>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]   [ Background chatter ]
>> John Cole: Well, good morning,
and welcome to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I'm the director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress
which is the library's reading promotion arm.
We were created in 1977 by Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin to reach
out around the country using the Library of Congress' name
and prestige to promote books and reading
and subsequently literacy and libraries as well.
We have a network of state centers for the book, one in each state.
They have to pay for themselves but we work with them
to help support local authors and book activity.
We are deeply involved here in Washington
with the National Book Festival which is going to be held this year
for the first time for two days on September 24
and 25 on the National Mall.
Here at the Library of Congress our other major activity is this book
series called "Books and Beyond" and we're grateful that you are here.
This particular series features new books by authors
who have a special connection of some kind
with the Library of Congress.   Quite often, as is the case today,
it's with those Library of Congress collections.
In other cases it might be a project that was developed by the library
with someone outside, but any way you cut it, what it turns out is
that we are celebrating books and we're celebrating libraries
that are the resources behind many of these books.
In this instance I want to hold up both the first edition of a book
and the subsequent edition which is going to be discussed today.
This is the "Ungentlemanly Art:
A History of American Political Cartoons," by Stephen Hess,
who is one of our speakers today, and Milton Kaplan.
I hold it up because it's an example --
an early example of a kind of collection oriented,
graphic arts oriented book from the library's collections and also
because I came to the Library of Congress in 1966 early enough
to have known Milton Kaplan who is the coauthor of this book.
This book was published in 1969.
And the way that this event came about today is
that at an earlier Center for the Book talk, I ran into Stephen Hess
who reminded me that a new edition of this book not only was out
but another one was coming, so we are able to bring this to fruition.
Today's event will include a book signing, not for the old book,
where -- Stephen has already signed for me on the old book along
by Stephen -- by Milton's signature -- but of the new book.
And the way we operate this is we will have a presentation
about a slideshow from our two authors and a discussion.
We will then -- there will by time towards the end
for questions and answers.
We also film these programs, so I have --
I want to ask you to turn off all things electronic and also
to mention that during the question and answer period,
we hope that you participate, but if you do participate, you are,
believe it or not, giving your permission to perhaps use your words
and images on the Web cast that will be the result
of the videotape that we're making today.
Finally, we will have the book signing which we will need
to start no later than one o'clock,
but we're very pleased that you can be here.
One of the features of the Books and Beyond series is
that we actually have a Books
and Beyond Book Club Facebook involvement, and you can go
on Facebook and look at past and present and future Books
and Beyond programs, add your comments, and look ahead
to see what else might be coming along.
Also, on the table in the back is a list of future Books
and Beyond talks and other center --
information about the Center for the Book and our programming.
But to be our moderator, I'm pleased to introduce a curator
from the prints and photographs division, Sara Duke.
One of the great advantages of the Center for the Book is to draw
on all of the Library of Congress' resources and collections,
and we have a long standing partnership with the Prints
and Photographs Division, and today Sara Duke who is the curator
of the Popular and Applied Graphic Art --
I always want to put "arts" on that --
but Art, in the Prints and Photographs Division is going
to be our introducer and our moderator.
Let's give her a hand.   Sara.
[ Applause ]   [ Silence ]
>> Sara Duke: Thank you, John.
Before I get going, Sandy's going to do a slideshow on the plasma screens
and if you are not in a good sight line of those plasma screens
and the cartoons are going to be fairly small,
You've been warned.
I'm just going to give you a brief overview of cartoon collections
at the Library of Congress, and then Sandy will have a display,
and then Sandy, Steve, and I will discuss political cartooning
in the United States.
The Library of Congress has about 128,000 cartoon prints and drawings.
You can't see them all from your computer, but you can see enough,
and I did put some bookmarks from the Prints
and Photographs online catalog
where you can see a selection of our cartoon holdings.
Our strength is in political cartoons which date
from sixteenth-century Europe through to about the 1990s.
We are still actively collecting.
My colleague Martha Kennedy and I acquire new cartoons every year.
I look to fill in some of our older early American imprints,
and Martha's doing a great job
of collecting current editorial cartoonists and comic strip creators
and comic book illustrators as well.
Our strength is in two cartoonists in particular, and those are going
to be part of the focus of today's discussion
but we're certainly not going to limit ourselves
to discussing them today, and, in fact, I encourage all of you
to ask questions about the state of political cartooning
or cartooning in general.
But our strength is in Herblock and in Bill Mauldin.
In 1975, Bill Mauldin gave 100 --
1,700 of his original cartoons that dated from 1938, his first cartoon
that he ever drew, through to 1965; and he gave about 50 percent
of his production from 1958 to 1965 -- to 1964.
We have selected cartoons by him that were published later
in his career, but our focus is really kind
And, then, the Library of Congress tries not
to acquire archives of cartoonists work.
We acquire great archives of authors and politicians but the Prints
and Photographs Division states up front that we don't acquire archives
of cartoonists' work and then we broke the rule.
We acquired the archive of Herblock.
We have about 14,460 published drawings,
exceptionally large 17-by-22 inch editorial cartoons,
and as Holly Krueger, our conservator, knows,
we have about 50,000 rough sketches.
Those came to us in 2002 by gift from the Herb Block Foundation.
And I also left in the back a larger -- larger than bookmark announcement
for the graphic arts galleries which are now located
in the Jefferson Building behind the bookstore.
We have a permanent facsimile display that introduces cartooning
in general, and then we have a rotating every sixth-month display
of Herblock cartoons in that space,
and then Martha Kennedy's put together a brilliant show,
Timely and Timeless, that will be things that we have added
to the collections since we went dark in the Swan Gallery in 2004,
and that will open in September.
So we're really here today to talk about Sandy and Steve's book,
"American Political Cartoons,"
and this book gives an impressive overview of the history
of American political cartoons from the inception, they say 1754,
and through the twentieth century,
right up until the Obama/McCain election.
And with that in mind, I'd like to introduce my cospeakers
and the author -- coauthors of this book
who will be discussing cartooning with me today.
Sandy Northrop is an award-mill -- award-winning filmmaker,
and the head of Wind and Stars Production Company.
After living in Vietnam with her husband David Lamb for three years,
she produced the trill -- a trilogy of films, "Vietnam Passage:
Journeys from War to Peace" for PBS.
But she has also been introduced -- interested in political cartooning
for a long time, and in the 1990s pursued a joint project
with the Library of Congress to produce a longer six-part series
on political cartooning in the United States for PBS that,
while it never came to fruition, is very evident in this publication.
[ Pause ]
In addition, Sandy's interest in political cartooning is taken her
down the path of exploring the career of Bill Mauldin,
the political cartoonist who's most famous for Willie and Joe,
for the 45th Division News, and Stars and Stripes,
but also had a brilliant career with the Saint Post --
"Saint Louis Post Dispatch" and the "Chicago Sun Times."
And that is intended as a part of the American Masters Series for PBS.
Steve Hess probably needs no introduction
at the Library of Congress.
He's a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution,
and in addition, has taught courses on media and public affairs
at George Washington University.
He has been a staff advisor to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower
and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
He wrote earlier this year that he accidentally fell in love
with political cartooning while researching a 1960s book
on the American presidency, and that ultimately led to the volume
that John showed you, "The Ungentlemanly Art:
A History of Political Cartoons" in 1968 and the two
of them joined forces to revise it in 1975 to take
into account all the wonderful wealth of cartoons
from the Watergate affair.
In 1996, Steve and Sandy joined forces to create --
to do "Drawn and Quartered" which is the predecessor
to American Political Cartoons and it was revised this year --
or this last year to take into account the wealth
of cartooning of the last decade.
And with that I think Sandy intends to show us a selection of cartoons.
>> Stephen Hess: Let me make one correction.
When you say "needs no introduction,"
the first president I worked for, Dwight Eisenhower,
had a favorite cartoon from the old "Saturday Evening Post."
It had someone at a dais like you were just at, saying,
"Our next speaker needs all the introduction he can get."
[ Laughter ]
I always felt that that was appropriate.
[ Laughter ]
>> Sandy Northrop: I think as Steve and I both want to tell you
about our first introduction to working with the Library
of Congress, and I'll let Steve go first.
>> Stephen Hess: Well --
>> Sara Duke: I'm going to ask you that you use the mic
because this is being recorded.   >> Stephen Hess: Oh, gosh.
Both of -- both of the previous introducers have hinted at the fact
that the first book I wrote with my mentor from Johns Hopkins,
Malcolm Moos was "Hats in the Ring,"
a study of presidential nominating politics which was to be published
by Random House, and I realized
that for the price they were charging it was a bit thin
and I better pad it, so that's
where I had my accidental love affair started
with -- with cartoons.
When I came to the Prints and Photographs to look for padding
for this book, Milton Kaplan, curator then, was very gracious
to me and we became friends and he convinced me
that what the world needed and didn't then have was a history
of American political cartoons.
And I never had as much trouble finding a publisher in my life,
it was big expensive book, but finally Macmillan published it
in 1968, it was the second edition to take advantage
of -- of Watergate in 1975.
But it didn't only introduce me to political cartoons, it introduced me
as well to political cartoonists.
So in 1965 with -- to write this book,
I started off across the country to meet our cartoonists, and, wow,
what a wild and wonderful group they were.
I got to Los Angeles first to meet Paul Conrad.
It was a Friday, we were to have lunch, I was a little early,
he was trying to do two cartoons that day for Sunday and Monday.
He whipped out a little drawing, he showed it to me, the --
the Chinese had just exploded a nuclear device,
it had a long missile, and lot of little men under it holding it up
and the caption was, "Chinese explode nuclear-divided muscle."
[sic] He said, "What do you think?"   I said, "Oh, Paul, that's terrible.
I mean they have an entire --
a nuclear weapon because they have a lot of nuclear scientists,
not because they have a lot of coolies."
"Oh, yeah."
So he ripped it up, started another and another, and I saw in the course
of 15 minutes as he created designs, I had never seen such a frenzy
of creativity in my life, and in many ways
that characterized the cartoonist.   I went on from there to Denver
where a young man had just arrived two years before from --
from Australia, Pat Oliphant, to take, actually,
Paul Conrad's seat at the "Denver Post."
We met, and he had just won the Pulitzer prize having been here two
years, and he explained me that he and his wife had gotten the book --
- here we are at the Council of the Book --
gotten a book by Gerald Johnson which was a history
of Pulitzer prize winners.
At that time each winner was based on one cartoon.
They went over it, analyzed it, and he --
and he drew a cartoon to win the Pulitzer prize and did.
It was the worst cartoon he ever did.
Pulitzer has a history of giving good cartoonists the prize
for bad cartoons.
Now, by the way, it's very different.
They have a portfolio, it's not just for one, it's for 10 or 20 cartoons.
And moving onto Chicago was incredible, as Sandy knows.
It is the hub -- or was then in the '60s of great cartoonists.
There were at least six or seven or eight really great cartoonists all
of whom wanted to go out for a drink,
Mauldin particularly, and on it went.
So this -- it was a gift that just keeps giving, as I joined forces
with -- with Sandy, and we've had a good time.
She'll tell you how we got together.   [ Pause ]
>> Sandy Northrop: My time at the Library of Congress,
I can't tell you, in 1994 I got a grant from the National Endowment
of Humanities to do what was not to become a PBS special,
a three-part special on the history of American political cartoons,
but what I was able to do was to spend a year up in that wonderful,
wonderful library at the top of Jefferson Building.
And each day I would fill out these call slips, and you got --
what came back the next day, things from 1800,
cartoonists that we can't --
don't even mention in our book and those that we do.
It was like Christmas every day, and I will be ever thankful
for that time spent doing the research for a show
that never became anything, but a book that did.
So with that I think we're going to start because I know you're all here
to see cartoons and it's only right that we start
with the current cartoons, today's cartoons.
"I want your birth certificate," says Donald Trump.
And as Steve will point out --   [ Laughter ]
>> Stephen Hess: [Inaudible] these cartoons.
By the way this, one couldn't be more in the news.
As you know, the President today released his birth certificate,
and I was on my -- the Michel Martin NPR program,
I'm it on Thursday talking about this largely --
because of a vicious racist cartoon that a woman
who was a Republican official in Orange County had put
out with a group of chimpanzees showing, of course,
[inaudible] our President.
I want to do a quick -- because I think this is an important point,
and a point of the future.
This woman -- we can now -- everyone of us can become a reporter,
just go on the Internet, you're a reporter now.
And in the same way can become a cartoonist.
Cartoonists are professionals, they have association, they have so forth
and so on, but this woman became a cartoonist, and I'm worried
that our future is going -- and the reputation of cartoonists are going
to be cluttered by the new accessibility of people who just
like to draw pictures,
and if they're vile enough, they'll become an issue.
So forgive me that's a long introduction
to a [inaudible] cartoon.
>> Sandy Northrop: "Not from this country.
Not from this planet."   [ Laughter ]
>> Stephen Hess: By the way,
he's in New Hampshire today about to get ready.
>> Sandy Northrop: And Michael Ramirez, "You want Trump" --
>> Stephen Hess: "You want Trump to be president, you're fired."
Ramirez is one of the few conservative cartoonists
in the business that's predominantly by -- done by white males.
>> Sandy Northrop: "And now for another issue.
Charlie Sheen."
>> Stephen Hess: "We interrupt this report of unrest in the Middle East
to bring you this breaking news."   [ Laughter ]
"You know you have a problem when" somebody --
>> Sandy Northrop: Muammar Gadhafi is sending Charlie Sheen an e-mail.
[ Laughter ]
>> Stephen Hess: The cartoonist is who?
>> Sandy Northrop: John Cole.   >> Stephen Hess: John Cole.
>> Sandy Northrop: Should be at the bottom of your screen.
"And here's another issue of incredible importance."
>> Stephen Hess: "Ignoring for the moment poopy old Afghanistan,
elections in Haiti, and boring NATO leaders
in Libyan -- in Lisbon, and" --
>> Sandy Northrop: "We give you the wedding ring."
Princess Diana's engagement ring.   And how about this?
>> Stephen Hess: "Once upon a time there was a handsome young prince.
Here we go again."
>> Sandy Northrop: And finally for the us on the modern stuff.
>> Stephen Hess: "I'd say it's a safe bet
that they're not registered at Kmart."
[ Laughter ]
>> Sandy Northrop: I think it's safe to say that none
of these cartoons are going to go down in the annals of time
or will they be sought after by the Library of Congress.
So today we thought we'd bring in -- you know, it was just a --
I'm going to say a "crap shoot" that we -- what any given week --
some cartoon will come up and maybe it will go down in the annals
of time, and I hope we're going to show you some
of those today, but these will not.   >> Stephen Hess: This --
it's interesting because here is one branch of cartooning which is sort
of a tickle them to death cartoon, something that goes
with your morning breakfast and wants you
to smile and it's very nice.   Our book tends not to focus on that.
We tend to focus on the hit them over the head cartoons
that we hope will change history, but these are very funny as well.
>> Sandy Northrop: Yeah, today Steve and I are going to take you
on a quick tour of what we think some American political cartoons'
lasting legacies as opposed to today's, and many of these are found
at the Library of Congress.
Today, because we have very short time and we wanted to really kind
of focus primarily on what's at the Library of Congress and where a lot
of our research was done, we're going to start with World War II.
>> Stephen Hess: Now, this is rather important.
Daniel Fitzpatrick was by the far the most important cartoonist
in the 1930s in terms of the threat of Hitler and Nazism.
And this is rather important because this was not
by any means what all Americans cartoonists were doing.
In fact, the cartoon that won the Pulitzer prize
in 1937 was an isolationist cartoon [inaudible] by the way, but this --
>> Sandy Northrop: I'm sorry.
>> Stephen Hess: Now we're going to go to --
>> Sandy Northrop: No.   No. Go ahead, I --
>> Stephen Hess: I'm sorry.   Turn it over to you [inaudible].
>> Sandy Northrop: No.
This was supposed to come up next and for some reason it didn't.
I just --   >> Stephen Hess: Yeah.
This is the whole history of part of a long series
in which he makes the swastika increasingly ugly and threatening.
>> Sandy Northrop: So that was what was produced on the home front,
and what was produced on the battlefield was done
by a guy name Bill Mauldin, who spoke about the grim realities
of war for the infantry men, the grunt.
>> Stephen Hess: "I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages."
>> Sandy Northrop: And these are his two iconic characters,
Willie and Joe.
>> Stephen Hess: "Joe, yesterday you saved my life
and I swore I'd pay you back.   Here's my last pair of dry socks."
>> Sandy Northrop: Mauldin repeatedly zeroed
in on the discrepancy between the life of the officers
and that of the enlisted men.   >> Stephen Hess: "Beautiful view.
Is there one of the enlisted men?"   [ Laughter ]
"Oh, I like officers.
They make me want to live until the wars over."
[Inaudible]   >> Sandy Northrop: These --
>> Stephen Hess: Lugging the officers' bags.
>> Sandy Northrop: -- bags.
These cartoons led to famous confrontation between Mauldin
and General George Patton, and Mauldin won.
And he soon became the youngest Pulitzer prize winner ever
to this day in any category, and here he was a high school dropout,
and he returned with a best-selling book, a Hollywood movie deal,
a lucrative contract to continue cartooning Willie and Joe
on the Home Front, and by some reports, he was worth $1 million
when he returned in June of 1945.
This was one of the cartoons that he did with his new contract
to bring Willie and Joe home to the home front
and have them experience life on a new front.
>> Stephen Hess: "You're lucky it's cloth.
Mine was made out -- mine was paper and it wore out."
Returning veteran.
"Major Wilson, back in uniform I see."
[ Laughter ]   >> Sandy Northrop: And this card --
this cartoon is particularly important
because it is biographical, because when Bill came down --
came home, he was a husband of a wife he knew very little,
they'd only really spent three months together,
and he had a son whom he had never seen, Bruce.
And this is from -- this is the original cartoon from the Library
of Congress collection, and Sara do you want to add anymore to this?
>> Sara Duke: No, I think --
>> Stephen Hess: Got to read the caption,
that's a little hard to read.
"How does it feel to be a free man, Willie?"
[Inaudible]
>> Sandy Northrop: So life wasn't going very well for Bill,
not only on that home front, but he was also feeling that he had done --
within six months of getting back, he had done the whole Willie
and Joe come home, what's it like to be a soldier, now kind of trying
to be reabsorbed into the home front, and he wanted to move
on to much more pressing issues.   This was one of them.
>> Stephen Hess: "Blood stains again."
By the way, 1946, this, again, he is well ahead
of where most American political cartoonists were as far
as the [inaudible] civil right.
They caught up eventually but [inaudible].
>> Sandy Northrop: Here's another one.
>> Stephen Hess: "Freedom's brave sentinels."
>> Sandy Northrop: United Features just was simply unhappy.
They thought that they -- in signing a Bill to do Willie and Joe,
that it was going to be humorous, and they're certainly finding
out that this was not humorous at all, and they began to do something
that Bill had allowed them to do in his contract,
they began to change both his art and his captions.
And this is -- Sara has helped me with this cartoon immensely,
and I'm going to take you into -- so what we have here is a guy standing
in front of the un-American Committee for Investigation
of Activities, Free Speech Division, but if you look up close,
and you can just kind of see this outline here,
the syndicate has pasted over what was a swastika on that
because they were very unhappy with Bill's leaning,
and they also allowed any cartoonist -- I mean, sorry, any of the papers
to change the caption as they saw fit.
And so Bill at this point in time had just had it; when his contract
with the United Features Syndicate runs out, he just quietly goes away.
Sara would tell you, he goes on to keep --
he tries to get into "The New Yorker,"
he never can get his cartoons into "The New Yorker" for some reason,
and so he really vanishes from cartooning for about 12 years,
seven -- 10, 11, 12, years, and he goes on and does other things.
There's only one other guy that is doing the same type
of gritty cartoons at this time that Bill was doing,
and that's a guy we all know pretty well: Herblock.
>> Stephen Hess: Well, Herblock started cartooning in 1929,
came to the "Washington Post" I think in 1947,
so you can see he had a major career before he even got here,
including winning a Pulitzer prize, and I might add, again,
as I had said of Fitzpatrick, he was the other person
who was very strongly -- in the '30s -- against the rise of Hitler.
This is by '49, and nobody needs to read the caption, "Fire hysteria."
Again, he was not the typical cartoonist,
but he had a very special audience being in Washington.
It's truly made a difference in the [inaudible] effect
that his cartoons had throughout the United States.
This is -- this one it says, "You mean I supposed to stand on that?"
McCarthyism -- the republic --
the chairman of the Republican National Committee,
three Republican senators pushing the elephant toward them.
By the way, the elephant was a symbol invented by Thomas Nast,
but an important part of that [inaudible] about the other things,
is he invented term McCarthyism.
The cartoonists are importantly have invented --
such as the word "McCarthyism" or such as the republican elephant
or even Nast's Santa Claus.   [ Pause ]
By '54, you see the importance of his strong cartoons
on McCarthyism particularly at a time when an academic --
academia and lots of other places were stepping back as far
as they could from this threat of the time.
>> Sandy Northrop: We'll, come back to Mr. Block, but before we would
like to take you and take a quick look, a very quick look at prejudice
as we've seen it in our cartoons within the United States.
We're not dealing with today our hero, Tom Nast,
the father of American cartooning,
and what we're showing you here is the downside not the upside,
but he drew cartoons that vilified both African-Americans
and the Irish with equal contempt.
In fact, he may have disliked the Irish more.
>> Stephen Hess: Yeah.   Catholics as well as Chinese.
This is rather fascinating because in the same issues
of "Harper's Weekly" which there might be six
of his cartoons fighting for the Tweed guy in Tammany Hall
which was the most successful series of American history,
there were also these cartoons, which I illustrate the point
that Sandy's making, while cartoonists reflected the virtues
of the United States, they also strongly reflected the prejudices.
>> Sandy Northrop: And what was very surprising to me was going
into the virulent anti-Chinese cartoons that he and others drew.
You want to read that caption, Steve?
>> Stephen Hess: No.   >> Sandy Northrop: No.
Okay.   [ Laughter ]
>> Stephen Hess: [Inaudible]   >> Sandy Northrop: Just --
he equates the African-American to the Chinese
and it's pretty -- pretty rough.   Here's a fun one.
What you're seeing here is in the background you've got the Wall
of China, the Great Wall of China being built,
and in the foreground you've got another wall being built
which is all based on things of prejudice.
Can you see some of the -- the things in the blocks there, Steve?
>> Stephen Hess: Un-American, anti-law walks,
law against something or other, yeah, the anti-Chinese wall,
the American wall goes up as the Chinese original goes down.
"Puck" and "Judge" were the two great humor magazines that came
through from the '80s to the turn of the century.
Magnificent color the likes of which we didn't really see again.
>> Sandy Northrop: And what's most interesting
about this is the flip between then and now.
Does anything really change?
If you build it they will still come.
>> Stephen Hess: Yeah.   Yeah. [Inaudible]
>> Sandy Northrop: One thing that really has happened and gladly so is
that the -- whose point of view gets represented has changed,
because of the Internet people like Lalo Alcaraz, his -- his --
he's a son of Mexican immigrants, and he takes his mission
as the advocate for Chicanos, Latinos,
and immigrants very seriously.
And although I can only show you a couple of his cartoons,
you'll see that his take is very scathing.
"Welcome to Arizona."   [ Pause ]
>> Stephen Hess: [Inaudible]
>> Sandy Northrop: A lot of cartoonists are now using this
which first appeared -- this symbol first appeared on California signs,
so if you were going in San Diego or south, this would appear
which meant, you know, look out for immigrants
or undocumented aliens were running across the road.
And let's look at how African-Americans have failed.
[Sic]   >> Stephen Hess: Yeah.
This is Currier and Ives.
We often associate them with pretty pictures of waterfalls and so forth.
There was a firm that started in 1835 to cartoons for both sides
of all campaigns, massively [inaudible].
This was a series they did called Darktown -- the Darktown Series,
full of very popular, in fact, people loved it,
and it showed totally -- totally loathsome depictions of blacks
as lazy, as not knowing which side -- end was up and so forth.
Thomas Worth was the artist for Currier and Ives.
>> Sandy Northrop: What's interesting is as we're moving
into the Civil Rights Movement, which will be our next series
of cartoons, cartoonists really didn't know how to caricature people
of color like Martin Luther King,
and so for the longest time what they did is they showed generic
black children, and this was easier
because although caricature was very much --
I mean, it had been a part
of the whole cartooning heritage throughout time,
when we moved into the Martin Luther Kings, the Jessie Jacksons and all
of the '60s, people were afraid to do that.
And --
>> Stephen Hess: Sensitivity of the cartoonists using liberal,
using white male, really broke when they had no choice,
when they suddenly had Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Justice Powell --
Justice Thomas, and so forth, and, of course,
ultimately when the President of the United States was black,
then they could concentrate on the fact that he had long ears
like George W. Bush [inaudible]
so the black stereotype [inaudible] stop.
>> Sandy Northrop: And there were black cartoonists then just
like Lalo Alcaraz today.
Ollie Harrington was just a terrific cartoonist,
and he worked for the black papers starting in World War II,
but most Americans -- white Americans that is,
didn't know his stuff until well into the '90s.
>> Stephen Hess: "Capture [inaudible].
Take this extra hammer I got here in case the gentlemen of the law decide
that this demonstration is too peaceful."
>> Sandy Northrop: And about this time Bill Mauldin comes back
on the scene.
He went to the "Saint Louis Post Dispatch" -- you've got to remember,
as I said earlier, that Bill Mauldin grew up dirt poor on a mountaintop
in Santa Fe, and he thought of himself as a redneck,
he never graduated from high school, and so when he started to figure
out how do I attack what's going on in the Civil Rights Movement,
he decided that he would attack those he felt he understood:
Fellow rednecks.   >> Stephen Hess: "Let that one go.
He says he don't want to be my people."
[ Laughter ]   "See you in church."
>> Sandy Northrop: And about this same time we have a whole new
generation of cartoonists coming up.
One is Jules Feiffer who became known in the "Village Voice,"
and he [inaudible] the rhetoric and the psychology
of us northern white liberals, and his cartoons read
like mini plays Steve [Inaudible] says.
So we're --   >> Stephen Hess: "Pardon me, sir.
Why are you following me?"
>> Sandy Northrop: "I'm your sit-in."
>> Stephen Hess: "You must have the wrong party.
I'm not a lunch counter."
>> Sandy Northrop: "I'm a social sit-in, not a property sit-in.
We integrate people."
>> Stephen Hess: "Don't get me wrong.
I understand what you're trying to do,
but I can't take you to work with me."
>> Sandy Northrop: "Have you ever taken a colored person
to work with you?"
>> Stephen Hess: "Believe me, I would if I found one qualified.
I'm on your side.   You don't want me."
>> Sandy Northrop: "Wonderful.   We can discuss it at work."
>> Stephen Hess: "Look, I do my bit.
Every day I deliberately sit next to one of you on the bus.
Don't I get some time off for liberalism?"
>> Sandy Northrop: "Have you ever taken a colored person home
with you?"   >> Stephen Hess: "Hold on.
I never mix my home life with my politics.
How long do you expect to stay with me?"
>> Sandy Northrop: "Whither you go, baby, I goest."
>> Stephen Hess: "Civil Rights used to be
so much more intolerable before Negroes got into everything."
[ Laughter ]
>> Sandy Northrop: Feiffer also became very,
very famous for the following type of soliloquies.
>> Stephen Hess: I think we can do it one by one.
>> Sandy Northrop: Yeah.   >> Stephen Hess: A Dance to 1967.
"In this dance I have symbolized a nation in flux.
Establishing fresh approaches to the problems of poverty;
crime in the streets; Vietnam; and civil rights.
A Dance to 1967."   [ Chuckles ]
>> Sandy Northrop: And the --   >> Stephen Hess: [Inaudible]
>> Sandy Northrop: And then along came Pat Oliphant.
As Steve told you, he arrived at the "Denver Post," he came in 1964,
and he was from Australia.
And he is often quoted as saying that when he got here,
cartooning was just moribund, he thought he had died and gone
to heaven, that it was, you know, the dove with -- the dove --
all these old symbols and here was an audience, he says,
that was really ready for a variety of new approaches.
This was Oliphant's approach to Civil Rights -- heads on.
[ Pause ]
>> Stephen Hess: Could you go back a second?
>> Sandy Northrop: Surely.   >> Stephen Hess: [Inaudible].
He has a little symbol down here, a penguin he calls "Puck";
in this case is, "Is this what you mean by get Whitey?"
And that I think he brought over from Adelaide, Australia,
where the publisher really controlled this part
and he could stick something
in to show what he was thinking at the same time.
People loved it and he carried the through in his cartoons.
I forget -- "I forget Mayor Dailey's orders.
Are these shoot to kill or maim and cripple?"
[ Pause ]   "Do you ever feel a little lonely?"
[ Chuckling ]
>> Sandy Northrop: Presidents become the symbols for their time
in office, just as you see our friend LBJ here.
We thought we'd show you a quick montage
of presidents you may have known.
If you know who they are, call them out, and I will say
that the first half of these all come from the collection
of the Library of Congress.   [ Music ]
>> Sandy Northrop: Still Roosevelt.   [ Music ]
Look at what's in the hair.   [ Music ]
>> Didn't Sandy do a nice job of putting those together?
>> Sandy Northrop: All right, and so we'll take it quickly, does --
did -- do you know who this is?   Steve called it out.
It's Grover Cleveland, and he had fathered a child out of wedlock,
and as he was running for president, his opponents tried
to make it a key issue of the presidential campaign.
Cleveland was completely unphased about it, just moved right on,
went on to win the election.   And this is what they sang.
"Mama, where's my Pa?   Gone to the White House.
Ha, ha, ha."   You all laughed at this one.
We all love it, and Steve will tell you more about it.
>> Stephen Hess: Yeah.
Peter Arno was [inaudible] cartoonist.
What happened was several weeks before the inauguration [inaudible]
March 4, there was an assassination attempt on Franklin Roosevelt
in Miami and the mayor of Chicago who was
in the car was him was killed.
So they -- the "New Yorker" pulled this cartoon,
they felt it was a little too sensitive given that history.
But that's indeed how the two of them
who truly didn't love each other probably looked as they went
down Pennsylvania Avenue.
>> Sandy Northrop: But this didn't -- this cover never ran.
This is William Gropper's take on how FDR would approach big business.
[ Pause ]   And the question of a third term.
>> Stephen Hess: The symbols like the -- like the cigarette lighter,
I don't know if this President is going to use a basketball
in the future but I wouldn't be surprised,
has to be some little symbol of the President.
[Inaudible].
This one when Lyndon Johnson had an operation, a gallbladder operation,
and in a press meeting picked up his shirt, showed the scar,
and just a line or two David B. [inaudible] changes the scar
into Vietnam, the scar that he had.
>> Sandy Northrop: And one my favorite cartoonists Doug Marlette,
who was killed some years ago, said, "Cartoonists want more
than just a good likeness.   We want his soul."
And if anybody really got it, that was this cartoon.
Paul Szep drew these two remarkable cartoons.
There's really nothing we have to say about them.
This is called the "Scepters of Vietnam."
[ Pause ]
>> Stephen Hess: This one is rather interesting, '73, because, in fact,
that's how the war ended, but Paul Szep certainly didn't know
when he drew the cartoon that that's how the war was going to end,
so they didn't release the cartoon
when the Americans came off the [inaudible].
>> Sandy Northrop: This is one of my favorite cartoons
because I just think that John Fischetti, who was very famous
"Chicago Daily News" cartoonist just really --
this is what Johnson felt every day.
>> Stephen Hess: "Sunrise all the foreign troublemakers gone to sleep
and all the domestic [inaudible]."   [ Chuckling ]
>> Sandy Northrop: And now we move on.
Mr. Block is back with us.   >> Stephen Hess: Yeah.
This is fairly important, "In the Life of Richard Nixon" coming
out of the sewer, and he actually canceled his subscription --
home subscription to the "Washington Post" after this
because of he didn't want his young children to see things like this
and be teased by their friends at school.
And subsequently said that the thing had to do
with getting rid of the Herblock image.
>> Sandy Northrop: And the reason that he disliked him was
because Nixon was -- he accused Nixon
of "red baiting" his opponent during a California Senate race,
and that is what so incensed him.
But suddenly Herblock had to deal with his editors who upon being --
when Nixon was elected vice president, one of his editors said
to him that you've got to kind -- a clean slate, please,
Mr. Block, a clean slate.
And so he sent Herblock a razor and -- with a cartoon that ended --
I'm sorry, with a poem that ended -- "Join the" --
>> Stephen Hess: "Join the good and kind and true, the faithful, just,
and brave, and grasp this razor in your hand,
and give this man a shave."
And there he is, the barber shop, H. Block, proprietor, [inaudible] gives
to every new President of the United States a clean shave.
>> Sandy Northrop: It didn't last long.
[ Laughter ]
By the time of Watergate and the disclosure
of the Watergate cover-up tapes, Herblock was not alone
in the way he went after our friend President Nixon.
A whole new generation were now manning the drawing boards.
One of them was Tony Auth of the "Philadelphia Inquirer."
>> Stephen Hess: Henry Kissinger.
>> Sandy Northrop: Another was Jeff McNally of the
"Richmond Post Dispatch" -- "Richmond News" later, sorry.
And Jeff would win three Pulitzers
in never quick succession before he died of cancer in 2003.
But there was only one cartoonist who had the honor
of being on Nixon's enemy list.   Got a guess, anyone?
Paul Conrad, "Los Angeles Times,"
and you'll see there was no wonder why.
>> Stephen Hess: "His own worst enemy."
>> Sandy Northrop: And note here -- we're going to show you three --
three Conrad cartoons -- how different the style is
and what different metaphors he used to get this [inaudible].
This is more straightforward; the next is Shakespearian.
[ Inaudible caption ]   >> Stephen Hess: "I knew them all."
>> Sandy Northrop: And sacrificed them all.
And this final one, again, without a caption, but look.
If you could see it up close, you would see that within that Web,
>> Stephen Hess: Dean, Colson, so on and so on, Ehrlichman, Magruder,
Haldeman, McCord, Mardian, they're there.
>> Sandy Northrop: I'm going to have to take you fairly quickly
to the next ones just because we're going to run out of time here,
and the back end of our presentation is more important than the next one.
But Steve and I thought you would all enjoy seeing some
of the cartoons from 9-11, and it's no surprise
that the cartoonists' take were in large part going back to the tried
and true symbols of America, Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty.
>> Stephen Hess: Uncle Sam is a symbol we trace right
through from the beginning of our book.
>> Sandy Northrop: But what was unified
in cartoonists' approach was what should America's response
to what had happened to us during 9-11.
Conservatives like Mike Ramirez saw it one way.
>> Stephen Hess: "Frankly, I can't think of a bigger threat to America
than the assault on our civil liberties."
>> Sandy Northrop: But a more liberal-minded cartoonist
like Clay Bennett had another concern,
which was privacy versus security.
>> Stephen Hess: Burning down the walls of his own house
to build a security net, Clay Bennett, one of us will say,
was an interesting --   very interesting cartoonist
because he didn't feel he drew caricatures very well
and so his cartoons tend to be thematic rather than directed
at one particular politicians.
>> Sandy Northrop: He really has created for all
of us a really fresh set of symbols, and, I mean, most -- he runs --
I would say 75 percent of his cartoons run
with no captions whatsoever.
"U.S. planes bombed Afghanistan less than a month after 9-11 hoping
to capture its most wanted terrorist,
Osama bin Laden" -- Laden, sorry.   >> Stephen Hess: [Inaudible]
>> Sandy Northrop: "On March 19, 2003, that became a reality."
>> Stephen Hess: "[Inaudible] patience,
remember I'm in charge" [inaudible].   >> Sandy Northrop: "50 days later."
>> Stephen Hess: "Mission accomplished, master,
if you don't count not capturing Saddam, not finding weapons
of mass destruction, and not establishing free democracy."
>> Sandy Northrop: As we all know,
"mission accomplished" was a statement
that would come to haunt Bush.
But, you know, the one question in everyone's mind was, even today,
the question of democracy in Iraq is still elusive.
And what about our troops?   Would you read that caption, Steve?
>> Stephen Hess: Sure.
"Why the generals never requested more troops."
And the general is saying, "We have one working tank,
two rounds of ammunition.
Check the numbers on your tickets to see if you're today's lucky players.
Done by our own Tom Toles who succeeded Herblock here
at the "Washington Post."
>> Sandy Northrop: And what many of you may have forgotten already is
that it was all the question of IEDs, improvised explosive devices,
and mothers had started sending their sons and daughters body armor,
and so this was very present for that day.
And as Steve said, this is Tom Toles,
and last night he won the Herblock Award which was just wonderful.
>> Stephen Hess: Here he is saying,
"I'm listing your condition as battle hardened."
The doctor is Dr. Rumsfeld.
>> Sandy Northrop: And the whole question back then in 2007,
as you might remember what was going on at Walter Reed,
the poor conditions there, and if I had a laser pointer,
I'd point out to you that the forklift says "Support our troops."
Now that's a lovely double entendre.
>> Stephen Hess: "Support the troops,
Walter Reed Army Medical Warehouse."
>> Sandy Northrop: So what we began to see --
let's take on what was happening back on in Iraq.
>> Stephen Hess: On the left, "When asked if this is sectarian violence
or a full-blown civil war," and on the right, the press says,
"many Iraqis were unable to answer."   >> Sandy Northrop: Sick.
Fun.   [ Pause ]
"Make us proud, son."
As some of you will remember, people were getting $25,000
for sending their child off to be a suicide bomber, but the promise
that went to many of these suicide bombers was that in heaven,
that they would, in fact, meet 72 virgins that would greet them
if they gave this sacrifice.
Jeff Danziger's cartoons required that knowledge of the news.
And good cartoonists that are so -- they're coming so fast at you,
you got to know what's happening.   And so this is it.
"Sign up now for a $10,000 bonus.
Nope. We'll pay for your college education.
Nope. And a brand new car.   Nope. Ah. How about 72 virgins?"
[ Pause ]   [ Chuckling ]
>> Stephen Hess: As you can gather from those strips,
a number of cartoonists at least in the
"Washington Post" also do comic strips at the same time [inaudible].
>> Sandy Northrop: We're going to move very quickly
on to the 2008 election, and back --
but back in 1993 Jim Borgman drew this cartoon.
"You can't get elected if you're" --
cross out three, two remaining -- "black and female."
Well, as we all know, that changed very quickly.
[ Chuckling ]
Not only were there a new set of caricatures to master
but also a new set of deliverables.
Cartoonists were now asked to supply a black and white cartoon
on deadline and a color one.
They were also expected to create and update blogs,
run cartoon contests, and that was the good news
for those who still had a job.
After producing this cartoon, Gordon Campbell thought he was on a roll.
Campbell remembers, "I'll be dammed,
if my cartoons weren't getting better
and better as the conflict raged.
But there was an ominous soundtrack playing in the background;
the guillotine was running -- was wheeling into news run -- room."
Campbell's job was one of the many local
and national cartoon positions lost to the downward spiraling readership
and revenues for newspapers throughout the United States
This is the work of Matt Wuerker -- and he is at "Politico."
He characterizes the first two million years
in the cartoonists in the media landscape.
[ Pause ]
As Matt's panels indicate, the death of newspapers and an Internet
that never stops has forced cartoonists
to explore new avenues of cartooning.
Kevin Kallaugher "KAL," lost his job at the "Baltimore Sun"
and when he did he launched an ambitious process.
He decided to turn his two-dimensional "W"
into a three-dimensional animation.   [ Pause ]
>> And now onto the super delegate [inaudible]: The war in Iraq.
What should the U.S. do next?   [Buzz] Senator Clinton?
>> We should bring our troops home in a safe and deliberate fashion.
[Buzz]   >> Wrong answer.
Senator Obama?
>> Bring our troops home immediately, without delay.
[Buzz]
>> I'm sorry, that is also incorrect.
President Bush?   >> Me? Oh, right, yeah.
>> Mr. President?   >> Deal. No, no, no, no.
No deal.
>> Mr. President, you need to answer this question
on the subject in Iraq.   >> Oh, right.
Yeah, yeah.   I've got an answer.
It's my job to answer.   I am the "answerer."
>> And your answer is?   >> Stay the course.
No? [Bell]   >> I'm sorry.
I'm very sorry.   There are no right answers for Iraq.
[ Laughter ]   >> Sandy Northrop: Ann Telnaes --
who is here today, let's give her a hand --
[ Applause ]
won the 2002 Pulitzer prize, and she is also one of the few,
few cartoonists that has ever been honored by a single showing of --
single artist showing at the Library of Congress.
She stands with Feiffer, Oliphant, and Herblock among others, so --
but Anne, despite all these glories, whatever she's done,
she couldn't make a living at what she was doing,
she never made enough money, and she decided to turn it around
and do something different.
This is one of her great cartoons at the time
that Saddam Hussein was executed.
But in 2008, she gave up daily cartooning
to draw three cartoons a week for washingtonpost.com.
>> From NPR News, this is All Things considered by Robert Siegel.
[ Chuckling ]   [ Bang ]
[ Chuckling ]
>> Sandy Northrop: Simple, quick, direct but three times a week.
You think what that takes.   [ Applause ]
I've got to skip the next ones because we just don't have time.
When John McCutcheon, who was a famous, famous cartoonist in 1900,
joined the "Chicago Tribune," he was one
of nearly 2,000 cartoonists working on daily newspapers.
When Bill Mauldin went back to daily cartooning in 1958,
the field had shrunk by three-fourths to 500.
Today, 50 years later, only 58 full-time jobs remain in newspapers.
That's -- that -- 58, 54, 62 --
you ask anybody, but it's pretty -- pretty small.
There are -- we can't predict the future,
but that does not diminish the success of the cartoon then and now
and its ability to freeze a moment in time
and say, that's the way it is.
Historian Larry Mintz wrote, "It takes a confident
and aggressive society to consider its most serious problems
and reduce them to jokes.
It involves a willingness to consider the stupidities and errors
of one's environments as less threatening --
as, in fact, survivable."   Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> John Cole: We have time for just about two or three questions,
so we can get the book signing in.   Five minutes of discussion.
>> Sandy Northrop: We also take critiques.
[ Chuckling ]   [ Pause ]
Yes?
>> Would you be willing to show some more cartoons on [inaudible].
>> Sandy Northrop: I don't have any loaded in.
We -- there are just a zillion of them, and I urge you --
you can find them at the lib --
sixth floor Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.
They are tremendous, but I can also -- if you see me afterwards,
I can guide you to where you can find some.
>> Sandy Northrop: Yes?
>> I guess most of the images that you're showing,
the library actually has the original cartoons?
>> Sandy Northrop: They have all of the Herblock, most of the Mauldin's
that we showed today, not all of them, immigration series,
and the early Presidents, that's pretty much was our source
and not exclusively, and everything else is anecdotal
but amazingly comprehensive.
And part of the fun is looking at the stuff up there,
and you can just punch them through, is the stuff that we forget,
that moments in time, you know.
I learned about Mark Hanna, who was who?
>> McKinley's --
>> Sandy Northrop: McKinley's press secretary.
>> No, no, no.   The chairman.
>> Sandy Northrop: -- chairman of his reelection campaign,
and just finding the stuff
that everybody's forgotten, I think that's the joy.
I mean, we have to adhere to kind of, you know,
going through the process and things that people will know,
but what the joy is in going up and discovering
for yourself is just finding all the things
that you've completely forgotten
and that were really important at that moment in time.
>> I guess one comment I'd make is that in the newspaper collection,
of course, you have the microfilm of the newspapers
so you could actually follow these things day-to-day --
>> Sandy Northrop: Absolutely.
>> -- rather than trying to actually put them [inaudible].
>> Sandy Northrop: Absolutely, and you can move forward.
But it's -- sometimes it's just exquisite
to see the beautiful art itself.   It's just -- yeah?
>> The other thing that's kind of interesting is the [inaudible]
with the cartoons with the Democratization of America,
because the early cartoons all had those dialogue bubbles which were --
you had to be able to read.
As time went on, they eliminated a lot of that.
One of the quotes [inaudible], he worried about that
because he knew his constituents couldn't read but they could see,
and it's kind of interesting
to see the evolution of cartoons in that way.
>> Sandy Northrop: Yeah.
>> Stephen Hess: It's an interesting question.
And, in fact, I can remember doing a program in Istanbul
with Turkish cartoonists who were absolutely terrific
and used almost no words at all, and I realized over time as I moved
around the country, that the more -- the greater illiteracy was,
the more the cartoonists had to rely on the picture,
and the stronger the picture became;
so in a sense you could say it's an area in which the Council
of the Book, we're too literate for some cartoonists.
>> Sandy Northrop: And also that they had a week to read them,
and so they could look at all the bubbles and just think about them
and talk about them, and they were actually a topic of conversation,
whereas today it's three to five seconds and it's over, you know.
You get it or not.   Yeah?
>> I'm curious to know why Oliphant said he was coming
into this moribund landscape
of political cartooning in the United States.
I thought that was a robust time --
>> Stephen Hess: I think partly because he came
out of the British tradition which was very strong
in England [inaudible] and so forth, and I think he probably was right
with the exception -- you know, it was a period --
really you're talking about half a dozen really good cartoonists
at that period.
I don't have to mention all the ones who weren't really good.
>> This was in the 70s?   Is that what you said?
>> Sandy Northrop: '60s -- this is '60 --
when does Oliphant come, '64 or '67?   >> Stephen Hess: Yeah, he comes --
>> Sandy Northrop: '64, so you've got Mauldin,
you've got Herblock, but you --   >> Stephen Hess: You got Conrad.
>> Sandy Northrop: -- Conrad, right.
>> Stephen Hess: I mean, really [inaudible] three, and he made four.
>> Sandy Northrop: Because Feiffer's just coming on, and you --
now when you get to '69 to '71,
you're going to get all the young ones, Auth, Mike Peters,
Doug Marlette, all those guys are going to come on, but Oliphant was
like two years before, or two to four years before that.
[ Pause ]   Thank you all for coming today.
We really appreciate it.   [ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.