Hoosier Cartoonist Censored by Big Tech

Ken Avidor is multitalented artist based in Indianapolis. His wife, Roberta Avidor, is also an artist. Working in oils and watercolor, she is a fine artist in more ways than one: her very fine depictions of urban scenes in the Circle City are well worth a look. Together the Avidors have a website called Avidor Studios. You can reach it by clicking here. You can read a little more about Mr. Avidor and his projects on the website FilmFreeway, here, and on his own blog, Bicyclopolis, here.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ken Avidor is a cartoonist, illustrator, street or urban artist, video artist, sculptor, and courtroom sketch artist. He recently created the first episode of an illustrated video series called Unjabbed and posted his video to the online platform Vimeo. On October 15, 2021, Mr. Avidor received word from Vimeo that it was removing Unjabbed because of its content. Vimeo explained:

"We do not allow health-related content that might cause people to take dangerous or unproven treatments or refrain from taking indicated precautions or treatments that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or World Health Organization (WHO). We also do not allow claims that an epidemic or pandemic (such as COVID-19) are conspiracies."

Mr. Avidor's video tells a story of a dystopian/post-apocalyptic future in which an unnamed disease and the human response to that disease have brought down a society and a civilization. In other words, Unjabbed is science fiction, more generally, fiction and a work of art. Evidently the platform Vimeo and all of its fellow travelers are unaware of the concepts of art and fiction. In any case, you can still see Unjabbed on another platform, called Rumble, by clicking here. I urge everyone to see it, to support Ken and Roberta Avidor in any way possible, and especially to stand up to censorship in all of its forms.

For the original story, see "Vimeo Removes Artist’s Fictional Vaccine Cartoon, Labeling It 'Dangerous' Health-Related Content" by Gabe Kaminsky on the website The Federalist, dated November 2, 2021, here.

Original text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Cartoon News 2019-Part Two

Mitch Daniels on Political Cartooning (and Political Cartoonist Gary Varvel)

In July of this year, Mitch Daniels, current president of Purdue University and former governor of Indiana, wrote about political cartooning in the United States, more specifically on the decline of a once great form of graphic art:

The digital age, for all its beneficial wonders, has left some regrettable casualties in its wake. No loss has been more troublesome for many of us than the decline of print journalism as our principal medium of information. . . .

With that development, we’re losing something I have always appreciated almost as much. The political cartoonist, an influential voice in public debates for centuries, is among our most endangered species. According to "Drawn & Quartered," a history of American political cartoons by Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, 2,000 editorial cartoonists were employed a century ago; estimates of the number of staff cartoonists working today range from about two dozen to maybe 40. [Boldface added.]

The Indianapolis Star lost its own political cartoonist earlier this year when Gary Varvel retired after nearly a quarter of a century at his post. President Daniels called Mr. Varvel the cartoonist he will miss the most.

You can read Mitch Daniels' piece, "Political Cartooning Is Becoming a Lost Art," originally published on July 31, 2019, on the website of the Washington Post, but if you don't have access to that site, you can probably find it just about anywhere, for it was widely reprinted in the nation's surviving newspapers.

(Maybe we should note that the onetime dean of American political cartoonists, John T. McCutcheon [1870-1949] of the Chicago Tribune, graduated from Purdue University in 1889. This year, then, is a nice, even anniversary year of the founding of Purdue University [1869], McCutcheon's graduation from that institution, and his death.)

Cartoon Controversy at Indiana University

A cartoon controversy erupted at Indiana University in November when the Center for the Study of the Middle East (CSME) sent out a newsletter and flier in which it reprinted a cartoon by the notoriously antisemitic Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff (b. 1968). There were of course objections to the use of the cartoon, which was distributed on Monday, November 4, 2019. The next day, the director of CSME, Feisal al-Istrabadi, sent out an email message apologizing for the use of the cartoon.

On November 8, the Indiana Daily Student published a letter to the editor entitled "How the Israel lobby at IU suppresses speech for Palestinian rights," accessible by clicking here. A letter in response, entitled "Response to Palestine Solidarity Committee," appeared on November 13. Click here to read that one. In between those two dates, on November 10, the Indiana Daily Student published an article called "Center for the Study of the Middle East apologizes after circulating flier with alleged anti-Semitic image," explaining the affair. That article is by Grace Ybarra, and you can read it by clicking here.

One of the problems with this and similar cartoon controversies might actually be described as a meta-problem: we can't see the offending cartoon for ourselves, even in this Internet Age in which just about anything can fly around the world at light speed. I despise the leftism and antisemitism that animate people like Carlos Latuff, but that doesn't mean we should not be able to see his cartoons. In fact, the whole purpose of freedom of speech and of the press is so that people with whom we might disagree may still express themselves freely. I guess my question is this: are our feelings and sensibilities really so tender and sensitive that we may not look upon the things that might offend us? And when a cartoon becomes news itself, are we not permitted to see it or consider it?

Incidentally, Mr. Latuff has contributed to Mad magazine--the Brazilian version--about which I wrote a few days ago.

Paul Gray Still Cartooning at 89

Turning to a happier topic, I would like to write about Paul Gray of Carlisle, Indiana, who is still cartooning at age eighty-nine. His art career began at age three when his older brother taught him to draw. Mr. Gray continued drawing while serving in the U.S. military in Germany during the 1950s. A high point of his career was his fourteen years of contributing gag cartoons to The Saturday Evening Post, from the 1960s to the 1970s. He also contributed to Pentecostal Evangel, the weekly magazine of the Assemblies of God.

Paul Gray became a pastor in 1961 and spent more than half a century in that position, finally to retire in 2015. Since 2002, he has drawn a weekly religious cartoon, Shades of Gray, for the Sullivan Daily Times in Sullivan, Indiana. You can read more about Paul Gray in the following articles:

• "89-year-old Carlisle cartoonist, minister still hard at work," dated October 31, 2019, on the website of WIBQ radio, here. 

• "Drawing Inspiration" by Eric Tiansay, dated December 6, 2019, on the website of Assemblies of God, here.

• "'Shades of Gray' brings a hint of sunshine to local papers," date unknown, on the website of the Sullivan, Indiana, Daily Times, here. You will need special access to read it.

I will have two more pieces of news, sad news and yet in some ways a celebration, to end the year.

Original text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The International Day of the Cartoonist 2018

On December 5, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. There is talk of discrimination, public accommodations, and so on in the case. Make no mistake, though. What is at stake here is whether the State can require an artist to create something he wishes not to create. Larger still are the questions of whether the individual serves himself or the State, whether he can be made to perform labor against his will by the State, and whether there are such things as private enterprise and private property, or whether those things are merely extensions of the State and exist to serve the purposes of the State. I'll have more to say on these questions below.

Masterpiece Cakeshop of Lakewood, Colorado, is owned and run by Jack Phillips. Mr. Phillips may or may not be a cartoonist, but he is an artist. Anyone who doubts that should see his work and the way in which he creates it. Although he may not be a cartoonist, I write about Jack Phillips today, the International Day of the Cartoonist, because of the issues involved in the case against him and in his case against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. I started observing this day in 2015 when five cartoonists were murdered in Paris in the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. They were murdered because they dared to draw what they pleased. I have since written about cartoonists who have been oppressed, threatened, harassed, tortured, imprisoned, or killed, again, for their art. Usually, when artists are treated this way, it is at the hands of the State, or, in the case of radical Islam, a political mass movement with aspirations towards control of the State. Jack Phillips won't be tortured or killed for his art, but he has already been harassed and may face other punishments for choosing not to create something he wishes not to create. My question is this: If he and artists like him do not comply with the requirements of the State, what shall be done with them? Shall they be fined, even to the point of bankruptcy or impoverishment? Shall they be endlessly harassed? Driven out of business? Imprisoned? Shall they have their substance eaten out? Or should we simply allow them their freedom?

* * *

In thinking about cartoonists and the Masterpiece Cakeshop case last month, I developed a hypothesis. My hypothesis is this: that the nation's political cartoonists, specifically those who lean to the left, will perceive the implications of this case for the artist, namely, that if one artist can be made by the State to create something against his will, then no artist is safe from official coercion; and, if those political cartoonists understand the implications, they are likely to remain silent on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. My hypothesis does not include conservative political cartoonists, as artists of that political or philosophical persuasion are almost certain to support the rights of the individual over the power and authority of the State.

So how do you test a hypothesis like this one? Well, I did what everyone does these days: I searched the Internet. Before doing that, though, I drew up a short list of political or editorial cartoonists who I believe lean to the left. In alphabetical order, they are:

• David Horsey (b. 1951) of the Los Angeles Times, formerly of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• Mike Luckovich (b. 1960) of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

• Joel Pett (b. 1953) of the Lexington Herald-Leader

• Ted Rall (b. 1963), a syndicated cartoonist

• Tom Toles (b. 1951) of the Washington Post

David Horsey and Joel Pett, by the way, were born in Indiana. Whether they like it or not, I'll call them Hoosiers.

As it turns out, I found very few drawings from political cartoonists on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. The cartoons I did find are pretty mild, I think, and don't address what I believe to be the real heart of the case, nor do they come out with any strong support for the two men who made the original complaint against Masterpiece Cakeshop or for the general idea behind their complaint. None was drawn by the cartoonists on my list.

Mike Keefe (b. 1946), a syndicated cartoonist with the Colorado Independent, formerly of the Denver Post, drew a cartoon dated December 7, 2017, showing Moses holding the Ten Commandments and stating: "And if you violate any one of these, no wedding cake for you!" (You can see the cartoon at the website of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists [AAEC], here.) That apparent allusion to Seinfeld may be a deflection from the far more serious topic at hand, in other words a way of noticing the topic without saying anything serious about it.

Chip Bok (b. 1952) of the Akron Beacon Journal, another cartoonist who was not on my list, also drew a cartoon commenting on the controversy. It shows a black man sitting at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and saying to the waitress: "Now that I'm sitting at your lunch counter, I'll have a slice of gay wedding cake." (The cartoon is dated December 9, 2017. You can see it on Mr. Bok's website by clicking here.) I don't think Mr. Bok's cartoon is especially well thought out. In fact, it seems to me practically a non-sequitur. But if Chip Bok's purpose is to equate homosexuality with being black in America, he ought to have studied our country's 400-year history of enslavement, rape, murder, torture, lynching, oppression, segregation, discrimination, and other offenses against African-Americans before making such a foolish calculation.

The most pointed cartoon that I found on the topic is actually from 2015 and was drawn by David Horsey. In it, an angry cake baker is handing out slices of wedding cake to a crowd of well-dressed people. The triple-tier cake (a devil's food cake, I'm sure) is decorated with the words: "Have a Happy Abomination." The cake topper is two little devils holding hands. The cake baker is saying in anger: "Which one of you sodomites wants the first piece?!" On the left is a caption that reads, "Caveat: You may not want a wedding cake made by someone who thinks that your marriage is evil . . ." Mr. Horsey's cartoon (to be found on the website of the Los Angeles Times, here) accompanies his own opinion piece on the religious liberty law advanced in Indiana in 2015. Mr. Horsey's piece may be slightly snooty, but he closes it with this reasonable consideration:

Gay activists are winning battle after battle, and may want to show some magnanimity in victory. If, in the end, it really comes down to a matter of a few wedding photographers, florists and bakers who disapprove of same-sex marriage, what is gained by forcing them to provide their services? If somebody doesn’t want to share the joyful occasion, does anyone really want to have them around? No wedding needs to be spoiled by a party pooper who thinks committed, lifelong love is a sin. 

I would like to think that David Horsey's opinion has not changed in the last two years. On the other hand, he might very well be flayed by the leftist media for writing something like that today. We should be clear, here, that Jack Phillips is almost certainly not like Mr. Horsey's cartoon caricature, nor is any true Christian likely to be. But then men of David Horsey's political stripe are permitted to trade in broad and inaccurate stereotypes where others are not.

In any case, you can't prove a negative. The fact that I found only two cartoons on the topic of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and none drawn by the five cartoonists on my list does not really confirm my hypothesis. (Maybe I should have designed my experiment better.) In other words, an absence of evidence doesn't make a firm foundation for a case. But if left-leaning political cartoonists remained silent on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, might that indicate something about where they stand? Maybe. Maybe not. There has certainly been enough else to keep them busy for these many months. Maybe I can test my hypothesis again when the Supreme Court announces its decision later this year.

* * *

A year ago today, I wrote about the cartoonist Joe Szabo, who was born and educated in Communist-controlled Hungary before fleeing to the United States. (Click here to read that entry.) Here he is discussing journalism in his native country with his friend Len Lear:

Journalists in a Communist country are considered a part of the political apparatus. You're not a watchdog, just the opposite. You are a lapdog. You are not there to print the news or to be objective. You are there to make the authorities in government look good and not to deviate from the party line. You are basically a public relations person for the rulers and oppressors.

Substitute the word artists for journalists, and you begin to close in on the questions central to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, namely: Is an artist his own person, an individual free to express himself or not as he chooses, or is he simply a part of the apparatus of the State, merely one of a collective compelled to serve its purposes? Is an artist a free and autonomous person or, in Joe Szabo's words, is he "basically a public relations person for . . . rulers and oppressors"? Does an artist own his own property? Does an artist have any right or claim to his own time, labor, energy, and creativity? Or do all of these things simply exist within the domain of the State, to be held, distributed, and controlled by the State as it sees fit? Is the artist his or her own master, or are artists simply servants of political power? And if an artist is such a servant, then what about everyone else? Are we not servants also?

I'll close with two quotes on totalitarianism. One is from an artist, T.H. White in his novel The Once and Future King (1958):

"Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory."

The other is from one of the architects of totalitarianism, Benito Mussolini:

"Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Shall it be forbidden the artist to create or not to create as he or she pleases? Shall artistic expression for the State's purposes be made compulsory? Shall anything be permitted to reside outside the State? Or shall we as artists--and as people--be free?

Original text copyright 2017, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The International Day of the Cartoonist 2017

I would like to observe the International Day of the Cartoonist 2017 by remembering the international cartoonist Joe Szabo, who died last year at the age of sixty-five. I'm happy to say that Joe was also a Hoosier, if only for a while.

Joseph George Szabo was born on February 4, 1950, in Budapest, Hungary, just six months after his country fell under communist rule. According to items on the Internet, Joe graduated from the Academy of Journalism in 1974. I believe that to mean what was then or is now called Bálint György Academy of Journalism in Budapest. On July 19, 1975, Joe Szabo married Flora Toth, also of Budapest.

In a remembrance of his friend, Len Lear wrote that Joe "wanted to be a real journalist because he had a passion for justice, but that was impossible in Communist Hungary, where any deviation from the party line could mean unemployment, exile, prison, torture or even death." (1) Although he worked in the late 1970s as assisting managing editor for Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation), the largest daily newspaper in Hungary, Joe was dissatisfied with his comfortable position and his relatively prosperous life in his native country. "Journalists in a Communist country are considered a part of the political apparatus," Joe told Mr. Lear. "You're not a watchdog, just the opposite. You are a lapdog. You are not there to print the news or to be objective. You are there to make the authorities in government look good and not to deviate from the party line. You are basically a public relations person for the rulers and oppressors." In 1980, Joe and his wife fled from Hungary to the United States by way of Austria and West Germany (where he sought political asylum at the U.S. embassy). In December 1981, Joe arrived in a small town in Indiana, possibly Warsaw, Indiana.

Not knowing English, Joe struggled and was unemployed for a couple of years. He found work as a freelance cartoonist for a time. With a drawing printed on May 13, 1985, his political cartoons began appearing in the Philadelphia Daily News. They were also syndicated by Rothco and were chosen by Charles Brooks for his annual collection Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year in 1986, 1987, 1988, and possibly other years. (My collection is incomplete.) In 1987, under the byline Joseph George Szabo, Joe began publishing WittyWorld International Cartoon Magazine. The first issue was dated Summer 1987.

I have just three issues of WittyWorld (Nos. 2-4). As a cartoonist, I can say that is everything a cartoonist might want in a magazine. It is well designed and well made, and though there are only forty-eight pages in each issue, those pages are packed full of information. The regular departments are especially fine. They include a letters page; "Witty Wire," a compilation of cartoon news from all over the world; reviews of comic books and animation books by Frederick Patten, of cartoon books by Hongying Liu-Lengyel, and of journals by John A. Lent; "Cartoon Laboratory" on innovations in cartooning; a column on syndicates; a calendar of events; and classified advertisements. There are of course many articles and pictorial features as well. WittyWorld ran for several years. The last number I have found is Number 18, from Autumn/Winter 1994.

Joe Szabo published WittyWorld from North Wales, Pennsylvania, a borough north of Philadelphia. He seems to have moved to Pennsylvania from Indiana and to have lived there for the rest of his life. Even though he had escaped to the United States, he still had reason to fear political oppression and political violence. "Remember," he said, "Joseph Stalin had Leon Trotsky murdered in 1940, although Trotsky was many thousands of miles away in Mexico. In the U.S. and western Europe, where there is freedom of movement, dictators like Vladimir Putin have had journalistic critics murdered. They could do it here, too. You are never really safe." (Boldface added.) The targets of the cartoons he drew and those he published by other cartoonists were not just communist rulers or rulers in formerly communist countries. They were and are oppressors and tyrants of every color and stripe.

In 1990, Joe convened a meeting of cartoonists in Budapest as the Iron Curtain was coming down. He traveled to other parts of the world, too, to meet with cartoonists, to speak at and attend exhibits and conferences, and to lecture on cartoons and cartooning. He spent the last decade of his life conducting research and interviews for a planned book, The Image of America, showing how people the world over see his adopted home country. With visits to nearly seventy countries, he had enough material for a lecture series, one that he conducted in the United States and abroad. (He found that people in other countries have ambivalent views, though tending to the negative, of the United States. Some of those views are delusional at best. For example, some Spaniards--like one of our recent presidential candidates--are 9/11 truthers.) Joe Szabo was also author and compiler of The Finest International Political Cartoons of Our Time, published in 1992 by his own WittyWorld imprint.

"I'd rather be poor in America than rich in Hungary," Joe Szabo once said. (2) Although he was not materially wealthy--he and his wife reared their five children in a small apartment stocked with used furniture and books--Joe Szabo enjoyed the benefits of freedom with his family in a new country. Sadly, he died at his desk on February 2, 2016, in North Wales, Pennsylvania, just two days short of his sixty-sixth birthday. His obituary observed, "He was a passionate risk taker, boundless world traveler, and world-class debater. He never once lost an argument. Joe's friends described him as having an infectious personality with a continuous thirst for knowledge." (3) I think it fair to say that he also had a thirst for freedom and a very keen interest--as cartoonists tend to have--in fellow cartoonists and in the craft and profession of cartooning, which is, if I might add, a fine and noble one.

In memory of Joseph George Szabo (1950-2016) and of:

George David Wolinski (1934-2015)
Jean Cabut (1938-2015)
Philippe Honoré (1941-2015)
Bernard Verlhac (1957-2015)
and Stéphane Charbonnier (1967-2015)

Notes
(1) From "Joe Szabo, Local Voice for Courage and Justice, Has Been Silenced" by Len Lear on the website Chestnut Hill Local, January 6, 2017, here.
(2) Ditto.
(3) "Joseph George Szabo," from the Landsdale Reporter, Lansdale, Pennsylvania, posted on the website Legacy.com, February 9, 2016, here.

A cartoon by Joe Szabo from 1987 showing the magnetic pull the United States has for people who wish to express themselves freely and, by extension, to live freely. From Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, 1987 Edition, edited by Charles Brooks.

Completed at a later date and backdated to January 7, 2016, in observance of the International Day of the Cartoonist.
Text copyright 2017, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Cartoonists and Power

On November 13, 2015, Islamic terrorists attacked several sites in and around Paris, in the process killing 130 people and injuring nearly 400 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility. One of the attackers had only recently arrived in Europe in the flood of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war.

The attack of November 13 was the second major attack to take place in Paris this year. On January 7, Islamists attacked the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The attackers killed eleven people and injured eleven others. Five of the dead--Jean Cabut, Stéphane Charbonnier, Philippe Honoré, Bernard Verlhac, and Georges Wolinski--were cartoonists. Wolinski was also Jewish. There were further terrorist actions in and around Paris over the next two days and countervailing shows of solidarity with the people of Paris in the following weeks. Our current president was conspicuously absent from the largest event, which took place on January 11 in Paris and included two million people and more than forty world leaders. 

On November 17 in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry had the following to say about the two attacks:

There's something different about what happened [on November 13] from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of--not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they're really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn't to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.

It isn't clear whether Kerry was speaking for himself, the President, the United States government, or anyone else, despite his claim that "everybody would feel that." He may not have been speaking in any formal capacity at all. His words sound informal and off the cuff. They are very nearly incoherent. Nonetheless, Secretary Kerry seems to have revealed his true thoughts, and his use of the word "legitimacy," despite any subsequent correction, places him in a category with Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League; cartoonist Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame; and several members of PEN International, all of whom have suggested that the five murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo provoked their own deaths or even that they deserved to die.

In response to the attacks of November 13, more than two dozen governors have stated that they will not accept Syrian refugees into their states, while at least five others have requested that any refugees be screened before entering. Among the governors not accepting refugees is Kentucky Governor-Elect Matt Bevin. On November 19, the Lexington Herald-Leader published an editorial cartoon by Hoosier cartoonist Joel Pett. The cartoon shows Bevin quaking with fear and hiding under his desk. On the floor is a map of Syria and a newspaper with the headline "Paris." On the governor-elect's desk are three pictures of his children. A fourth is being held by one of Bevin's aides, who is saying: "Sir, they're not terrorists . . . they're your own adopted kids!" I should point out that Matt Bevin is the father of ten children, four of whom are adopted from Ethiopia.

Governor-Elect Bevin responded almost immediately to the cartoon. In an article called "Bevin Criticizes Herald-Leader for Editorial Cartoon Involving His Adopted Children" in the Lexington Herald-Leader (Nov. 19, 2015), he was quoted as saying:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed, today, the Lexington Herald-Leader chose to articulate with great clarity the deplorably racist ideology of "cartoonist" Joel Pett. Shame on Mr. Pett for his deplorable attack on my children and shame on the editorial controls that approved this overt racism.

Further:

Let me be crystal clear, the tone of racial intolerance being struck by the Herald-Leader has no place in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and will not be tolerated by our administration.

Pett, who lived in Africa for five years in his childhood, said that he is not a racist. He chalks up Bevin's reaction to "inexperience on his part."

Joel Pett's cartoon may or not be on target. It may or may not be in good taste. That's beside the point. The point is that a cartoonist here in the United States is facing threats, veiled as they may be, from someone far more powerful than he is, simply for expressing himself as an artist. In this country, that threat is ridiculous. Joel Pett is obviously not taking it seriously. In Paris, however, five cartoonists paid for their art with their lives. Contrary to what Garry Trudeau said, they were not operating from a position of power. They were not "punching down." They were in fact punching up against people far more powerful than they were. Their only weapon was a pen. Their killers used firearms and explosives.

What the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists drew may at times have been in poor taste, just as what Joel Pett and other political cartoonists draw may at times be. The issues, however, are simple: either artists have the right to express themselves or they do not. The threat or use of force against them is either legitimate or it is not. Where the Islamic terrorists stand on these issues is clear. Their position is not surprising. What is less clear is just where John Kerry, Garry Trudeau, and Matt Bevin stand. That's the part that is surprising, and I have to say, alarming.

Original text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Allen Saunders and Chief Wahoo

The World Series begins a week from today, on October 27, 2015. Time was when the Fall Classic would be ending about now. These days it goes on into November unless one team knocks out the other in four games straight. Even if that happens, the baseball season will overlap week eight of the NFL season, which begins on October 29. So there are overlapping seasons in our two biggest sports. There are also overlapping controversies. The controversy over the Washington Redskins' name is the bigger of the two. That's understandable, as the name is troubling to many people. But there is a controversy in baseball, too, and it involves not the name of a team but its logo and mascot. The team is the Cleveland Indians, and the logo and mascot together are called Chief Wahoo. Thereby hangs a tale.

John Allen Saunders was born on March 24, 1899, in Lebanon, a town located in Boone County, northwest of Indianapolis. He graduated from, then taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In 1927, he moved to Toledo, Ohio, to become a journalist. Saunders was a cartoonist himself, but his real talent was as a writer. In the 1930s, he began working with a stable of cartoonists in Toledo. Eventually his collaborators would include Elmer Woggan (1898-1978) on Big Chief Wahoo, Ken Ernst (1918-1985) on Mary Worth, William Overgard (1926-1990) on Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, and Alfred Andriola (1912-1983) on Kerry Drake. He also advised Nick Dallis (1911-1991), co-creator of Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker, and Apartment 3-G. If there was any one person responsible for the creation of the soap opera comic strip, it was probably Allen Saunders.

In an article called "Changing World of the Comic Page," co-written with Elmer Woggan and published in The Federal Illustrator in Summer 1941, Saunders went into the origins of the comic strip Chief Wahoo. Rather than quote it at length, I'll just show it in its entirety below.

Big Chief Wahoo began in the comics page on November 23, 1936, as The Great Gusto. The name was changed on January 17, 1937. In June 1940, Big Chief Wahoo became just Chief Wahoo. From there, the strip evolved into Chief Wahoo and Steve Roper (1945), then Steve Roper and Wahoo (1946), Steve Roper (1948), and finally Steve Roper and Mike Nomad (1984). Elmer Woggan got credit for drawing Chief Wahoo from its inception until 1954, when William Overgard took over. Allen Saunders was the writer until 1983. He died on January 28, 1986, at age eighty-six.

The Cleveland Indians baseball club was founded in the misty dawn days of the American League and gained its current name in 1915, making this year the team's centennial. (This centennial season didn't turn out very well for the Indians. With a record barely above .500, they finished in the middle of their division.) The logo and mascot of the team are a good deal younger than one hundred years. According to an article called "The Secret History of Chief Wahoo" by Brad Ricca, dated June 19, 2014, the character that became the current logo and mascot first appeared on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on May 3, 1932. Drawn by Cleveland cartoonist Fred George Leinert (1895-1974), the Plain Dealer's "Little Indian" became wildly popular among fans. The Indian logo didn't become official until 1947 when owner Bill Veeck hired the J.F. Novak Company to come up with something that "would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm" in regards to his team. (1, 2) The job of designing the logo fell on seventeen-year-old Walter Goldbach. Through various modifications, the image he created has come down to us as the character we now call Chief Wahoo. However, Mr. Goldbach's new Cleveland Indian wasn't called Chief Wahoo until 1950 or so. There are various theories as to how he acquired that moniker. It could have come from an old cheer. The simplest explanation might be that Cleveland fans took the name right out of the comics page, in which case Allen Saunders, a native of the land of Indians, provided it, though in an indirect way. Whether that's something to be proud of or ashamed of, I can't say.

The controversy and the cartoonist connection continue. An article called "Cartoon Predicted Encounter Between Indians Fan and Chief Wahoo Protester" by Mike Oz (Yahoo Sports, Apr. 7, 2014) shows a photographic image of a Cleveland Indians fan in full regalia facing Robert Roche, executive director of the American Indian Education Center in Parma, Ohio, on opening day in Cleveland. Below that is a cartoon of the same situation, drawn by Lalo Alcaraz twelve years before. The juxtaposition of these two images--the photograph and the cartoon--is a good example of how the cartoonist functions as a canary in the coal mine of society.

Notes

(1) Quoted in "The Curse of Chief Wahoo" by Peter Pattakos from the website Scene, April 25, 2012, here.

(2) Also in 1947, Veeck hired Larry Doby for his club. Doby was the first black player in the American League.

Original text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Stand or Kneel?

May has arrived and P.E.N. is in crisis. Officially non-political, the international organization of poets, essayists, and novelists is faced with a divide in its ranks. Some members wish to condemn the suppression of free thought, free speech, and free expression imposed by political extremists at work in a member nation. Others would rather not kick the hornet's nest of a growing and very aggressive and violent threat, a threat not only to Western liberal values but also to European Jews. As one prominent member of the group writes, "It is better to remain silent than to show disapproval. If we protest, we shall provoke an international squabble . . . . It is for us to remain neutral and silent."

You might think the controversy involves the upcoming PEN Literary Gala, scheduled for Tuesday, May 5, 2015, at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. At that event, PEN America plans to bestow upon the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. The award is for Charlie Hebdo's fierce resistance to attempts to deny its writers and artists their freedom of expression, a freedom we recognize as essential to our way of life and inseparable from ourselves as human beings. Editor and cartoonist Stéphane Carbonnier, who went by the nom-de-plume "Charb," led his newspaper in its resistance to oppression, famously vowing, "Je prefere mourir debout que vivre à genoux"--"I would rather die standing than live on my knees." That's a rare expression of courage among Western journalists. Now, with the actions of 145 PEN members, a sizable number of Western and non-Western writers can be included among those who would wish to silence dissent and to deny free expression, an extraordinary irony given their vocation, and a betrayal of everything that they ought to hold sacred. Incredibly, Joyce Carol Oates is among them.

As everyone who follows world events should know by now, Stéphane Charbonnier--along with fellow cartoonists George David Wolinski ("Wolinski"), Jean Cabut ("Cabu"), Philippe Honoré ("Honoré"), and Bernard Verlhac ("Tignous")--were murdered on January 7, 2015, in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo. The murderers were Islamists who were themselves killed two days later by French police. At the same time, a coreligionist of the two men murdered four Jews at a kosher supermarket, also located in Paris. Like the Charlie Hebdo murderers, he, met his end at the hands of the police. In the aftermath of the shootings, millions gathered in Paris, claiming in solidarity with the murdered journalists, "Je suis Charlie." Within days, on January 11, world leaders gathered in Paris, where they attended an enormous rally, the largest in France since World War II. Our current president, who had, in a speech of a two years prior, said, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam," was conspicuously absent from the event. Instead he sent James Taylor to France to sing to our grieving allies a little song while the King of Ketchup looked on.  

The recriminations began instantly upon the slaughter of the cartoonists. Bill Donahue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights stated as clearly as anyone the opinion that the cartoonists got what was coming to them when he wrote: "Stéphane Charbonnier, the paper's [editorial director], was killed in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn't understand the role he played in his tragic death." (1) Have you got that? Mr. Donahue--and those who share his opinions--is saying that Charbonnier was responsible for his own murder. Giving new meaning to the term "yellow journalism," some newspapers declined to publish the offending images from Charlie Hebdo. British police actually kept track of people who bought the first issue after the attacks, with the implication that buying a copy of Charlie Hebdo makes a person suspect of planned or actual criminality. (2) Perhaps it soon will be a crime to disagree with official state opinion if Ed Miliband becomes prime minister of England.

There was far more support than disapprobation, however. Even some Muslims decried the violence and carried "Je suis Charlie" or even "Je suis Juif" signs. Vladimir Putin, no great friend of human rights, condemned the attacks. So did Julian Assange, who "tweeted" (boy, now we're scared--somebody tweeted something): "The world must now avenge Charlie Hebdo by swiftly publishing all their cartoons." (3) Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, no stranger to controversy, said, "We all have to stand up today, whether we are humorists or not." (4) Not all cartoonists shared that opinion. A cartoon in the local paper where I live, essentially agreeing with Bill Donahue, suggested that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists invited their own murders. Bizarrely, a reader wrote to the paper praising the local cartoonist's "courage" in drawing what he did. In the current state of affairs, and among people of certain political persuasions, up is apparently down and down is apparently up.

More recently, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who may or may not be a member of PEN, fell into line against freedom of expression when he spoke the following words:

Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.

By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died. Meanwhile, the French government kept busy rounding up and arresting over 100 Muslims who had foolishly used their freedom of speech to express their support of the attacks. (5)

I have met Garry Trudeau and found him to be a gracious person. His wife, Jane Pauley, is a fellow Hoosier. We in Indiana are proud of her as we are of anyone from our state who has made something of herself. But I find Mr. Trudeau's words preposterous. There is much to refute in what he has said. I will leave it at this: How can the man who has been gunned down, his blood spilled, spattered, and pouring from multiple bullet wounds, possibly be more powerful than the man who has killed him?

Garry Trudeau won a Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1975 for his work on the newspaper comic strip Doonesbury. It was the first time that a comic strip had won the award. I don't know if there was any controversy at the time. Political cartoonists may be a little prickly about comic strip cartoonists butting in to their territory. That was certainly the case the next time a comic strip cartoonist, Berkeley Breathed of Bloom County, won the Pulitzer, in 1987. Regardless of whether comic strip cartoonists are deserving of Pulitzer Prizes in cartooning, it comes as no small irony that the 145 PEN writers of today, who seem to share an opinion with Garry Trudeau, find that the five dead cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, who stood alone--alone--against violence and threats of violence, are undeserving of an award for courage. Novelist Peter Carey, a signatory of the PEN letter opposing the award to Charlie Hebdo, echoes the words of Mr. Trudeau: "All this [the controversy over freedom of speech] is complicated by PEN's seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population." (6) Again, apparently, people who murder are powerless, while people who are murdered are powerful. And they only get what is coming to them.

In fairness to Garry Trudeau, the 145 PEN writers, and their muddled ideas, PEN is also fully capable of gobbledygook. Here is part of the organization's response to the controversy: "There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, an urgent brilliance in saying what you have been told not to say in order to make it sayable." (7) This is by an organization of writers who I believe must pride themselves on their ability to write. The local reader who wrote to the local paper praising the local cartoonist's "courage" could not have said it worse or with less conciseness, clarity, or sense.

I began this essay with a description of a crisis. The crisis of which I write is not actually the current crisis--despite the preceding eight paragraphs--but one that occurred eighty-two years ago this month. From May 25 (or 26) to May 28, 1933, members of the International P.E.N. Club met in Ragusa, Italy (now Dubrovnik, Croatia), for their 11th annual congress. (8) The issue that divided the German-speaking attendees was book-burning. Earlier that month, on May 10, 1933, members of the German Student Union, essentially a Nazi organization, burned in Berlin upwards of 25,000 books by Jewish, liberal, leftist, communist, and pacifist authors. "The book burnings became the central focus of the International PEN Club meeting in Ragusa in May 1933," wrote Donald G. Daviau, who continued:

When the Austrian PEN delegation introduced a resolution condemning the students' action, the German representatives walked out of the meeting in protest, accompanied by the Austrians Grete von Urbanitzky, head of the Austrian group, Felix Salten [source of the quote in the opening paragraph of this essay], the publisher Paul Zsolnay, Egon Caesar Corti [,] who even at this early juncture was a convinced National Socialist, and others. (9; boldface added)

The political divide between the Austrian writers became a permanent split in June 1933 when a number of pro-Austrian members of the Austrian P.E.N. Club passed a resolution "defending intellectual freedom and condemning the abolition of human rights and the persecution of writers in Nazi Germany." (10) A dozen and a half (or more) writers resigned from the club in protest. "The organization [as a result] was reduced to so few members . . . that it could no longer function." (11) Its successors drifted into Nazism.

In response to the current crisis in PEN, Salman Rushdie has some advice: "What I would say to both Peter [Carey] and Michael [Ondaatje] and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them." (12) The signatories to the current PEN letter could learn something from the experience of the pro-German, pro-Nazi, or at least not anti-Nazi writers who left the Austrian P.E.N. Club in 1933: Felix Salten, a Jew (and the author of Bambi), was forced to flee Austria and died in exile in Switzerland in 1945. Grete von Urbanitzky, her works prohibited in Nazi Germany in 1941, left that country for France before going into exile in Switzerland. Paul Zsolnay, also a Jew, left Austria in November 1938 for Great Britain (after the Anschluss) and did not return to his homeland until after the war. Even the National Socialist Egon Caesar Corti was denied certain benefits of membership in his party because of the Jewishness of his wife. In other words, the Nazis, in time, went after the men and women who had supported them or refused to denounce them as they were rising to power. I might have read of a similar situation, but I can't remember where.

Totalitarianism was on the rise in the 1930s. That is clear enough in hindsight. The problem of the totalitarian mind was diagnosed as well as by anybody by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements in 1951. We should recognize by now the nature of totalitarianism and its mortal dangers, no one so much as the thinker, the writer, the artist, and the journalist. And yet here we are, threatened once again by totalitarian systems, while the very people who should know better sympathize with, identify with, support, defend, and apologize for those who would wish to impose those systems upon us. The man who pulls the trigger is bad enough, but in the end he may simply be one among the myrmidons of a far worse thing, the man possessed of a murderous idea, even if that idea has every good intention behind it. My question is this: Have we learned nothing?

Notes

(1) From USA Today, January 15, 2015, p. 7a, column 4.
(2) See "Police from Several UK Forces Seek Details of Charlie Hebdo Readers" on the website of The Guardian, Feb. 10, 2015.
(3) From USA Today/Indianapolis Star, January 8, 2015, p. 2B, column 3.
(4) Ditto.
(5) From "The Abuse of Satire" by Garry Trudeau on the website of The Atlantic, April 11, 2015.
(6) From "Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo" by Jennifer Schuessler on the website of PEN America, here. Ironically, the subtitle of the website is (in  part) "Free Expression."
(7) From "Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo" by Jennifer Schuessler, the original story in the New York Times, April 26, 2015, here.
(8) The acronym PEN is made two ways: P.E.N. and PEN. It stands for or stood for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, and seems to have been changed somewhere along the line. I have used the first formation for the old controversy and the second for the new controversy.
(9) From "Introduction" by Donald G. Daviau in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938 (Ariadne Press, 1995), p. 62.
(10) Ditto, p. 63.
(11) Ditto, p. 64.
(12) From "Salman Rushdie Slams Critics of PEN’s Charlie Hebdo Tribute" by Alison Flood and Alan Yuhas in The Guardian, April 27, 2015, here.

Copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Mightier Than the Sword

"No political cartoonist is worth his salt who misuses his valuable space by drawing inoffensive, pretty pictures about the news. A political cartoon is a weapon of attack to be used against the evils and the follies of society. It is potentially the strongest weapon in modern journalism. Often it is drawn in good humor and often it is not. It does not matter how it is drawn if it achieves the purpose of the cartoonist. His purpose is not to be well-liked and popular. It is to reveal injustice and deflate humbug. His purpose is to sting you to awareness of what he regards as a social evil."

--Scott Long 

In his preface to The McDonald Book: A Collection of Editorial Cartoons by the Grand Forks Herald’s Award Winning Cartoonist [Stuart McDonald] (1963)

* * *

"In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands."

--James A. Garfield

Quoted in Our American Heritage, Charles L. Wallis, editor (1970)

Thanks to BH for the first quote.

Artists Murdered for Their Art

Today, in Paris, five cartoonists were murdered for their art. Their names were Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Charb--respectively, George David Wolinski (1934-2015), Jean Cabut (1938-2015), Philippe Honoré (1941-2015), Bernard Verlhac (1957-2015), and Stéphane Charbonnier (1967-2015). One cartoonist, Corinne Rey, escaped with her life. In all likelihood, there have never been so many cartoonists to die in one day, certainly never in a single incident. Those five murdered cartoonists probably outnumber all other murdered cartoonists in history. The men who murdered them subscribe to a belief system that readily and perversely claims martyrdom in murder. The true martyrs today were the cartoonists themselves. Ironically, they worked for a leftist and anti-religious newspaper called Charlie Hebdo, and in consequence might very well decline conventional martyrdom. Perhaps significantly, one of the cartoonists was Jewish.

Like artists everywhere, those five French cartoonists sought to bring new things into creation, to express themselves through their art, and to throw the light of truth upon a benighted earth. And like cartoonists everywhere, they wished to expose the evil, corruption, folly, and oppression that exist among men and their institutions. For that they were murdered by the kind of men who have existed in every time and place, men who seek to deny free expression and to deprive others of their rights, their freedoms, their property, and their lives, men who prefer darkness to light and lies to the truth. These men go by a different name today than they did during much of the twentieth century, yet we have seen their kind before and we have defeated them before. We can defeat them again by recognizing the threat, by taking action against those who threaten us and our way of life, but perhaps most importantly by not sympathizing or collaborating with them, and by not supporting them or excusing their actions in any way, as so many in Europe, Great Britain, and America seem so willing to do. An added irony is that today's murderers did by violence what some Western governments, certain journalists, and various individuals have wished to do by disapprobation, censorship, or force of law--they silenced the voices of dissent.

If we are to survive, we must have the clarity of vision, the uncompromising desire to tell the truth, and the quotidian courage of the artist--the cartoonist--who stands at the barricades against murder, lies, tyranny, and oppression. I have a modest proposal: Let January 7 forever after today be the International Day of the Cartoonist.

Copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley