Lost Laughter

Lost Laughter (See cartoons, pp. 14 & 15)

Because U. S. voters take their political cartoons in small daily doses, they rarely get a mass impression of the entire crop during one national campaign. If they could view the full output for the 1936 election, many of them would probably be either discouraged at the low estate of politics as material for caricature or depressed at the downward course of the old art of cartooning. Significant was the fact that the Pulitzer Prize committee last May found not a single cartoon worthy of its $500 award.

The cartoonist's best boon to citizens weary of campaign pomposities and profundities is laughter. Than laughter, few political weapons are more damaging. Manhattan's smartchart, The New Yorker, demonstrated that sound fact this year when, just for fun, it printed two political cartoons. They proved among the most effective of the campaign. One, by slim, modest William G. Crawford, who signs himself Galbraith, gave a new twist to the young mistress-old lover theme. The other, by famed Peter Arno, capitalized the currently popular pastime of attending newsreel theatres for the pleasure of cheering one's Presidential favorite, hissing his opponent.

By contrast, most newspaper cartooning of the campaign has been dismally lacking in fun. For oldtime jest and jibe, most cartoonists have substituted grim seriousness, sullen partisanship. A charitable explanation is that the Roosevelt-Landon campaign has been a confused, bad-tempered one, and cartoonists have simply reflected the temper of their editors and readers.

Last good campaign for cartoonists was that of 1928. Times were good, popular issues were sharp, simple, easily pictured--the Brown Derby, the Noble Experiment, Two Cars in Every Garage & a Chicken in Every Pot. By 1932 Depression had cast the land in gloom and cartoonists were forced to wrestle with such huge intangibles as the Gold Standard, War Debts, Unemployment, a Change.

Even less solid stuff in which to sink a pen has been furnished by the New Deal's vast social and economic innovations. Republicans have jabbed hardest and oftenest at Spending & Taxation, with frequent digs at the Red Issue, Relief Corruption, Regimentation, Unemployment, Foreign Farm Imports. Democratic favorites have been Recovery and the Interests, nicely combined in pictures of plutocratic Old Deal ingrates howling calamity against a background of soaring business graphs and smoking factories.

Only one crackerjack new cartoonist has emerged in the campaign, and only one crackerjack new cartoon character. The first created the second. Early in the year, lean, bushy-haired Clarence Daniel Batchelor sat down at his board in the New York News office, drew a petulant, pot-bellied little man, naked except for a silk hat, labeled him "Old Deal." This character, funny yet forceful, caught the public fancy at once, grew famed when Cartoonist Batchelor pictured him perched pensively on a rock high over Washington, reflecting, "Gawd, how I hate his guts." Since then "Old Deal" has boasted, blustered, sneered, gloomed, acquired a pair of shorts and a sunflower patch over his navel, served as inspiration for a new political animal, taken his place in cartoon history.

Native of Osage City, Kans., hard-working Cartoonist Batchelor has never met Alf Landon, has "curiosity." His 1888 birthday was on April 1, which he considers an excellent one for a cartoonist. He once did human-interest cartooning for the old New York Evening Post, has been on the News for five years. Genuinely convinced that the current campaign presents the first "real economic lineup" since the days of Roosevelt I, he tackles his work with heartfelt zest. His closest and most sympathetic collaborator is his ardently pro-New Deal employer, the News' Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson. Every day he sketches four or five drafts, works out the final composition with Publisher Patterson. Cartoonist Batchelor says "Old Deal" was inspired by a Shakespearean quotation :

Fat paunches have lean pates and daily bits

Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.*

The New Deal's biggest journalistic support is the Scripps-Howard chain, and Harold Morton Talburt of its Washington News has proved the best-humored, most vigorous and fertile of cartooning veterans. One of the few who have seemed to enjoy the campaign, he has used his comical little top-hatted elephant with telling effect against the GOP. Notable among oldtimers who have failed to share their employers' wholehearted partisanship is Cartoonist Talburt's Scripps-Howard colleague, Rollin Kirby of the New York World-Telegram, three-time Pulitzer Prizeman. His most famed figure, a lean, dour-faced, black-garbed Prohibition, has outlived its political usefulness. Still featuring his bloated, blowsy old man labeled GOP and his Republican elephant Bolivar, Cartoonist Kirby has drawn with all of his old-time skill, little of his oldtime punch.

Another able oldtimer, cramped by his newspaper's current poltical allegiance is Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Until that longtime Democratic sheet shifted to Landon last month (TIME, Oct. 5), Cartoonist Fitzpatrick was happily engaged in lampooning Republicans with such stark, simple drawings as "The Kansas Coolidge." Since then he has been reduced to innocuous pictures of elephant and donkey running around in a circle or bellowing into microphones.

For brutal power, no New Deal attack on the Republican foe has matched the sledgehammer blows of Red cartoonists spurred on by their hate & fear of "Landon-Hearst-Liberty League reaction." Typical is a current "Unnatural History'' series in the New Masses by John Mackey, of which the first drawing depicted as cats & dogs a fatuous Landon, an idiotic Knox, a horrid Hearst. Scottish-born Cartoonist Mackey lives over a store in dingy Greenwich Village, has earned his living since childhood. His favorite targets are the Nazis, the British Royal Family.

As in 1932, the GOP's ablest pen in 1936 has been that of Des Moines Register's, Jay Norwood ("Ding") Darling. This year "Ding," who carried away from Washington a first-rate grudge when he quit the U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey because the New Deal failed to spend enough on conserving his beloved wild life, has pounded tirelessly at the New Deal spending on other projects. He has shown Harry Hopkins making the electorate sit up and bark for WPA grants, Franklin Roosevelt as a Roman emperor tossing a puny taxpayer to a gladiator labeled Eleven Billion Dollar Deficit.

Though he has performed both roles with equal fervency, William. Randolph Hearst has not been, so far as cartooning goes, nearly so potent an enemy of Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 as he was his friend in 1932. His Frederick Burr ("Happy Hooligan") Opper has retired; his Tom Powers and Nelson Harding have lost their touch. Hence Publisher Hearst's message of hate has been chiefly depicted by such second-string draughtsmen as King Features' James G. ("Little Jimmy") Swinnerton and the New York American's Dorman H. Smith. Both specialize in a moronic, capped-&-gowned Brain Truster. Cartoonist Swinnerton's is distinguished by jackass ears.

Of regular Republican dailies Democrat Roosevelt gets his biggest brickbats from the Chicago Tribune and its Carey Cassius Orr. The Tribune's famed, aging John Tinney McCutcheon finds Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick's rabid anti-New Dealism distasteful, ventures no further into politics than an occasional (Continued on p. 16) jest on the disparity of straw votes (TIME, Aug. 3). Gruff, one-eyed Cartoonist Orr does not hate Franklin Roosevelt either, simply considers him "despicable like a snake." He likes to picture the President as a Red, a would-be Hitler, a gorilla-like monster of Fear, Doubt and Ruin. Other cartoonists consider Carey Orr an exponent of "brute force, which gets reaction not converts." Nevertheless Publisher McCormick continues to play his product day after day on the front page.

Members of the Orr School are the Philadelphia Inquirer's one-legged, cigar-chewing Hugh Hutton, whose Brain Truster is more ominously idiotic than Hearstling Swinnerton's, and the Los Angeles Times's young Bruce Russell, whose Franklin Roosevelt is the ugliest of the lot.

After 24 years with the Saturday Evening Post, Herbert Johnson displays a belief in the righteousness of U. S. Business and the Republican Party as unwavering as the lines of his workmanlike cartoons. Once he pictured "Government in Business" as a banyan tree whose roots curled out to strangle honest enterprise. He liked the idea, improved on it in a second cartoon by turning the banyan tree into an octopus named "New Deal."

After twelve years on the Baltimore Sun, which opposes both Roosevelt and Landon, Edmund Duffy is disposed to regard politics as a joke. This year he has drawn a wry-mouthed Franklin Roosevelt and a pompous, silk-hatted GOP with equal indifference, saved his enthusiasm for the cause of Peace.

--From Love's Labour's Lost.

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