Two brooding New York policemen in conversation: "If we could only have one of those good old ticker-tape and paper-shower parades to take their minds off things."—Garrett Price, 1931

Genial dowager to clubwoman: "Of course, we must draw some sort of distinction between wishing to overthrow the government and not liking the present administration."—Helen Hokinson, 1935

Two men observing a dog, weeping: "He’s been like this ever since Munich."—James Thurber, 1939

The New Yorker cartoons of the 1930s supply a remarkably acute social commentary on the Depression years. Despite left-wing editorial attacks, despite the avowed apolitical stance of editor Harold Ross and most of the staff responsible for cartoon selection and captions—like Rea Irwin, Katherine White, E. B. White, and Wolcott Gibbs—despite the concentrated audience of "the upper spending group of New York" and the concomitant high percentage of posh advertising, still, the New Yorker cartoons displayed both a developing social conscience during the decade and a wide-ranging sardonic portrait of actual conditions in the 1930s. While the cartoons were obviously more comic than editorial, the magazine’s artwork did not, after the stock market crash, exist in a socio-political vacuum. Indeed, one of the most fierce political cartoons of the century appeared in this supposedly lightly ironic and bourgeois journal: Reginald Marsh’s 1934 drawing of a woman holding her child above a crowd so the child can see. The comment is, "It’s her first lynching."

Of course, in number, the cartoons that treated social, economic, or foreign affairs matters in an ironic fashion fluctuated through the decade, starting slowly in the first two years, flourishing during Roosevelt’s first term, falling off when upswings seemed plausible, and spurting again as the threat of war grew stronger. Also, themes changed from early interest in the oddness of the business collapse and the need to cut back spending, to a fascination with radical chic, bureaucracy,

and the curious shifts of the once-wealthy, to more immediate reflections of FDR (and Mrs. Roosevelt) and European terrors. And some cartoonists had styles more suitable for social cartoons than did others—Carl Rose and Alan Dunn, in particular—but artists as different as Helen Hokinson and James Thurber, Charles Addams and Rea Irwin, George Price and Gardner Rea provided pictures that were as politically relevant as those of more familiar satirists such as Marsh or Wallace Morgan.

In 1930 the typical cartoon subjects included courtship, marriage, drink, yachts, children, parties, travel, taxies, firemen, boxers, desert islands, courtrooms, modern art, nostalgia, food and restaurants, architecture, sport, fashion, books, and autos. These themes continued throughout the decade, with the addition by 1935 of topics such as sex, interior decoration, stores, plays, and beauty care. In a typical issue of 1937, we find drawings by Peter Arno on sex, Dunn on art, Thurber on confusion, Robert Day on sport, Barbara Shermund on restaurants, Richard Decker on courtrooms, Irwin on movies, Addams on horror, Garrett Price on radio programs, Hokinson (two appearances) on lectures and shopping, William Steig on kids, and George Price on absurdity. Yet as the decade progressed, the number of cartoons with serious implications increased. Sometimes in a given issue that typically ran fifteen cartoons, as many as four raised social issues, however lightly or indirectly. My best estimate is that of nearly 8,000 cartoons printed from 1930 to 1940, over 300 were socially meaningful— a small percentage but a significant one. Many were too topical to be included in New Yorker anthologies—either yearly ones or retrospective books. And the magazine itself pretended to be above real political concerns, which it professed to leave to such other magazines as the New Masses, the old Life, or Ballyhoo. But I disagree with most comments on the New Yorker by cartoon historians like Thomas Craven. "The social upheaval," Craven says, "did not interrupt [the magazine’s] established procedure, and its allusions to the questions of the day were faint and far between."² As what W. H. Auden called the "dishonest decade" grew grimmer, the New Yorker’s editorial policy shifted from insouciance to concern. White increasingly wrote on world affairs in the Notes & Comments section; there were more frequent appearances of reportage from writers like Edmund Wilson, Martha Gellhorn, Ruth McKenney, Leo Rosten, Hyman Goldberg, and A. J. Liebling; Auden published poems there, as did Stephen Benet and Kenneth Fearing. Stories by Arthur Kober, Albert Maltz, Leone Zugsmith, Jerome Weidman, Daniel Fuchs, and Kay Boyle treated lower class or political interests; and Clifton Fadiman’s book reviews

were remarkably sympathetic to proletarian literature. And the quality, if not in each issue the quantity, of the cartoons reflected this 1930s editorial attention to the realities of unrest, poverty, depression, and fascism. For writing parallel to the visual effects of many of the political cartoons, we have Morris Bishop’s 1938 poem ostensibly about Roosevelt, "Him."

"The undistributed corporate profit
Tax," he said, "is suicide!
He never will make a penny off it!"
"I guess you’re right," his wife replied,
"He’s got a collection of Red advisers
Who don’t care what the people need."
He said, "His personal idolizers!"
"I guess you’re right," his wife agreed.
"He thinks he can move us around like chessmen!
What kind of a fellow would take delight
In sounding off to a lot of yes-men?"
His wife remarked, "I guess you’re right."

Interestingly, a few weeks after those lines appeared, the New Yorker, under its "Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse," published a furious telegram from one Caldwell Patton, Chairman, Republican Committee for Public Safety, Yale Club: "I am interested in knowing whether you’re running a comic periodical or an organ for Communist propaganda." He goes on to express outrage at cartoons ridiculing the DAR and Jersey City’s Mayor Hague and concludes, "It would be more honest to sell out your publication and draw cartoons for The Daily Worker. . . . I regret that you have changed a once humorous publication into an instrument for advancement of Bolshevism." Thus, in the eyes of some beholders, the New Yorker cartoons were indeed radical in the latter part of the Depression years.

For some contemporaries, and for most historians and biographers, however, the New Yorker was much too mild and distanced in its response to the traumatic years. The Trotskyite Dwight Macdonald, writing in the 1937 Partisan Review, clearly felt that the New Yorker was relatively weak where it counted. Its bias for humor was that of the inadequate writer no longer trying to make sense out of a complicated world; so the "stock of data is strictly limited to the inconsequential"; its tone of "ironic humility" would be fitting at a cocktail party [where, indeed, many of the cartoonists found settings for their most devastating dialogue] where no subjects are taboo as long as they are amusing."³ According to Macdonald, the magazine’s reaction to the crash was to distance itself from the business world: "All that had really happened was that the New Yorker honeymoon with the oligarchy was over and it had begun to look on its consort more critically."⁴ He insisted on the

columnists’ and artists’ uncertainty because of their impotence, on the story writers’ refusal to focus on proletarian sufferings, but rather to show minor actors—boxers, alcoholics—an accusation that does strike home with reference to the cartoonists. Yet despite a grudging acceptance of New Yorker humor as an "accurate expression of a decaying social order," Macdonald finds the luxurious ads, the departments attending to sports and fashion, decadent. Dwight Macdonald’s assessment of the cartoons is inappropriately negative. "In the class war the New Yorker is ostentatiously neutral. It makes fun of subway guards and of men-about-town, of shop-girls and debutantes. It refuses, officially, to recognize the existence of wars, strikes, and revolution. . . ."⁵ The last sentence seems to me simply wrong.

The New Masses Marxist in-house humorist Kyle Crichton who wrote under the pseudonym Robert Forsythe had gone beyond Macdonald in attacking the New Yorker as a bastion of bourgeois cartoons. Forsythe made his position clear in a 1935 collection of his pieces—plus some cartoons by New Masses contributors—Redder Than the Rose. "Obviously what one must have to be a success with The New Yorker is an ability to make even the most transcendental event trivial. The trick is never to raise the voice, never to become excited in the face of disaster, always to drink the old-fashioned to the last orange peel despite the revolution without. There is something pathetically childish about the courage of their ignorance."⁶

And Forsythe lashes out directly at New Yorker cartoons: "One look at the drawings and the captions from the New Yorker . . . reveals that far from dealing with basic emotions which are as fresh one year as the next, they are trifling with oblivion."⁷ Perhaps, but the examples of New Masses cartoons he included hardly support Forsythe’s point. They are angrier and cruder but no more basic; see Crockett Johnson’s pitcher and catcher talking—"Somehow I don’t feel that all the eyes of the nation is on us this season." There are two cartoons by Gardner Rea that seem indistinguishable from his New Yorker work, one showing a muralist being told that to the committee his painting hasn’t quite caught God’s expression, another of a dowager at a cocktail party introducing a precious young man to a similar woman: "Mr. Pixley is our very foremost authority on Socialism, Musteism, Lovestoneism, and Mickey Mouse."

James Thurber accepted some of this criticism. He understood that Harold Ross rarely discussed domestic politics and knew little about the international scene⁸ and that the cartoons were often vague since the Depression or the rise of Hitler was seen only as "supplying the art department with dozens of drawings."⁹ And, said Thurber, Ross didn’t

want "to stem tides, join crusades, or take political stands. The New Yorker," he staunchly contended, "was not the New Republic or the Nation . . . it wanted funny drawings . . . without propaganda." He was against "social conscious stuff" because the magazine would be "overwhelmed by it."¹⁰ Thurber did feel guilty, despite his defensive stance. In 1934, furious at New Masses and Republic attacks on the New Yorker for ignoring the worker, Thurber admitted in a long letter to Malcolm Cowley,

We know that the structure, the fabric, the purpose of everything has changed. We are caught with our mental pants down. . . . It is our fault that we have thus been caught out of life, fishing in our little stream, planning our vacation, making love to a girl, writing silly little pieces about timid men afraid of the night that comes with sundown, oblivious of the night that comes with revolution.¹¹

To be sure, the New Yorker cartoons did treat these topics, but the drawings, including Thurber’s, dealt with fears, not hopes, of revolution—see his 1933 sketch of husband and wife in twin beds, she clutching a shotgun, he arguing, "I tell you there isn’t going to be an insurrection."

Like E. B. White, Thurber had a social conscience but didn’t want to fall into a Thirties left rut. Thurber took Robert Benchley’s positive side in a debate with Donald Ogden Stewart over whether there should be humor about the working classes.¹² White, for his part, was well aware that the Depression questioned the validity of the American Dream, that fascism threatened peace. Referring to Rea Irwin’s familiar New Yorker cover figure, White commented that "Comrade Tilley’s rather formal hat" now showed the dents of rioting.¹³ The cartoon acceptances and captioning were a group effort in the 1930s, and according to the later New Yorker editor William Shawn, Ross was "open-minded in the field of comic art. He may have had his preferences in styles, but he was receptive to as many styles as there were talented and original comic artists."¹⁴

In what is probably the most thoughtful study of the New Yorker, Dale Kramer viewed the magazine’s ironical and paternal attitudes as a way of protecting the reader from ridicule since the magazine advocated nothing. "Most of the New Yorker cartoons reflected the times, the city and the mildly editorial attitude toward what people were up to."¹⁵ He admitted that the New Yorker was slow to get into the Depression subject, hardly noticing the stock market crash, then treating it lightly. "At first the New Yorker cartoons depicted only upper-income crash sufferers who were not to be greatly pitied." But "once the baselessness of President Hoover’s optimistic promises had been established, the cartoonists began to have real fun—much of it devastating."¹⁶ While cartoons were often not directly political, while the proletarians were

neither celebrated nor pitied, still, they appeared: Syd Hoff’s undershirted fathers, Steig’s street kids, Denys Wortman’s salesgirls and tailors. The New Yorker in the 1940s toyed with and then dropped the idea of direct political cartoon commentary. Thus, Harold Ross: "We want our artists and idea men to give some thought to the development of a political type of cartoon that will make pointed comment on the war."⁷ While this change never took place, in the late 1930s the fear of war led cartoonists to address social matters directly. During most of the decade, however, the cartoonists usually eschewed realism and depended on ironic, slant-wise comment. Reginald Marsh was the exception, Helen Hokinson the rule; Wortman’s sweatshop workers were funny, and Thurber’s revolutionaries couldn’t draw blood.

There occurred within the hard covers of the 1935 collection of the New Yorker cartoons a debate on the appropriate nature of comic art’s response to the angry decade, particularly to urban realities. Lewis Mumford, the New Yorker’s art and architecture columnist, wrote a mildly censorious introduction, "The Undertaker’s Garland." He found the cartoons to be "elfin, disassociated, abstract."¹⁸ Mumford went on to describe, fifty years ahead of time, this present essay. "If some research foundation will stake me to a corps of investigators, a pretty statistician from Vassar [50 years ago, remember] and an office in Rockefeller Center, I will undertake to discover whether this is the effect of the publishers’ bias in the present selection [correct inference—ES], in which case forget it, or the effect of the fourth and fifth year of the depression upon American humor. . . ."¹⁹ To Mumford’s complaint that the cartoons were not sufficiently urban and lacked salt, Wolcott Gibbs, who worked full-time for the magazine as editor and as sharer of the theater column with Benchley, replied with a second introduction, "Fresh Flowers." Gibbs admitted that the book doesn’t collect "perishable" topical comment, for the references would seem obscure, and if the cartoons lacked salt "(by which I feel strongly convinced Mr. Mumford means social purpose), it is the fault of the editors, who in ten years have done little or nothing toward formulating a coherent political philosophy (beyond the negative of suspecting all philosophies), and have, I’m afraid, practically no intention of beginning now."²⁰

At the start of the decade, when the number of social cartoons in New Yorker pages was quite small, four themes predominated: a bemused look at the strange antics of the economy; a more general comment on Depression-induced changes in social mores; harsh condemnations of

radical chic posturings; and glances at the lives of the proletariat. These themes continued throughout the 1930s, reaching a humorous peak during Roosevelt’s first term and gradually diminishing in the late 1930s.

An early motif was the Hoover promise that the economy was just about to turn the corner. One anonymous version shows two florists mourning over a dying plant: "I’m afraid we’ll have to throw her out if she doesn’t turn the corner pretty soon." Much fiercer is Al Frueh’s brilliantly executed "Just Around the Corner," which portrays a spindly man on a crutch feeling his way along a wall that slants downward on a graph representing the stock market grid. While the first cartoon is a forced use of a cant phrase, the second shows both pity and anger. Alan Dunn gives another twist when a mother calls off a child climbing a chair where the father is working: "Don’t bother Daddy, darling. He’s turning the corner." When the key phrase becomes "upswing," Perry Barlow presents an apple salesman talking to a street sweeper, "The upswing will come. It’ll come. This can’t go on." Peter Arno catches the hypocrisy of economic confidence: "Madam, the whole strength of this great institution stands back of that statement!" intones a pompous banker to a seated dowager—but the reader sees the banker from the rear where a patch appears prominently on the seat of his pants. More sardonic is Carl Rose’s "Big Business," subtitled, "A Board of Directors inspects third-quarter net earnings available for dividends after deductions for fixed charges, income tax, depreciation, and obsolescence"—a group of men is huddled around a table, guards are at the door—and a dollar in change is scrutinized.

Rea Irwin, the New Yorker’s cartoon editor, supplied a series entitled "The Turning of the Tide," which also mocks false hopes for recovery. The earliest reveals wild excitement, joy, dancing in an office as "A brokerage house receives an order to buy ten shares of Goldman Sachs." Each of these cartoons takes a full page, so that the contrast between the mass of observers in a vast setting and the minute economic actuality makes Irwin’s point. A triumphant executive, a thrilled secretary, and beaming ancient clerks hail the fact that "The Department of Agriculture receives an order for three packages of geranium seeds"; a couple of excited woodmen exult because "A Canadian trapper is commissioned by Revillon Fréres to bag two beavers"; a top-hatted man in a tattered coat happily delivers a brick in "A well-to-do philanthropist contributes a brick to St. John the Divine"; and as "The Hoover anti-hoarding commission induces Master Peter Delancey Witherspoon to deposit the contents of his penny bank," a small boy, accompanied by executives, a police guard, enters the bank to the cheers of a crowd.

Often the economic comments derive from the disparity between the status of the figures in the drawing and the words in the caption. Helen Hokinson’s solemn plaint, "People just aren’t buying luxuries now," is uttered by a street balloon salesman. Otto Soglow without comment draws a pawnshop window full of top hats; Dunn reveals a foolish rich lady attentive to the radio words "—peas are slightly weaker; potatoes continue dull"; Robert Day’s two clerks mourn, "Two moths flew into the store today."

That the economy is not moving becomes manifest. Irwin’s dowager, breakfasting in bed, speaks in shocked tones to a window washer who is raising his hat, "Why Mr. Trimble! I thought you were still employed at the bank!" William Steig’s businessman in a swimming pool is certain, "I saw it coming ten years ago." With fine displacement, Whitney Darrow draws two Chinese peasants conversing in a rice paddy: "The Chin Lees had to sell their Buick and move back to Mott Street." Taking over for Irwin, Rose initiates a series "Red-Letter Days in United States Fiscal History" in which a man balances the budget by drinking the twenty-seventh billionth glass of 3.2 beer, or wealthy Long Islanders spade under forty percent of their asparagus patch. Some economic problems approach settlement. Daniel Alain shows a former businessman now in prison stripes putting up a sign—"Sunday at 2 p. m. Baseball Game. Trusties vs. Wall Street." Rose’s father with baby carriage bids farewell to his fellow male babysitters: "Well, fellows, the firm’s calling me back tomorrow. It certainly was a pleasure to have known you." One of Gluyas Williams’s "Industrial Crises" depicts people taking rare books and manuscripts, children clutching old maps because "Owing to loss-taking, the Morgan Library is forced to go on a circulating basis." Gardner Rea’s huge room in a mansion decorated only by two chairs has three inhabitants: the wife speaks to her husband while an old woman stares out the window—"Don’t you think, Albert, now that the upswing is here, we could afford to get Mother a chair?" Even Richard Decker’s tramp on a park bench retains his nameplate. William accepts the way things are in a twenty-four panel, double page strip of a wealthy man making a visit to his safe deposit box . . . to dust it. Yet changes are always possible: Dunn produces a man buying ten copies of a book called Inflation Ahead. "That’s the same man who bought ten copies of ‘The Coming American Boom’ last summer." Dunn’s members of a exclusive golf club, in the late l930s, ask "How about putting nine holes into soya beans until this administration blows over?" And Wallace Morgan’s rich old men in 1939 wax nostalgic over old wines: "Vintage ’29. Oh! Steel 261—Can 184—Tel & Tel 310."

During the l930s New Yorker cartoonists attended to more

generalized social conditions with less force than they applied to the economy. Reginald Marsh regularly depicts in kindly fashion New Yorkers at play; at times his comments are bemused as when men, dwarfed by huge skyscrapers, converse, "I tell you, Gus, this town ain’t what it used to be," or a full page of buildings appears—with men at the bottom in shadow—under the rubric "Where men accumulate and wealth decays." In a lighter vein, James Thurber draws a full page of top-hatted men illustrating "Don’ts For the Inflation"—don’t shout over the phone, run, lie down, keep saying, "Hark!" scream, offer money you printed yourself. George Price notices Southern bigotry with an all-white jury and a black defendant: "Yo’ Honah, suh, aftah due deliberation, we the jury is convinced that the defendant is colored as hell, suh!" Rea shows concern over arrogant social workers asking a wretched slum family, "Are you bothered by overlapping relief organizations?" And Rose attends to ecology; in the two panels of "Westward the Course of Empire," one depicts woodsmen tramping through the wilderness, the other an army officer directing young men—from a train with the sign "Emergency Reforestation Corps"—carrying seedlings to a stump-covered area. Trials confuse Hokinson’s woman who inquires of her husband, "But Edmund, if Mr. Mooney was acquitted and didn’t attack those white girls, why is he in prison?" While the magazine takes no stance on guilt or innocence of Tom Mooney or the Scottsboro boys, her ignorance does make a social point. By 1936, Rose is more explicit about Southern views: in "Strange Events of an Election Year—Governor Talmadge of Georgia Musters the Democrats of the Old South, Suh, for a March on Washington to Save the Constitution," and a planter in his limousine, followed by whites in Civil War uniforms, leaves the plantation filled with weeping darkies and ladies in crinoline. Even at decade’s end, class arrogance is a target; in Irwin’s "Turn-About Tales" he shows "A Committee from Second Avenue Investigates Living Conditions in the Home of a Junior League Member," by having fat women examine lingerie, sample perfume, check diary, and talk down to a young lady.

Both the proletariat and the wealthy appear equally absurd in their responses to Thirties pressures, but the former receive more sympathy, for they are shown as naive, while the wealthy are usually absurd. Marsh’s burly workers observe two fops with padded coats and accept what appears: "Cripes! Look at the shoulders on them guys," while Rea’s hot-dog vendor furiously demands of a top-hatted gentleman, "My gawd, don’t your kind never eat?" Denys Wortman’s two male sweatshop workers accept their lots: "What a perfect day! Just the kind you’d like to live over again!" His female workers say, "You know what I feel like doing tonight, Ethel. Going out with a swell guy in a limousine

to a country club for dinner." Later in the decade, Robert Day shows workers knowing which side they are on as, all grins, they tear down a billboard that asks "Do You Want a Job—Elect Landon." And in his quiet way, Soglow punctures sentimental images by creating a soapbox orator whose job is to sell soap.

The wealthy are often targets for heavy irony. Hokinson’s dowager wails to her friend, "I think I’m going to have to give up my apartment and move to Pierre’s." Soglow’s bitter "Block-Aid" is captioned: "A public-spirited citizen volunteers to help one family on his block"—the picture is of a huge mansion that fills exactly one block. Or for Dunn, the Depression means "They used to have a station wagon. They must have lost everything," in the conversation of two women as a chauffeur picks up schoolboys in a limousine. Decker envisions class shifts; one day-laborer says to another as a third stalks off, "I told you never to mention Skull and Bones in front of Reilly." Yale’s lesson is lost on Rea’s wealthy lady who inquires of her husband, "But what’s the good of your being on the Home Relief Committee if we still have to economize?" These are Dickens-like in savagery.

The finest social cartoon of the decade, in my opinion, is Rose’s two-page spread, "The Rightist Opposition Forms a United Front and Takes Over Union Square For a Counter Demonstration." Every wealthy cliché’ is appropriated—and reversed—as pompous executives march, dowagers demonstrate, polo players parade. The signs are marvelous, true comic semiotics of the 1930s—"Wealthy of the World Unite—Join the Piping Rock"; ‘Higher Fees for Corporation Directors"; "Give Us Those 8,000,000 Share Days Again." And the details are myriad and appropriate: vendors sell orchids or copies of Yachting. Such people would join Alain’s rich couple in Mexico who complain, "That’s funny! Diego promised me he would use my face to symbolize corrupted capitalism," desiring Rivera’s attention more than class survival. Stupidity seems a quality even of those used by the rich: two businessmen discuss a voluptuous mistress: "I never told her about the depression. She would have worried." But Rose’s grim, aging clubmen seem more alert: "What we need, gentlemen, is a volunteer to go down to Union Square and bore from within." The second best cartoon of the decade may also be by Rose: another double page, "A Caravan of California Millionaires, Fleeing Eastward from the State Income Tax, Encamps for the Night in Hostile Wisconsin Territory," Cadillacs drawn up in a circle, servants preparing meals over campfires, businessmen with rifles guarding the perimeter, tuxedoed men studying maps. Ultimately, the wealthy in New Yorker cartoons seem easily to corrupt the workers who serve. Barbara Shermund’s saleswoman is

allied with her mink coated customer: "Recession, depression, or panic, lingerie always gets hit first." The Hokinson lady dimly attempts to cope with class warfare, asking her stockbroker, "Well, then, wouldn’t it be a good idea for me to buy some stock in the C. I. O.?"

Most fascinating to New Yorker cartoonists throughout the decade was the confusion of roles shown by wealthy leftists who believed they could by forms or words become or imitate proletarians or radicals. Frueh sets a certain tone at the commencement of the 1930s with nine panels devoted to "a former Man of the People, Grown Wealthy, Attends a May-Day Riot," where, receiving a rock from his chauffeur, the plutocrat casually tosses it out of his limousine, vaguely in the direction of a distant riot, then is driven on. More radically chic is Garrett Price’s scruffy young man who tells a lady, "I’d like to hire a hall suitable for a small national political convention." Similarly ridiculed are Shermund’s two beautifully dressed young men who are introduced in a restaurant by an elegant young woman: "Mr. Ellicott, too, is an ardent socialist." Garrett Price’s two NYU students appear equally ineffective as they decide to abandon the university: "Let’s go up to Union Square and hear somebody who has something to say." The same artist draws a radical male student courting a grim female who clutches her Life of Lenin: "What are you doing, Flag Day?" A familiar theme elicits a comically radical twist from George Price who shows a father and son—carrying a slingshot—as part of a wild, marching mob with topical signs of protest: "Communists Arise," "Pardon Mooney," "Free Rent for the Unemployed." The caption is "This is the boy’s first riot, and he’s all agog."

If strikes were laughable, New Deal bureaucracies were annoying. The proliferation of agencies, from NRA and CWA to Social Security, fascinated New Yorker artists. Early on, Shermund catches the lingo:

two seductive women view a man, one saying "He’s very interesting—he’s on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation." The New Yorker simply loved the NRA, blue eagle and all. George Price depicts a baseball team with double the number of infielders and outfielders, an NRA sign near the coaching box; "We increased our team to twenty players," says manager to umpire. In a full page, Rea draws a massive stage for a musical, a huge NRA slogan, "We Do Our Part," and the director remarking, "There, Morris! If that don’t bring prosperity, nothing will." Arno’s familiar wispy man in bed with a magnificent woman worries "Codification, codification, codification! Where will it all end?" The NRA administrator, General Hugh Johnson, motivates Alice Harvey’s breakfast scene, "Don’t bother Daddy now. General Johnson cracked down on him this morning"; Dunn’s boss dictates a

letter to the General as a striker’s rock flies through the window; Dunn shows two stores, one advertising a bankruptcy sale, the other "77B Reorganization Sale."

As for the notorious ditch diggers, they constantly subvert logic. Decker’s foreman says casually, "Oil, gold, maybe basements—the CWA just said dig"; his intellectual with a shovel is captioned: "Henry got psychoanalyzed and now he has a job with the PWA."

This annoyance with conformity struck the main anti-New Deal cartoon note. Day’s fancier row house with mosque and pillars is there because "Jukes got a loan from the Federal Housing Commission." Irwin opens a series "Regimentation Overtakes Society" with a picture of the National Guard enforcing the sixty-four hour clause in the code about weekends by carrying off on stretchers rich drunks, polo players, even horses. Rose’s sailor is tattooed as part of a PWA project in accordance with an approved designs pamphlet.

The constant changes in agencies seemed ridiculous. Price handles the end of the NRA by depicting a man in a tattoo parlor with the eagle already on his chest, demanding, "Well, smart guy, ya gotta cover up dis boid. I told you in de foist place it was only a novelty." Day shows bureaucrats themselves: "Senator, may I present Mr. Beasley of the TVA, formerly of the NRA and the AAA?" George Price’s grand line, "Well, whoever he is, every time I ring up a dollar he snatches out thirty cents," illustrated by an Uncle Sam figure sitting by the storekeeper’s cash register, indicates the New Deal’s cost. Money is the subtext of most of these cartoons. Day has a visitor advise a seller of Indian pottery

surrounded by thousands of unsold pots, "Why don’t you take your — problem to the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation?" Day’s two

cops view a Reward poster promising $7,875,000 and indicate, "I suppose it’s part of the pump-priming program."

That bureaucracy might end became a late l930s concept best

illustrated by Alain’s observers who say, "I understand there’s been - -quite a shakeup in Washington," as WPA workers cringe under the whip

of a Southern overseer. The bureaucratic decision to shift the date of Thanksgiving brought a spate of cartoons like the depiction of Arno’s guest who is cared for by the hostess’s order to her butler, "Bring Mr. Rogers some bacon and eggs, Bassett. He’s not celebrating till next week."

Supreme Court opposition and Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the court were variously ridiculed by the New Yorker—from Day’s sympathetic "My God, Ed! The whole damned thing’s been declared unconstitutional!" (in reference to a huge dam under construction) to his sketch of the Supreme Court building and its sign, "Business Going on

During Alterations." George Price’s wry version has two lawyers conversing while all the aged justices fight savagely among themselves: "You see? In time they’re bound to weed themselves out."

If Roosevelt’s agencies and court approach brought on cartoon criticism, creative arts under the New Deal became, obviously, a special topic for a magazine such as the New Yorker, which ran regular drama, music, and art departments. Government-sponsored murals gave cartoonists a natural target. Rose’s artist appears at a tiny Appalachian store and post office to announce, "The CWA has commissioned me to paint a mural here." Dunn’s mentor advised an artist, "You must paint only to please yourself—not Rexford Tugwell" (the administrator substitutes for the critics).

An Alain mother warns her child, "Careful, dear! Don’t get too close" to a frantic capital vs. labor mural, a mural not as ugly as Petty’s wildly symbolic creation, the painter of which avers, "I’ve had a few nibbles from the government." In contrast to the stage success of union-sponsored musicals like Pins and Needles, Rose announces, "The Theatre Guild Counters the Entrance of the International Ladies’ Garment Worker’ Union into Theatrical Production by Introducing a Ready-to-Wear-Dress Line . . . and draws a sweatshop on the stage filled with sewing machines, salesmen, and clothing racks." Perhaps the finest comment on the end of government art dreams is one of Irwin’s "Turn-About Tales," where "Artist Paints Mural with Capitalistic Motif," reversing E. B. White’s famous New Yorker poetic protest about Rockefeller’s suppression of Diego Rivera’s murals; in Irwin’s cartoon enraged radicals shout and point at the painting that shows Communism as an octopus strangling the American Pioneer Spirit, Labor, Individualism, Liberty.

These hits at radicals continue, as nearly every cartoonist adapts the theme to the appropriate style. Hokinson’s "Miss Pertwee is a friend of Soviet Russia," but she is our dowager being introduced to a gentleman at a fancy party. Soglow’s Little King brings a soapbox orator to the palace for a private hearing; or, being told, "The populace is rioting," the King joins them. Hokinson’s young woman petulantly asks her parents, "Well, then, can I come out after the revolution?" (a wonderfully obscure caption). George Price beautifully catches intra-party factions in his "Oswald’s getting pretty conservative lately," referring to a marcher whose sign reads merely, "Workers Reflect," while others say "Smash the Bosses" or "Down With Bloodsuckers."

Revolution never became an actual element of leftist activity during the American 1930s, and Dunn pinpoints that rhetorical unreality in mid-decade with his portrait of wealthy Reds at a penthouse party who

believe, "Oh, it’s all very simple. Our little group will simply seize the powerhouse and the radio station." This impotence fits George Price’s catatonic levitated man who in one of his many appearances carries a "Workers Arise!" sign with the accompanying comment, "He’s been getting very class-conscious lately." Garrett Price follows radical belief to the kindergarten where a Red-diapered tot firmly announces, "Communists don’t make cornucopias." Alain’s kids are also certain of their ground at a Macy’s parade: "Pop says it’s just a capitalist smokescreen to keep our minds off our grievances." Hokinson depicts a self-assured wealthy wife aboard ship who is certain that "Howard is going to see that we’re shown the real Russia."

In the later years of the decade, revolutionary fervor lessens. Thurber’s sense of absurdity accounts for his drunken woman departing a house where the walls are covered with antique weapons and remarking to the disapproving host, "See you at the barricades, Mr. Whitsonby!" Shermund’s ballet-goers try to make sense of the action by asserting, "They’re tied up some way with the coming revolution"; the same artist later shows a rich lady with a bell-pull who asserts, "My son is a radical. He says some day I’ll pull this thing and nobody will come." The New Deal success in quelling radical fervor is documented by the Hokinson lady who clearly informs an intense young man, "I won’t hear a word against General Motors!" But among the greatest New Yorker political cartoons of the l930s must rank Mary Petty’s devastating conversation between two maids while the butler pours drinks at a posh cocktail party: "This is the round that starts them weeping for the Spanish Loyalists." The picture and caption secure the New Yorker pose of acceptance of leftist concepts and ridicule of their bourgeois adherents. Like Hokinson’s chairlady who announces that "Today Mr. Chatfield is going to show us a little—but not too much—of the horror in Spain," New Yorker figures toy with radicalism; a similar Hokinson lady seeks to know only that a waiter is certain of his restaurant’s politics: "Now you’re sure this is Loyalist sherry?" Thurber’s bemused wife suspects the shift in political climate in late 1937 when she asks her husband, "Whatever became of the Socialist Party?" George Price echoes the confusions as an observer explains the theory of a wild-eyed orator who "advocates a pension of thirty dollars every day except Thursday."

Yet even at the period’s end the cartoonists observed some true believers in revolution. George Price’s fine caricature of bearded radicals intensely leaving a United Front mass meeting indicates their passionate concern: "We were doing all right until those cooler heads prevailed." And Charles Addams shows a man bemusedly reading a

letter while he stands in front of his model of the White House, surrounded by dynamite boxes; "Dear Fellow Alumnus: Your face was among the missing at our annual reunion last June. Won’t you help us to keep ‘tabs’ on members of the class of ’17 by telling us what you are doing now? . . . R. Taylor tolls the end of 1930s radicalism in his panel of a Union Square speaker lying in a bed on the platform: "He advocates a program of peaceful resignation."

In the second half of the decade, the targets of the New Yorker cartoonists’ satire became more specific. Perhaps because of a growing sense of recovered hope, newly emerging comic themes included strikes, New Deal bureaucracy, government-sponsored art, court-packing, and the Roosevelts themselves. And in the late 1930s the winds of European fascism and war blew a chilly feeling into not-so-funny drawings.

Strikes fascinated cartoonists’ senses of incongruity, and artists most often concentrated on absurd picket signs. Day’s well-dressed pickets of a Yacht showroom carry signs saying, "Mutiny: Workers of the Foster Boat Corp. On Mutiny." In Day’s bicycle race appears the sign, "Carpenter Work on this track Unfair to Organized Labor." Rose depicts dancers lying down with their legs crossed under the heading, "The Rockettes Participate in a Lie-Down Strike." Day has a restaurant picketed by bartenders, electricians, waiters, exterminators . . . to the phrase, "Poor Mervey is certainly having his share of labor troubles." Rose’s pickets of Ye Tastie Foode Shoppe carry signs, "Unfaire to ye Laboure." Alain’s nervous tourists worry about two peasants asleep in a Mexican store doorway: "But suppose they’re pickets?" Arno has a man picketing a hotel in the rain as a doorman holds an umbrella over the striker. Alain’s pickets carry neon signs, Soglow’s respond to the news that an Acme store will soon open by carrying a board: "Acme Will Probably Be Unfair." George Price’s old men in wheel chairs picket a surgical supply store.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself—and Mrs. Roosevelt, of course—provided the best political subject matter for New Yorker cartoonists during the decade. While the cartoons at times mocked his weaknesses, by far the largest percentage mocked the flaws of his detractors. And Eleanor was always a subject of wonder and, ultimately, admiration.

As early as 1932, Rose shows President Hoover on the phone: "Hello Governor Roosevelt. You haven’t got a good idea for a Thanksgiving proclamation, have you?" As the second term approached, Roosevelt

haters appeared more frequently in New Yorker cartoons. George Galbreath’s rich man promises his mistress, "And if Roosevelt is not re-elected, perhaps even a villa in Newport, my dearest sweet." Decker’s elderly wife warns a furious old man, "Now Stewart, you know the doctor told you you shouldn’t talk about Roosevelt." The only cartoon I discovered directly picturing FDR was Dunn’s view of the president at his desk, with his secretary speaking: "Excuse me Mr. President, this button opens Boulder Dam—that button is Mr. McIntyre." The greatest of all anti-FDR cartoons is Arno’s group of wealthy clubmen and dowagers speaking to a man in the window of his mansion; "Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt," chortles the white-mustached old man. Still, I consider Hokinson’s quieter panel almost more effective, as the dowager in the polling booth inquires, "Can you tell me which one of these levers I pull to vote against the present administration?" And this theme seemed endless. Arno’s angry mustached man eventually demands of the astonished black pushing an Atlantic City chair, "And you! What do you think of this third-term nonsense?" Thurber’s woman reading the newspaper to her little husband demands, "Don’t keep saying ‘God forbid!’ everytime I mention Mr. Roosevelt"; and Thurber’s boorish waiter asks a customer, "And how do you stand on a third term, scout, right or wrong?" That FDR was better than his attackers appears clearly in one of Williams’s "Raconteurs" series, where a cigar-smoking, tuxedoed, elderly clubman in front of the fire addresses seven cronies: "Here’s a new one I heard downtown today—F. D. and Eleanor were going shopping, and she said, ‘Franklin . . .’" Williams shows a similar group in a smoking car, and the long anecdote promises that "he" is slipping, and businessmen are waking up. Morgan’s clubman is equally disturbed: "Ashley’s daughter accepted an invitation to a White House reception and the old boy is pretty badly shaken up." The sweetest cartoon response to Roosevelt’s leadership comes from Hokinson’s dowager who tells her minister after church, "I’m so glad you asked God to guide the President."

As for Eleanor, her movements fascinated New Yorker cartoonists. An especially famous cartoon is Day’s panel in 1933 showing two coal miners with lanterns on their hats watching as a light comes along the shaft: "For gosh sakes, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt." The theme persists:

Rea’s South Dakota delegation arrives at the White House only to be told, "But Gentlemen, Mrs. Roosevelt is in South Dakota"; Hokinson’s two ladies hear from a White House guard, "She’ll be here Wednesday morning, Ma’am, but I understand she’s leaving again Wednesday evening." Throughout the l930s, Mrs. Roosevelt inspired only

admiration, wonder, and affection among New Yorker cartoonists, exemplified by Barlow’s two tenement ladies on a fire escape: "Mrs. Mears, save ‘My Day’ for me, will you?" The Roosevelts were, in essence, the only heroic figures to be treated consistently in New Yorker cartoons during the decade, yet they were almost never actually pictured.

Such was not the case with New Yorker cartoonists’ only genuine villains of the 1930s, the fascist dictators. Adolf Hitler was a persona of evil from the start; Benito Mussolini, a comic fool; Joseph Stalin, enigmatic; and—with General Franco merely a concept—Spain a lost cause. Hitler was special, a pariah from the start; in Rose’s early "Unlooked For Event of the Literary Season," he shows how the "Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin tender a tea to one of their authors"— and the author of Mein Kampf is the only guest in the room with two frock-coated old Bostonians. Hokinson’s clubwomen were nervous about Mussolini during the time of Ethiopia—"The vote is now fifteen to one that we deplore Mussolini’s attitude. I think it would be nice if we could go on record unanimously deploring Mussolini’s attitude"—but they hated Hitler and his book: "Are you sure he won’t be paid a royalty," asks a lady in a bookstore at decade’s end. Fear became a genuine theme. The week after Munich, Rose contributes a tiny picture of a "Clearance Sale, 80% Reduction" on globes and atlases. Galbreath’s middle-class parents are appalled by their intensely pacifist son: "You mean you’d just sit there even if Japan and Germany and Italy invaded us in a body?" Irwin draws a savage page of fourteen panels telling an anti-Nazi parable: the boy who was taught that apes are non-Aryans torments one in a zoo; he is killed and given a statue; his parents dream that he is taken to heaven by a Valkyrie; his teacher and Hitler attend the funeral. This dark tone was counterbalanced by a Shermund cartoon set in a beauty shop where the masseuse cajoles, "Now, dear, we’ll just forget all about Hitler and Mussolini and all our nasty old cares." Williams has his "Raconteurs" clubman lecturing on the "foreign mess" and giving assurances that Germans will throw out Hitler, that the economic condition precludes war—but these cartoons are nervous. Alain catches a tone of anger when two maids observe a spoon bent out of shape: "Mr. Thatcher must of talked ’bout Hitler plenty. Look at this spoon." Rose comments on Munich directly as two diplomats talk at the table, "Just sign here. You can read it later," while Hitler and Stalin observe. Previously, Stalin was a much more ambiguous figure. Alain’s juggling parachutist hopes Stalin is watching, but Addams’ Russian soldier is more grimly realistic when during a vast physical training exercise, one soldier leaps while the others squat—"Mark my words, comrade Pavlov will be purged by nightfall." Humor of any kind gives

way to savage caricature in the series with which Irwin closed the decade: "A Nazi History of the World." In huge full-page drawings, a swastika-decorated angel with a sword drives off Adam and Eve as "The Non-Aryans are Expelled from the Garden of Eden"; Hitler is Pharaoh as "Pharaoh Relieves the Chosen People of Their Worldly Possessions Before the Exodus"; the series goes on to Carthage and Britain. The savage ironic tone and the brutal art work reflect a real sense of terror of fascism . . . and apprehension of war.

During the 1930s, New Yorker cartoons deplored militarism. This theme did not reflect a shifting political line as was the case with, say, New Masses illustrations. And by 1940, the cartoons reflected an acceptance of the coming conflict but, equally, unease. From irony to disbelief to acceptance, New Yorker anti-war cartoons best exemplified the socio-political stance of this supposedly light-hearted, apolitical magazine. War was envisioned as stupid, terrifying, and, finally, just another bureaucratic reality. At the start, Rose laughs at the idea of "Disarmament": in four strips, diplomats march into a conference, sign a treaty, march out, and soldiers saw off a tiny piece from a cannon’s mouth. Marsh is as sardonic when a tourist comforts a Chinese peasant in front of his destroyed village: "C’est la guerre, old man." As the decade wore on, the tone became more cynical; thus, Rea’s Chinese on a battlefield remark, "I hear war may be declared any day now." Towards the last years of the l930s Galbreath draws what I consider one of the fine, unknown New Yorker social cartoons. It is not humorous. A depressed couple sits listening to the radio, which reports 1938 news—Russo-Japanese tension, Austrian suicide of a man imprisoned for playing a Strauss waltz on a violin, bombs over Barcelona, plants shut down in Detroit, Washington’s land-spend program. This litany of 1930s terrors is quietly underscored by a small pile of child’s toys on the floor.

Fear drives Rose’s ten panels of "The Story of Mankind"—from caveman to caveman through the centuries until war comes. Rea shows workmen covering the angel of peace statue with sandbags, and George Price does the same with Uncle Stevie. Hokinson’s lady shopper is pleased to hear "This little jacket got out of Paris just in time"; Rose’s ship is badly camouflaged as a farm; Day’s scientist invents a special weapon that contains a devastating explosive and propaganda leaflets for the survivors; his grocery clerk reassures a woman hoarder. As 1939 closes, there are many military cartoons of a soldier getting a table near the door in case of national emergency (Rea), of a mobile artilleryman unable to find a parking place (Dunn), of people in gas masks being introduced (Day), of a tank among cars at an auto show (Dunn), of a

General, covered with carrier pigeons, receiving heavy mail (Price), of swimmers abandoning a pool when a periscope appears (Addams). Many other cartoons repeat the frightening war concepts of tanks and submarines, blackouts and shortages. Three cartoons speak for themselves and properly close the New Yorker’s 1930s social commentary. A Thurber woman says to a man on a couch, "I suppose all that you men think about is war." In an anonymous panel a librarian informs a user, "We’ve given up humor. Sorry." And, in the most poignant and apocalyptic social cartoon of the Thirties, Peter Arno, no less, that delineator of drunks and clubmen, sex and sport, draws a full page, without caption of a massive cemetery covered with row upon row of crosses, attended only by an old man wearing a military cap, leaning on a rake, and observing in the distant autumn sky a V-formation of. . . geese? bombers?

SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

¹Ralph Ingersoll, "The New Yorker," Fortune (10 August 1934), p. 74.
²Thomas Craven, Cartoon Cavalcade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943), p. 242.
³Dwight Macdonald, "Laugh and Lie Down," Partisan Review, 4 (Dec. 1937), 44.
⁴Macdonald, p. 46.
⁵Macdonald, p. 50.
⁶Robert Forsythe, Redder Than the Rose (New York: Covici-Friede, 1935), p. 119.
⁷Forsythe, pp. 121-122.
⁸James Thurber, The Years With Ross (Boston: Little Brown, 1958), p. 73.
⁹Thurber, p. 154.
¹⁰Thurber, p. 172.
¹¹Burton Bernstein, Thurber (New York: Ballantine, 1976), p. 310.
¹²Bernstein, p. 327.
¹³Scott Elledge, E. B. White (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 188.
¹⁴Brendan Gill, Here at the "New Yorker" (New York,: Random House, 1935), p. 390.
¹⁵Dale Kramer, Ross and the "New Yorker" (New York: Doubleday, 1951), p. 202.
¹⁶Kramer, pp. 225, 227.
¹⁷Kramer, p. 266.
¹⁸Lewis Mumford, "The Undertaker’s Garland," Seventh "New Yorker" Album (New York: Random House, 1935), n. p.
¹⁹Mumford.
²⁰Wolcott Gibbs, "Fresh Flowers," Seventh "New Yorker" Album.