The Press: Prophecy

Charles Wheeler Ervin, 73-year-old public relations adviser to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, looks back with nostalgia on the years when he was editor of the Socialist New York Call, from 1916 until 1922. He likes to thumb through old files of the Call, reread Eugene Debs’s daily letters from prison, smile at advertisements announcing John and Lionel Barrymore in The Jest, cluck his tongue appreciatively at some of the best news reporting of another troubled era.

Last week he came upon something beyond clucking or smiling over—a disturbingly prophetic cartoon. Published in 1919, it showed Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Orlando leaving the Peace Conference, the treaty on the floor, a child labeled “1940 Class” standing with head bowed behind a pillar. Caption: THE TIGER: “Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping!”

The Call had reprinted the cartoon from the London Daily Herald, for whom it was drawn by Australian-born William Henry Dyson. Will Dyson had been fired for “utter incompetence” by Lord Northcliffe when George Lansbury took him on the Herald at $25 a week in 1912. In the great days of the Herald his savage satires on British complacency won him fame if not money; his “Sentenced to Life” and “The Vampire” were reprinted far & wide. Opposed to the War, he nevertheless refused to attack England while it lasted. A year of frontline duty and two-wounds deepened his cynicism; in 1920 he abandoned England and returned to Australia. Ten years later he exhibited a series of brilliantly bitter etchings in Manhattan (TIME, May 4, 1931). Last year he died, a bit too soon to boast of his prophetic vision.