Rube Goldberg

• Born: July 4, 1883
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: December 7, 1970
• Place of death: New York, New York

Cartoonist

An influential editorial cartoonist of the twentieth century, Goldberg drew wildly original cartoons that offered a provocative critique of American culture, notably its wary fascination with machines and technology.

Areas of achievement: Art; journalism

Early Life

Rube Goldberg (rewb GOHLD-burg) was born in San Francisco, California, on the Fourth of July, 1883. As a child, Goldberg loved to sketch, tracing elaborate drawings from encyclopedias and magazines before he was six. At the age of twelve, he took informal drawing lessons from a neighbor, a sign painter, who taught him bold and heavy line strokes and sharpened his observational skills to record the world around him with meticulous care. His father, a banker and real estate broker, frowned on his son’s dream of becoming an artist, seeing little possibility for stable income. He offered a compromise—he would pay for his son’s college education if Goldberg would study mining engineering at the nearby University of California, Berkeley, a field that promised reliable (and lucrative) employment and involved expert drawing skills. Obedient, Goldberg enrolled in the program. However, he was not happy. He spent a summer before his senior year working in a gold mine, and it was a terrifying experience. Dutifully, he completed his degree, and in 1904 he accepted a position with the city’s water and sewers department.

Within six months, however, he tired of the tedium of office work and the politicking of the back room. Satisfied that he had tried, he quit to pursue his childhood ambition: to be a cartoonist. The only opening he could find he took: in the sports department of the San Francisco Chronicle. Initially, he was a general custodian, but soon he demonstrated his skills at drawing and was made a sports cartoonist, providing vivid sketches, mostly of boxing matches and baseball games. The work was demanding—sports cartoons were half a page, and Goldberg was expected to produce more than three hundred each year. Nevertheless, he loved the work. Within a year, he was working for the much larger San Francisco Bulletin. His drawings found a wide audience and increased newspaper sales—his sketches were bold, capturing the drama and animation of competition with remarkable immediacy. In 1907, with just under two hundred dollars in his pocket, Goldberg moved to New York City, determined to make it big.

Life’s Work

Initially, Goldberg freelanced his cartoons to five different newspapers, notably the New York Evening Mail. In 1912, the New York Evening Mail gave Goldberg his first big break—his own regular feature. Titled Foolish Questions, it poked fun at the obvious questions that annoying people ask. By 1915, the feature was nationally syndicated. At the same time, Goldberg created several long-running character-driven comic series, notably Mike and Ike, Boob McNutt, and Lala Palooza, that poked gentle fun at the foibles of characters who were noticeably human—naïve and harmless dreamers who lacked the common sense to realize their most profound ambitions. The comics were hugely successful. Reportedly, Goldberg earned more than $100,000 in 1920.

In 1914, Goldberg debuted a character based loosely on an eccentric professor of analytical mechanics at Berkeley: The character was named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. Each cartoon would feature Professor Butts’s “explanation” of one of his newest inventions, gadgets that would accomplish the simplest kinds of tasks (folding a napkin or turning a door knob or opening a window) only by engaging an extremely complicated and wildly inventive chain reaction of gears, wheels, handles, cranks, and other assorted devices. The series quickly found a national audience. For more than fifty years, Goldberg devoted much of his professional work to designing these whimsical contraptions, drawing on his solid credentials in engineering to devise gadgets that revealed a zany creativity.

In the years leading up to World War II, Goldberg was the most recognized and prolific cartoonist in America. In addition to his numerous series, Goldberg accepted a position as editorial cartoonist for The New York Sun in 1938, where he produced scathing political cartoons, notably ones that promoted American involvement in stopping Adolf Hitler long before it was popular (given the virulence of the hate mail he received, he convinced his two grown sons to change their last name to avoid the possibility of retaliation).

Determined to give artistic legitimacy to cartooning, Goldberg spearheaded the founding of the National Cartoonists Society in 1946 and served as its first president. The organization brought together the talents of comic strip artists, editorial cartoonists, panel cartoonists, and sports cartoonists and sought to promote cartoonists as both artists and cultural commentators. Indeed, in 1948, Goldberg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning for his provocative cartoon entitled “Peace Today,” which warned of the absurdity of a world, in possession of an atomic bomb, willing to wage ultimate war as a way to make peace.

Goldberg drew until he was in his seventies. Approaching eighty, Goldberg, restless with the limitations of cartooning, turned his artistic energy to sculpture. In fact, it was his sculpture that, ironically, earned him at last the Cartoonist of the Year honor from the society he had helped found nearly forty years earlier. A celebration of Goldberg’s lifework was mounted by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology, just months before his death from cancer, at the age of eighty-seven, on December 7, 1970.

Significance

Goldberg’s artistic achievements made him influential; he was a nationally recognized celebrity and a regular on radio and later television shows. More significant than his longevity or his productivity (at one time he was creating more than fifty strips) were Goldberg’s superb satiric observations. Whether in his earliest comic strip character studies or in his elaborate contraptions or in his scathing editorial cartoons, Goldberg exercised the fullest range of satire with confidence and precision, from gently poking fun at his characters’ struggles to find love or career success to caustic and uncompromising attacks on institutions and ideologies that he perceived as a threat to freedom and individuality.

Bibliography

Berry, Ian, Lawrence Raab, and Linda Scherer. Chain Reaction: Rube Goldberg and Contemporary Art. Sarasota Springs, N.Y.: Tang Teaching Museum, 2001. Important assessment of Goldberg as an influential artist. Places Goldberg within a broad context of postmodern sculpture and its explorations of machines as art.

Goldberg, Reuben Lucius. The Best of Rube Goldberg. New York: Prentice Hall, 1979. Vividly illustrated collection of some of Goldberg’s most famous contraptions. Introduction provides biography that stresses Goldberg’s engineering background and its influence on his sense of technology.

Kaplan, Arie. From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2008. History of the influence of Jewish sensibility on the evolution of comics after World War II; includes Goldberg as an early example and adds helpful commentary on his satire.

Wolfe, Maynard Frank. Rube Goldberg: Inventions! New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Handsomely illustrated collection of Goldberg’s gadgets.

Wood, Art. Great Cartoonists and Their Art. Monticello, Ky.: Firebird Press, 2000. Positions Goldberg as one of the most influential newspaper cartoonists in American cultural history. Includes commentary on Goldberg’s political cartoons.