Napoleon once said that the English caricaturist James Gillray “did more than all the armies in Europe to bring me down.” Here’a an example.
Two years after King Louis Philippe famously abolished censorship of the press in France, Daumier produced his famous pear-shaped caricature. Daumier, his publisher Philipon, and his printer were all indicted for arousing hatred of and contempt of the King’s government, and for offending the King’s person.” Only Daumier went to prison.
Nast’s depictions of boss Teed are justly credited with bringing him and his corrupt Tammany Hall cronies down. He fqmously said, “I don’t give a straw for your newspapers articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damn pictures.”
Young and Minor were two of the artists whose work appeared regularly in THE MASSES. In August, 1917 the Post Office revoked The Masses’ mailing privileges. The Masses was brought to trial twice as the editors (including the cartoonists) were charged with “conspiring to obstruct conscription.” Although Young and Minor stayed out of prison, the lawsuits caused the magazine to suspend publication.
Young and Minor were two of the artists whose work appeared regularly in The Masses. In August, 1917 the Post Office revoked The Masses’ mailing privileges. The Masses was brought to trial twice as the editors (including the cartoonists) were charged with “conspiring to obstruct conscription”. Alhough Young and Minor stayed out of prison, the lawsuits caused the magazine to suspend publication.
During World War I, no cartoonist exercised more influence than Louis Raemaekers of Holland. Charged with “endangering Dutch neutrality” his cartoons led the Germans to offer a 12,000-guilder reward for his capture, dead or alive. A German newspaper, summarizing the terms of peace Germany would exact after it won the war, declared that indemnity would be demanded for every one of Raemaeker’s cartoons.
On January 8, 1942 Philip Zec’s cartoon in London’s’ The Daily Mirror showed an exhausted, torpedoed British sailor adrift in the Atlantic. The caption: “The price of petrol has been increased by one penny. Official.” Britain’s Home Secretary described the cartoon as “Worthy of Goebbels at his best. Plainly meant to tell seamen not to go to war to put money in the pockets of the petrol owners.”
Winston Churchill believed the cartoon suggested that lives were being put at risk to increase profits, and would undermine morale, and ordered an investigation to discover who owned The Mirror. It led to “one of the stormiest debates in the wartime parliament.” All that Zec had meant to say was that gasoline shortages would put lives at risk.
As Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, reported to David Low’s publisher, “You cannot imagine the frenzy that these cartoons cause. As soon as a copy of The Evening Standard arrives it is poured over for Low’s cartoon and if it is of Hitler, as it usually is, telephones buzz, temperatures rise, fever mounts, the whole governmental system of Germany is in an uproar. It has hardly subsided before the next one arrives. England can’t understand the violence of the reaction.”
Actually, Low had a theory to explain Hitler’s fits. “No dictator is inconvenienced or even displeased by cartoons showing his terrible person stalking through blood and mud. that is the kind of idea about himself that the power-seeking world-beater would want to propagate. It not only feeds his vanity but unfortunately it shows profitable returns in an awed world. What he does not want to get around is the idea that he is an ass, which is really damaging.”
Every week, Der Sturmer, the notorious anti-semitic Nazi weekly (whose masthead slogan read: “The Jew is our misfortune”), ran vicious, ugly caricatures of Jews on its cover. A Der SturmerJew was easily recognized: ugly, unshaven, short, fat, drooling, hook-nosed. After the war the Nuemberg Tribunal indicted twenty four defendants, who represented a cross-section of Nazi leadership, on charges of crime against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity (including an overarching conspiracy count.) Der Sturmer’s Jules Streicher was the only editor among them. Primarily as a result of running weekly cartoons like this one, Streicher was found guilty, hanged and cremated at Dachau.
In more than thirty years at the helm of The Nation, only once did the staff march on my office with a petition (signed by twenty five people in an office that I had thought employed only twenty three), demanding in advance that we not publish something — and that something was a caricature of Henry Kissinger, in David Levine’s words, “screwing the world.” The staff’s objection: “…a progressive magazine has no business using rape jokes and sexist imagery (he screws, she is screwed) to make the point that Kissinger revels in international dominance. Kissinger is a man, but the globe is not a woman.”
When the Danish newspaper, JYLLANDS POSTEN, commissioned a dozen cartoonists to provide depictions of Muhammad, hundreds of thousands of Muslims took to the streets in protest, embassies were shut down, danish goods were boycotted, the cartoonists were forced to go into hiding with million-dollar price-tags put on their heads. Worldwide, more than a hundred people were killed, another five hundred injured. The most powerful depiction of Muhammad, however, was by Le Monde’s cartoonist, Plantu. commenting on the episode, he showed artist’s hand gripping a pencil, and writing again and again, “I must not draw Muhammad,” as the words spiraled into a portrait of…who else?
When a book came out saying that Abe Lincoln might be gay, a line and an image popped into the head of Bob Grossman. His “Babe Lincoln”, which appeared in THE NATION, is the result. The letters of protest are still coming in. Gay activists and others object to what they see as Grossman’s assumption that “a man who loves a man really wants to be a woman.” In one of the politer notes, a former editor of ESQUIRE accused us of publishing “homophobic garbage”. Grossman, who humbly observed that “In the impoverished mental landscape of a cartoonist, this is what p[asses for true inspiration” apologized to all he had offended.
In Barak Obama’s first presidential campaign, The New Yorker featured a cover cartoon by Barry Blitt showing Barak and Michelle Obama dressed in terrorist garb (rifles on camouflage-covered shoulder and all) doing a fist-bump. Not only did thousands of agitated readers protest, cancel subscriptions and otherwise complain, but the then-candidate-for-President took time out from an otherwise busy schedule to denounce the cartoon as offensive. In fact, as New Yorker editor David Remnick pointed out. “It’s not a satire about Obama, it’s a satire about the distortions and prejudices about him.”
Then there was Spiegelman’s New Yorker March 8, 1999 cover cartoon which mocked the the New York cops who had fired 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo, an unarmed (and as it turned out, innocent) Guinean immigrant. The Mayor denounced it. The Governor denounced it. Two hundred and fifty police officers picketed the offices of The New Yorker, and a New York Post editorial advised the cartoonist, ” If you’re burglarized or your family is menaced by thugs, you should be consistent. Call Al Sharpton instead of 911. See what that gets you, Spiegelman, you creep!”
It was this cartoon which appeared in South Africa’s THE SUNDAY TIMES, that caused South African President Jacob Zuma. at the time contending with charges of rape and corruption, to sue the TIMES media group for defamation by cartoon, alleging damages of five million rand ($600,000) . Oh yes, Zapiro started putting that shower head on Zumas’s noggin after he mentioned in passing that the woman he had allegedly raped (his defense: it was consensual sex), was HIV positive, so he took a shower by way of protecting himself from contracting the disease.
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