It's Them Damn' Pitchers

The final issue of “Newsweek” every year has been a double issue. I’ve always looked forward to it—because it has always had a large section at the back of the book that is filled with best editorial cartoons of that year.
I set this year’s issue aside until I had a nice relaxed day to open it and peruse the cartoons. This year, there was a single page with a grand total of six editorial cartoons. Why?
I fell in love with editorial cartooning back in the late 1940s when I whiled away summer days in the stacks of the Grand Rapids Public Library. Over the years I came upon all sorts of fascinating things—Civil War diaries, official evaluations on the effectiveness of American Strategic bombing during World War II (which, obviously, no one in the Pentagon had read by the 1960s), but my greatest delight came in reading the editorial cartoonists.
My immediate favorite was David Lowe of the “London Times”. He skewed the rising Nazis, British policy before the war, and American foolishness throughout it all with delicious ease. He helped form my historical images of Stalin, Hitler, Colonel Blimp and the American Congress as no one else ever has.
My second favorite was, immediately, the young corporal William Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons of World War II. (I got my hands on a memorial edition last year—they’re just as good now as they were then.) Willie and Joe shambling past a bombed French farm house with the housewife glaring at them, “Don’t blame us, lady.”
(To my mind, Mauldin was never as good when he went on to draw civilian cartoons for the St. Louis “Post-Dispatch” after the war, second Pulitzer Prize or no. I gather Charles Schulz’s “Snoopy” agrees with me.)
There were more modern cartoonists that I thoroughly enjoyed—internationally syndicated cartoonist Patrick Oliphant created a little penguin, Punk, to stand at the bottom of his cartoons and make wonderfully sarcastic comments. (Did Punk share Oliphant’s Pulitzer?)
The “Washington Post’s” Herblock did perfectly dreadful—and deserved—things to people like Joe McCarthy and Nixon. He drew from 1929 to 2001, pulling down three Pulitzer prizes, probably deserving more. Want a fast overview of Twentieth Century American history? You couldn’t do better than scan an anthology of Herblock’s cartoons.
I could go on. Did anyone ever do a better job at political satire than Walt Kelly’s “Pogo”? Every example of human behavior—and foibles—is represented in at least one of his animal characters. V.T. Hamlin created the wonderfully satiric “Alley Oop” in 1932, threw in a time machine the year I was born and went on poking holes in social pretenses for decades.
So I’ve always enjoyed looking at “Newsweek’s” annual review of what editorial cartoonists are saying now. They denied me that pleasure this year. I’m not happy. They substituted the review with printed interviews with Hillary and Henry Kissinger, Hamid Karzai, Geithner, Bill Clinton and Jeff Bezos. I got half-way through them and realized I was bored to tears (I don’t trust was Karzai SAYS; I want to hear what he DOES. Capice?)
News is going away—not just in “Newsweek”. So is pungent commentary, as it has been so vividly illustrated for the past century or more on editorial pages by brilliant cartoonists.
Perhaps the highest accolade given to an American political cartoonist came in 1876 when Spanish police recognized fugitive political Boss Tweed from a Thomas Nast cartoon in “Harper’s Weekly”. The man had stolen around five billion (in modern dollars), he’d escaped prison, but an editorial cartoon finally brought him down.
As Tweed put it, “It was them damn’ pitchers”. Apparently the editor of “Newsweek” felt the same way about them.