Picture Postcards from Des Moines to Peru

In late December 1910, Joe Becker set out from Peru, Indiana, aboard the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, bound for Des Moines, Iowa, and a job with the Jewel Tea Company. Married earlier that year to young Marie Silberman, he would leave her behind for awhile for work in a faraway city. Within days of his arrival--maybe even on the day of his arrival--he began sending postcards back home. This was during the picture postcard craze of the early 1900s. The difference between Joe's cards and thousands of others flying through the mail every day is that his were hand-drawn and hand-colored. Joe Becker himself was the artist, and his postcards offer a charming view of life in 1910 and 1911. They also give us an idea of the love and devotion Joe Becker felt for his young wife.

Joseph H. Becker was born in 1881 in Indiana. On April 11, 1910 (her obituary says 1911), he married Marie I. Silberman, who, in January, had reached age twenty-one. The newlyweds enjoyed their first eight months together. By Christmas they had a home at 85 East Eighth Street in Peru, a squarish wooden frame house, painted green, with a swing on the porch and a dog in the yard. On Christmas evening, the Beckers held a party at their house. Joe played the fiddle and called the dance while Marie looked on from beside the Christmas tree. Gertrude and Mary shared a place at the upright piano, and Papa danced with Mrs. Mulcahy. Rose, dressed in Christmas colors, had Jess as her partner. Helen and Fred danced together, too, but Mayme and Graham were the ones who really kicked up their heels.

Sometime between Christmas and December 29, Joe got on the train to Des Moines. For the next couple of months, he batched it in an Iowa rooming house, faithfully sending back to Marie his postcards, sometimes two in one day. I have twenty-three of them in all, but there must have been more. The first is from December 29, the last from April 1. The first four cards are quick sketches in ink that has become sepia-toned with age. The card from January 3 is the first in color. Joe let his beard get a little scruffy in Des Moines. His home habits might have suffered a little, too. One highlight of his time away was a trip to the Palace Skating Rink, one that ended in "tradegy" when he fell from his wheeled feet.

I don't know when Joe Becker returned to Peru and to his Marie. As their first anniversary approached, Joe drew the last of the cards I have in my possession. The card is not postmarked but instead dated April 1--April Fool's Day. Joe and Marie lived most of their lives in their hometown of Peru, where they reared two sons and a daughter. The postcards I have presumably came down through their daughter, thence presumably to her own children or grandchildren, thence to a fellow parishioner. After she passed away, they went to her husband, a longtime photographer in Peru. From him they came into our family.

Joe Becker the artist died in 1945. Marie Becker, the recipient of those long-ago postcards, followed him to the grave in 1964. Both are buried in St. Charles Catholic Cemetery in Peru.

Text and captions 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

Springtime Humor from Harvey Peake

Born in 1866 in New Albany, Indiana, Harvey Peake was a jack-of-all-trades. Cartoonist, illustrator, postcard artist, poet, author, humorist, and creator of syndicated features, Peake and his work were regulars in the nation's newspapers and magazines for decades. Here is his clever take on Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" set in a springtime garden. Unfortunately the illustration is not his, but one by M. Peckham. The date is March 23, 1913. 

Here instead is one of Harvey Peake's own cartoons, "The Easter Parade in Squareville" from the same page of the New York Sun. This was Peake's typical style: simple geometric patterns in black and white.

Harvey Peake was one of a kind and one of Indiana's great unsung cartoonists and humorists. He lived nearly a century and died in 1958. Peake is buried in the city of his birth.

Captions copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abraham Lincoln by John Tinney McCutcheon

One hundred fifty years ago today, an assassin shot Abraham Lincoln as he was watching a play in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Carried across the street, Abe died early the next morning. His shooter likewise fell with a bullet to the head eleven days later.

The Civil War had effectively come to a close only a few days before the president was shot, when General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to General U.S. Grant's Union Army at Appomattox. The war had begun a little over a month after Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. The official end to the insurrection came a little less than a month after his death. This season, we are busy observing the sesquicentennial of the end of a war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans perished so that millions more might be free.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. He was the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, their daughter Sarah Lincoln, born in 1807, being the first. The Lincolns were what might be described, perhaps in a condescending manner, as poor. The conditions of their lives became the subject of John T. McCutcheon's cartoon of February 12, 1929, shown above.

Abe Lincoln--nicknamed "Honest Abe" and "The Railsplitter" and "The Great Emancipator"--was born in Kentucky but spent his formative years in Indiana. His mother died there and lies buried in Indiana soil. John Tinney McCutcheon, the cartoonist, was also a Hoosier. He came into the world on a farm near South Raub on May 6, 1870, about halfway through Reconstruction and only three months after the Fifteenth Amendment, the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments, was ratified. His father, John Barr McCutcheon, had fought in the Civil War. The younger McCutcheon, known as the dean of American cartoonists for his longevity, died on June 10, 1949.

John T. McCutcheon drew his cartoon in observance of Abe Lincoln's birth. His commentary is thick with irony. Lincoln rose up from his humble origins to be one of our greatest presidents and one of the greatest men in American history. In this anniversary week of the surrender at Appomattox and the death of the president, I would rather celebrate his life than mourn his death, a life that began in a backwoods Kentucky cabin and against any odds made by poverty or disadvantage, which proved to be of no great significance at all.

Abraham Lincoln's life began with unlimited potential, as all lives do. The irony in the cartoon is that the Lincolns' new baby--despite his birth into humility and poverty--would go on to preside over a nation at war against a great moral evil, the defining moral issue of the nineteenth century in America. There is an added irony in that McCutcheon's cartoon--without his intent or awareness--also touches on the great moral issue of our day, an issue with more than a few parallels to slavery.


In February 1862, at about the time of Abe's fifty-third birthday, The Atlantic Monthly printed Julia Ward Howe's lyrics for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The first stanza and the first refrain end with the same words: "His truth is marching on." Abraham Lincoln carried the banner of truth. He has fallen, but we can take up that banner and carry it forward, and those after us can do the same. With or without us, truth will, nonetheless, march on.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Elizabeth Driggs Bacon (1881-1928)

Elizabeth "Beth" Driggs was born on February 1, 1881, in Indianapolis, Indiana. From 1902 to 1905, she taught Saturday classes for children at the Herron School of Art in her home city. That's where she met her future husband, Louis A. Bacon, an art student and supervisor of manual training in the elementary schools of Indianapolis. In 1912, Louis Bacon resigned his position to take a job with Atkinson, Mentzer and Grover, a publisher of textbooks and other books based in Chicago. (Harry E. Wood succeeded him in his position with the Indianapolis schools.) The change came not long after Elizabeth Driggs and Louis A. Bacon were married on June 17, 1911, in Indianapolis. The couple had one daughter, Honoria.

Elizabeth Driggs studied at the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase; at the Art Institute of Chicago under John Johansen, Martha Baker, Frederick Richardson, Frederick Warren Freer, and John Vanderpoel; and at the Brandywine School under Howard Pyle. Baker, Vanderpoel, and Pyle died in in the same year, 1911.

Elizabeth Driggs Bacon was a painter of portraits, landscapes, and still-life. She also created large, decorative scenes from mythology. She exhibited in Indianapolis and Richmond and in Chicago with the Hoosier Salon. Elizabeth won prizes at the Hoosier Salon and at the Indiana State Fair in 1926. The latter was first prize for a poster in color. The titles of her paintings exhibited at the Hoosier Salon include "The Apple Tree," "Theft of the Grapes," "Gazelles," and "The Boar Hunt." She was also a member of several art organizations.

In 1922, Elizabeth Driggs Bacon co-founded Orchard Country Day School, an experimental first grade in Indianapolis. One of the other co-founders of the school, Mary Stewart Carey, donated her home and apple orchard, located at 5050 North Meridian Street, for the school. It is still in operation as The Orchard School and is located at 615 West 64th Street.

In addition to being a teacher and artist, Elizabeth Driggs Bacon was a writer and editor. Her subject of course was art. In 1922, she served as art critic for the Indianapolis News. From 1926 to her unexpected death in 1928, she wrote the weekly newsletter and edited the monthly bulletin of the John Herron Art Institute.

Elizabeth Driggs Bacon died eighty-seven years ago this month, on March 15, 1928, in Indianapolis. She was just forty-seven years old.

A very poor image of art by Elizabeth Driggs Bacon. Images of her art are otherwise unavailable to me.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Frank Vietor (1919-2006)

Francis E. "Frank" Vietor was born on December 21, 1919, in Poland, a small town in Clay County, Indiana. He served as a photographer and illustrator in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, including time in North Africa and Italy. After the war, he worked as an illustrator with Paton Studios in Indianapolis and graduated from the Herron School of Art in 1948. A decade later, in 1958, he and Jim Bradford formed their own advertising studio, Bradford and Vietor, in Indianapolis.

After many years as an advertising artist, Frank Vietor began painting landscapes and pictures of trains. "I've always loved trains," he wrote in 1984, "and we have a model railroad layout in the garage which competes with the car for the space." Working in acrylic and gouache (opaque watercolor), Vietor specialized in scenes of small towns. "The small towns I paint are typical of midwest rural America," he explained. His small-town landscapes typically show a view from a distance, where town gives way to country.

Frank Vietor died in March 2006 at age eighty-six.

"Summertime," a small painting that looks like a piece of advertising art or commercial art, but alone might be considered a genre painting.

"Man with a Jug"

A very charming still-life called "Indiana State Fair." Again, this painting has the look of a commercial work of art, perhaps the cover of a booklet, but is capable of standing on its own.

"Railway Landscape," a small painting of a large and powerful subject and one of Frank Vietor's specialties.

"Winter in Brookville"--Frank Vietor wasn't the first Indiana artist to paint in Brookville, an old town in the eastern part of the state, nor will he be the last.

Images courtesy of Fine Estate Art. 
Text and captions copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Moses L. Tucker (1868-1926)

In 1888, Edward Elder Cooper (1859-1908), originally of Jacksonville, Florida, began publishing the Indianapolis Freeman, a successor to the Indianapolis Colored World and soon to be billed as "America's First Illustrated Colored Weekly." Although it did not start as an illustrated paper, The Freeman switched to that format in September 1888. Late that year or early the next, Cooper recruited Henry Jackson Lewis (ca. 1837-1891) of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to work for him as a cartoonist and illustrator. According to Marvin D. Jeter, Lewis' earliest surviving cartoon in The Freeman is from February 2, 1889. (1) The cartoon is political in nature, making it perhaps the first of its kind by a black artist in an American newspaper. As a pioneer working for a pioneering newspaper, Lewis blazed a trail for other black cartoonists and illustrators, including Garfield Thomas Haywood (1880-1931) and Hale Aspacio Woodruff (1900-1980). Both men worked for The Freeman before it came to a close in 1926.

Probably the first to follow in Lewis' footsteps was Moses Lenore Tucker. Little is known of Tucker's life, but according to James E. Brunson III, Edward E. Cooper hired the Georgia native in 1889 after Henry Jackson Lewis had contracted what would prove to be a fatal case of pneumonia. (2) Edward H. Lee of Chicago joined Lewis and Tucker at The Freeman at about the same time. "Having added a new force to our staff of artists," Cooper announced, "we are now prepared to give a larger quantity and a better quality of illustrations." (3) Together, Lewis, Tucker, and Lee drew the newspaper's masthead, column headings, political cartoons, portrait drawings, and other graphics. As Lewis' illness worsened, more work fell upon Tucker and Lee, and though Tucker was reputed to be a lightning-fast artist--he could draw rapidly with either hand--both men became dissatisfied with their treatment by their editor. That dissatisfaction arose from Cooper's practice of paying flat rates, retaining all rights to his artists' work, and selling that work to other newspapers, presumably without compensating them. (Today we would call that kind of arrangement work-for-hire.) Tucker and Lee finally left The Freeman for another black newspaper called The Appeal. (4) Henry Jackson Lewis' last drawing for The Freeman in his lifetime was published on March 28, 1891. He died less than two weeks later, on April 9, 1891.

Moses Tucker's career in Indianapolis didn't end when he left The Freeman, but there is scant information on his life after his break with the paper. There is only a little more information about him before he arrived in Indianapolis. His story hinges, in part, on the identity of a man named Moses Tucker who was enumerated in the U.S. census as an inmate in Indianapolis in 1900 and 1910. That man had been born in Georgia in 1868. But was he Moses Lenore Tucker, the artist previously with The Freeman? In his article on Edward E. Cooper, James E. Brunson provides evidence that Moses L. Tucker was indeed institutionalized later in life:

Tucker's wild lifestyle, coupled with addictions to cigarettes and opium, [Cooper] wrote, caused a mental breakdown, forcing the artist to enter an insane asylum. There is truth to this claim: in the 1920s, the artist resided in a local asylum, while continuing his creative output. (5)

Mr. Brunson's point is that Cooper often "scolded his critics" and "publicly chastised those who crossed him" (6). By leaving Cooper's employ, Tucker must have brought down Cooper's wrath upon himself. But the quote above also serves to connect the census records with the artist, Moses Tucker. Combined with what we previously knew of him, the knowledge that Tucker was institutionalized helps us draw a fuller portrait of him, although there is still plenty of room for conjecture.

Moses Lenore Tucker was born in 1868 in Georgia less than four years after the Civil War had ended and almost certainly to former slaves. In the 1880 census, Tucker was in Atlanta. When Edward Elder Cooper found him almost a decade later, Tucker was working at the Atlanta Engraving Company and drawing portraits, cartoons, and caricatures for a periodical called The Georgia Cracker. Tucker is also supposed to have contributed to Life and Judge, both of which had been in print since the early 1880s. Tucker would have been about twenty-one when he made the move to The Freeman. 

Moses L. Tucker presumably arrived in Indianapolis in 1889. In the city directory of 1890, he was listed as an engraver at The Freeman, with an address of 518 North West Street. In his article, Mr. Brunson suggests that Tucker left The Freeman not long after that (perhaps in 1890 or 1891) for a job at The Appeal. He may very well have left with Edward H. Lee for Chicago, Lee's home city, where The Appeal had regional offices and published a local edition. In any case, Tucker was in Indianapolis by 1900 when he was enumerated in the census as an inmate. He was again enumerated as an inmate in 1910. According to James E. Brunson III, Tucker remained in "a local asylum" into the 1920s, where he continued to create works of art. As it turns out, that place was the Marion County Asylum for the Incurably Insane, located in Julietta, east-southeast of Indianapolis on the county line. The asylum was opened in 1899. It seems likely that Moses Tucker was at the Julietta asylum in 1900, 1910, and 1920. He died there in September 1926 of tuberculosis.

In this Black History Month, and the 126th anniversary month of what may have been the first political cartoon drawn by a black artist and printed in and American newspaper, we can celebrate Edward Elder Cooper and the artists of The Freeman, including Henry Jackson Lewis, Edward H. Lee, Garfield Thomas Haywood, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, and Moses Lenore Tucker.

Notes

(1) Jeter, Marvin D., ed. Edward Palmer's Arkansaw Mounds (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1990), p. 78.
(2) Brunson, James E., III. "Edward Elder Cooper: Entrepreneur, Journalist, Aesthete, and Baseball Enthusiast," Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Fall 2010, p. 32.

(3) Quoted in Brunson, Traces, pp. 32-33.

(4) Originally The Western Appeal, the newspaper was first published in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1888, the publishers opened regional offices in Chicago and Louisville. The opening of other regional offices followed. The title of the newspaper was shortened from The Western Appeal to The Appeal in 1889. It is ironic that the editor of a newspaper called The Freeman would treat its artists--one of whom had been born into slavery and at least one other as the child of slaves--in the way that it did, but this is how the world treats artists in general.

(5) Brunson, Traces, p. 33.

(6) Ditto.

Further Reading

Brunson, James E., III. The Early Image of Black Baseball: Race and Representation in the Popular Press, 1871-1890 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2009). Tucker is mentioned in several places in this book.
Brunson, James E., III. "Edward Elder Cooper: Entrepreneur, Journalist, Aesthete, and Baseball Enthusiast," Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Fall 2010, pp. 30-35.
Jeter, Marvin D., ed. Edward Palmer's Arkansaw Mounds (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1990), p. 78. The book includes a lengthy discussion of the life and work of Henry Jackson Lewis.

Sachsman, David B., et al., eds. Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), p. 134.

Taylor, Garland Martin. "Out of Jest: The Art of Henry Jackson Lewis," Critical Inquiry, Comics and Media issue, Spring 2014 (Vol. 40, Issue 3), pp. 198-202.
And a source that I would very much like to see but which is unavailable to me:
Covo, Jacqueline. "Henry Jackson Lewis and Moses L. Tucker: 19th Century Cartoonists: The Indianapolis Freeman." A paper presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Study of Afro-American Life and History, Chicago, Illinois, Oct. 27-31, 1976.

An editorial cartoon by Moses Lenore Tucker from the Indianapolis Freeman, March 21, 1890. From the blog Songs Without Words, "a digital exhibit made possible by a Faculty Development Grant from the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury."

An unsigned cartoon from The Freeman from January 18, 1890. The blog Songs Without Words says that it is probably Tucker's work. Note the reference to Tucker's former home state.

Another cartoon by Tucker, from The Freeman, September 27, 1890. 

The asylum at Julietta, along Brookville Road in far eastern Marion County, Indiana. Moses L. Tucker was institutionalized here as of 1903, probably before and certainly after. At the time, the institution was called the Asylum for the Incurably Insane. It went by other names and served other purposes over the course of its history, from its founding in 1899 to its closing in the 1990s.

Central State Hospital, the Old Main Building and the place where male patients were kept. If Moses L. Tucker was ever institutionalized here, he may very well have lived in this building. Update (Mar. 8, 2017): Based on updated information, it seems unlikely now that Tucker ever lived at Central State.

Updated March 8, 2017. Thanks to Terry S. for further information on Moses Tucker.
Text and captions copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley