There they are, in a cart, careening down a cash covered road while
Democrats: Ickes (Herald Sr.), Henry Wallace, and Donald Richberg shovel more sacks of money out of the donkey-powered cart.
Rex Tugwell, head Brain Truster flails away at the Democratic donkey symbol.
A Trotsky-esque figure completes a Plan Of Action For U.S. Poster. SPEND!SPEND! SPEND!
WHY DID THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE JUST PUBLISH THIS 1934 CARTOON AGAIN?
OK, I get it. The Democrats are screwing up "the soundest government in the world" while the "pinkies" from Harvard wield the power bottle. We used to call them "commie-pinkos" when Sen.Joe McCarthy was around. He hit the power and the bottle. It destroyed him.
This cartoon has been e-mailed to me several times by my concerned conservative friends. There is a tag line at the end of the e-mail, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905.
That got my interest so I looked up "the past".
WHO PUBLISHED THE CARTOON?
Colonel Robert "Bertie" McCormick owned The Tribune for most of the first half of the 20th century. He was, like Warren G. Harding, a good newspaperman, but his personal viewpoints often were at odds with the rest of the world. Harry Vaughn, actually General Vaughan, President Truman's Military Aide in the White House said this about Bertie:
VAUGHAN: Bertie was, yes. He was a little to the right of Louis XVI. You know it was his paper (The Chicago Tribune) that had that headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." I got a copy of it on the wall there.
Perhaps we should include the famous photo of Truman holding up the Tribune with that headline beside the Santayane quote.
McCormick disliked Truman but he hated FDR. Franklin Roosevelt was a prep school classmate and nemesis of Bertie. FDR's New Deal politics and global ambitions represented nearly everything McCormick abhorred.
There are those who said that Bertie bought his military commission in the Illinois National Guard. McCormick’s military title was fully earned, according to a fascinating book, The Colonel: The Life & Legend of Robert B. McCormick, 1880-1955, by Richard Norton Smith. The book also states that he fought bravely and successfully on the Western Front with the First Division. Indeed, he renamed his family home for a desperate battle in which he and his troops withstood a massive German attack (at Cantigny, France). When he died, he was buried in his faded khaki uniform. Cantigny is also a must-see museum with super-detailed life-sized dioramas that you can walk through. The reconstruction of the World War I Cantigny site is particularly impressive
After his military service, Bertie became an "Isolationist". (From the book) He resolutely opposed American action, except in defense of the homeland. He was an imperious, at times capricious, employer, capable of extraordinary rudeness and generosity. He was, at once, comically self-important and self-deprecating. Never happier than when riding to hounds, he championed, indeed romanticized, the American yeoman, and bemoaned the snobbery and decadence of the rich. A stalwart advocate of what we would today call family values, he had the lifelong habit of pursuing married women. So much for the publisher of the cartoon.
WHO DREW THE CARTOON?
"The one-eyed Cartoonist, Carey Orr, does not hate Franklin Roosevelt either, simply considers him "despicable like a snake." He likes to picture the President as a Red, a would-be Hitler, a gorilla-like monster of Fear, Doubt and Ruin. Other cartoonists consider Carey Orr an exponent of "brute force, which gets reaction not converts." Nevertheless Publisher McCormick continues to play his product day after day on the front page." Oct. 26, 1936 Time Magazine
Orr was a semi-professional baseball player while a teenager, and he worked as a player long enough to save enough money to put himself through art school in Chicago. After working in Nashville, Tenn., Orr came back to the Chicago Tribune where he stayed for 50 years. He taught night classes at the Chicago Institute of Art where one of his students was Walt Disney. Disney never made it as a cartoonist but he did scribble "apologies to Orr" on a panel of rough sketches.
Carey Orr (1890-1967) was always a conservative editorial cartoonist blasting FDR and Communism. 26 years after the "flying money cart" cartoon and toward the end of his career, he received a Pulitzer Prize for an editorial cartoon, "The Kindly Tiger" (published in 1960). In that cartoon about the "Congo crisis", a tiger whose stripes spell Communism licks his chops as he watches an approaching black African on "a long trek to freedom". Attached to his tale is a tag, "Krushy's Kat". "May I Give You A Ride?" he asks.
COULD ANYONE COME UP WITH
A MORE FITTING DESCRIPTION
OF WHAT IS GOING ON NOW?
(this was the question attached to the top of the e-mailed 1934 cartoon)
Of course. First, tell me exactly what is going on now, or better, where it will end? If you can, we will be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. I don't trust the Democratic or Republican spinmeisters. Copy these loaded words from the 1934 cartoon like "broken (busted) government","capitalist failure", "junk the constitution" and "dictatorship". And don't forget "the resources of the soundest government in the world" Give the words to Pat Oliphant, Mike Luckovich, Glenn McCoy, Mike Ramirez, or Mike Peters to name a few of our best Editorial Cartoonists. Tell them to take the events of 2008/2009 and combine with these words to make a new political cartoon. Watch out, right, left and center.
Read my earlier blog on editorial cartoons:
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