Potent Pictures

HOOVER v. SMITH

Sticks and stones can break no political bones. Words are what help or hurt. And more potent than words are pictures.

There are two kinds of political pictures. Photographs are used to popularize. The camera shows the candidates at their best. The negatives are usually touched up to show better than best.

Cartoons usually go to the other extreme. Their use is chiefly destructive, to ridicule and depreciate the other side’s men and issues. The national campaign of 1928 has been notably a campaign of cartoons for two reasons: The issues are sharp and bitter; and both sides have ruled out what Nominee Smith called “baloney” pictures —posed photographs of the Nominees digging on farms, milking cows, kissing babies.

Outstanding in the cartoon history of the 1928 campaign have been: For the Republicans, Cartoonist Thomas Edwards Powers of the Hearst newspapers; for the Democrats, Cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the New York World. John Tinney McCutcheon’s work on the Chicago Tribune (Republican) has been, except for his “Tammany Farmers” series,* quiet and conventional. The Tribune has to be wet in Chicago and no organ in the city that gave William Hale (“Big Bill”) Thompson to the G. O. P. can afford to go very strongly on the Tammany-corruption theme. The “Tammany Farmers” series has stressed urban ignorance and presumption rather than any sinister note. Quite as characteristic of the G. O. P. sermons which the Tribune’s front page often preaches, such as a picture of “Uncle Sam” painting a sign on the Capitol: “Wanted!—Man to head largest industrial, agricultural and commercial organization in the world.” The title of this cartoon was: “Mr. Hoover Answers the Description.”

Notable on the Democratic side there are, besides Rollin Kirby, Cartoonists Edmund Duffy of the Baltimore Sun and Nelson Harding of the Brooklyn Eagle. But the Duffy vein is too broad to rank high and the Harding execution has been better than the Harding ideas.

Rollin Kirby, ace of Democratic cartoonists, is as fertile as he is facile. A slender little Scot, he sits under the gilded dome of the Pulitzer Building and does his job with dour thoroughness. He learned his line and perhaps some of his satirical sharpness under the late great Artist Whistler. His method is the oldtime one of standardizing the figures he seeks to flay. His corpulent, fat-jowled metaphor for the G. O. P. has became almost as well-known as was the late Thomas Nast’s moneybag effigy of Boss Tweed years ago.* In the gallery of Kirby stigmata, the figure of Theodore Roosevelt the Younger as a small, grimacing boy in a sport shirt, invented for the Smith-Roosevelt gubernatorial contest in 1926, has lately been joined by a small, wild-eyed girl in a smock, brandishing a torch labeled “Sectarianism” and herself labeled “Mrs. Willebrandt.”

Cartoonist Powers of the Hearst newspapers has had the assistance of his old-time friend and fellow Hearstling, Arthur Brisbane. These two used to be together on the World years ago. One of the most famed Powers subjects was “The Boy Editor,” executed from time to time when the young Brisbane was performing prodigies in Manhattan.

When Publisher Hearst was a Democrat, Cartoonist Powers invented his famed figure, the “Interests.” It was his pen also which identified the late Marcus Alonzo Hanna with the dollarsign. This year the “Interests” have been cleverly brought back to suit the shift in Hearst politics and, between them, the Messrs. Powers and Brisbane have personified the present-day Democracy as a female donkey called “Diamond Lil.” They took the name from a play by much-arrested Actress Mae West—a play about a clever, jewel-laden harlot. They have pictured “Diamond Lil” ogling the farmer, sweltering in a Tammany furpiece, getting blown out of her car by the Maine election, juggling issues in vaudeville, playing the stockmarket, etc., etc. Democratic Chairman Raskob usually accompanies her.

None knows better than Publisher Hearst the power of the pictured word. He also employs Cartoonist James (“Jimmie”) Swinnerton, who pictures Tammany as a little tiger-yegg with a slouch cap; Cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper, of “Happy Hooligan” fame, who pictures Tammany as an old-man-of-the-sea on the donkey’s back; Cartoonist Windsor McCay, nightmare man, creator of “Little Nemo,” who illustrates the Hearst Sunday supplements with shuddersome, anti-Tammany compositions.

Cartoonist Jay Norwood (“Ding”) Darling, from whose drawing-board in Des Moines, Iowa, comes much that is memorable in pictorial politics, considers that the cartoonist’s status is that of a court jester. If “Ding” ever crusades, it is always in the lighter vein. He serves a nationwide syndicate which contains a wide variety of political sympathies. He tries to be non-partisan but is clearly classifiable as Dry and anti-Tammany.

¶ Less rigidly partisan than the Hearst web of 26 newspapers is the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, also 26 strong. The Scripps-Howard chain supported La Follette in 1924 and decided to support Hoover without “knocking” Smith this year. Scripps-Howard is wet. These facts explained the appearance, in close succession lately, of the two pictures by Scripps-Howard Cartoonist Harry F. Talburt reproduced on pages 30 and 32.

¶ Nelson Harding, whose “Intolerance” figure is reproduced, won the Pulitzer Prize of 1927 for his picture of Colonel Lindbergh flying to Mexico with his plane casting a cruciform shadow labeled “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” At the end of August he drew a telling picture called “The Big Bout to Date”—an enormous prize-ring in which two tiny pugilists (the two Parties) threatened each other with furious futility from opposite corners. The crowd was yelling: “Fight! G’wan, fight!”

¶ The episode referred to by the Edmund Duffy caricature was when Nominee Curtis was heckled at Spencer, Iowa (TIME, Oct. 1). The quotation as given by Duffy is inaccurate. Nominee Curtis, vexed by questions about something he had already explained, cried: “I guess you are too dumb to understand.”

¶ Cartoonist Kirby’s “You Done Good, Kid” appeared after Nominee Smith had answered the attack on his legislative record made by Editor William Allen White of the Emporia, Kan., Gazette. Editor White retracted the more disgraceful part of his charges. The G. O. P. at no time took official credit or responsibility for the White work. Many another cartoon was drawn about this episode. In his retraction, issued just before sailing to Europe, Editor White said : “I’m throwing no mud at. Governor Smith.” A picture at once suggested itself and was drawn — a little man on the stern of a steamer sloshing a mudball at a big man on a pier.

¶ A prolific subject for cartooning was the confused interparty “bolting” that began so soon as both Nominees were known. Nelson Harding drew a comic picture called “Any Man’s Land,” with voters running across, crawling across, tripping, tumbling, spinning in circles, bumping stomachs, going mad.

¶ Cartoonist Charles Henry Sykes has been Life’s political brush since 1922. Since 1911 he has drawn for the newspapers of Publisher Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis.

¶ Admired by many an editor, but inaccessible because he draws only for the New York Times, is adroit Cartoonist Edwin Marcus. Only on Sundays does the fatherly Times condescend to publish “features.” Cartoonist Marcus regularly does portraits for the theatrical section and cartoons on leading topics in season. He is one of the few living cartoonists who was born and raised in Manhattan. His most famed compositions were made during the War—”The Road to Yesterday” (War dragging Europe back to Barbarism) and “Damn the torpedoes—go ahead” (quoting Admiral Farragut at Mobile Bay). His “pals” are Cartoonist Cliff Sterrett (“Polly and her Pals”) and Editor Bertie Charles Forbes of Forbes’ Magazine, with whom he plays checkers. Cartoonist Marcus used to work for the old-time New York Herald, often illustrating the stories of a fast-and-furious red-headed court reporter named Herbert Bayard Swope—now fast-and-furious executive editor of the New York World.

*The cartoons in this issue of TIME are reproduced by special permission of the publications by which they are copyrighted.

*The Kirby cartoon of the G. O. P. saying “Tammany!” in the midst of its rogues’ gallery has been broadcast as Democratic propaganda. Last week “Frank J. McKenna of Excelsior, Minn., and friends” paid $137.20 to insert it as an advertisement in the pro-Hoover Minneapolis Tribune.