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It can sometimes elicit action by overstating—and overheating—an issue: Daniel R. Fitzpatrick's unsubtle smog-laden cartoons helped clean up St. Louis' air back in the 1950s. It can provide a graphic perspective on this or any other time: Thomas Nast's cartoon of the U.S. contending with inflation might have been inked yesterday instead of in 1876. And the cartoon can provide a time capsule for the historian. New York Times Columnist William V. Shannon offers a sound, if wistful, prophecy when he foresees that "a hundred years from now, Herblock will be read and his cartoons admired by everyone trying to understand these strange times."
In fact, cartoons help illuminate all strange tunes. Of all the publications of the Foreign Policy Association, none enjoys the immediacy of its A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I. In an introduction, Political Analyst Richard H. Rovere acknowledges the ability of certain cartoons to provide "flashes of extraordinary insight and political prescience." In this category he places a David Low cartoon of 1939. Hitler bows to Stalin: "The scum of the earth, I believe." Stalin returns the courtesy: "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume." Recalls Rovere: "It took most of us more than 20 years to catch up with the truth captured by Low—that where ideology and national interest are in conflict, national interest prevails."
Low was the last of the great British cartoonists. But even at his apogee he seldom surpassed the best of his American colleagues. A Cartoon History offers compelling work of artists representing the whole ideological spectrum. On the political left are some superlative efforts from the World War II years: William Cropper's fascists, consuming the globe for dinner, and Saul Steinberg's Hitler, portrayed as a constipated hen. The progressives are matched in temper and tone by conservatives of the '50s: Joseph Parrish's conception of the U.N. as a Trojan horse, brimming with "alien spies"; Reg Manning's portrayal of General MacArthur's hat hemmed in by toppers belonging to The Appeasing Diplomats.
It would be the grossest distortion to pretend that editorial cartoonists are all Goyas in a hurry. Nothing inspires bromides like a deadline. Artists against the clock have too often relied on labels and fatigued metaphors to make their point. Back in 1925, The New Yorker lampooned the journeyman cartoonist with his crayoned clichés: the literalized Sea of Public Indignation; the bearded Radical; the masked thief with his tag of Crime Wave; the debt-ridden Commuter.