A closer look

Political Cartoonists v. the New Deal

When are political cartoons a useful way to understand public opinion during different eras of U.S. history—and when can they misrepresent popular thinking?

by Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY (Emeritus)

Historical Context

By the early twentieth century, every major U.S. newspaper published a daily political cartoon, usually on the front page. By the 1930s, public interest in editorial cartoons had lessened, in part due to greater uniformity in the opinions they expressed. The narrower range in views was one result of the rise of national syndicates located in major cities that distributed cartoons produced by the best-known cartoonists. No longer as appealing to the general public, most cartoons were moved to the interior editorial page. Yet, while not as popular as before, they remained a standard newspaper feature, and historians have often turned to political cartoons as one way to evaluate public opinion.

But how reliable are they as a way to gauge popular sentiments? The New Deal offers a useful lesson. As far as most newspaper and magazine political cartoonists were concerned, New Deal programs were wrongheaded if not outright threats to the American republic. While President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 election by a significant margin, most newspaper and magazine publishers were wealthy Republicans who opposed him. As a result, the political cartoons in their publications also opposed Roosevelt. Based on the cartoon record of the era the New Deal’s policies were highly unpopular.

A Handful of Admirers

The Republican-controlled press included most of the mass-circulation daily newspapers, but there were other news sources in the 1930s that provided the U.S. public with graphic commentary. A broad spectrum of weekly and monthly publications created by immigrant groups, African Americans, trade unionists, and radical organizations offered their readers political cartoons with a range of perspectives. But the daily mass-circulation press garnered the most readers.

Nonetheless, among cartoonists working for daily newspapers, there were a few who consistently supported the New Deal’s social and economic programs. Prominent among those admirers was Clarence Batchelor of the New York Daily News. His rendition of a robust president belied Roosevelt’s actual reliance, after contracting polio, on a wheelchair. In the lead-up to the 1936 presidential election, Batchelor’s cartoon, “Yes, You Remembered Me,” reminded readers about the New Deal programs’ efforts to confront the nation’s unemployment crisis. An antiwar advocate, Batchelor’s support of FDR waned when the U.S. entered the Second World War.

The New Deal Threat

But the vast majority of newspaper cartoonists, including some of the nation's most revered, were resolutely opposed to the New Deal, from its regulation of business practices to its programs to relieve unemployment. Among them was the former professional baseball player Carey Orr, whose cartoons were featured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, owned by the outspoken anti–New Dealer Robert McCormick. Orr’s 1935 “The Trojan Horse at Our Gate” warned that the New Deal was like the gift that the ancient Greeks left outside the gates of Troy—within which warriors hid—leading to the fall of the walled city. In his view, the seemingly benevolent New Deal policies expanding government programs would result in dictatorship.

FDR and His Gang

Dangerous Reform Programs

The Washington Star was the leading newspaper in 1930s Washington, D.C., and its cartoonist, Clifford Berryman, was a longtime prominent figure in the politics and society of the nation’s capital. Usually featured on the Star’s front page, Berryman’s staunchly anti–New Deal views were unusual among conservative cartoonists for abstaining from caricature. But, as his 1938 “The Fuehrer Wallace” demonstrated, while he avoided exaggerating his targets’ features, his cartoons were unbridled attacks on the Roosevelt administration. For example, the Department of Agriculture’s policies to ameliorate rural poverty were not just misguided, in Berryman’s view they were tantamount to fascism. His vision of the totalitarian threat included a Hitler-like Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace offering the Nazi salute to passing ranks of goose-stepping farmers, obedient to and dependent on government control of the economy.

Often acerbic, sometimes vicious, always exuberant in denunciation, political cartoonists’ views of the achievements and failures of the New Deal in the mass-circulation press registered the frustrations of the conservative bastion of newspaper publishing in an era characterized by governmental activism and social reform. “Never had cartoonists and public opinion been on such separate tracks,” concluded cartoon historians Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan, “and never had each so little effect on the other.”

Reflection Questions

Examine the Trojan Horse cartoon and consider all the labels in it. Consider whether the cartoon would “work” without labels. Would readers understand its message if they didn’t know the story of the Trojan War?

Discuss the possible reasons why the Des Moines Register refused to publish the 1936 Halloween cartoon although it appeared in the New York Herald Tribune.

Compare the “Ding” Darling and Berryman cartoons. Which cartooning technique—caricature or a more “realistic” approach—is more effective in conveying its messages? Discuss how you think the visualization and message work together—or don’t.

Additional Reading

Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons (New York: Macmillan, 1968)

Richard Samuel West, Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of Jay N. “Ding” Darling (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012).

Related Chapters

The Great Depression and the First New Deal, 1929-1935