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In the few decades just before and just after the 20th century began, U.S. political cartooning enjoyed its golden age. At a time when there were some 500 more daily papers than today, most of them had staff cartoonists. They were predominantly men of strong convictions who drew with a brutal vigor that most of today's newspapers would hesitate to print. The best of them—the New York World's Rollin Kirby, whose "Mr. Dry" hastened Prohibition's repeal; the Post-Dispatch's corrosive Daniel R. Fitzpatrick; the Baltimore Sun's hard-hitting Edmund Duffy; J. N. (Ding) Darling of the Des Moines Register and the New York Herald Tribune; Arthur Henry (Art) Young of Chicago's old Inter-Ocean, a bitter commentator on social injustice—burned with an inner fire that gave their names and their work a national currency.
Like a Picnic. Gut-fighting on the editorial page has largely passed from vogue. Today, many U.S. editorial cartoonists treat their cartoons merely as squiggles to relieve the boredom of the editorial page, end up boring their readers with such stereotyped figures as Uncle Sam, Justice and Lady Luck, such stock targets as drunken driving, Soviet Russia and unscrupulous landlords. To cover their own inadequacies, they often over-label until the reader misses the point for the paragraphs. "There are little figures running around labeled 'Administration,' " says the London Evening Standard's Vicky, "and if they draw a cloud, they label it 'cloud.' " Snorts Effel (François Lejeune) of Paris' L'Express: "Most American cartoons look like a picnic after the picnickers have gone home."
Only 119 men now work at the art of editorial cartooning in the U.S.—one for every 15 daily newspapers. Either for economy or fear of offending someone—and someone is always willing to be offended—the vast majority of papers get along with the harmless, inoffensive cartoons peddled by the feature syndicates and wire services for as little as $5 a week. Serving customers of every conceivable doctrine, such cartoons are almost ingeniously equivocal. The Associated Press's John M. Morris, an amiable fence straddler, accommodates his 200-odd papers by avoiding all pointed controversy, shooting only at universally acceptable villains.
The timidity that now dominates his craft makes Bill Mauldin fighting mad. Too many of today's artists, he says, "regard editorial cartooning as a trade instead of a profession. They try not to be too offensive. The hell with that.
We need more stirrer-uppers."