century in political cartoons, The

From Opper, Minor, and Fitzpatrick to Herblock, Mauldin, and Oliphant, artists have been powerful forces in journalism

He was God's gift to cartoonists. Theodore Roosevelt, with his toothy grin and macho exuberance, helped usher in the new Age of the Political Cartoon when he became president in 1901. A decade later, almost every major newspaper in the U.S. had at least one full-time political cartoonist. In 1922, only five years after the Pulitzer Prizes were established, the political cartoon was added to the list of categories.

The portfolio on these pages features the most talented and influential cartoonists of the past hundred years. Not all the artists are household names, even in journalism history courses. But in their day, these artists moved mountains: inciting public debate, dramatizing major issues, afflicting the comfortable.

Political cartoons have a rich history. The New York Daily Graphic published them from its first issue in 1873 - some front page, some full-page. Pennsylvania, California, Indiana, Alabama, and New York all introduced anti-cartoon censorship bills in their legislatures around the turn of the century.

Cartoons constitute a journalistic form that has its roots in the powerful art of satirists like Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, and Bernhard Gillam in the nineteenth century. (Nast claimed that Tammany Hall once offered him more than $100,000 to stop drawing.) Those pioneers, with their often ferocious attacks on politicians and policies, mostly caricatured congressional leaders, unelected bosses, and assorted demagogues. Familiar icons included Uncle Sam, the Democrat donkey, the Republican elephant, the Tammany tiger, Old Man Prohibition. Then came the Era of Personality. After Theodore Roosevelt, a president's job description included being a lightning rod for artists' satire, leading to a hundred-year gallery of eminently caricaturable faces: Coolidge, FDR, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. The political cartoon as a component of daily American journalism is a twentieth century phenomenon. Technology is one major reason for that. A hundred years ago, printing techniques made feasible photoengraved line-art mass-produced by letterpress. In 1900, some newspaper artists still scratched their drawings on chalkplates, and the printed cartoons were a confusion of awkward, angular lines. Thereafter, pen-and-ink drawing dominated, as photoengraving became standard in the industry. In the `teens, many artists shifted to the lithographer's crayon on textured paper, a look that was near-universal until mechanical shading (tones applied chemically to the original cartoon) came along in the late 1960s.

Three cartoonists have been the major stylistic inspirations to political cartoonists over the past hundred years. Robert Minor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and later, the radical press); "Herblock" (Herbert Block) of The Washington Post; and Pat Oliphant of Universal Press Syndicate. Minor was one of the first American cartoonists to employ grease crayon on paper. On his family tree are cartoonists who aped his style or used his tools or both: Daniel Fitzpatrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Rollin Kirby of the New York World, Boardman Robinson of The Masses and the New York Tribune, Edmund Duffy of the Baltimore Sun, R.A Lewis of The Milwaukee Journal, Ollie Harrington of The Pittsburgh Courier, Tom Little of the Nashville Tennessean, and Jacob Burck of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Homer Davenport of the New York Journal often drew a dour President McKinley as a lap dog of his handler, industrialist Mark Hanna, and of venal, rapacious figures representing monopolies. The New York Evening Journal's Frederick Burr Opper sketched Theodore Roosevelt as a manic, infantile Rough Rider on a wooden stick horse. (Edith Roosevelt collected a scrapbook of these drawings to keep her husband humble.) John McCutcheon of the Chicago Tribune was gentler than his fellows and frequently labeled his figures, even when the likenesses were dead on. The Hearst papers' Winsor McCay- the cartooning genius who also created the Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip and virtually invented the American animated cartoon - drew as if his cartoons were thundering Old Testament prophecies.

The Masses cartoonists -- those of the legendary radical magazine of the 'teens, and journals in its leftist tradition were stylists in the Robert Minor vein, but clearly were inspired by the iconoclasm (and grease crayons) of European publications like L:Assiette au Beurre and its cartoonists Steinlen, Caran d'Ache, Forain, and others. The Chicago Tribune spawned a "school" of artistically consanguine artists (Carey Orr, Joseph Parrish, Ed Holland, SJ. Ray, Calvin Sohmdal) who were invariably as right-wing as The Masses cartoonists were leftists.

When Herblock emerged in the late 1920s with a style borrowed from Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling (Des Moines Register) and Vaughn Shoemaker (Chicago Daily News), a majority of the profession flocked to his "look." The remarkable Herblock, truly an American institution, is a cartoonist's cartoonist His style begot an army of imitators. His conceptualizations consistently have ranged from prescient to devastating. And his career - 1929 to the present - has encompassed most of this crowded century. Australian immigrant Pat Oliphant offered a style totally his own and revolutionary in the field. The Oliphant look long-faced characters, sparse use of icons and labels, arresting "camera angles" still dominates the field, at least in the minds of cartoonists who aspire to Oliphant's unflagging brilliance. oday, amid Oliphant's dark perorations, Jeff MacNelly's (Chicago Tribune) elaborate ironies, Mike Peters's (Dayton Daily News) absurd reductios, Jim Borgman's (Cincinnati Enquirer) cynical barbs, and Tony Auth's (Philadelphia Inquirer) mini-murals, the art of political cartooning is changing before our eyes. Contemporary artists often employ centralcasting suburbanites (now more common than Uncle Sam, donkeys, or elephants); a television set (with couch potatoes talking back to pols and anchorpersons); and talking heads (the comic strip form, versus the single-panel format, has burgeoned).