Overview
In late nineteenth-century America, political cartoonists Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, Bernhard Gillam and Grant Hamilton enjoyed a stature as political powerbrokers barely imaginable in today's world of instant information and electronic reality. Their drawings in Harper's Weekly, the dime humor magazines Puck and the Judge, and elsewhere were often in their own right major political events. In a world of bare-knuckles partisan journalism, such power often corrupted, and creative genius was rarely restrained by ethics. Interpretations gave way to sheer invention, transforming public servants into ogres more by physiognomy than by fact. Blacks, Indians, the Irish, Jews, Mormons, and Roman Catholics were reduced to a few stereotypical characteristics that would make a modern-day bigot blush. In this pungent climate, and with well over 100 cartoons as living proof, Roger Fischer - in a series of lively episodes - weaves the cartoon genre in to the larger fabric of politics and thought the Guilded Age, and beyond.Editorials
Booknews
Fischer (history U. of Minnesota-Duluth) surveys the art and power of political cartoons in the US through the 19th and 20th centuries. He demonstrates the freedom with which cartoonists portrayed politicians they did not like and created insulting stereotypes of such groups as native Americans, Blacks, Irish, and Jews. He also describes how cartoonists became political figures in their own right and were subject to the same temptations of corruption as others. Chapters also focus on the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln memorial, literary allusions, and Richard Nixon. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Kirkus Reviews
Fischer (History and American Studies/Univ. of Minn., Duluth) offers nine essays on various aspects of the history of American political cartooning.Pulitzer Prizewinning cartoonist Jeff MacNelly once noted that if they couldn't draw, most political cartoonists would probably have become hired assassins. It's a quote so witty and on the money that Fischer repeats it three times. As he observes, political cartoonists tend to be sharp-tongued as well as sharp- witted iconoclasts, and although their power has diminished in this century, they still attract unwanted attention to greasy politicians; after all, Paul Conrad made Nixon's "enemies list." Of course, in the previous century, before TV, radio, and the wire services, the potency of the cartoon image was greater. In the first and most interesting essay in this volume, Fischer revisits the war between Thomas Nast and his nemesis, William "Boss" Tweed, but what the author finds is a far cry from the legend. Tweed, he argues, wasn't the great crook of popular belief, nor did he meet his demise at the hands of the cartoonist. However, he readily allows, "it was Nast who elevated graphic assassination to an art." Fischer traces the elevation of Populist William Peffer, a rare third-party success who served in the US Senate, into a demonic figure by cartoonists who distorted his record mercilessly; the use of "filler" cartoons in 19th-century magazines that indulged in scurrilous racial and ethnic stereotyping; and the treatment of the Statue of Liberty and Lincoln as iconic figures.
The result is an uneven collection, always informative, intermittently entertaining, but too often a seemingly endless catalog of ideas and representations. The best thing about this book is (as Boss Tweed called them) the "damned pictures" themselves.