Timely and Timeless
Twentieth Century Cartoon Critics

In this drawing for the leftist journal The Masses, Art Young attacks newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) by casting the capitalist press as a house of prostitution, where “Madam Editor” welcomes the “Advertiser Client.” Among his most famous cartoons, this drawing marks a shift from humor to politics that occurred in this publication where Young served as a founding editor and contributor from 1911–1918. Following study abroad, Young began his career by cartooning for Inter Ocean with Thomas Nast in Chicago. Later, he drew cartoons for Cosmopolitan, Puck, Collier’s, Hearst’s Evening Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and Life.

In these two cityscapes, Winsor McCay, a prolific cartoonist known for his striking graphic style, highlights sources of urban anxiety. The rampant social ills of the 1920s included bootleg liquor, violent crime, drugs, and fraudulent money-making schemes. A decade later, McCay depicts an alarming mechanical beast labeled “technocracy,” a 1930s concept advocating management of society by technical experts. Between 1913 and 1934 McCay drew bold, fine-lined editorial cartoons for leading newspapers including New York American and New York Herald-Tribune.

In his graphical review for Fritz Lang’s modernist film Metropolis, Reginald Marsh depicts lines of automaton-like factory workers in a futuristic dystopia. His drawing poignantly prefigures his later indelible images of Depression-era breadlines. A well known chronicler of the American scene, Marsh began as a freelance illustrator, newspaper artist, and contributor to the New Yorker. He produced lushly drawn cartoons based on observations of urban life for the magazine between 1925 and 1934.

Leslie Illingworth pits a small British plane flown by a haloed St. George against a looming, winged Nazi “dragon” who crawls over the orderly English countryside; the dragon’s claw-like arm partly crushing the town below. Illingworth’s detailed depiction of buildings and fleeing figures foreshadows the wartime destruction in soon-to-be bombed Britain. One of Britain’s great twentieth-century cartoonists, Illingworth won acclaim for the artistry of his drawing and produced particularly strong commentary on World War II.

Anne Mergen challenges apathetic voters in this cartoon, in which she portrays a staggering number of people lined up for the circus, the Orange Bowl, and the theater while just two lonely voters appear at voting booths. Between 1933 and 1956, Mergen worked as the editorial cartoonist for the Miami Daily News during an era when few women held such jobs. In addition to foreign and domestic politics, Mergen repeatedly addressed voting and other issues she deemed vital to civic welfare.

Three African American boys wryly consider the possibility of attending desegregated schools, the intended result of the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling on the Brown vs. Board of Education case, which called for integration of public schools. Condemning the decision, governors of Southern states vowed to circumvent the ruling and integration was impeded for years. In his work, African American cartoonist Oliver Harrington sharply criticized the race situation in the United States and displayed notable sensitivity to the plight of young black children.