Hit It If It's Big

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As morning broke each workday last week over the pleasant St. Louis suburb of University City, an impish-looking, tire-waisted man gingerly eased himself into a tub of steaming hot water and submerged right up to his jug-handle ears. For most men, the solitary ritual of the tub means a chance to escape for a while from the cares and worries of the world outside--but not for William Henry Mauldin, editorial cartoonist of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In Mauldin's cauldron, the heat creates light--in the form of inspiration for his drawing board. The water of his bath is roiled with national and international crises, and in the rising steam swarm the wraithlike figures of politicians, statesmen and world leaders. While his skin turns lobster-red and he blisters his insides with coffee from a king-size cup, Cartoonist Bill Mauldin is hard at work.

Steam heat is, in fact, the ideal climate for Mauldin's style of searing creativity. In an art that often uses a shovel instead of a rapier, a backslap instead of a boot, Mauldin, 39, wields the hottest editorial brush in the U.S. Full of caustic and rebellious passions, he boils over onto his drawing board with the scalding effect of a well-aimed spit of lava. "You've got to be a misanthrope in this business," says Mauldin. "A real son of a bitch. I'm touchy. I've got raw nerve ends, and I'll jump. If I see a stuffed shirt, I want to punch it." Mauldin's professional credo: "If it's big, hit it. You can't go far wrong."

The wonder is that this ordinarily mild-mannered, suburbia-chained father, who even admits that his swimming pool is "my status symbol," is able to punch so hard. Borne to fame in World War II on the shoulders of his famed G.I. cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, Mauldin seemed dashed and aimless once the smoke of war had cleared away. "My life has been backwards," he says. "Big success, retirement, and now I'm making an honest living." Starting a brand-new career three years ago at the Post-Dispatch, he has risen to the top of his profession, using as his ladder an inland newspaper that has always encouraged crusaders and viewed the nation and the world with "show me" detachment.

Voodoo & Vulnerability. Mauldin packs a wallop that can be absorbed in seconds--and seconds, as he well knows, are all his work will get from the Post-Dispatch's readers (circ. 406,947) and the other 10 million in his 99-newspaper syndication. He understands even better--as many of his colleagues seem to forget --that editorial cartooning is essentially an aggressive art, aimed at the belly rather than the brain. Mauldin never defends; he attacks. The difference between an editorial cartoon and the editorial across the page, he says, is "the difference between a sergeant's whistle and a Brahms symphony."

Bill Mauldin blows his sergeant's whistle as a call to battle. At his weakest when assaulting local targets, such as St. Louis' antiquated building code, he is strongest when blazing away with lethal skill at the vulnerable figures that prowl the political jungles of Washington and the other capitals of the world. Mauldin understands the art of politics as few cartoonists do (he has run for public office) and plays on the public's fascination with the intricacies of the subject --a fascination that has kept Advise and Consent on the bestseller lists for 100 weeks. Thus he could reduce the political complexities of the row between the Speaker of the House and the chairman of the powerful Rules Committee to an easily digestible cartoon. "No hard feelin's, Mr. Sam," says Chairman Howard Smith into the telephone after losing the power struggle to Speaker Sam Rayburn. Then Smith continues solicitously, as he sticks pins into a voodoo doll of Rayburn: "By the way, how are you feelin'?"

Cracks in the Idol. This spirit of attack charges Mauldin's work. At home, he can ridicule the race issue by drawing two Dixie rednecks armed with baseball bats and speculatively eying a Negro just out of the picture. "Let that one go," says one. "He says he don't wanna be mah equal." He treats the space race between Russia and the U.S. with barbell scorn: a monkey up a tree demands of its space-suited companion back from a quick zip through the firmament, "Where the hell have you been?" Ranging across the world for targets, he aims at many, misses few. Mauldin's Khrushchev stands in the U.N., a squat, solitary and ridiculous figure with his own shoe stuffed into his mouth. As for Russia's huge and backward Orientalally, Communist China, few cartoonists could sum it up better than Mauldin's trenchant cartoon that shows the Chinese as human ties beneath an oncoming train.

Occasionally, Mauldin's wallops land a little below the belt -- as in his figure of Charles de Gaulle sitting by the bed of a skeleton labeled "Colonialism" and observing cheerfully: "While there's life there's hope." A liberal by instinct, Mauldin refused to be hog-tied by the hampering allegiances that can destroy a cartoonist's punch. "I have lots of acquaintances and few friends," he says. Democrat Mauldin was all for John Kennedy during the campaign, but lost little time after the election in searching for cracks in the idol. He poked fun at the new host of Harvard men in Washington, showed Kennedy sitting in a rocking chair knitting while U.S. prestige declined. On the two crucial issues of the New Frontier so far --Laos and Cuba -- Mauldin has hit as hard as anyone: Khrushchev amiably consumes a fowl (Laos) as Kennedy looks on, a blind Kennedy is flung heels over head by a Seeing-Eye dog (the CIA) hot on the trail of a skunk clearly meant to be Cuba. "Once Kennedy was President," says Mauldin, "I didn't even give him the usual 100 days of grace. I stung him hard. And I'll sting him again." Such deep engagement in battle, says Cartoonist Paul Flora of Hamburg's weekly Die Zeit, "is Mauldin's strength. He may outlast us all."

Lusty Life. At the core of so versatile a talent lies a deep satirical lode that links Bill Mauldin to the giants of caricature who arose in Europe two centuries ago. Actually, the art goes all the way back to the ancient Egyptian papyri, which bore lampoons of the high life of the times. But not until the 18th century, in a Europe boiling with life and endless political wars, did the art turn to the inexhaustible veins of political and social satire that are still being mined today.

In England, William Hogarth (1697-1764) chose the common man as his theme and produced an imperishable record of the lusty life all about him: his Gin Lane, a sermon on the evils of drink, has lost none of its thunder in 200 years.

In early 19th century Spain, Francisco Goya etched his famed Los Desastres de la Guerra, which still stands as the most vivid denunciation of war ever conceived. In France, Honore Victorin Daumier refined the growing art with his clean lines and acid skill. It remained for a pugnacious young republic across the Atlantic to adapt caricature to journalism, thus giving the press an instrument of unparalleled immediacy and force.

Beyond the Smoke. U.S. editorial cartooning ripened swiftly. Not long after Benjamin Franklin roused the colonies against the perils of the French and Indian War with his Pennsylvania Gazette's famed segmented snake ("Join, or Die"), technological improvements in printing opened the way for more generous use of illustration. Inspired by similar periodicals abroad, a new journalistic genre arose -- Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, Vanity Fair, Puck-- that saw in the cartoon something more than mere illustration.

The career of German-born Thomas Nast, who worked for several of these magazines, typifies the U.S. cartoon's evolution into a journalistic weapon. Assigned to draw sketches in the field after Civil War broke out, Nast looked beyond the smoke to the battle's meaning. Such cartoons as "A Christmas Furlough," showing Union soldiers in touching domestic scenes, stiffened the North's spine at a time when the South seemed to be winning. This and other cartoons caused Lincoln to call Nast "our best recruiting sergeant."

But Nast reached his full stature only after the war in his relentless pursuit of William Marcy Tweed, corrupt and greedy boss of New York's Tammany Hall. Taking the Tammany Tiger as his symbol, Nast made himself famous--and Tweed infamous. Of his dozens of Tammany cartoons, none projected rawer power than the 1871 engraving in Harper's that showed the tiger clawing at the body of a woman (The Republic) and taunting the world with Tweed's own arrogant words: "What are you going to do about it?" Imprisoned in 1875, Tweed escaped and fled to Europe--into the hands of Spanish police, who recognized him from a Nast cartoon.

In the few decades just before and just after the 20th century began, U.S. political cartooning enjoyed its golden age. At a time when there were some 500 more daily papers than today, most of them had staff cartoonists. They were predominantly men of strong convictions who drew with a brutal vigor that most of today's newspapers would hesitate to print. The best of them--the New York World's Rollin Kirby, whose "Mr. Dry" hastened Prohibition's repeal; the Post-Dispatch's corrosive Daniel R. Fitzpatrick; the Baltimore Sun's hard-hitting Edmund Duffy; J. N. (Ding) Darling of the Des Moines Register and the New York Herald Tribune; Arthur Henry (Art) Young of Chicago's old Inter-Ocean, a bitter commentator on social injustice--burned with an inner fire that gave their names and their work a national currency.

Like a Picnic. Gut-fighting on the editorial page has largely passed from vogue. Today, many U.S. editorial cartoonists treat their cartoons merely as squiggles to relieve the boredom of the editorial page, end up boring their readers with such stereotyped figures as Uncle Sam, Justice and Lady Luck, such stock targets as drunken driving, Soviet Russia and unscrupulous landlords. To cover their own inadequacies, they often over-label until the reader misses the point for the paragraphs. "There are little figures running around labeled 'Administration,' " says the London Evening Standard's Vicky, "and if they draw a cloud, they label it 'cloud.' " Snorts Effel (Franc,ois Lejeune) of Paris' L'Express: "Most American cartoons look like a picnic after the picnickers have gone home."

Only 119 men now work at the art of editorial cartooning in the U.S.--one for every 15 daily newspapers. Either for economy or fear of offending someone--and someone is always willing to be offended--the vast majority of papers get along with the harmless, inoffensive cartoons peddled by the feature syndicates and wire services for as little as $5 a week. Serving customers of every conceivable doctrine, such cartoons are almost ingeniously equivocal. The Associated Press's John M. Morris, an amiable fence straddler, accommodates his 200-odd papers by avoiding all pointed controversy, shooting only at universally acceptable villains.

The timidity that now dominates his craft makes Bill Mauldin fighting mad. Too many of today's artists, he says, "regard editorial cartooning as a trade instead of a profession. They try not to be too offensive. The hell with that.

We need more stirrer-uppers."

Searing Defiance. Mauldin has been a stirrer-upper--and an artist--all his life. At three he was sketching on the inside walls of a bordello in Parral, a Mexican town to which Sidney Albert Mauldin. Bill's peripatetic father, had taken his family to try his hand at mining. Bill soon showed evidence of another indispensable ingredient of the good cartoonist: a low boiling point. When he was a spindly eight (the result of rickets) with a head too big for his body, he overheard a New Mexico rancher say to a crony: "If that was my son, I'd drown him." Says Mauldin, who never forgot or forgave the insult: "I could picture that bastard holding me under water for no reason. I had a searing feeling of defiance. I'd show that big son of a bitch."

Eventually, he did--in the only way that he knew. Sent to Chicago in 1939 for a year at the Academy of Fine Arts with $500 from his maternal grandmother, he learned editorial cartooning by day and spent each night drawing ten gag cartoons. Of some 3,000 submitted to 20 magazines, he sold about 50 specimens at $2 each--all to Arizona Highways magazine. He did better at political cartooning. Working both sides of the political street in Phoenix a year later, he drew campaign art not only for Arizona's incumbent Governor but for his opponent as well. When this double-dealing was exposed, Mauldin joined the Arizona National Guard.

The Washing War. What could have been a digression in uniform developed into a career. With neither the physique nor the temperament for soldiering--during one four-month stretch he stood 64 days of K.P.--Private Mauldin was assigned to truck driving. After the scrawny chauffeur had stripped more than his share of gears, the motor pool captain gladly gave him permission to try out as cartoonist for the division newspaper.

"The kid was a strike," recalls the paper's founder, Walter ("Skipper") Harrison, then on leave from his duties as managing editor of the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman. Mauldin's early work, much of it in the area of latrine humor, soon made him the best-known dogface in the division. But after his outfit moved to Italy, Mauldin began toying with something bigger than barracks jokes.

Instinctively sympathetic to the gripes, fears and frustrations of the civilian suddenly converted to fighting man, Mauldin guided his pen toward some permanent cartoon characters who would express what he felt. In 1943, already appearing regularly in Stars and Stripes, he introduced Willie and Joe. "I just stumbled on the right device for portraying war," Mauldin says. "I never once drew a dead soldier. I gave the impression of death and tragedy just offstage. I thrived on boredom. Ninety percent of the war I saw was the quiet war, the housekeeping war, the washing war."

Alongside Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, Mauldin's stoic, unshaven pair took their pinup places in foxholes, tents and barracks all over Europe. The G.I. could richly appreciate the saw-toothed irony of Mauldin's cartoons. In one, a dog-tired and shambling Joe guards the three equally exhausted Germans he has flushed from some bloody pocket of the war. Mauldin's caption, inspired by a news dispatch: "Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners." A cavalryman sadly administers the coup de grace to a Jeep with a broken axle. Relaxed before battle, Willie angrily casts his eye on his buddy's unlovely countenance: "Why th' hell couldn't you have been born a beautiful woman?"

Purple Band-Aid. A three-stripe sergeant, Mauldin soon had the prerogatives of a general. He cruised the front in his own Jeep--a gift from Lieut. General Mark Clark--twice as famous, and twice as welcome, as any other visitor outside of Marlene Dietrich. He liberated artist's material where he could find it: in Italy he often sketched on the backs of the Mussolini portraits that hung in most Italian homes. "I was no hero," says Mauldin. "I wasn't leading a perilous life." But he got close enough to the shooting to be superficially injured by a mortar shell fragment in fighting near Cassino in 1943. Applying for a fresh Band-Aid, he was handed a Purple Heart to go with it--and turned the incident into an incisive cartoon. "Just gimme a coupla aspirin," says Willie to the Medical Corpsman offering him a medal. "I already got a Purple Heart."

Constitutionally opposed to authority, Mauldin attacked the military caste system without mercy. "Them buttons wuz shot off when I took this town, sir," growls a slovenly Willie to a spit-and-polish rest-area lieutenant. "One more crack like that," snarls a private to a major, "an' you won't have yer job back after th' war." Inevitably, this kind of enlisted man's license landed Mauldin in trouble. It culminated in a personal confrontation with Lieut. General George S. Patton in Luxembourg in 1945.

"It seems," says Mauldin dryly, "that General Patton didn't like the sloppy, insubordinate-looking soldiers I was drawing. He pulled several of my cartoons out of a drawer. I asked him if he thought I was inaccurate. He admitted that the men do look like that at the front. Then I asked him if he wanted me to make inaccurate pictures of the men. He said no--he didn't want me to do that. Then he changed the subject." From the encounter, Mauldin--and Willie and Joe--emerged in unrepentant triumph.

Aimless Drifting. With five wartime books--among them the best-selling Up Front--and a 1945 Pulitzer Prize for cartooning to his credit, Mauldin came back from the war, at 23 a celebrity who had to shave only twice a week. His 1942 marriage had foundered in a messy divorce, and like many another G.I., he had a hard time readjusting to civilian life. "I never quite could shake off the guilt feeling that I had made something good out of the war," he says. "It wasn't a nice feeling." Willie and Joe also had trouble readjusting to civvies (they wound up running a gas station, wearing surplus officer caps). Against the advice of his horrified syndicate, Mauldin let them expire in six months, began lashing out in half-baked rage at the Ku Klux Klan, race discrimination and the American Legion. "I didn't have very much to say," he admits now. "I became a bore." Too often his work was shrill and off target. The syndication evaporated steadily, during one period at the rate of one paper a day. Among the defectors: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When his contract lapsed in 1948, Mauldin did not seek to renew it.

Bill Mauldin thereupon began the aimless drifting that was to mark his next decade. He published four more books, wrote five unpublished novels and an unpublished play. He acted in two war movies, Teresa and The Red Badge of Courage. He covered Korea for Collier's. Suddenly fascinated by flying, he acquired a $9,000 Piper Tri-Pacer by writing and illustrating company promotion, and winged restlessly about the U.S. "That airplane," said a friend, "was just a great big Yo-Yo for Bill to play with."

In 1956, playing country squire with a 10-acre estate 35 miles north of Manhattan, Mauldin ran for Congress as a Democrat in a Republican stronghold: New York State's 28th Congressional District. Politician Mauldin was predictably defeated by the Republican incumbent, Katharine St. George, came out of the experience "broke and through with politics."

"Take Ten Years." One winter's day in 1958, flying east on a magazine assignment, Mauldin was grounded by bad weather in St. Louis. On impulse, he paid a visit to the Post-Dispatch's Dan Fitzpatrick, whom Mauldin had long admired. To Mauldin's surprise, he found Fitz on the eve of retirement. Did Mauldin have any suggestions about a replacement? "Sure," said Mauldin. "Hire me." Two months later, he stepped into Fitzpatrick's shoes.

By then, the paper had thoroughly cased its man and passed favorable judgment. "The nicest thing they said to me when I came," says Mauldin, "was to tell me to relax. They said if I needed ten years to find my style, take ten years." The applied psychology worked fine. "In the beginning. Bill's drawings were a bit stilted," said Publisher Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who hired Mauldin. "But that was only for a matter of weeks. In Mauldin we very quickly discovered we had a terrifically original cartoonist. He has a great sense of humor and a profound sense of dignity in the liberal tradition of our newspaper."

Mauldin's originality hatches only after the most stringent of professional routines, of which the morning parboil is but a part. Four hours of preparation, four hours of execution go into each cartoon. Arriving at his cluttered Post-Dispatch office about 10 in the morning, Mauldin reads the freshly printed city edition for the current news. Within the hour, he has submitted, half anxiously, half belligerently, a rough pencil sketch of his idea to Editorial Page Editor Robert Lasch. The two have a smooth working relation. "Bob," says Mauldin, "is like a good cop, there to protect you, not to arrest you." Mauldin is given unusual leeway in his work; the paper has never asked him to come out for or against anyone. On the other hand, says Lasch, "there have never been any serious disagreements. Mauldin does not consider himself bigger than the Post-Dispatch"

Once Lasch approves, Mauldin works up half a dozen crude, matchbook-sized "spots"--samples that vary widely in composition and approach. These spots play an important role in giving his idea different settings: "You've got to be suspicious if anything satisfies you right off." After a quick lunch, Mauldin grids his drawingboard work area into nine squares and begins drafting the cartoon, first in pencil and then in ink. A stickler for just the right detail, he frequently consults his favorite reference, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, or poses before a Polaroid Land camera (with a self-tripping shutter) to get the authentic look of a clenched fist, a tyrant's sneer, a trouser seat viewed from the rear.

A left-hander who works carefully up from the lower right-hand corner so as not to smear his work, Mauldin generally has finished next day's cartoon by 6, personally escorts it to the engraving department ("I would never trust a copy boy with it") before "heading out for the Bismarck, a Post-Dispatch hangout, for a relaxing martini or two with friends. But his thoughts are never far from the job. His second wife Natalie, a Sarah Lawrence graduate whom Mauldin met at a Manhattan party after the war, has learned not to talk to Bill at bedtime, when his glazed eyes tell her he has fallen into an inspirational mood. The neighbors are used to the predawn roar of Mauldin's 14-year-old Jeep; he is off to the paper to make some suddenly visualized change in his cartoon.

Outdistancing the Field. In a profession by no means overcrowded with talent, Editorial Cartoonist Bill Mauldin has outdistanced the field. There are a few strong pens still around, but not many.

The best of these is the Washington Post and Times Herald's liberal Herbert Block (Herblock), 51, an implacable, fire-breathing enemy of all conservatives; he once drew Richard M. Nixon climbing out of a sewer. Herblock was slowed down by a 1959 heart attack, and later by his respect for John F. Kennedy. But the Herblock brickbats still land with thudding regularity--even if they rarely hit the Administration. England's David Low, whose brilliant wartime cartoons nominated him as the greatest cartoonist of the century, is far off form at 70. "The war," observed a Low friend recently, "stole the fire from his belly."

There are other men running along with Bill Mauldin. On the Denver Post, Paul Conrad, 37, is improving a gift for satire that sometimes slops over into slapstick. Hugh Haynie, 34, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, after trying to imitate Herblock, is now working up a pungent style of his own. The Baltimore Sun's Richard Q. Yardley, 59, is an inventive craftsman who is not afraid to apply new techniques to an ancient art. On the New York Herald Tribune, Dan Dowling draws with much of the impact of the man he succeeded: Ding Darling. But all these men are professional miles behind Mauldin.

Still Learning. As the sole provider for a $39,000 neo-Spanish home, his modest backyard swimming pool and four young sons (Andrew, 12; David, 10; John, 9; and Nathaniel, 7), Bill Mauldin lives a pleasant middle-class suburban life. The Post-Dispatch pays him $20,000 a year (about half Fitz's salary at retirement); from his syndication comes another $6,000. Outside of the pool and an occasional wild game of poker, he has few interests beyond his family and his art. He cares little for fancy foods ("Bill never pays any attention to what I cook; he just eats it," complains Natalie) or fancy dress, and is currently trying to break a lifelong addiction to tobacco (he smoked his first cigar at four).

But while content, Mauldin is not serene. He never will be, nor does he consider it desirable for a man of his calling. In the annealment of war and success that came too soon, in the long search for maturity, Cartoonist Mauldin has learned an important lesson about himself and his art. "I've still got a lot to learn," he says. "I've had to learn caricature since I came to the Post-Dispatch, and it's just passable, just beginning to be acceptable. I often have to label people like Adenauer. You shouldn't have to label Adenauer."

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