Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is Stuff you should Know. And that's it. It's the and On edition.
Yeah, it's about editorial cartoons aka political cartoons. They are one and the same. They're you know, usually appear in the traditionally in the editorial section or the opinion section of newspapers, so that's why you can call them either. And this is a profession that appears to be dying out if you look at the number of editorial cartoonists that are like full time staff at major newspapers, because there used to be more than two thousand about one
hundred years ago. Now there's less than twenty. And Dave, you know, helped us with this and found that staff. And I think we were both initially like, oh my god, they're all going away. Not necessarily true. Those are full time staffers on newspapers. Newspapers are in trouble, so that's a big reason why we'll get to that. But there are still plenty of editorial cartoonists and political cartoonists mainly working online.
Right, Yeah, And for syndication companies, Like you can work for a syndicate and they'll distribute it to newspapers that want to run your political cartoon, just like with comics.
Yeah. So it's I won't say like we're at peak the Golden age of it, but it's it's still alive and well in just sort of a different form.
Yeah. I've seen the Golden Age referred to as in the nineteenth century. You know, I'm like, these people didn't live through the eighties. That was the golden age.
Baby, oh man, I saw if I had a dime for every like cartoonish drawing of Tip O'Neil or Ronald Reagan. I saw growing up a security right, I didn't even like, who are these people?
Yeah? No, that's a really great point that they editorial cartoons are like of the moment sometimes of the day where they like, they'll still make sense later that week, but they're not hitting because something already changed or moved on and they don't. As such, it's very rare that an editorial cartoon can still like land the way it
originally did. That means that whatever it was talking about was so historic that people decades on know the like the ins and outs of it that the political cartoon is referring to. But for the most part, it's like
daily minutia of ongoing politics and government. And if you just go back, like ten or fifteen years, it's like, I forgot John Bayner even existed until I went back and looked at some of the old political cartoons, and it's so important at the time, but you know, all these years on, it does not matter what that political cartoon was saying at the time it was. And that's a huge point about those things.
That's why Michaels Ducaucus drove a tank. I remember, who's Michael doucaccas funny stuff? Oh yeah, his wife Kitty, that's right. And dan Quail spells potato wrong. It's so funny to kind of think about the greatest political hits of our childhood.
Yeah, it's it's really far away, Chuck.
Yeah, But like you said, it's sort of like greatest hits. You can look back at some Nixon Watergate political cartoons and totally get it, and they land, but they're not always funny. And that's the whole point of this, or not the whole point. But it's satire. It's satire. Can be super super funny, like if you read The Onion or something like that, or a well made satirical film or television show, but it's a different kind of humor.
A lot of times satire isn't necessarily laugh out loud stuff because the point of satire usually is to influence what somebody thinks about something through in this case, image right.
One of the explanations I saw for satires that it uses like a surface level presentation of a point to point out that the counterpoint is actually the more sensible thing.
I can if I thought about that and saw it written down, I could probably figure out exactly.
Okay, I've got one for you, Alexander Pope said, Praise undeserved is satire in disguise. No, still nothing. Okay, go watch the movie Soul Plane or Brian's Song and you will know what I'm talking about with satire.
Brian's Song. You know they used to use that in crying studies. That's the one thing I remember about Brian Song was when I was a kid, I saw a news report where they're like, this new movie is so sad, and it showed people like in a room watching Brian's Song with these little tear gutters strapped to their face. Yeah, and just like bawling at that movie.
And I'm sure the pull cartoon of the day about right had people crying and somebody said, are they watching Brian's song? And the guy says, no, they just found out Ronald Reagan was re elected governor.
Well, we also you and I are as we said on record many times before I grew up as adherence to Mad magazine, and they didn't. I mean, they did political cartoons essentially, it just wasn't for a newspaper, but there was plenty of that stuff in there.
Nice point. One of the other things about political cartoons is they present opinion. They do it in a way that's humorous, that's recognizable, you don't have to know how to read, which was for a long time the point of political cartoons. And it's presented in a way so that it takes everything you know. It makes assumptions about
what you know. But usually they're pretty good at that, and it takes everything you know and can turn it on its head, can point out the folly, the ridiculousness of usually governments, politicians, policy sees that kind of stuff, but sometimes it's aimed unfairly at groups of people. The other point about it is that the actual like types of art it uses have been shown to neurologically like hit us different than say, like a photograph.
Yeah, like when you draw a caricature or someone, or exaggerate, exaggerate the three year old if you exaggerate.
Some Wait, hold on right, you can't do it as well as you.
That's right, that's pretty good. Uh yeah, it's it's has more of a like, neurologically more of an impact than an actual photograph of somebody doing something even ridiculous.
Yeah, it's called a super normal stimulus or a super stimuli, which is it just hits your brain that much harder. And so the caricature like, it's just something people just figured out over time, building little by little to create like the optimal political cartoon, which apparently popped up around the nineteen fifties.
Well, or if you go to you know, a theme park or the streets of Paris or something, and you see a caricature artist parked next to the realistic like I'll do a realistic pencil sketch of you. Yeah, you got like one person over there, you got ten people in line, trying to get a big, old fathead version of themselves.
Yeah, because they want to be super stimulated.
Can I amend one thing that you said. You said that they use humor almost always that's the case, But some of my favorite political cartoons over the years sometimes they'll have just the really brutally cut, punchy sad ones. Yes, they're very very effective, you know, hilarious.
No, yeah, no, they definitely. It doesn't always have to be humor, right.
For sure, but what it always has to do is prove some kind of a point. There's never a political cartoon like, oh, this is just funny or something, because that's a comic striper. That's family circus exactly.
So I say we go back way back to potentially the origin of political cartoons, which were religious in nature, because back in the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther was trying to reform the Catholic Church and ended up just kind of spinning off his own jam, the religion was politics. They were interchangeable, it was one of the same. So when he started printing wood cut cartoons that were really unflattering depictions of the pope and the bishops and the
cardinals who aided the Pope. He was making a political statement. And so some people say that some of these prints from like way back in fifteen forty five, there's one called The Birth and Origin of the Pope, that this was essentially the first political cartoon ever printed. Because that's another thing too, you have to have a mass medium
to spread this idea. And so this was shortly after the printing press was invented, and almost off the bat, Martin Luther was among the people who were using it to make political statements using cartoons.
That's right. And if you're at home saying like, I bet he did that because so many people couldn't read yet, you're exactly right. The printing press was brand new and that changed literacy for the world basically, but right after it was invented, a lot of people still couldn't read, and so he knew that if he wanted to hit his target audience in the right way, the Birth and Origin of the Pope, it's a good way to do it. We'll describe a few of these that are sort of
easy to picture. We're not going to get in the weeds, I think, kind of describing in detailed pictures on an audio show. But this one is very simple. It was the Pope and the cardinals being pooped out by a she devil.
And then yeah, and then nursed by other she doubles Medusa's breastfeeding. It looks like a bishop in one part of this. It's really something. And that was I think, I think, I said fifteen forty five, and then nothing happened for two hundred years. And then a guy came along named William Hogarth. And those of you who really, really really pay attention to the stuff we say might find that that name rings a bell, and that would be because we talked about William Hogarth and our gin episode.
That's right, there was a political cartoon he drew about, you know, drunks basically living at the corner of Beer Street in jen Lane. And that was Hogarth, who's considered the grandfather of political cartoons. He was a serious painter, but then he got into making fun of rich folks in London.
Yes for sure. And he also it was a social commentary, so it was sad attire, it was exaggerated. That's another kind of key part of political cartoons, and it made a point about in this case society rather than politics. And so as a result William Hogarth is considered the
grandfather of political cartoons. He was not making political cartoons, but he definitely set out some of the points on the table that would later be picked up actually fairly quickly by printers, publishers, and cartoonists, among whom was Benjamin Franklin, who started He ran what's considered the first American political cartoon back in seventeen fifty four.
Yeah, so that was only, you know, a couple of decades after Hogarth. Yeah, Hogarth's Hogwart his earliest work. So it was sort of in the same era. And as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, Benjamin Franklin ran a newspaper, yeah, the Philadelphia Gazette, and
it was a cartoon. It was a cut up rattlesnake, with each section of the snake being a colony, like you know, New York had the abbreviation of the colony and it said join or die, and it was, you know, to try and rally people to unify against France and the lead up to the French and Indian War. And he is credited as even though he probably didn't draw this thing, he ran it. He is credited for making the rattlesnake a popular symbol for the colonies of the
well not United States yet, the colonies. Yeah, it's all I need to say.
And that's a pretty famous image that cut up snake as far as the US is concerned. But that was almost like a little side step for political cartoons because again, nothing happened for a good fifty years. And then along came James Gilray. He is considered the father of political cartoons. He was drawing satirical images to lampoon and point out the folly of people in charge. In this case, the King George the Third was his favorite, his favorite target
because he was British. He was also anti colonial too, and so there was one very famous one that he did that depicts the Prime Minister at the time, William Pitt, with Napoleon carving up the world to eat. Yeah, it's in the form of a plum pudding also known as plum poutine, and Pitt and Napoleon are sitting at a table carving it up, just greedily eating the rest of the world. And apparently Napoleon was well aware of James Gilray because he had a pretty great quote, didn't he.
H Yeah, I used to do a good Napoleon. I am I gonna try, though. Really he said that Gilray did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down. And if you look at this cartoon, it's it really sort of looks like what we know as a modern political editorial cartoon. It's really really cool looking and it looks great. The art is great, but it just it sort of has that look. It seems like one of the probably the first person who was making these cartoons that look like what we have today.
Right, that's why Gilbert is considered the father of the whole thing, that's right, And he came around. I think that the plumb Pudding in Danger was the name of the one we were just talking about. That was in eighteen and oh five. And at the same time, magazines started being established and founded around this time that were
dedicated to satire. So the form, the art form of political cartoons and political satirical magazines came together at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, not just in Britain but France. Turns out, France is basically the spears point of satire. Yeah, did not know that, but that's it's the truth.
Everybody I remember when the Charlie Hebdos stuff came out, and we're going to talk about that toward in the act three here, But that's when I sort of learned, like, how, you know Stute and on point their satire had been for a long long time. I didn't know that previously, right, Yeah, that doesn't seem most very French thing, but I don't know, maybe it is.
I didn't either. But there was a guy from the early nineteenth century I think named Honore Domier, and Domier actually got in trouble. I think he actually went to prison for his political cartoons.
Right.
Yeah. In the eighteen thirties, they the French government sort of relaxed their laws against censorship and so he had a little bit more leeway I guess to operate, and initially in eighteen thirty one he was threatened with a six thousand franc fine in eighteen thirty one. That's I don't know what the conversion.
Is, but that's got to be a lot of dough forty five thousand US dollars today, which you think it'd be way more. But that's what did you really do that? I found a Swedish currency converter, historic currency converter.
So inflation and currency conversions. Yes, amazing, and that's why you're Josh Clark.
I didn't make this extra money. I just used it.
Six thousand franc fine. He drew a caricature of King Louis Philippe with a pair for a head, and then when he was threatened with his fine, he put out a possibly one of the first or the first multipanel cartoon, a four panel cartoon showing the metamorphosis from this king, going like, he's the king as a caricature, and now he looks a little more like a pair, a little more like a pair, and then he just has a pair for a head.
Yeah. And the whole point was, come on, like, the guy looks like a pair, and it's ridiculous that you would try to find me six thousand dollars for pointing out something so obvious. Yeah, And I guess he avoided that fine at the time, but afterward he's like, Okay, I really need to get in trouble, so I'm going to create one called Argantua. And this one was way worse than saying the king looks like he has a
pair for a head. This was the king Giant like gorging himself on taxes that were being fed directly to him by the poor people. He's sitting on his throne and then he's pooping out like tax breaks and special treatment for the wealthy friends of his, And that one got him in trouble.
Yeah, it's a good cartoons, Like it's a ramp from the ground straight up to this giant's mouth with people in their wheelbears, just like walking up and getting in his mouth and being pooped out as spoils.
It's a great, great piece of art too, Yeah, not just the political version of a political aspect. It's beautiful as far as art goes.
But that got him six months in the Huscal, but they let him out and he started working again. King Philippe was asked about this, and you know, kind of like, why are you cracking down on this? But can have a pamphlet printed with words that are very critical of you, And he said, a pamphlet is no more than a violation of opinion. A caricature amounts to an act of violence.
You started out with almost a French accent there for a second, and then.
I debated it. Then I came back, and then it was British for a hot second, and then it was just regal general regal.
Yeah, it really did evolve that quickly too, that failed. So, yeah, King Louis Philippe put his finger on something that that there's something special or something different about a political cartoon that is way different than say a news article or even a photograph. You know, you can make the point the news article for centuries and centuries could only be read by a select number of people. Everybody could get a political cartoon. But there's something more than that too.
There's there's just something about a political cartoon that people who've been taken down by political cartoons have been able to put their finger on and say, there's this is way worse than just writing about me for some reason.
Yeah, I think that tracks too, even to like, if you think about, in like high school, if a teacher caught you writing like a note to your friend that said, you know, mister Clark is such a jerk. I think that would be taken different than if someone drew a picture of mister Clark like bit over being paddled by a line of students or something. You know, Uh, don't you think would it be equal?
No, it would it'd be equal unless you put like stink lines coming off of me and would be really hautful.
Oh man, stink lines. It was the first person to do the stink lines.
I don't know. I'll bet it was a political cartoonist too. What's that great?
Should we take a break?
Yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about one of the more famous political cartoonists of all time, Thomas nast.
Lately, I've been learning some stuff.
About insomnia or aluminia.
How about the one on border like disorder that at birth order?
That one be warm, but it was so nice I learned this. Why except for body, listen.
Up, stop.
Stop stop stop.
All right, we're back, Josh promised. Talk of Thomas Nast. Uh. He's the most famous American political cartoonist, probably very influential cartoonist of the nineteenth century. And that's you know, early on you were like, what what was going on back then? Well, the Civil War was going on back then, and he was a German immigrant who drew for Harper's Weekly when Harper's Weekly was really growing in their readership with a lot of pro union political cartoons.
Yeah, there was one I think kind of tracks with what you were saying. It's not at all funny, but it's super poignant, right, called Compromise with the South. The Democrats had run on a platform that the Civil War had been a failure up to this point for the eighteen sixty four election when Lincoln was standing for reelection, and that we should basically work with the South to just forget about the Civil War and end this. And
Thomas Nast didn't like that one bit. So this Compromise with the South image shows an amputee Union soldier standing on a crutch, shaking hands with his head bowed, shaking hands with a triumphant Confederate officer who's Jefferson Davis. Is it Jefferson Davis. He's got like his boot standing one foot on a Union soldier's grave, and Colombia, who represents
the United States, is weeping at that grave. And then, also poignantly, there's a Union soldier, an African American Union soldier and his wife who are now on the Southern side and they're shackled back to being slaves.
So it's a gut punch man, it is.
It's a really good example of a political cartoon that isn't funny but really gets the point across. And apparently it had a huge impact on America, especially the Union, right.
Yeah, I mean some people say that had a lot to do with Lincoln getting re elected. Lincoln referred to Thomas Nast at one point as our best recruiting agent, and in the eighteen sixty eight election, Ulysses S. Grant credited his win to the sword of Sheridan and the pencil of Nast.
Yeah.
I had never heard of Colombia, but you'll see in a lot of these political cartoons, Colombia as a presentation of America was used a lot. And I think this is just a guess. I didn't look it up, but it seems like Lady Liberty's Statue of Liberty has sort of replaced Columbia as far as the cartoon ship goes, because anytime there's like a sort of one of the sad gut punch ones, it's some shameful thing America has done, and like Lady Liberty is crying somewhere or something like that.
Yeah, I think Uncle Sam also displaced clos well, and Thomas Nast is the one who popularized the current image of Uncle Sam with his hat and that's right. All that that was Thomas Nast as well. He had a huge, huge impact as a political cartoonist.
Well, he did the he was the guy who came up with the elephant and the donkey for the two political parties, that's right, and also popularized our current conception, American conception of Santa Claus.
Yeah, because remember German immigrants are the ones who really brought Christmas to the United States, and Thomas Nass was a German immigrant, so he loved Christmas, and yeah, he gave us our version of Santa Claus. The thing that he's most remembered for as a political cartoonist, though, is that he is credited with taking down William Boss Tweed, who was one of the most corrupt political officials in the history of the United States. Apparently in a decade.
He is thought to have stolen a billion dollars from New York City in today's money.
That's incredible. Yeah, he's popped up a lot in our obviously our New York centric episodes about the history of New York. Very corrupt person for the Tammany Hall political machine. And I think Nast had more than one hundred and forty Boss Tweed cartoons alone in Harper's.
Yeah, so yeah, it was a big deal. Boss Tweed, very much like King Louis Philippe, was aware that, like these things were having an effect on him, and he apparently said, stop them, damn pictures. I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can't read, but they can't help seeing them damn pictures. And I mean there was a lot of reporting at the time by some of the New York newspapers like about Boss Tweed, and they definitely had some effect on getting him investigated
and ultimately put into prison where he died. But like, you really can't, like you could put all those articles and combine them pretty much equally with Thomas Nast's political cartoons and be like, this is what took down Boss treat these two things basically equally.
Yeah, for sure. And you know, there are a lot of times I think people think about political cartoons as coming from the political left or the you know, the liberal progressive side, and that is certainly true, but they're you know, all kinds of newspapers have always had political cartoons, and all sorts of issues have been attacked from all l from political cartoonists over the years have been you know, plenty of examples of both, and Nasa was one of
those that was sort of a contradiction. There's you know, we'll talk a little bit about immigration and political cartoons throughout history, and he was one who kind of hit it from both sides. He would draw one one year in eighteen seventy criticizing anti immigration the No Nothing Party, and that was called throwing down the Ladder by which they rose, and about a year later had political cartoons out, you know, criticizing Irish immigrants as violent drunks taking over the country.
Right, Yeah, And this was a time when immigration was huge, huge issue in the United States for probably the first time it would became like a flashpoint like issue that you could run an entire campaign on.
Yeah. Yeah.
For example, there was a cartoon from nineteen oh three in a satirical weekly called Judge called Unrestricted Dumping Ground Man. This one's tough, it is, and there's a lot going on in this cartoon. It's color which is it really pops But Uncle Sam is basically standing at the shores of the United States and there's a bunch of immigrants swimming to the shore, but they're rats with human faces, which number one is unsettling, but number two is really offensive.
And they're being dumped out of basically it looks almost like a mailbox or something that says the slums of Europe, and they're being dumped into New York Harbor and Uncle Sam's just standing there watching, wondering if he can do anything about it. And then William McKinley is floating in like a cloud. The reason William McKinley was featured is
because he was president. He was assassinated by a guy named Leo Cholgosh in eighteen ninety nine, and chol Gosh born in Michigan, but he was considered an immigrant because his parents were immigrants. So like, this was the kind of stuff that was being run in papers and magazines at the time, basically saying like like immigrants are rats, and like you can't let them in.
Yeah, well, and those rats. Also, just to further drive the point home, they had labels on these individual human rats that said like mafia, anarchist, socialist, So it was you know, pretty on the nose, I guess you could say, right. There was another ad as far as the Immigration Front goes Teddy. Roosevelt at one point talked about hyphenated Americans being able to vote, like that shouldn't happen, Irish, American, German, American. And this one was from Puck Magazine, which was is
that American? Was that British? I thought that was British.
I think Punch was British and Puck was America.
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, Punch was British. But it had a caption again Uncle Sam saying, why should I let these freaks vote when they're only half American?
Right? Yeah, it's a yeah, it's it's a really bizarre cartoon. It's tough to describe, but go look that one up. So one of the other things we said is that political cartoons sometimes also target policies social issues, and there was a really good one that Dave turned up called from the Cradle to the Mill that really got across child labor or the need for child labor laws. It's
this innocent looking little probably five year old kid. I think he's holding a Teddy Bear still, and this dark, ghoulish spirit.
Named Necessity grim Reaper basically.
Yeah, essentially has come into the child's house and is taking him by the hand to lead him off to the mill for work. And it really it gets the point across. Like, you know, this was from nineteen twelve, and if child labor was still an issue to date, you could run it today. It just really just captured what the problem was.
Yeah, and this was a time, you know, we talked about the in France, you know, when the one political card this was put in jail for six months. In America at this point there were limits on freedom of speech. So in nineteen seventeen that artists who drew that was targeted by the freshly passed Espionage Act, which was part of which was an attempt to silence critics of US going into World War One, and they almost did put him in prison for a cartoon called having Their Fling.
And this is a pretty brutal one too, and it showed the like editors, capitalist politicians, and preachers like cheering entry into an orgy of death.
Basically, Yeah, that one hits as well for sure. Speaking of world wars, World War two was a big kind of a accelerator of political cartoons because by this time newspapers have really hit in the United States and around the world. But there were a lot of newspapers in the middle of the century, the twentieth century and so World War two like produced a lot of fodder for
political cartoons. One of whom one of the I don't know if he was one of the most famous at the time, but today one of the most noteworthy was Doctor Seuss. Well, I think we mentioned in our Doctor Seu's episode was a political cartoonist for a little while during World War one or two.
Yeah, of course, Theater Geisel. Yeah, we did talk about this because some of the stuff he worked for a New York newspaper called PM for I think two or three years in the early forties, and it's, you know, it looks like doctor SEUs stuff in his total signature style, but he would would you like some of them would be like against racist and discriminatory hiring practices and policies
that are hampering the war effort. But he also, and we talked about this in the Sue's episode, you know, many years later, was kind of called out for having a lot of racist caricatures drawn in his in his work.
Yeah, especially there's one of Tojo, who ran Japan at the time during World War two, and in just the most racist Japanese stereotype you can possibly imagine, but.
Doctor style, yeah, exactly. So.
Yeah, there was another prominent cartoonist that actually emerged from World War Two was drawing editorial cartoons on the front lines of World War Two. His name was Bill Malden. I want to say, Maudlin's so bad, but it's Malden.
Yeah, me too.
And if you see pictures of him when he was drawing these cartoons during World War Two, he looks like a baby. He looks like the kid that necessity comes and takes from his house to the mill in that one nineteen twelve political cartoon.
Now I'm looking up a picture of him because I didn't actually look up the artists, and yeah, he looks like a child.
He really does. And he came up with two of the most beloved characters recurring characters in the history of political cartoons, in part because there's not really that many recurring characters in political cartoons, right, But there were two gis named Willy and Joe, and he just depicted their life in the front lines humorously for the most part, but sometimes kind of poignantly as well.
Yeah, and these a lot of times were just I don't think we mentioned like, you know, sometimes it'll be an image with a kind of like the back of the New Yorker with those cartoons, that they'll have a caption, right, my ideas, most of these had captions the Willy and Joe stuff, but not all political cartoons use words at all, Sometimes very few words. Sometimes this word's just in the image, like on a sign or you know, something like that. But sometimes it's like a character saying something.
Yeah. There's one that I think really kind of stands out of Bill Mauldin's that shows a GI returning from World War Two. He's sitting in at a at a table and he's being interviewed by the press, and there's an Army pr man standing next to him and has his arm around his shoulder, and he's speaking on behalf of this GI and he says he thinks the food over there was swell. He's glad to be home, but he misses the excitement of battle. You may quote him,
and it's just kind of well, I don't know. I'll leave it to you to decide what it means.
Right, Yeah, there's another one here that I'm looking at that's Willy and Joe reading the papers of their new a new soldier brought to the battalion, and the new soldier is clearly like, you know, thirteen years old or something. M H and Willy and Joe. He says, oh, that's okay. The replacement center says, he comes from a long line of infantrymen.
Yeah, his uniform is like hanging off of him.
Yeah, so clearly making a point about like sending children to war.
There was another thing too, that was a recurring theme in these in Malden's World War two cartoons, and that is how important hearing from people back home was to gis like getting male was a recurring throughout that. And there was one that I saw that it was like you were saying, there's no dialogue, there's no caption or anything like that, but it's a soldier and he's sitting there with like he's sitting down with his back against
a tree. He's holding his rifle up, but at his feet is a bunch of packages that say do not open until December twenty fifth, So like he's in battle carrying around this package that he can't wait to open until Christmas. It's like it's got a touch of humor to it, but more than anything. It really struck me as quite touching, you know.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. The one that artistically is like I think one of the coolest ones was actually from a German. I mean, I really hates saying this out loud. It was from a Nazi and what was his name? His name was Harld. He was a Norwegian Nazi named Harold Domslash and in nineteen forty four he drew a political cartoon. The caption reads, the USA shall save European
culture from destruction with what right? And it's a picture, you know, sort of pointing out all the hypocrisies of America, like you know, this this big winged, sort of multi arm, multi leg beast made out of a drum, and it has a Klansman head and holding a money bag and there's a news hanging off. It's just crazy looking. It looks like something like Pink Floyd would have used on an album cover.
Yeah, it is nuts. It's called culture Terror, but spelled with a K, and I think terror is spelled differently too, I guess in the Norwegian.
Well there's your band, then just call your band that and use that as the album cover.
Culture ear. Yeah, that's a great idea halfway there, but go check it out because it's it's striking as just the art alone is striking, but that the nazis calling out America for our own misdeeds misdeeds, great, thank you. That was also carried on by some Americans too. There was a black cartoonist named Jay Jackson who drew for the Chicago Defender, which is a black newspaper. And during World War Two, did you see the one of the blind leading the blind? Yeah, I mean talk about striking.
So it's America. It's a figure representing America, and he's leading a figure with the swastika, so he's representing Germany. I think it even says Germany on the guy, and they're both blind, and they're both wearing dark glasses and on the lenses it says race hate. So what he's saying is that, like you know, both of these countries that are fighting this war for moral superiority are both blinded by their hatred of different races. And it's one
of the better political cartoons I've ever seen. Again, not funny like you were saying, but still yeah, just an amazing point.
Yeah, for sure, we should probably take our last break, right, before the break, I want to make that they've been giving out a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. They started at nineteen twenty two, and Bill Mauldon won that Pulitzer for his World War Two work. And we'll talk about someone else who won several of those awards right after this.
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How about the one on borderlight disorder that are got birth order?
That one be warm, but it was so nice I learned this. Why except ebody, listen up, shop lead stop, stop stop.
Okay, Chuck. I just want to point out I think we said we weren't really going to describe images, right well mine, yeah, we've been doing it pretty prolifically. I hope it's going well. I can't tell all right no more, so I think we should talk about a guy named HERB Block or her Block was his pen name, cartoon name, and he's considered probably the most important political cartoonist of
the entire twentieth century. He's got three Pulitzers for cartooning alone, and an additional Pulitzer for public service that he got for just excoriating Nixon over the Watergate scandal.
Yeah, I imagine if you're a political cartoonist during Watergate, you're kind of licking your chops a bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. McCarthyism, Like he was really around during a fraught time politically.
Yeah, he drew just Block alone drew more than one hundred cartoons about Watergate between seventy two and seventy four. And that's something that I think bears pointing out. Political cartoon tunists are expected to draw a cartoon a day. Like you didn't write an article every day, you didn't go cover something. You drew a political cartoon five days a week to run in the daily newspaper.
Yeah, and twenty five of them for Saturday and Sunday. Right and Block Actually, I mean I talked about the time that he was there. I mean it's actually pretty vast. He was there from forty six to two thousand and one. Yeah, so he got to cover quite a bit politically. He coined the term McCarthyism. I think we talked about that
in the McCarthyism episode in nineteen fifty cartoon. He was definitely, you know, on the on the left side of the political spectrum because he would go after you know, environmental polluters, in war, the immorality of war, the government, you know, as a whole. And they have named since two thousand and four the best editorial political cartoonists is named after him, the herb Block Prize.
Yeah. And I went to see who some of the recent candidates or winners were, and there's one that I noticed. I was looking through current political cartoons and this guy kept coming up, same as Pedro ex Molina, and he draws for counterpoint. So he is super lefty. He was a twenty twenty four finalist for the her Block Prize. But his cartoons are just on point. He's I think probably the best working today of the younger generation.
Oh cool.
One of the ones that I saw was there's an old like an extension court outlet. You know, I have like the two outlets that you can plug into.
Oh you sent me this one, right, yeah.
And it just looks old and worn and everything. And one of the outlets says Biden and the other one says Trump. And then and also in the picture is an Apple charger and that says gen Z. They have nowhere to no one, yeah, yeah, and it's just there's no words aside from the names and the and gen and like it just again really gets the point across. But I like that guy's work.
Yeah. It also instead of saying jenc could have said a lot of America.
Right right for sure.
So we should finish up by talking a bit about Charlie Hebdoe. As promised early on, you mentioned that France has been a hot bed for satire since the get go, and the radical satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has been around for a long long time, since nineteen sixty. Their original motto was mean and nasty, and they made we probably would not hear in the States unless you just are sort of in the know, not known much about Charlie Hebdo had it not been for a couple of tragic events.
On Halloween Day in twenty eleven, they published an issue number one thousand and eleven they retitled instead of Charlie Hebdo, they retitled the issue Charlie Hebdo for Sharia Law and they were. It was a cover in response to the Tunisian News, where an Islami's party had won parliamentary elections there, and on the cover it featured a cartoon rendering of the prophet Mohammad and the caption read one hundred lashes
if you do not die laughing. And in Islam, any image of Mohammad is very much forbidden, much less you know, a cartoon making fun of something. And violence ensued because of this.
Yeah, I think in two thoy twelve, no, that same year, twenty eleven, so within a couple months, the offices were firebombed. No one was hurt, but in response, and I didn't know this, I thought it was just that cover, that drawing, which is you know, like you don't do that. It's a violation of like a huge violation of Islamic custom to make any kind of, like you said, picture of Muhammad,
let alone making a cartoon. But they they went even further after the fire bombing, and they in twenty twelve they published more cartoons, one of which was Mohammed naked on all fours. And that actually, from what I can tell, is what triggered the murders of a bunch of the people who work at the offices in twenty fifteen.
Yeah, it was two men stormed into the offices murdered twelve people. This was, you know, the biggest news. There's a cat walking around outside my house right now that I do not recognize. Very interesting. Sorry, just caught me off guard.
Yeah it did.
I was like, did one of my cats get out? It's like, nope, it's not one of my cats.
It's a burder.
Yeah, murdered twelve people. Probably not the best time to mention that during the middle of this awful retelling, including the editor of Charlie Hebdo for other cartoonists and also went on to kill four Jewish people and then the French police took them out.
Yeah, and so like immediately there were protests and marches in France, like millions of people across the country, and basically a meme was developed almost immediately. It was just sweet Charlie and it means I am Charlie, and they were saying like I'm standing up for freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and that was pretty much the zeitgeist across all of France, like everyone stood up and supported Charlie Hebdo after that tragedy, and I saw chuck that
ten years on. The ten year anniversary just came and went in this past January. They apparently people have changed their opinions in some cases, just like thirty one percent of people polled agreed with the idea that Charlie Hebdo brought that on themselves, whereas that same the answer to that question would have probably been in the low single digits right after the shit time. Yeah, I just thought that was interesting. I mean, how different things can change in ten years, you know.
Yeah, I mean in the wake of a tragedy like that. Yeah. I'm not saying I agree one or the other. I just I think a lot of times opinions change on stuff like that over time for certain people.
Ten years is a long time these days. It didn't used to be, but man, oh man, a lot can happen in ten years. We've learned to pack it in.
So we mentioned early on that there's only twenty like on staff major newspaper cartoonists. The reason for that, as we all know, is newspapers are having a tough time. Declining subscriptions. Mean they don't want to have further declining subscriptions by angering readership on either side of the political spectrum because people might cancel over something like that and they just can't afford that anymore. So people are more sensitive these days. They're sadly editors are not standing behind
their cartoonists like they used to. They flag something, they you know, they'll pull it and the cartoonists may quit or maybe fired.
Yeah. I mean, if people complain about a political cartoon, it used to be like, hey, it's it's true. Now it's like oh sorry, and then they print a retraction and then fire the political cartoonists. That's new. That's that's the way that the industry is changing. But it seems to be pretty much relegated to newspapers and just some newspapers, you know, like Mike Lukovich at the AJAC. He's one of the premier editorial cartoonists still working today for a newspaper.
Man. He's been around for a long long time.
Yeah, and he doesn't pull punches, and I think that AJAC is still behind him every single time.
Yeah.
So it's not it's not like it's going to happen, you know, no matter what newspaper you work at, it just depends on the usually the outlook of the publisher, right, And if you offend the publisher, used to be like the editors would talk them down, but the editors don't
do that anymore, and so you can get fired. And there was a very well known political cartoonist, another Pulitzer winner named Anne Telnay's And in twenty nineteen she kind of saw the writing on the wall and she published like a series or not a series as multi multipanel cartoon that basically was an infographic explaining what political cartoonists do, the danger that they're in right now in the United States, and as far as like being canceled and fired, and
then what the problem, what the ultimate problem with that is, And she essentially says, political cartoonists are the canary and the coal mine. If we start getting fired for expressing opinions and views that are legitimate because people don't want to hear that, that is a big red flag that freedom of expression is under attack in your country. And she was saying that's basically happening right now. And she ultimately quit just earlier this year. Right.
Yeah, she had been at the Washington Post for seventeen years and quit because her editors there at the Post refused to publish one of her cartoons based only on her opinion. So it's, uh, yeah, that's kind of the state of things at the Washington Post these days.
Yes, So, and across a lot of newspapers. Like again, they're like an endangered breed, but that's specifically at newspapers. It's still a very thriving art form, and you can make a really good case that it's still around and very popular. It's just transmuted in a lot of cases to memes. I'll give you an example of when I saw recently, you know that this is fine, the dog sitting at the table drinking coffee in a room that's on fire. I haven't see this is fine.
I don't see any memes though it's.
A great meme. But in one panel, he's just sitting there and it says arson is free speech now. And then the next panel it's him just sitting there drinking the coffee in the room on fire and says this is fine, and that I mean, it's a meme. Somebody put it together, probably using a meme generator. But you can also make a case that that is in a lot of ways, it bears a stronger resemblance to political cartoons. All right, you got anything else?
I got nothing else?
Okay, Well, since we got nothing else, that means this episode is done and it's time for listener mail.
This one's scrabble centric. Before I read this email, we do have to acknowledge that we failed to mention the ultimate Simpson's reference, of course, of quigibow, very very old Simpson's reference from an early episode where Bart Simpson I think it was Bart, argued for quijibow, which was just the letters as they appeared on his rack was a word, right right, Okay, So sorry about the quiji bow we heard from a lot of people, but this is a
different email. Hey, guys, the real reason I'm writing is tell you about the role of scrabble in my family's history. My parents love to play scrabble, and my dad, being the kind of guy he was, made a table to record their stats by hand, using a ruler about to make sure the lines are straight and the columns are each the same width from page to page. Ended up using five pages or so of very thin lines. He would record the date in the game that was played,
in the final score, and my mom's final score. Two more columns in which he would track a running total of mini games of how many games each of them had won. Besides being a perfect example of my dad, there's also interesting thing about the dates. There are three periods when they begin to play all the time, following periods for which they hardly played it all in between each my two siblings and I were born. That's pretty funny. They're like, why did things drop off for two years?
We had other things to do.
Exactly when my dad died, I inherited their scrabble board and their record was in it. And this is one of my most precious possessions. That is from Reverend Eric.
That's a sweet email. Thanks a lot, Reverend.
That's great.
I can just imagine man making your own columns and rows with the ruler. That's dedication right there.
I know those dads. I'm not that dad, and my dad wasn't that dad, but I've known those dads.
Yep. If you want to be like Reverend Eric, can send us an email that tells us how sweet your parents were. We love those kinds of things. You can send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.