The Art of Ill Will the Story of American Political Cartoons

Holiday Books

Political Cartoons

• Dec. ii, 2007

Tom Lehrer in one case remarked that "political satire became obsolete" when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn't know the half of information technology; in 2004, a little more than xxx years later, the Medal of Freedom, America'southward highest civilian laurels, was awarded to the major architects of the Iraq disaster, George Tenet, Tommy Franks and L. Paul Bremer. However far from being obsolete, political satire thrives, especially late nights on Comedy Fundamental.

And so it'south a proficient time to examine one of satire's richer veins, the editorial drawing. Donald Dewey, the author of THE ART OF Sick Volition: The Story of American Political Cartoons (New York University, $34.95), takes his title from a comment by Jules Feiffer: "Outside of basic intelligence, there is nothing more important to a good political cartoonist than sick will." In a fascinating essay, Dewey traces the history of the American political drawing from "Bring together, or Die," a woodcut (engraved by Paul Revere) of a snake divided into eight pieces that accompanied a Benjamin Franklin editorial lamenting the colonies' lack of unity, to the present.

Simply the volume's real reason for being is its more than 200 political cartoons, most of them from the Granger Collection in New York Urban center, which calls itself the most "reliable source for the history of the world in pictures." The cartoons are arranged chronologically within capacity organized by theme: presidents, wars and strange relations, local and domestic politics, so on. Dewey, who has written biographies of James Stewart and Marcello Mastroianni and books on baseball and other subjects, points out that "editorial cartoons honed their political blades on the technologies, opportunities and pressures of the 19th-century mass media."

Thomas Nast's vicious cartoons from the 1870s depicting William 1000. Tweed, the New York City boss, boss the department on local and domestic politics. At that place is the bloated Tweed in Roman garb in a higher place the caption "To the victor vest the spoils" and Tweed as a vulture ("Allow united states of america prey"). Today Nast's cartoons are yet forepart and middle in whatsoever business relationship of the Tweed ring, but Dewey, who wonders just how much influence cartoonists actually have, argues that information technology was The New York Times'due south exposure of the Tweed band's fraud rather than Nast's work that led to the boss'southward downfall. Dewey likewise notes that Franklin Roosevelt was elected four times despite the heckling of many editorial page cartoonists. Richard Nixon attracted the ire of Herbert 50. Block, known as Herblock. His cartoons — represented here by a slimy dark-jowled Nixon itch out of a sewer, from 1954 — so distressed Nixon in the Watergate era that he somewhen canceled his subscription to The Washington Post, where Herblock'due south cartoons appeared. Nevertheless, Dewey points out, "a decade and a half of anti-Nixon cartoons from newspapers coast to declension did not prevent his election ... in 1968 or re-election in 1972."

Every bit Dewey ties the art of the political cartoon to the rise of newspapers, he worries that their pass up may spell the end of the form every bit anything more than than amusement. He believes that syndication has already steered cartoonists away from local politics, and that editors' power to choose cartoons from a wide option rather than deal with individual cartoonists has made the form blander. He is not optimistic virtually the hereafter of cartooning on the Web, and does not see the many gallery exhibitions of cartoonists' work as a hopeful sign, because none of these have "the same exposure for potential impact that impress does."

One might quarrel with some of Dewey's conclusions and choices, and wish that his comments most the relationship between politics and amusement went a little deeper. I missed 1 of my favorite political cartoons, David Levine's 1965 caricature of Lyndon Johnson with a gallbladder scar shaped like Vietnam. I also missed the work of Edward Sorel and Signe Wilkinson and Tom Tomorrow and Alison Bechdel. The volume'south limitation may stalk from its reliance on the Granger Collection, which cooperated in its publication. There are no New Yorker cartoons, for example, meaning that Peter Arno's socialites who plan to "go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt" aren't included. Many of the more recent cartoons — Garry Trudeau on Reagan, for example, and Steve Benson's 2003 drawing of an Iraq war memorial that mimics the photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, with the flag flying from an oil derrick — come from sources other than the Granger Collection, which seems stronger on earlier work.

Nonetheless, an afternoon with "The Art of Ill Will" is time well spent, especially when followed past "Funny Times," the drawing monthly, and "The Colbert Report."

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Dixler-t.html