Political cartoons

Political cartoons are drawings that reflect political commentary on current events or personalities. They are editorials that use satire and exaggeration to challenge authority or focus on social ills and have done so throughout the centuries. Most political cartoonists use metaphors and caricatures to illuminate complicated political situations and summarize a current event with a humorous or emotional illustration. Over the centuries two distinct styles of political cartooning have emerged: a traditional style using visual metaphors like the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant, and a text-heavy style narrating a linear story in a comic strip like Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau. Famous political cartoonists of the past and present include Thomas Nast, the father of political cartoons, and his successor Joseph Keppler. More recent artists include James Albert Wales, Herbert Block, and Pat Oliphant. Political cartoons are most often found on the editorial page of newspapers, although a few can be found in the regular comics section.

Brief History

Political cartoons can be traced to antiquity, but Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation in Europe and Benjamin Franklin in Colonial America are two later examples of caricaturists effectively using political cartoons. Martin Luther realized how powerfully political cartoons could affect a highly illiterate peasant class that he had to reach as well as the merchant class that could economically support his reforms, and he distributed illustrated pamphlets around towns and villages to influence public opinion.

More than two centuries later in colonial America, Benjamin Franklin used a political cartoon at the Albany Congress of 1754 to support his plan for a union between the colonies to deal with the Iroquois Nation. Historians consider his political caricature, “Join or Die,” depicting a snake with severed parts that symbolized the Colonies, the first political cartoon in America. Most contemporary newspapers published Franklin’s cartoon, which became wildly popular for its context against an Indian threat and its building on the popular belief that a dead snake would revive if the pieces were lined up next to each other.

Continuing the German influence on political cartooning, The Thinker’s Club cartoon in Germany satirized the censorship of freedom of expression in universities that the Carlsbad Decrees created in the German Confederation in 1819. The cartoon illustrates the censorship by depicting a professor and students asking how long they would be allowed to think. By the middle of the nineteenth century, newspapers around the world featured political cartoons about contemporary politics. During the American Civil War and Reconstruction, using realistic drawing techniques that he had perfected in his native Germany, Thomas Nast drew 160 editorial cartoons attacking the Boss Tweed political machine in New York City.

After Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler became one of the most commercially and artistically successful political cartoonists of the Gilded Age. He immigrated from his native Vienna to St. Louis, Missouri, and while living in St. Louis he founded several illustrated humor magazines, including German and English versions of Puck. His cartoons resonated with the German community and he established an English version of Puck containing his cartoons in New York.

Impact

The first American-born caricaturist was James Albert Wales of Clyde, Ohio who perfected his craft during an apprenticeship to a Toledo wood engraver and later in Cincinnati and Cleveland where he drew cartoons for the Leader during the presidential election of 1872. After working in Chicago, he went to New York in 1873 and worked as a caricaturist on Puck, establishing a reputation for excellent work.

Editorial cartoonist Herbert Lawrence Block, known as Herblock, published his first cartoon advocating the conservation of American forests in April 1929, and in the following years he draw cartoons depicting the dangers of Soviet aggression, the Nazi danger, and American isolationists. In the early 1950s, Herb Block coined the term McCarthyism to highlight the dangers of American overreaction to communism. In the 1960s, he drew cartoons against the United States’ war effort in Vietnam, in the 1970s about the Watergate scandal, in the 1980s and 1990s he satirized presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, and in the twenty-first century he satirized President George W. Bush. For decades he created caricatures about social issues including gun control, abortion, and the tobacco industry.

Created under the influence of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, Doonesbury by American cartoonist Garry Trudeau chronicles often with political strokes the lives of people from the President of the United States to the main character, Michael Doonesbury, who evolves from a college student to a senior citizen in the cartoon strip’s more than forty-year run.

The career of editorial cartoonist and Australia native Patrick Bruce Oliphant has spanned more than fifty years, several newspapers, and countless exhibitions. After working as a staff cartoonist for the Adelaide Advertiser until 1964, he moved to the United States to work at newspapers including the Denver Post and Washington Star. His trademark character is Punk, a small street and politically wise penguin.

The work of Patrick Oliphant and that of other cartoonists has been criticized as being controversial. Patrick Oliphant sometimes uses ethnic caricatures and in 2005 the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee labeled some of his caricatures racist and misleading. Several incidents have involved the relationship between political cartoons and Islam. In 2005 violent protests were held in response to cartoon depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which many Muslims find blasphemous, printed in a Danish newspaper. Another cartoon controversy began in 2007 when an editorial cartoon appeared in an edition of a Bangladeshi newspaper, Prothom Alo, on September 17, 2007. The cartoon featured an elderly man and a boy with the boy jokingly using the name of Muhammad. Bangladeshi Muslim organizations held public protests that turned into violent street clashes. Arifur Rahman, who created the cartoon, was arrested and imprisoned and the publishers publicly apologized. Tensions over depictions of Muhammad continued through the activities of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, with several of the newspaper's cartoonists and editors receiving threats from Islamist terrorist organizations. On January 7, 2015, gunmen attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing and wounding over twenty people. Controversy remains over the line between freedom of speech and hate speech.

According to the Herb Block Foundation, at the start of the twentieth century there were approximately two thousand editorial cartoonists employed by newspapers in the United States. In 2013, there were fewer than forty staff editorial cartoonists, and their numbers continue to decline with the decline in readership of newspapers and exodus of newspaper readers to the Internet. In an ironic turnabout in political cartoon history, the profession has come full circle to be rebuilt from the bottom up in the mostly uncensored arena of the Internet.

Bibliography

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