Editorial Cartoons: Capturing the Essence

By Stefan Kanfer

"Boss" Tweed, corrupt Tammany chief of the 1860s, raised little objection when muckraking reporters prowled city hall. What the papers wrote had no meaning, Tweed liked to boast; his constituency was illiterate. The only criticism that ever bothered or threatened him, the Boss confessed, was "them damn pictures."

Thomas Nast's editorial cartoons were worth fearing; the savage caricatures showed Tweed variously as a vulture, a bag of money and, when Nast had sufficiently aroused the civic conscience, a felon in prison stripes.

A century of history has brought little change. Corruption is still ubiquitous--but so, happily, is the editorial cartoon, grinning out from banks of gray prose. In about 16 square inches, that journalistic institution still manages to encapsulate crises, expose pretensions and eviscerate swollen egos--all with a few well-drawn strokes. Two new paperback editions underscore the point. On the far side of history, Thomas Nast: Cartoons & Illustrations (Dover) reveals a mature artist whose work could exhibit the bite of Daumier and the mordant wit of Twain. His meticulous crosshatching created three ineradicable symbols: the Democratic Donkey, the Republican Elephant and the Tammany Tiger. Nast's gentler conceptions of John Bull, Uncle Sam and even Santa Claus are the ones that most artists still sedulously ape. On the near side, Herblock 's State of the Union (Viking/Compass) presents the dean of contemporary cartoonists, Herbert Block, drawing--and quartering--his favorite quarry: Government waste, pomposity, fat-cat lobbyists, and last and by all means lost, the Nixon Administration.

Between these two masters, a hundred years' worth of artists have passed in review. A few remain in the memory because of a Pulitzer Prize or an anthologized work; the bulk have been forgotten. Yet anyone who peruses ancient journals knows that if nothing is as old as yesterday's news, nothing seems fresher than its editorial cartoon. In satirizing events and event makers, the cartoon refines material until only the ridiculous essence remains. Circumstances impossible in the real world are staged upon the cartoonist's proscenium: the politician comes face to face with his broken promises, hypocrisy assumes a human face, fingers are pointed, blame is fixed, responsibility attached to recognizable figures.

Such onslaughts have their liabilities. The cartoon's first obligation is to be pithy; faces and facts may be stretched to fit a gag. Editorial artists work best against rather than for something, and not every issue is as black and white as the drawing proclaims. That lack of shading and subtlety obviously influenced New York Times Founder Adolph Ochs when he kept sketches from his paper's editorial page--a tradition that is maintained today. "A cartoon," Ochs is said to have complained, "cannot say 'On the other hand.'" On the other hand, a cartoon can do what prose cannot.

It can sometimes elicit action by overstating--and overheating--an issue: Daniel R. Fitzpatrick's unsubtle smog-laden cartoons helped clean up St. Louis' air back in the 1950s. It can provide a graphic perspective on this or any other time: Thomas Nast's cartoon of the U.S. contending with inflation might have been inked yesterday instead of in 1876. And the cartoon can provide a time capsule for the historian. New York Times Columnist William V. Shannon offers a sound, if wistful, prophecy when he foresees that "a hundred years from now, Herblock will be read and his cartoons admired by everyone trying to understand these strange times."

In fact, cartoons help illuminate all strange tunes. Of all the publications of the Foreign Policy Association, none enjoys the immediacy of its A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I. In an introduction, Political Analyst Richard H. Rovere acknowledges the ability of certain cartoons to provide "flashes of extraordinary insight and political prescience." In this category he places a David Low cartoon of 1939. Hitler bows to Stalin: "The scum of the earth, I believe." Stalin returns the courtesy: "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume." Recalls Rovere: "It took most of us more than 20 years to catch up with the truth captured by Low--that where ideology and national interest are in conflict, national interest prevails."

Low was the last of the great British cartoonists. But even at his apogee he seldom surpassed the best of his American colleagues. A Cartoon History offers compelling work of artists representing the whole ideological spectrum. On the political left are some superlative efforts from the World War II years: William Cropper's fascists, consuming the globe for dinner, and Saul Steinberg's Hitler, portrayed as a constipated hen. The progressives are matched in temper and tone by conservatives of the '50s: Joseph Parrish's conception of the U.N. as a Trojan horse, brimming with "alien spies"; Reg Manning's portrayal of General MacArthur's hat hemmed in by toppers belonging to The Appeasing Diplomats.

It would be the grossest distortion to pretend that editorial cartoonists are all Goyas in a hurry. Nothing inspires bromides like a deadline. Artists against the clock have too often relied on labels and fatigued metaphors to make their point. Back in 1925, The New Yorker lampooned the journeyman cartoonist with his crayoned cliches: the literalized Sea of Public Indignation; the bearded Radical; the masked thief with his tag of Crime Wave; the debt-ridden Commuter.

Happily, such pictures are beginning to find less favor with readers--and with cartoonists. Says Bill Mauldin, at 53 a. 35-year veteran of the editorial page: "Cartoons are getting better, more and more away from labels. Readers are more savvy. It is less and less necessary to put names on things. The trend is more interesting drawing, less complicated captions." To sharpen his point, Mauldin spent last semester teaching a course in his profession at Yale. "I deliberately started with a nondrawing bunch," recalls the most technically proficient cartoonist of his generation. "What counts is the thinking. A drawing with authority helps give authority to an idea, but there's no way a weak idea can make a good cartoon." Don Wright, Pulitzer-prizewinning cartoonist of the Miami News, agrees. "The editorial cartoon has become a welcome relief from some of the ponderous, elitist, overwritten poopery that typifies so many editorial pages today."

Wright's judgment has been accepted by many editors who know that, of all features, the editorial cartoon is the least imitable by TV. Cartoonists have been encouraged to explore new forms: Jules Feiffer's psychiatric monologues have spawned a generation of imitators; Garry Trudeau's campus favorite, Doonesbury, is bringing politics back to the comic strip. Moreover, because cartoons are a major journalistic attraction, editors are often tolerant of artistic statements that would not be welcome in a prose piece. Says Herblock: "A lot of newspapers run my stuff even though they don't agree with me. They feel it's a signed piece of work, an example of personal opinion." This liberty has brought U.S. editorial cartooning to something of a rebirth. It is a renaissance with too few galleries; the great epoch of newspapers is gone and with it, many of the journals that carried the art of the great cartoonists. Yet the work somehow finds space in the surviving dailies, in magazines and in student publications. At its frequent best, contemporary cartooning in the U.S. steadily outshines work anywhere else in the world. No country now produces corrosive lampoons equal to Patrick Oliphant's vaudeville sketches or Paul Conrad's acidulous critiques. The competition for attention may have reduced the impact of graphic art everywhere. Yet the cartoon seems to be gaining influence. No photograph damaged Lyndon Johnson so much as David Levine's waspish drawing of L.B. J. lifting his shirt to reveal a gall bladder scar--in the shape of Viet Nam. Richard Nixon once admitted, "I wouldn't start the morning by looking at Herblock." Even President Ford, gazing forlornly at a gallery of U.S. political cartoons, recently conceded, "The pen is mightier than the politician."

It is likely to remain so. The mood of the nation is skepticism, not credulity. The appetite for the cartoon is whetted. International and local tensions call for caricature, not portrait. Today, more than a score of editorial cartoonists answer that demand--and answer it with astonishing quality. These artists fulfill the difficult prerequisites that Historian Allan Nevins lays down for their work: "Wit and humor; truth, at least one side of the truth; and moral purpose." After 100 years, the nation that nurtured Nast can be proud of his successors.

That, of course, is an ambiguous compliment. If U.S. cartoonists are nonpareil, might it be because they never lack for objects of derision? Is it because shortages, recession, political scandals and assorted other follies provide a perpetual festival for anyone with a grease pencil and a sense of humor? Whatever the reasons, the editorial cartoon is one of America's liveliest and most permanent art forms. As Watergate proved, politics cannot eradicate or even tame journalism. As subsequent events have demonstrated, the reverse is also true. Them damn pictures are likely to enliven the next hundred years--and more. Stefan Kanfer

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