World Film and Television Progress (1938)

(Cartoons — continued) draughtsmanship wasted — on everlasting cuckoldry". He prostituted his great skill by picturing the roue's life as the only one worth living and ridiculed every virtue as bourgeois. Randon, Gill (who liked to pillory Gambetta), Forain of Dreyfus days, and others, played important roles, but further discussion of their work is not possible here. IN HOLLAND In this twentieth century no cartoonist has wielded so great an influence upon so many of his contemporaries and through them upon history, as the famous Hollander, Louis Raemaekers, during the World War. As a citizen of a neutral country and an eye-witness of the invasion of Belgium, he had authority. Most of his drawings appeared first in the Amsterdam Telegraaf; they are reproduced in every country on the globe. So bitter was the feeling in Germany toward Raemaekers, according to the English critic H. Perry Robinson, that a German newspaper, summarising the terms of peace which Germany would exact, declared that indemnity would be demanded for every one of Raemaekers' cartoons. The same authority relates that a Dutch sentry, stationed at Waals in Limburg where wire fencing marked the frontier through the main street of the town, heard from a German sentry that there was one man in Holland who, if the Dutch soldier could induce him to step across the line, would be worth 12,000 marks. That man was Raemaekers. One of the best known of Raemaekers' cartoons was called The Adoration of the Magi and showed Wilhelm II of Germany, Francis Joseph of Austria, and Mahommet VI of Turkey, bringing gifts to the new-born Saviour. This drawing, a superb example of satire, was evoked by the words of the Kaiser: "In these revolutionary times . . . the sole support and only protection of the Church are to be found in the Imperial hand and under the aegis of the German Empire." IN THE UNITED STATES The political cartoon has come into greater general use in the United States than in any other country. An English critic assures us smugly and truthfully that "The proverbial irreverence of the American mind toward even its most cherished personages and ideals has made it particularly responsive to the appeal of the caricature." We are extremists in America and the language of cartoons is for us a native tongue. The earliest cartoons dealing with American problems or issues appeared in England, when the colonies were still under British rule. Most of these, oddly enough, show greater sympathy for the restless and rebellious colonists than for the monarch and Parliament — further evidence that the cartoon is essentially democratic. Our first American cartoonist was Franklin— the shrewd, humour-loving politician who never permitted anger to cloud his vision or the spirit of revenge to embarrass his wisdom. The quarrels among the colonies had long distressed Franklin for he saw, more 22 Left : Vaughen Shoemaker : The Will o the Wisp {Chicago Daily News) Below : By Honore Downier, 1871 {Huntington Gallery) clearly than most, that the future depended upon unity. When the unhappy struggle between the colonists and the French for possession of the lands west of the Alleghenies was about to break out, Franklin, urging the colonies to unite against their common foe, published in his Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9th, 1754, the famous snake cartoon. This wood block depicted a snake cut into eight pieces, this number of pieces presumably representing the colonial divisions then eligible to send delegates to the Albany Congress about to convene June 19th, 1754. The caption was "Join or Die". With slight variations this cartoon was used for many years in different journals and at various crises. The early nineteenth century produced a few cartoonists, notably William Charles and Amos Doolittle. Charles, a Scotsman, had been forced to leave his own country and had come to the colonies, where he produced many drawings of the War of 1812, which was marked by an almost complete dearth of cartoons. Controversy is the cartoonist's staff of life; he starves in times of "brotherly love". After 1824 the flow of cartoons set in again, and never since that time, with the exception of an occasional slight coma, has the spirit of controversy, and with it the cartoon, failed to flourish in the political life of the United States. In contrast to the slightly organised and tepid campaigns which had gone before, Jackson's political battles of 1828 and 1832 were vibrant with personal abuse, vitupera {Huntington Gallery) tion, and slander. Material abounded for the cartoonist. A veritable flood of cartoons accompanied Jackson's re-election in 1832. The crude, rugged frontier democrat was the delight of cartoonists, whatever their political creed. But three other figures in the entire history of American cartoons have stirred such extremes of affection, hatred, and scorn among cartoonists. The other three are Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. All were essentially individual, strongly-marked personalities with political creeds and methods clearly defined.