Drawing Russia

Any doubts about the impact of political cartoons would appear to have been settled by the global furor over the 12 caricatures of Mohammed that originally appeared in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. Yet the violent and sometimes lethal demonstrations organized by Muslim groups on several continents mainly confirmed something that cartoonists themselves have not always been eager to acknowledge – that editorial cartoons have always been far more effective in propagating ethnic, racial, and social stereotypes than in influencing anyone’s political views. 

Nowhere has this been truer than in the United States. While American cartoons have historically concentrated most of their caricaturing on the Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Native Americans, they haven’t spared any cultural group, including the Russians. The intention has never been flattery.

Practically since Thomas Nast took on William “Boss” Tweed in New York City during the late 1860s and 1870s, American editorial cartoonists have been hailed as the Republic’s ultimate gadflys – those who, in one well-traveled phrase, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” 

As evidence of the artists’ influence, some have been quick to point to the attempts by five different states (New York, Pennsylvania, California, Indiana, Alabama) around the turn of the 20th century to pass legislation banning cartoon criticism of public officials. The most futile – and farcical – of these ploys was Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Pennypacker’s move in 1903 to stamp out what he called “worthless” newspapers that practiced “the kind of slander which is closely akin to treason.” 

In retaliation for attacks on him by cartoonists Walt McDougall and Charles Nelan of the Philadelphia North American, Pennypacker’s Republicans introduced a bill that made it a crime to publish any cartoon “portraying, describing, or representing any person... in the form or likeness of a beast, bird, fish, insect, or other unhuman animal.” McDougall’s reply was to portray Pennypacker as a stein of beer, adding the warning that the legislation should have “included more than the animal kingdom alone, for we have an ample field in the vegetable, if not even the mineral field... What chances of caricature lie in the tomato, the string bean, the cucumber, the onion, and the leek cannot be guessed.”

In the face of such ridicule, Pennypacker’s heavy-handedness did not get very far. Nor for that matter did the legislative maneuvers in New York, California, Indiana, and Alabama before similar reactions of disdain. 

Had cartoonists shown themselves to be more powerful than political machines? Not quite. Equally noteworthy in each of the aborted crackdowns was that they were spearheaded by politicians who, like the ludicrous Pennypacker, had just been either elected or reelected despite the animosity of the cartoonists. This might have made the state legislators institutionally repressive and might have made them personally vindictive, but it didn’t make them losers in the voting booth.

There are other reasons to doubt the extent of cartooning’s political clout. While it is generally overlooked today, for example, it was not so much Nast as it was a New York Times expose of systematic embezzlement and chicanery that brought down Tweed and his Manhattan machine. For all the provocative images provided by the Herb Blocks, Walt Kellys, and Jules Feiffers, there is scant evidence that they, any more than their predecessors back to Nast or successors up to a Ted Rall, have, in political ideological terms, done more than serve up graphic critiques – as stimulating and even indelible as they might have been – to predisposed sympathizers. Readers who bought the Village Voice solely for Feiffer (and there were many of them) during his long years with that New York weekly were not likely to have been members of the Nixon Fan Club to start with. 

On the other hand, a case could be made that the single strongest impression made by American political cartoons came over the final decades of the 19th century, with their consolidation of familiar ethnic and racial stereotypes in the national mind, spearheaded by the Protestant Republican establishment running the most prominent periodicals. These elites looked at immigrants from Europe and Asia not primarily as economic threats to native blue-collar workers (that was a problem for the workers, and, besides, what was wrong with employers seeking cheaper manpower?), but, with their Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish backgrounds, as a potential voter pool for the Democratic Party and its non-Presbyterian and non-Methodist ways. Thus, in addition to denigrating blacks as wide-eyed watermelon eaters and Native Americans as ideal genocide fodder, the Jew was portrayed as a money grubber, the Irishman as a drunk, the Russian as an uncouth kulak, and the Italian as an organ grinder. Such was the routine breakfast table and living room reading fare at the end of the 19th century in America. 

This isn’t to say cartoonists originated the stereotypes. But, before the grotesqueries were found in the daily print media, one had to walk into a tobacco shop or print store specifically to buy a postcard or poster of such caricatures. Moreover, by being included in such prestigious publications as Nast’s Harper’s Weekly, the stereotypes gained a respectability they did not have as free-standing pieces and a regularity they lacked as parts of minstrel shows and other burlesque entertainments. The print media made them socially acceptable.

Where Russians in particular were concerned, being uncouth was often the least of it. If one Russian had assassinated Czar Alexander II in 1881, they all had, making Russia a nation of bomb-throwing anarchists. It was only a small step within these dim halls of imagination to associate Russian immigrants with arrivals from Italy who, it went without saying, were all members of the Black Hand. A typical example of warning against accepting such “undesirables” was Frank Beard’s 1895 piece, “Columbia’s Unwelcome Guests,” in which the divinity symbolizing America is confronted with unwashed hordes described as anarchists, socialists, and gangsters “from the sewers” of Russia and Italy. 

Even cruder were the depictions of the Jewish immigrant wave from Russia toward the end of the 19th century. Although for some years there had been a great deal of ugly caricaturing of Central European Jews in such periodicals as Harper’s Weekly, Puck, and Judge, the “money grubbers” had also usually been portrayed as doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. The later immigrants from Russia, however, weren’t just Jews, they were poor Jews – two strikes in the eyes of those controlling the print media. With rag dealers and fish peddlers centerstage, hooked noses and open palms were presumed to be commentaries in themselves. Cartoonist Grant Hamilton put these stereotypes to full use in 1892, in “Their New Jerusalem.” In Hamilton’s depiction, so many Russian Jews were arriving in America that the nation’s “first families” were having to flee to the West.

But there was also one important difference between Russia and most of the other countries from which immigrants were reaching New York – Russia was a significant world power then involved in more than one geopolitical chess game with the United States. At one level, this prompted cartoon chauvinism against Russia as a whole, rather than simply against those leaving the country for the U.S. On another level, it inspired cartoonists to use any debatable Washington agreements with Russia as a stick against the White House. And there is no better example of this than the 1867 purchase of Alaska.

What amused headline-readers of the period as the acquisition of  “Walrussia,” and what would later jump out of history books of generations of school children as “Seward’s Folly,” gained those descriptions for political reasons that had less to do with Alaska than with the contempt most dailies and weeklies had for Democratic President Andrew Johnson and his Secretary of State William Seward. A seven-million-dollar real estate steal meant nothing. As far as Harper’s Weekly and the rest of the pro-Republican press was concerned, the only important things to know about Johnson were that he had betrayed Reconstruction principles and that he harbored monarchical ambitions (this earning him the sobriquet of “King Andy”). In this light, the purchase of Alaska from Russia was viewed merely as an attempt to divert popular resentment against the White House. 

The epitome of this kind of commentary was Nast’s April 20, 1867, “The Big Thing,” in which Seward, dressed as a mother caring for her child, is shown trying to relieve the national pain by applying Redding’s Russian Salve (actually a popular ointment of the period) to the head of King Andy (below). Nast, who was always the busiest of cartoonists, crowding as many elements as possible into his sketches, surrounds the pair with wall posters alluding to the Copperhead exploitation of the South after the Civil War – a pillaging attributed to Johnson’s lack of vigilance and law enforcement. With specific reference to Alaska, there are depictions of Uncle Sam trudging in snowshoes across an icy tundra, of polar bears and walruses, and of an Eskimo family sarcastically described as “One of the Advantages” of the deal with Russia.

Another, unsigned cartoon from the period in the same vein, entitled “Preparing for the Heated Term,” shows Johnson and Seward (contemptuously identified as “Billy”) towing a Russian iceberg toward Congress, in order to cool down antagonistic legislative tempers for the imminent debate over the Alaska deal. (Despite universal predictions by the Republican press that the accord would never be ratified by Congress, popular pressures on Capitol Hill ensured that it was.)

If distrust of the Alaska purchase had mostly to do with who had pulled it off, there was far more direct suspicion of Russia in other arenas. This was markedly so in relation to the tsarist regime’s steady territorial expansion through the middle of the 19th century, until it had reached the borders of China and Afghanistan. Given its own trade ambitions in Asia, the U.S. viewed the Russians as unwanted competitors for regional markets and in turn stepped up the pace of its commercial accords across the Pacific to pave its own path to the East. One of the best cartoons portraying this rivalry was Frank Bellew’s 1876 piece “The Two Young Giants, Ivan and Jonathan, Reaching for Asia by Opposite Routes.” (Jonathan was a symbol for the U.S. that, for the most part, preceded Uncle Sam but that was also often incorporated into the more contemporary figure.) The two are shown trying to hang on to the globe as they seek an imperialist footing in Asia (see page 44). 

The race for Asia remained very much a cartoon theme for the rest of the century. It was also in this period that American cartoonists increasingly adopted the practice of their British counterparts of employing a bear rather than an unkempt peasant as a symbol for Russia. (This was abetted to some degree by the usually sarcastic references to polar bears in the wake of the Alaska agreement.) Still, the peasant was back when the editorial page artists crowed about the success of Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door diplomatic initiatives where trade with China was concerned. One representative 1900 cartoon showed Uncle Sam standing astride the gate of the Forbidden City while Russia and England looked on helplessly.

In retrospect, Uncle Sam’s triumphalism in Beijing turned out to be a benign prelude to the cartoon treatment of Russia and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. But, whether the bearded and capped peasants were anarchists or Bolsheviks, whether it was a polar bear or a grizzly, whether it was a hand bomb or a nuclear warhead, American cartoonists never ran out of inspiration from Moscow. They could not have. The issues might have been dramatically different, but the caricatures viewed as animating them were melodramatically the same.  RL

Immigration is hardly a new debate on the American political landscape. In 1895, Frank Beard depicted every Russian as a potential nihilist or terrorist and every Italian as a member of the Black Hand, with the immigrants emerging onto American shores from Europe’s sewers. 

Ugly stereotypes of Jews were common grist for the cartoonist’s pen at the turn of the 20th century (above). In “Their New Jerusalem” (1892), Grant Hamilton avers that so many Jews were arriving from Russia that the “first families” of America were being forced to flee west.

President Andrew Johnson and his Secretary of State William Seward were repeatedly lampooned (right) for their treaty to purchase Alaska, which was not originally expected to pass through the Senate.