Cartooning Capitalism

ART YOUNG'S CARTOON HISTORY (1866-1943)

As a younger man, Art learned the trade from a legendary group of editors, publishers and cartoonists.  In 1888, Art Young moved to New York where he worked for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.  After spending a year studying drawing with renowned academic painter William Bourguereau in Paris, Young took an offer from the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1892, where he had the opportunity to work under Thomas Nast, the most important American political cartoonist of the 19th century.  Though Young grew suspicious of Nast’s personal politics (which ran towards an extreme nativism), Nast’s successful campaign against New York’s corrupt machine politician “Boss Tweed” provided Young with proof that cartoonist had the power to affect real political change. “I have always felt,” wrote Art Young in 1927, “that there is more power in my talent than in the mind of a statesman.”

Young’s conversion to Socialism happened gradually, but it crystallized around the events of the Haymarket bombing of 1886.  Amidst a citywide general strike for the eight-hour day, an anarchist rally held in Chicago’s Haymarket Square ended in violence when someone threw a bomb into a line of police who had ordered the peaceful rally to disperse.  Within the reactionary maelstrom that followed the bombing, Art Young clung to his paper’s belief that the anarchists were part of a conspiracy against civilization itself.  “My social awareness remained undeveloped,” he recalled decades later, “I had no perspective on the human conflict, and had not found out how to connect up an effect with its underlying cause.”  Yet, Young did get very close to the case when visited the prison and drew the last living portraits of the eight men mere days before one of the men committed suicide and four others were hanged.  Years later, Young expressed deep regret for his political ignorance and at the age of thirty-six he realized that he was part of the problem, and that his life and work needed to change.

American Socialism loved conversion narratives. And of the hundreds of "How I Became a Socialist" stories told in these years the shock of the Haymarket bomb and the radical's martyrdom proved a defining moment for a generation.

For Art Young, the effort to reproduce his own revelation in the mind of his audience – to break through the conventions of capitalist common sense – became the primary subject of his increasingly radical cartooning.  Middle class moral platitudes, superficial free market economic doctrines and other capitalist “copy book maxims,” provided Art Young with his captions, while his drawings delved deeply into the reality behind the surface appearance of monopoly capitalism. 

Click here for more of Art Young's anti-capitalist cartoons.

Having worked for commercial newspapers for decades, it was not until Art joined the editorial board of The Masses that he found full political expression for his work.  It was a pleasure for which he received nearly no pay, but, in his words, The Masses “paid a good deal in that coin of consolation, that comfort to the mind when it is relieved of pent up grievances against social conventions and the tyranny of wealth.”  Young found a home within the magazine’s critical philosophy and with no restrictions on content or commentary, he took the opportunity to dive into political abstraction, producing a stream of simplified allegories on the nature of class conflict, war and American capitalism’s corruption of civil society and cultural life. 

Click here to see a collection of images from The Masses and The Liberator

Never content to simply work in pen and ink, Art Young threw himself into political activism.  While studying socialism in various New York radical schools, union halls and salons, he took lessons in rhetoric and public speaking to hone his skills on the soapbox and lectern (the anxiety of which he illustrated above).  In the years before World War I, Young ran for several city and municipal offices in New York on the Socialist Party ticket.  When the Socialist Party opposed American entry into the War, their leaders became targets for the capitalist newspapers, 100% American patriotic vigilantes, as well as countersubversives within the justice department and newly formed FBI.   Below we see Young's published response to a demand for his identification from a New York committee investigating wartime disloyalty. 

At the peak of the Red Scare in 1919, while his former colleagues at The Masses - Jack Reed and Max Eastman - helped to form the Communist Part of the USA, Art Young busily founded several new magazines of leftist humor and anti-war art, the most important of which is the brilliant, if short-lived, Good Morning.  The mild name, according to Young, was a trick to evade the notice of the censors. 

Click here to see a collection of cartoons from Good Morning. 

“I shot a cartoon into the air; 
It fell – I know not where,
But after all there’s no regret,
The idea may be going yet.”  
                           - Art Young