Gump v. Editor

To be photographed sawing wood or milking a Holstein, to be listed "Among Those Sailing", to stand as godfather to a talcum powder or a 5-cent cigar--this is to be great. But there are degrees in greatness, and it is believed that the U. S. can boast but one man whose picture, although he has never been seen in the flesh, is published daily in most of the nation's press; whose name, although he has never shaken hands with a voter, has been scrawled on many bona fide ballots; whose family life is studied in all its intimacies each day by about 1/10 of the people who inhabit this continent. The name of this gentle-man--perhaps the greatest personage since Foxy Grandpa--is Andy Gump.

Unlike such zanies as Happy Hooligan, whose inertia and general attitude of laissez-faire lend an implication of shiftlessness to his character, unlike Mutt and partner Jeff--that ill-matched pair of indigent charlatans whose operations are too often of a shady cast, unlike Dinty Moore, who makes a public brag of the all-too-obvious fact that he is no gentleman, unlike the henpecked and somewhat fatuous Aloysius P. McGinnis--Andrew Gump's influence is for good and he is taken seriously. The millions who follow his changes of fortune, as charted for them daily in black and white, and in colors on Sunday, by Cartoonist Sidney Smith, are not the literati. Their mental age has been variously estimated as a healthy 12, or a rather pallid 13. Gump is their superior in intelligence. They borrow his jokes. They admire his prosperity, his quickness in answering his wife's sallies. Finding him in most things admirable, they pay him the compliment of imitation.

Now among the many newspapers in which Cartoonist Smith's creations are syndicated is the Chicago Tribune. Last week Gump, quite unwittingly, betrayed the Tribune into an editorial lapse.

The Tribune, which plays the Mutt to the Jeff of the New York Daily News, caters directly to the vast army of Gump's admirers. Its dispatches are not difficult to understand. Its headlines are often mumbled with relish by worthies whose brains do not easily grasp a word until that word is first shaped by the lips. To this gum-chewing public the Tribune in Chicago, the News in New York, has long been talking about revolvers.

The word, when mumbled in reading, becomes "revolavers". Its twin Hydra is the deady "automatick". "Away with such", the Tribune and the News have cried. There are two many shootings. Ergo, there are too many revolavers, automaticks. Let the citizen lay his aside, let the criminal be prevented from procuring any. In many rapid-fire editorials the Tribune has driven home these points. Often the exhortations were embellished, at the top, with a revolaver or automatick, luridly drawn in black and white: "Stop selling these".

It is difficult, therefore, to adequately picture the horror and surprise of those Tribune readers who beheld over their three minute eggs one morning last week, the following sentiments issuing from the lips of Andrew Gump:

(Business of cleaning enormous six-shooter) :

"I just received another anonymous letter from Carlos and his gang threatening me with death and destruction for trying to force Carlos to pay back the money he stole from, the widow Zander--I'm being shadowed and last night I saw one of his spies peeking through my bedroom window--they're trying to scare me--let them keep right on trying."

(Nonchalant puncturing of tin pan with bullets) :

"Well, the old trigger finger is as steady as a cement sidewalk-- if Carlos arrives with seven friends only one of them will leave--they may arrive in a limousine but they'll depart in an Ambulance-- as long as I have my trusty cannon I won't bother waking up a policeman to protect me."

(Aim taken at a similar can hung from a bough behind Gump's head. The great marksman controls his shooting by looking into a mirror) :

"Any assassin who tries to sneak up and stab me in the back better wear his black suit and do the undertaker a favor--they can't bluff me--Carlos ought to know that the howl of a coyote may scare a jackrabbit but it sounds like a lullaby to a mountain lion."

In the minds of thousands of Tribune readers an appalling conflict began. For the first time in their lives they found themselves called upon to choose between two infallible authorities. Who was right--Gump, or the Editor?