Contempt of Court

On the Wednesday evening before New Year's a tubby, clear-eyed old man shuffled out of Manhattan's Hotel Irving to mail a bundle of 28 identical New Year's cards of his own making. Soon he shuffled back in, went up to his room. Few minutes later, his switchboard light blinked red; but there was no answer on his phone. The desk clerk and a resident doctor found him face down, unconscious, across his bed. Half an hour later, Art Young, one of the great U.S. cartoonists, was dead.

Arthur Brisbane had once said of Art Young, "He will probably die pointing to tomorrow without ever having seen it."

Prod at Today. Art Young had been pointing at tomorrow, usually by prodding at today, for more years than many U.S. radicals could remember. He had done three books with drawings about Hell; in the last volume, Hell was equipped with all modern inconveniences, and the new rulers (Capitalists) referred to Satan as "the bellhop," "the rubberstamp." He had drawn, for the old Life and many other magazines. He had done simple, sad, angry drawings like the one in which the little boy and girl of the slums find their own words for a beautiful night: "Chee Annie, look at the stars, thick as bedbugs!"

Old-fashioned as his work was, most of it stood up infinitely better than most political cartoons. Art Young's drawings seldom descended to petty squabbling; they had a kind of homely greatness.

With Mild Surprise. Arthur Henry Young was born in Stephenson County, Ill. in 1866. The family moved to Monroe, Wis., where he grew up among the leisured jokes and hay-scented dialectics of his father's general store.

By the time he was 17 he was selling drawings to Judge. At 18 he went to Chicago to art school. He studied in Paris, came home, married a home-town girl he had loved since childhood, got busy cartooning for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, the Evening Mail, the Daily News, the Tribune. He was probably the first daily political cartoonist in the U.S.

But from the turn of the century on, Art never wandered far from New York--and seldom sought or held a job. In his middle 40s he began to realize, with mild surprise, that he was a Socialist, though he never much cared for party labels. From then on, in more ways than one, he was pretty consistently in the red.

In 1911 Young, along with John Reed, Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, founded the leftist and pacifist Masses. When the U.S. got into World War I, his most famous cartoon, the savage Having Their Fling, helped put Art and colleagues on trial for sedition, a capital crime. For seven days & nights during that trial, Max Eastman could not sleep a wink.

One day, towards the climax of the proceedings, Art dropped into an audible snooze. When his horrified co-defendants awoke him he reached for a pencil, drew his classical cartoon of contempt of court (see cut) which he captioned "Art Young on trial for his life." After the case had been dropped, the prosecuting attorney (who had had to admit that "everybody likes Art Young") bid for the picture.

Out of Bounds. Art dabbled unpractically in practical politics. In his most spectacular campaign (for assemblyman on the Socialist ticket of 1913) he made some 40 impassioned speeches all over New York City, only to learn later that he had not delivered one of them in the district he proposed to represent.

In proportion as the whole texture of U.S. leftism became cold, professional, anti-humanitarian, Art withdrew more & more to his own purely individualistic, essentially Christian intransigence.

In 1934, the good friends who staged a benefit to take care of his bills and his failing health included Anarchist Carlo Tresca, Communist Earl Browder, Socialist Norman Thomas, Sentimentalist Alexander Woollcott.

The Alien Accolade. Gentle, kindly Art Young, with his friendly but unmistakable contempt for all courts of orthodoxy, would not have been entirely pleased, the chances are, if he could have seen New York's Herald Tribune and Times take him affectionately under their editorial wings after he was dead.

"That gregarious, convivial, lovable and superbly talented gentleman," said the Herald Tribune. "A lovable soul in spite of his sometimes heterodox opinions," said the Times.

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