Drawn and Quartered

The subtitle of the 1996 book "Drawn and Quartered" is "The History of American Political Cartoons," an apt description illustrations that detail the American social and political experiment, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the waves of immigrants to America, the wars and elections of the 20th Century.  Authors Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop include more than 150 cartoons in their book.

Here's a tidbit.  The Republican party was represented by several different animals until the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an elephant to symbolize the twenty year old Republican party in the cartoon panel "The Third Term Panic," published in Harper's Weekly November 7, 1874.  In the panel (p. 27), the elephant throws its weight around, overcoming Tammany, inflation and repudiation.  We are familiar with inflation but what were the other two?

Harper's Weekly, and Nast, was sympathetic to the Republican party, whose strength was in the North.  During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, transitional southern state governments headed by Republican "carpetbagger" politicians issued bonds that were bought by a lot of Northeners.  Southerners argued that these debts should be repudiated or cancelled, just as the bonds of the southern states had been nullified by the 14th Amendment. The Republican elephant is pictured as destroying the forces of repudiation.

Tammany reform referred to a circle of corrupt Democratic politicans, headed by "Boss" Tweed, that controlled New York politics.  Nast's cartoons exposed the Tammany misdeeds and helped bring down the Tammany ring.

This book is a fun way to learn American history - a review of  the events and issues that were at the forefront of American concerns.  A more difficult lesson to learn is the ephemeral nature of current affairs.  Those living a hundred years from now will have little knowledge or concern with most of the burning issues of today just as we are unfamiliar with many of the struggles of 19th Century Americans.  When we extract the universal themes of corruption, however, the horror and folly of war, the dishonesty and contradiction that prompted these cartoons, we can appreciate the persistent unchanging repugnance that characterizes human affairs.

The Indignant Eye

The Indignant Eye is a 1969 book by Ralph E. Shikes that illustrates and explains political cartoons and sketches over a five hundred year period in Europe and the U.S.  The 400 illustrations are a wonderful narrative filter for history telling because it focuses on the concerns of people living in those times at those places.

Shikes commentary contains many insights.  Here's one on page 200 of the Beacon Press edition in regards to the century of revolt that began with the French Revolution: "the Rousseauist concept of political equality - the belief that power in a democracy stems from the people - was still ranged against the conviction of the church, the army, the higher bureaucracy, the aristocrats, and the wealthier bourgeoisie that authority must come from above and that special privilege was justifiable."

This theme of class, a stratification of human society that is pre-ordained by God, or genetics, continues to this day. It was at the heart of the eugenics movement in the U.S. where 60,000 people were sterilized over a fifty year period from 1909 to 1960.  The idea of the saved and the unsaved remains a key feature of some Christian churches.

Included in the book are sketches by prominent artists Van Gogh, Miro, and Picasso and leading printmakers and caricaturists Honore Daumier and Jacques Callot.  The book is an entertaining and informative journey through half a millenium of folly, outrage and misery.