Fighting Words (And Pictures)

The effective political cartoon does not tell a story: It points out that stories exist, many of them incongruent with the official ones that obscure the awful cruelties of everyday life. This suggestion recurs through Donald Dewey’s handsome and bracingly irreverent history of the form, “The Art of Ill Will” (NYU Press, 304 pages, $34.95), in which cartoons never shame anybody out of office, bring about peace, or inspire demands for a recount. Instead, they fail at every turn — for their target is too formidable. As Mr. Dewey observes, the responsible cartoonist is preoccupied with “power and its exercise,” not with exposing the idle quirks of a given authority figure. (Obviously, though, that can be fun too: Witness the frequency of mid-19th- century panels that fixated on the last name of Lewis Cass, a Democratic presidential candidate, and all the words it rhymed with.)From its beginnings, the American political cartoon has experienced more success as a generator of symbols than a shaper of opinions. As if to stave off any fears that this will be a backslap-filled history, Mr. Dewey, a celebrated writer of both fiction and nonfiction, opens his introductory essay by pointing out the practical failure of one of the enduring images of American history, the segmented snake of Benjamin Franklin’s famous “Join, or Die” editorial. While it may not have been the first political cartoon, Mr. Dewey writes, it was certainly “the first to have its politics rejected” — Franklin failed to secure any support for his unification plan when the “Join, or Die” woodcut drawing debuted in 1754. From there we are treated to the literal drawing board of democratic image-making. Columbia, the unofficial “granddaughter” of the British symbol-goddess Britannia, never caught on despite the efforts of cartoonists in the 1770s. The Republican Party inherited its elephant logo from an 1874 Thomas Nast illustration of a cowering elephant — meant to symbolize Republican voters, not the party. And the Democratic Party got stuck with their donkey even though some Southerners lobbied to be depicted as an always-alert rooster. We need not dwell on the impolite suggestions here.“The Art of Ill Will” is essentially two books: Mr. Dewey’s learned yet loose 73-page narrative history of the form leads into a pictorial survey of the form’s best moments. While American cartoons have been dismissed as “a laughing stock among other countries of the world” — the accusation of Australian Pat Oliphant, later a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Denver Post — the form seems uniquely suited for a society founded on the precarious balance of national myths with the democratic diversity of everyday life. With few political victories to tally, Mr. Dewey celebrates the form’s subtler, unexpected triumphs: the symbols that have endured; the evolution of a satirical, purposefully sarcastic wit; the dizzying index of political ideas and anxieties in search of language, and the contributions to speech, such as “zilch” and “Milquetoast” or “McCarthyism” and “political correctness.”While Mr. Dewey is refreshingly frank about the political cartoonist’s negligible effect in shaping policy, he is inspiring to read when discussing the cartoonist’s motivation. Pointing out that most smart cartoonists abhor the two-party system far more than they abhor the two parties themselves, Mr. Dewey concludes: “To caricature, satirize, and otherwise question that system rather than either of its separate components implies not a liberal or conservative viewpoint, but a radical one.” Whenever Mr. Dewey’s introduction approaches the density one expects from a historical survey, he carefully unwinds a moment of elegant, biting wit. In discussing the persistence of cartoons trafficking in unflattering stereotypes of Asian figures, Mr. Dewey utterly dismantles the apologist’s claim that such images were merely the product of lazy (but non-racist) editors buying the cheap filler works from subcontractors. If this were the case, he argues, then the “deadline defense could also be applied to the publisher who, faced with too much white space on an Alcoholics Anonymous bulletin, paid a subcontractor for pictures of his favorite bars.”Mr. Dewey is a delightful host, describing misogynistic panels of rotund bloomers as “ugly battleaxes” and carefully lingering on the story of a Pennsylvania governor who tried in vain to legislate against politician-as-animal caricatures. (He ended up in the following week’s paper depicted as a stein of beer.)Browsing the gallery of cartoons, one is struck by the craftsmanship more than the wit. It is remarkable to consider that during the form’s Gilded Age heyday, a cartoon could end up the newspaper’s lead story. Thomas Nast, the most important American practitioner, even helmed his own magazine, the short-lived Nast’s Weekly. One could get lost in the infinite cross-hatching and microscopic detailing of “We are on the Home Stretch” (1872), one of Nast’s many bitter assaults on Horace Greeley. This one is a bit of wishful thinking: the “home stretch” referring to a cute, cannonball-shaped Greeley lying dead on a stretcher.At times the images are surreal. J.S. Pughe’s “If” (1904) imagines what the inaugural dinner would look like if William Randolph Hearst were elected president. Hearst, who had been collecting the world’s finest cartoon strips for his newspaper, tips his glass to some early-century favorites: the oafish Katzenjammers, the raggedy, hard-luck Happy Hooligan, and a dragon chewing on a portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt. There is a Dada-like quality to Joseph Keppler’s “Modern Colossus of (Rail) Roads” (1879), as an eerily realistic, giant William Vanderbilt skis along the Union Pacific line — with miniature versions of Cyrus Field and Jay Gould growing out of his thighs.Ralph Waldo Emerson praised the caricature’s capacity to convey a broad, complex moment “in an instant.” What he described wasn’t a fleeting, passing second but a pinprick jab to the consciousness. A morose Vietnam War-era etching of President Nixon as Hamlet, atop a mountain of skulls, still provokes this kind of split-second judgment. But as we approach the present, examples of this manner of savage and deeply intelligent sense of satire grow rare. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which are photography and television, and the new forms of political comedy they have enabled. But Mr. Dewey also laments a turn in the 1960s and 1970s, as politics became its own one-liner and political satire was replaced with dumbed-down gags about the president’s dopiness. Without that crucial critical pause, Mr. Dewey fears, we will be left with funny pictures and a mere “history of cartooning.”Mr. Hsu teaches English at Vassar College and writes for Slate and the New York Times.

Fighting Words (And Pictures)

Fighting Words (And Pictures)

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