German immigrant, so he loved Christmas.

Speaker 3 And yeah, he gave us our version of Santa Claus. The thing that he's most remembered for as a political cartoonist, though, is that he is credited with taking down

Speaker 3 William Boss Tweed, who is one of the most corrupt political officials in the history of the United States.

Speaker 3 Apparently, in a decade, he is thought to have stolen a billion dollars from New York City in today's money. That's incredible.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 He's popped up a lot in our, obviously, our New York-centric episodes about the history of New York.

Speaker 2 Very corrupt person for the, you know, Tammany Hall political machine. And I think NAST had more than 140 Boss Tweed cartoons alone in Harbor's.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So, yeah,

Speaker 3 it was a big deal. Boss Tweed, very much like King Louis-Philippe, was aware that these things were having an effect on him.
And he apparently said, stop them damn pictures.

Speaker 3 I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can't read, but they can't help seeing them damn pictures.

Speaker 3 And I mean, there was a lot of reporting at the time by some of the New York newspapers about Boss Tweed, and they definitely had some effect on getting him investigated and ultimately put into prison where he died.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 like you really can't,

Speaker 3 like you could put all those articles and combine them pretty much equally with Thomas Nast's political cartoons and be like, this is what took down Boss Tweed, these two things basically equally.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 a lot of times I think people think about political cartoons as coming from the political left or, you know, the liberal progressive side. And that is certainly true.
But

Speaker 2 all kinds of newspapers have always had political cartoons and all sorts of issues have been attacked from all angles from political cartoonists over the years.

Speaker 2 There have been, you know, plenty of examples of both. And NASS was one of those that was sort of a contradiction.

Speaker 2 There's, you know, we'll talk a little bit about immigration and political cartoons throughout history, and he was one who kind of hit it from both sides.

Speaker 2 He would draw one one year in 1870 criticizing anti-immigration,

Speaker 2 the Know Nothing Party, and that was called Throwing Down the Ladder by Which They Rose.

Speaker 2 And about a year later, had political cartoons out, you know, criticizing Irish immigrants as violent drunks taking over the country.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and this was a time when immigration was a huge, huge issue in the United States for probably the first time. It became like a flashpoint, like issue that you could run an entire campaign on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 For example, there was a

Speaker 3 cartoon from 1903 in a satirical weekly called Judge called Unrestricted Dumping Ground.

Speaker 2 Man, this one's tough.

Speaker 3 It is. And there's a lot going on in this cartoon.

Speaker 3 There's its color, which is, it really pops.

Speaker 3 But Uncle Sam is basically standing at the shores of the United States, and there's a bunch of immigrants swimming to the shore, but they're rats with human faces, which number one is unsettling, but number two is really offensive.

Speaker 3 And they're being dumped out of basically, it looks almost like a mailbox or something that says the slums of Europe.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they're being dumped into New York Harbor. And Uncle Sam's just standing there watching, wondering if he can do anything about it.
And then William McKinley is floating in like a cloud.

Speaker 3 The reason William McKinley was featured is because he was president. He was assassinated by a guy named Leo Cholgosh in 1899.

Speaker 3 And Cholgosh was born in Michigan, but he was considered an immigrant because his parents were immigrants.

Speaker 3 So like this was the kind of stuff that was being run in papers and magazines at the time, basically saying like, like immigrants are rats and like you can't let them in.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, and those rats also, just to further drive the point home, they had labels on these individual individual human rats that said like mafia, anarchist, socialist.

Speaker 2 So it was, you know, pretty on the nose, I guess you could say.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 2 There was another ad,

Speaker 2 as far as the immigration front goes, Teddy Roosevelt at one point talked about hyphenated Americans being able to vote, like that shouldn't happen, Irish-American, German-American.

Speaker 2 And this one was from Puck magazine, which was,

Speaker 2 was that American? Was that British? I thought that was British.

Speaker 3 I think Punch was British and Puck was American. Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Punch was British.

Speaker 2 But it had a caption, again, Uncle Sam saying, why should I let these freaks vote when they're only half American?

Speaker 3 Right. Yeah.
It's a, yeah, it's, it's, it's a really bizarre cartoon. It's tough to describe, but go look that one up.

Speaker 3 So one of the other things we said is, is that political cartoons sometimes also target policies, social issues.

Speaker 3 And there was a really good one that Dave turned up called From the Cradle to the Mill that really got across child labor or the need for child labor laws.

Speaker 3 It's this innocent-looking little probably five-year-old kid. I think he's holding a teddy bear still, and this dark, ghoulish spirit named Necessity.
He's a Grim Reaper, basically.

Speaker 3 Yeah, essentially, has come into the child's house and is taking him by the hand to lead him off to the mill for work.

Speaker 3 And it really, it gets the point across. Like, you know, this was from 1912.
And if child labor was still an issue today, you could run it today. It just really just captured what the problem was.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And this was a time, you know, we talked about the

Speaker 2 in France, you know, when the when the one political cartoonist was put in jail for six months. In America, at this point, there were limits on freedom of speech.

Speaker 2 So in 1917, that artist who drew that was targeted

Speaker 2 by the

Speaker 2 freshly passed Espionage Act,

Speaker 2 which was part of which was an attempt to silence critics of us going into World War I.

Speaker 2 And they almost did put him in prison for a cartoon called Having Their Fling.

Speaker 2 And this is a pretty brutal one, too. And it showed the

Speaker 2 editors, capitalist politicians, and preachers cheering entry into

Speaker 2 an orgy of death, basically.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that one hits as well, for sure. Speaking of World Wars, World War II is a big

Speaker 3 kind of accelerator of political cartoons.

Speaker 3 Because by this time, newspapers have really hit in the United States and around the world, but there were a lot of newspapers in the middle of the century, the 20th century.

Speaker 3 And so World War II like produced a lot of fodder for political cartoons. One of whom, one of the,

Speaker 3 I don't know if he was one of the most famous at the time, but today one of the most noteworthy was Dr. Seuss, who I think we mentioned in our Dr.

Speaker 3 Seuss episode was a political cartoonist for a little while during World War I or two.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 Theodor Geisel. Yeah, we did talk about this because some of the stuff, he worked for a New York newspaper called PM for, I think, two or three years in the early 40s.
Right.

Speaker 2 And it's, you know, it looks like Dr. Seuss stuff in his total signature style.

Speaker 2 But he would,

Speaker 2 you know, like some of them would be

Speaker 2 like against racist and discriminatory hiring practices and policies that are hampering the war effort.

Speaker 2 But he also, and we talked about this in the Seuss episode, you know, many years later, was kind of called out for having a lot of racist caricatures drawn in his work.

Speaker 3 Yeah, especially there's one of Tojo who ran Japan at the time during World War II, and

Speaker 3 in just the most racist Japanese stereotype you can possibly imagine, but Dr. Seuss style.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, there was another prominent cartoonist that actually emerged from World War II, like was drawing editorial cartoons on the front lines of World War II. His name was Bill Malden.

Speaker 3 I want to say Maudlin so bad, but it's Maulden. Yeah, me too.
And if you see pictures of him when he was, you know, drawing these cartoons during World War II, he looks like a baby.

Speaker 3 He looks like the kid that necessity comes and takes from his house to the mill in that one 1912 political cartoon.

Speaker 2 Now I'm looking up a picture of him because I didn't actually look up the artist. And yeah, he looks like a child.

Speaker 3 He really does. And he came up with two of the most

Speaker 3 beloved characters, recurring characters in the history of political cartoons, in part because there's not really that many recurring characters in political cartoons, right?

Speaker 3 But there were two GIs named Willie and Joe, and he just depicted their life. um

Speaker 3 in the front lines humorously for the most part but sometimes kind of poignantly as well yeah and these a lot of times were just

Speaker 2 I don't think we mentioned like you know sometimes it'll be an image with a

Speaker 2 kind of like at the back of the New Yorker with those cartoons that they'll have a caption.

Speaker 3 Right. The New Yorker is stealing my ideas.

Speaker 3 Ziggy at the complete window.

Speaker 2 Most of these had captions, the Willie and Joe stuff, but

Speaker 2 not all political cartoons use words at all. Sometimes very few words.
Sometimes this word's just in the image, like on a sign or, you know, something like that.

Speaker 2 But sometimes it's like a character saying something.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's one that I think really kind of stands out of Bill Malden's that shows a GI returning from World War II. He's sitting

Speaker 3 at a table and he's being interviewed by the press, and there's an Army PR man standing next to him and has his arm around his shoulder, and he's speaking on behalf of this GI.

Speaker 3 And he says he thinks the food over there was swell. He's glad to be home, but he misses the excitement of battle.
You may quote him. And it's just kind of, well, I don't know.

Speaker 3 I'll leave it to you to decide what it means.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's another one here that I'm looking at that's Willie and Joe reading the papers of their new

Speaker 2 soldier brought to the battalion. And the new soldier is clearly like, you know, 13 years old or something.

Speaker 2 And Willie and Joe, he says, oh, that's okay. The replacement center says he comes from a long line of infantrymen.

Speaker 3 Yeah, his uniform is like hanging off of him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so clearly making a point about like sending children to war.

Speaker 3 There was another thing, too, that was a recurring theme in these, um, in Malden's World War II cartoons, and that is how important hearing from people back home was to GIs.

Speaker 3 Like, uh, getting mail was a recurring theme throughout that. And there was one that I saw that it was like you were saying, there's no dialogue, there's no caption or anything like that.

Speaker 3 But it's a soldier, and he's sitting there with like he's he's sitting down with his back against a tree.

Speaker 3 He's holding his rifle up, but at his feet is a bunch of packages that say do not open until December 25th.

Speaker 3 So, like, he's in battle carrying around this package that he can't wait to open until Christmas.

Speaker 3 It's like it's got a touch of humor to it, but more than anything, it really struck me as quite touching, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, for sure. The one that artistically is

Speaker 2 like, I think one of the coolest ones was actually from a German.

Speaker 2 I mean, I really hate saying this out loud. It was from a Nazi.
And what was his name? His name was Harold. He was a Norwegian Nazi named Harald Domslech.

Speaker 2 And in 1944, he drew a political cartoon. The caption reads, the USA shall save European culture from destruction.
With what right?

Speaker 2 And it's a picture,

Speaker 2 you know, sort of

Speaker 2 pointing out all the hypocrisies of America, like, you know, this big winged sort of multi-armed, multi-legged beast beast made out of a drum and has a Klansman head and holding a money bag, and

Speaker 2 there's a noose hanging off. It's just crazy looking.
It looks like something like Pink Floyd would have used on an album cover.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it is nuts. It's called Culture Terror, but spelled with a K.

Speaker 3 And I think terror is spelled differently too. I guess in the Norwegian.

Speaker 2 Well, there's your band then. Just call your band that and use that as the album cover.

Speaker 3 Culture Terror. Yeah, that's a great idea.
You're halfway there. But go check it out because it's striking as just the art alone is striking.

Speaker 3 Um, but that the Nazis calling out America for our own misdeeds, misdeeds, great, thank you. Um, that was also carried on by some Americans, too.

Speaker 3 There was a black cartoonist named Jay Jackson who drew for the Chicago Defender, which is a black newspaper. Um, and during World War II, did you see the one of the blind leading the blind?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I I mean, talk about striking. So it's America.

Speaker 3 It's a figure representing America, and he's leading a figure with swastika. So he's representing Germany.
I think it even says Germany on the guy.

Speaker 3 And they're both blind, and they're both wearing dark glasses, and on the lenses, it says race hate.

Speaker 3 So what he's saying is that, like, you know, both of these countries that are fighting this war for moral superiority are both blinded by their hatred of different races. And

Speaker 3 it's one of the better political cartoons I've ever seen. Again, not funny, like you were saying, but still

Speaker 3 just an amazing point.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. We should probably take our last break.

Speaker 2 Right before the break, I want to mention that they've been giving out a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

Speaker 2 They started that in 1922, and Bill Malden won that Pulitzer for his World War II work. And we'll talk about someone else who won several of those awards right after this.

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Speaker 2 Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia.

Speaker 2 How about the one on borderline disorder?

Speaker 4 Better yet, perforder.

Speaker 4 Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice.

Speaker 4 Everybody, listen up.

Speaker 4 Oh, it's Charles and Joshua.

Speaker 4 It's not, it's not, it's not.

Speaker 4 It should not.

Speaker 3 Okay, Chuck, I just want to point out, I think we said we weren't really going to describe images. Right.
Well, not much. Yeah.
We've been doing it pretty prolifically. I hope it's going well.

Speaker 3 I can't tell.

Speaker 2 All right, no more.

Speaker 3 So I I think we should talk about a guy named Herb Block, or Herblock was his pen name, cartoon name. And he's considered probably the most important political cartoonist of the entire 20th century.

Speaker 3 He's got three Pulitzers for cartooning alone and an additional Pulitzer for public service that he got for just excoriating Nixon over the Watergate scandal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I imagine if you're a political cartoonist during Watergate, you're kind of licking your chops a bit, you know. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 Or McCarthyism, like he was really around during a fraught, fraught time politically.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he drew, just Block alone drew more than 100 cartoons about Watergate between 72 and 74. And that's something that I think bears pointing out.

Speaker 3 Political cartoonists are expected to draw a cartoon a day. Like you didn't write an article every day.
You didn't go cover something.

Speaker 3 You drew a political cartoon five days a week to run in the daily newspaper.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and 25 of them for Saturday and Sunday.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 2 And Block actually,

Speaker 2 I mean, I talked about the time that he was there. I mean, it's actually pretty vast.
He was there from 46 to 2001.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So he got to cover quite a bit politically. He coined the term McCarthyism.
I think we talked about that in the McCarthyism episode in a 1950 cartoon.

Speaker 2 He was definitely, you know, on the left side of the political spectrum because he would go after, you know, environmental polluters and

Speaker 2 war, the immorality of war,

Speaker 2 the government as a whole. And they have named

Speaker 2 since 2004, the best editorial and political cartoonist is named after him, the Herblock Prize.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I went and looked to see who some of the recent candidates or winners were. And there's one that I noticed.
I was looking through current political cartoons, and this guy kept coming up.

Speaker 3 His name was Pedro X. Molina, and he draws for counterpoint.
So he is super lefty.

Speaker 3 He was a 2024 finalist for the Herblock Prize, but his cartoons are just on point. He's, I think, probably the best working today of the younger generation.
Oh, cool.

Speaker 3 One of the ones that I saw was there's an old,

Speaker 3 like an extension cord outlet. You know, I'll have like the two outlets that you can plug into.

Speaker 2 Oh, you sent me this one, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. It just looks old and worn and everything.
And one of the outlets says Biden, and the other one says Trump. And then also in the picture is an Apple charger, and that says Gen Z.

Speaker 3 They have nowhere to, no one to plug into. Yeah.
And it's just, there's no words aside from the names

Speaker 3 and Gen Z. And like, it just, again,

Speaker 3 really gets the point across. But I like that guy's work.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It also, instead of saying Gen Z, could have said a lot of America.
Right.

Speaker 3 Right, for sure.

Speaker 2 So we should finish up by talking a bit about Charlie Hebdo, as promised early on.

Speaker 2 You mentioned that France has been a hotbed for satire since the get-go.

Speaker 2 And the radical, satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo

Speaker 2 has been around for a long, long time, since 1960. Their original motto was mean and nasty.

Speaker 2 And they made, but we probably would not here in the States, unless you just are sort of in the know, not known much about Charlie Hebdo had it not been for a couple of tragic events.

Speaker 2 On Halloween Day in 2011, they published

Speaker 2 an issue number 1011.

Speaker 2 They retitled, instead of Charlie Hebdo, they retitled the issue Charia Hebdo for Sharia Law.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was a cover in response to the Tunisian news where an Islamist party had won parliamentary elections there.

Speaker 2 And on the cover, it featured a cartoon rendering of the prophet Muhammad and the caption read 100 lashes if you do not die laughing

Speaker 3 and in Islam any image of Muhammad is very much forbidden much less you know a cartoon making fun of something right and violence ensued because of this yeah I think in 2012 no that same year 2011 so within a couple months the offices were firebombed no one was hurt but in response, and I didn't know this, I thought it was just that cover, that drawing, which is, you know, like you don't do that.

Speaker 3 That's a violation of like a huge violation of Islamic custom to make any kind of, like you said, picture of Muhammad, let alone make him a cartoon.

Speaker 3 But they, they went even further after the firebombing. And they, in 2012, they published more cartoons,

Speaker 3 one of which was Muhammad Naked on all fours. And that actually, from what I can tell, is what triggered

Speaker 3 the murders of a bunch of the people who worked at the offices in 2015.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was two men stormed into the offices, murdered 12 people.

Speaker 2 This was, you know, the biggest news. There's a cat walking around outside my house right now that I do not recognize.
Very interesting.

Speaker 3 Sorry.

Speaker 2 Just caught me off guard. Yeah, it did.
I was like, did one of my cats get out? It's like, nope, it's not one of my cats. It's a burger.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 murdered 12 people, probably not the best time to mention that, during the middle of this awful, awful retelling, including the editor of Charlie Hebdo and four other cartoonists.

Speaker 2 And also went on to kill four Jewish people. And then the French police took them out.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and so like immediately there were protests and marches in France, like millions of people across the country. And

Speaker 3 basically a meme was developed almost immediately. It was Je Sui Charlie.
And it means I am Charlie. And they were saying, like, I'm standing up for

Speaker 3 freedom of expression, freedom of speech. And

Speaker 3 that was pretty much the zeitgeist across all of France. Like, everyone stood up and supported Charlie Hebdo after that tragedy.

Speaker 3 And I saw, Chuck, that 10 years on, the 10-year anniversary just came and went this past January.

Speaker 3 Apparently, people have changed their opinions in

Speaker 3 some cases.

Speaker 3 Like 31% of people polled agreed with the idea that Charlie Hebdo brought that on themselves.

Speaker 3 Whereas that same, the answer to that question would have probably been in the low single digits right after the show.

Speaker 2 At the time. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I just thought that was interesting.
I mean, how different things can change in 10 years, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, in the wake of a tragedy like that,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying I agree one or the other. I just, I just, I think think a lot of times opinions change on stuff like that over time for certain people.

Speaker 3 10 years is a long time these days. It didn't used to be, but man, oh man, a lot can happen in 10 years.
We've learned to pack it in.

Speaker 2 So we mentioned early on that there's only 20 like on-staff major newspaper cartoonists. The reason for that, as we all know, is newspapers are

Speaker 2 having a tough time.

Speaker 2 Declining subscriptions mean they don't want to have further declining subscriptions by angering readership on either side of the political spectrum because people might cancel over something like that and they just can't afford that anymore.

Speaker 2 So people are more sensitive these days.

Speaker 2 Sadly, editors are not standing behind their cartoonists like they used to. Yeah, they definitely.
And if they flag something,

Speaker 2 they'll pull it and the cartoonists may quit or may be fired.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, if people complain about a political cartoon, it used to be like, hey, it's true.
Now it's like, oh, sorry. And then they print a retraction and then fire the political cartoonists.

Speaker 3 That's new.

Speaker 3 That's the way that the

Speaker 3 industry is changing. But

Speaker 3 it seems to be pretty much relegated to newspapers and just some newspapers.

Speaker 3 Right. You know, like Mike Lukovich at the AJC.
He's one of the premier editorial cartoonists still working today for a newspaper.

Speaker 2 Man, he's been around for a long, long time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and he doesn't pull punches. And I think the AJC is still behind him every single time.
Yeah. So it's not like it's going to happen, you know, no matter what newspaper you work at.

Speaker 3 It just depends on the, usually, the outlook of the publisher. Right.
And if you offend the publisher, it used to be like the editors would talk them down, but the editors don't do that anymore.

Speaker 3 And so you can get fired. And there was a very well-known political cartoonist, another Pulitzer winner named Anne Telnes.

Speaker 3 And in 2019, she kind of saw the writing on the wall and she published like a series, or not a series, it was multi-multi-panel cartoon that basically was an infographic explaining what political cartoonists do, the danger that they're in right now in the United States, and as far as like being canceled and fired, and then what the problem, what the ultimate problem with that is.

Speaker 3 And she essentially says political cartoonists are the canary in the coal mine.

Speaker 3 If we start start getting fired for expressing opinions and views that are legitimate because people don't want to hear that, that is a big red flag that freedom of expression is under attack in your country.

Speaker 3 And she was saying that's basically happening right now. And she ultimately quit just earlier this year, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, she had been at the Washington Post for 17 years and quit because her editors there at the Post refused to publish one of her cartoons

Speaker 2 based only on her opinion. So it's,

Speaker 2 yeah, that's kind of the state of things at the Washington Post these days.

Speaker 3 Yes. So, and across a lot of newspapers.
Like, again, they're like

Speaker 3 an endangered breed,

Speaker 3 but that's specifically at newspapers. It's still a very thriving art form.

Speaker 3 And you can make a really good case that

Speaker 3 it's still around and very popular. It's just transmuted in a lot of cases to memes.

Speaker 3 I'll give you an example of one I saw recently.

Speaker 3 You know the This Is Fine, the dog sitting at the table drinking coffee in a room that's on fire?

Speaker 3 It says this is fine.

Speaker 2 I don't see any memes though.

Speaker 3 It's a great meme. But in one panel, he's just sitting there and it says arson is free speech now.
And then the next panel, it's him just sitting there drinking the coffee in the room on fire.

Speaker 3 And he says, this is fine. And that, I mean,

Speaker 3 it's a meme. Somebody put it together probably using a meme generator but you can also make a case that that is in a lot of ways it bears a strong resemblance to political cartoons all right

Speaker 3 you got anything else I got nothing else okay well since we got nothing else that means this episode is done and it's time for listener mail

Speaker 2 This one's Scrabble-centric. Before I read this email, we do have to acknowledge that we failed to mention the ultimate Simpsons reference, of course, of Quidgebo,

Speaker 2 a very, very old Simpsons reference from an early episode where Bart Simpson, I think it was Bart, argued for Quidgebo, which was just the letters as they appeared on his rack, was a word, right?

Speaker 3 Right. Okay.

Speaker 2 So sorry about the Quidgebo. We heard from a lot of people.
But this is a different email. Hey, guys, the real reason I'm writing is to tell you about the role of Scrabble in my family's history.

Speaker 2 My parents loved to play Scrabble, and my dad, being the kind of guy he was, made up a table to record their stats by hand using a ruler both to make sure the lines were straight and the columns are each the same width from page to page.

Speaker 2 Ended up using five pages or so of very thin lines. He would record the date and the game that was played and the final score and my mom's final score.

Speaker 2 Two more columns in which he would track a running total of many games of how many games each of them had won.

Speaker 2 Besides being a perfect example of my dad, there's also interesting thing about the dates.

Speaker 2 There are three periods when they begin to play all the time, following periods for which they hardly played at all, in between each my two siblings and I were born.

Speaker 2 That's pretty funny. They're like, why did things drop off for two years?

Speaker 3 We had other things to do.

Speaker 2 Exactly. When my dad died, I inherited their Scrabble board and their record was in it.

Speaker 2 And this is one of my most precious possessions. That is from Reverend Eric.

Speaker 3 That's a sweet email. Thanks a lot, Reverend Eric.
That's great. I can just imagine, man, making your own columns and rows with a ruler.
That's dedication right there.

Speaker 2 I know those dads. I'm not that dad, and my dad wasn't that dad, but I've known those dads.
Yep.

Speaker 3 If you want to be like Reverend Eric and send us an email that tells us how sweet your parents were, we love those kinds of things. You can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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