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The Image-Makers' Arsenal in an Age of War and Empire, 1898–1899: A Cartoon Essay, Featuring the Work of Charles Bartholomew (of the Minneapolis Journal) and Albert Wilbur Steele (of the Denver Post)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

BONNIE M. MILLER
BONNIE M. MILLER
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts at Boston, American Studies. Email: Bonnie.Miller@umb.edu
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Abstract

Utilizing the work of two cartoonists who produced for newspapers outside the central establishment of the yellow press, this essay argues for the critical role of political cartoonists in shaping viewers' expectations of US involvement in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It features seventeen cartoons, arranged carefully to reflect the shifting political climate, in order to demonstrate the narrative frameworks, image selections, and paradigm shifts in their representations of war and empire. Their cartoons were emblematic of how artists nationwide harnessed typographies of gender, race, and sexuality to create compelling justifications for and against policies of war and colonial acquisition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 53 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 See John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

2 Caswell, Lucy Shelton, “Drawing Swords: War in American Editorial Cartoons,” American Journalism, 21, 2 (2004), 13–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the history and analysis of editorial cartoons see Medhurst, Martin and Desousa, Michael, “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse,” Communication Monographs, 48 (September 1981), 197–236CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morrison, Matthew, “The Role of the Political Cartoonist in Image Making,” Central States Speech Journal, 20 (Winter 1969), 252–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carl, LeRoy, “Political Cartoons: ‘Ink Blots’ of the Editorial Page,” Journal of Popular Culture, 4 (1970), 39–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert Philippe, Political Graphics: Art as a Weapon (New York: Abbeville Press, 1980); Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (Toronto: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1981); Paul Somers, Editorial Cartooning and Caricature: A Reference Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998); Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons (Montgomery: Elliot & Clark Publishing, 1996).

3 For a sense of placement, I included the masthead in Figures 12 and 17. But the reader should note that 13 out of the 17 cartoons pictured here were large multi-column front-page cartoons.

4 Earl Mayo, “Cartoons and Cartoonists,” Los Angeles Times, 27 March 1898, 12–13.

5 “Obituary of Albert Wilbur Steele,” Trail Magazine of Colorado, 17, 10 (1925), 23–24.

6 Gene Fowler, Timber Line: A Story of Bonfils and Tammen (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1933), 135.

7 Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 5.

8 William Hornby, Voices of Empire: A Centennial Sketch of the Denver Post (Colorado: Colorado Historical Society, 1992), 12.

9 Minneapolis Journal, 4 April 1898, 9.

10 The Minneapolis Journal: Its History, Character, Management and News Service: Its Special Features and Past Achievements, Volume 3 (Minneapolis: The Journal Printing Company, 1899), 7–11.

11 Flower, B. O., “A Pioneer Newspaper Cartoonist,” Arena, 33, 182 (Jan. 1905), 64Google Scholar.

12 The most prominent studies of Spanish-American War journalism credit the “yellow” press for rousing the nation to war: Joseph Wisan, The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934); Marcus Wilkerson, Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War: A Study in War Propaganda (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967); Charles Brown, The Correspondents' War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967); Joyce Milton, The Yellow Kids: Foreign Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Daniel Cohen, Yellow Journalism: Scandal, Sensationalism, and Gossip in the Media (Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books, 2000), 30–34.

13 This study is influenced by Louis Pérez Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Virginia Bouvier's “Imaging a Nation: U.S. Political Cartoons and the War of 1898,” in idem, Whose America? The War of 1898 and the Battles to Define the Nation (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2001), 91–122; and idem, “Imperial Humor: U.S. Political Cartoons and the War of 1898,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review, 8 (Winter 1999), 5–41Google Scholar; Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Michael Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 58–68; Martha Banta, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 200–11; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

14 For annotated collections of Spanish-American and Philippine-American War cartoons see John Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Abe Ignacio, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (San Francisco: T'Boli Publishing and Distribution, 2004).

15 For discussion of this abolitionist emblem see Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

16 On the Black Legend see Julián Juderías, La Leyenda Negra: Estudios acerca del Concepto de España en el Extranjero, 9th edn (Barcelona: Araluce, 1943); Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1971); Joseph Sanchez, The Spanish Black Legend: Origins of Anti-Hispanic Stereotypes (New Mexico: Spanish Colonial Research Center, 1990).

17 Quoted in Pérez Jr., 230.

18 Congressional Record: Containing the Proceedings and Debates of the Fifty-Fifth Congress, Second Session, Volume XXXI (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1898), 4062.

19 McKinley left little written record of his intentions in going to war with Spain. Some historians such as Foner, LaFeber, Williams, and Zakaria argue that McKinley had an imperial design that followed the expansionist trends of late nineteenth-century foreign policy. Others, such as Dobson, Leech, and Trask, claim that McKinley acted reluctantly after much indecision. Philip Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963); William A. Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York: Random House, 1969); Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 158; John Dobson, Reticent Expansionism: The Foreign Policy of William McKinley (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988); Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959); David Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: The Macmillan Publishing Company, 1981).

20 See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

21 “The Stars and Stripes,” Dallas News, 21 Aug. 1898, 14.

22 David Starr Jordan, “Lest We Forget”: An Address Delivered before the Graduating Class of 1898 Leland Stanford Jr. University on May 25, 1898 (Palo Alto: published by courtesy of John J. Valentine, Esq., 10 Aug. 1898), 9.

23 “The New Fad of Colonial Expansion,” Denver Post, 12 June 1898, 4.

24 See Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904 (London: Associated University Press, 1981).

25 On the anti-imperialist movement see Robert Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (Chicago: Imprint Publications, Inc., 1968); Richard Welch, Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); Daniel Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Opposition to the Philippine-American War (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1972).

26 “A Coming Burning Question,” Minneapolis Journal, 8 June 1898, 4.

27 On the erasure of Cuban participation in the war see Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire; Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood; Louis Pérez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 99–101.

28 “Our Cuban Brothers,” Minneapolis Journal, 18 July 1898, 4.

29 “Cuba,” Minneapolis Journal, 18 May 1898, 4.

30 “Slowly Changing Front,” Denver Post, 15 Jan. 1899, 4.

31 Quoted in Appel, John, “From Shanties to Lace Curtains: The Irish Image in Puck, 1876–1910,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13 (Oct. 1971), 374CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 On the visual precedents of domestic racial representations see Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 125–26; Joshua Brown, “Countersigns” and “Jim Crow,” in Eric Foner, ed., Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 181–188, 219–20.

33 Lasch, Christopher, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality of Man,” Journal of Southern History, 24 (Aug. 1958), 319–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 “The Situation in the Philippines,” Denver Post, 7 April 1899, 4.

35 For examples of this precedent functioning in 20-century US media politics see John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).