Introduction
1. From Benjamin Franklin’s address to the Massachusetts House of Representatives on July 7, 1773. Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0155.
2. Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jane Mecom, 1773, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0246.
3. Benjamin Franklin, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0213.
4. See Mulford, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire.
5. See Perez, Cuba in the American Imagination. See also Neiberg, Path to War.
6. Schuck, “Immigration System Today,” 5. See also John Hingham’s notion of “resurgent nativism” in Strangers in the Land, and more recently what E. Johanna Hartelius and others characterize as the rhetoricity of nativism, identity, and otherness in Rhetorics of U.S. Immigration.
7. The gist here is that ethnicity overlaps with nationality in a manner that lets humor slip into shared assumptions and collective predispositions that drive cultural politics, especially in systems of dominance. For more on this overlap, see work on ethnic and racial humor by Mahadev L. Apte, Arthur Asa Berger, Christie Davies, James H. Dormon, John Lowe, Lawrence E. Mintz, Elliott Oring, Victor Raskin, and Henry B. Wonham.
8. See, for instance, Grant E. Hamilton’s cartoon entitled “The Spanish Brute Adds Mutilation to Murder,” which appeared in Judge in July 1898, and Victor Gillam’s cartoon entitled “The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling),” which appeared in Judge in April 1899. An article in the literary journal Bookman about nineteenth-century caricature summarized a prevailing feeling in the years just after the Spanish-American War (not to mention a gloss on the rhetorical difference that caricature makes as a way of seeing). Remarking on Hamilton’s caricature in particular, the authors write, “It shows a hideous ape-like monster representing Spain, one blood-dripping hand smearing the tombstones erected to the sailors of the Maine and the other clutching a reeking knife. All about him under the tropical trees are the bodies of his mutilated victims. The expression of the monster’s countenance is a lesson in national prejudice. It shows how far a well-balanced nation may go in moments of bitterness and anger.” See Cooper and Maurice, “History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature,” 65.
9. McCartney, Power and Progress, 45.
10. Woodrow Wilson, December 1902, “The Ideals of America,” Atlantic, Ideas Tour, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/idealism/wilson-full.html.
11. Eco, On Ugliness.
12. Franklin, “His Examination Before the House of Commons.” See also Lester C. Olson, “MAGNA Britannia,” 100, 102.
13. Ceaser, “Origins and Character of American Exceptionalism.” See also McDaniel, “Speaking Like a State.”
14. Benjamin Franklin, letter to Mary Hewson, January 27, 1783, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-39-02-0028.
15. See, for instance, Chapman et al., Comics and the World Wars; Knopf, Comic Art of War; Kemnitz, “Cartoon as a Historical Source”; Banta, Barbaric Intercourse; Caswell, “Drawing Swords”; Coupe, “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature”; DeSousa and Medhurst, “Political Cartoons and American Culture”; Dewey, Art of Ill Will; Heller and Anderson, Savage Mirror; Howes, “Imagining a Multiplicity”; Streicher, “On a Theory of Political Caricature”; Hess and Northrop, American Political Cartoons.
16. Specifically, see Chute, Disaster Drawn, and Scott, Comics and Conflict. For an early rendition of this kind of critical thinking, see Hecht’s edited volume, War in Cartoons. See also Gilbert and Lucaites, “Bringing War Down to Earth.”
17. Porterfield, “Efflorescence of Caricature.”
18. Scott, Baudelaire’s “Le Spleen de Paris,” 17.
19. Benjamin Franklin, letter to Sarah Bache, January 26, 1784, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-41-02-0327.
20. See “Rattlesnake as a Symbol.” Franklin’s essay was published in the Pennsylvania Journal under the pseudonym “An American Guesser” on December 27, 1775. Great Seal, https://greatseal.com/symbols/rattlesnake.html.
21. This was one of Franklin’s well-known mottos. It was also part of Thomas Jefferson’s personal seal. Information about the seal can be found under “Benjamin Franklin’s Great Seal Design” at Great Seal, https://greatseal.com/committees/firstcomm/reverse.html.
22. See, for instance, Theiss-Morse, Who Counts as an American?, 5–6; Lieven, America Right or Wrong; Huntington, Who Are We?, 116; Miller, Citizenship and National Identity; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Laclau, “On Imagined Communities,” 28.
23. “Terminological Chaos” is the title of the fourth chapter of Connor’s book, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding.
24. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 49.
25. Ibid., 56.
26. This line is from Franklin’s response during his questioning at the House of Commons in 1766. See “Examination of Dr. Benjamin Franklin in the House of Commons,” Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=4119.
27. See Gilbert, “Obama the Grotesque.”
28. Wonham, Playing the Races, 46. See also Barry, Visual Intelligence, 80.
29. Billig, Banal Nationalism.
30. Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, 228.
31. See Schmidt, Folly of War.
32. Bergson, “Laughter,” 79.
33. Carrier, Aesthetics of Comics, 84. See also Kris and Gombrich, “Principles of Caricature.” It is worth pointing out here that caricature disposes its viewers to considering comic objects of ridicule for their display of what Gombrich might call the artificiali perspectiva, or the artifice of perspective. Gombrich, an art historian from Austria who wrote in the fog of World War II, long argued that distortions in caricature goad us to rethink our relationship to what we imagine to be undistorted. Gombrich submits that this goes for the critic of caricature as well. Exaggerations provoke attention to particular features, or what Gombrich might call artifactual, if not artificial, aspects in “the evidence of images.”
34. George Washington, Letter to David Humphreys, July 25, 1785, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-03-02-0142.
35. Boyesen, “Plague of Jocularity,” 529.
36. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 188.
37. Ibid., 69.
38. Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, 224.
39. Ibid., 232, 521.
40. Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick, 253.
41. Banta, Barbaric Intercourse. See also Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature.
42. W. H., “Slick, Downing, Crockett, Etc.,” 138–39.
43. Rourke, American Humor, 20.
44. Nickels, Civil War Humor, x, 12.
45. Berger, Anatomy of Humor, 36.
46. Hervey, Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” 1.
47. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 73. See also Lyotard, “Fiscourse Digure.”
48. Holzer, “With Malice Toward Both,” 113.
49. Heller and Anderson, Savage Mirror.
50. Koestler, Act of Creation, 70.
51. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order, 152.
52. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 161.
53. See “Eleventh Series of Nonsense” and “Twelfth Series of the Paradox” in particular in Deleuze, Logic of Sense.
54. Peirce, “Man’s Glassy Essence.”
55. See Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness. For a take on this notion more directly related to my study, see also “America in a Mirror.” Also note that caricature as ugliness is constitutive of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s definition of it in Philosophy of Fine Art. See George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/55334/55334-h/55334-h.htm.
56. See Shrum, In the Looking Glass.
57. See Zijderveld, Reality in a Looking-Glass. See also Zijderveld, “Trend Report.”
58. Magazine of Science, and School of Arts, 66.
59. Boyle, “Anamorphic Image,” 1.
60. Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 21.
61. See Lynch, History of Caricature.
62. For a compelling discussion of the distinction between, and distinct union of, caricature and cartoons, see Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, 52–61.
63. Burke, Permanence and Change, 112.
64. Ibid., 115.
65. Boskin, “History and Humor,” 19.
66. See Gilbert, “Decolonizing Caricature.”
67. Engelhardt, End of Victory Culture.
68. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 139.
69. The comic disposition embodied by most editorial cartoonists, and even humorists more generally, inheres the outsider status. In other words, to better deal with or make fun of what is familiar among those who belong, those trafficking in rhetorics of humor very often act as if they are strangers in their own home.
70. Edelman, From Art to Politics, 12.
71. Apel, War Culture and the Contest of Images, 12.
72. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 93.
Chapter 1
1. Chesterton, “Unanswered Challenge,” 64.
2. Masson, “Our Beginnings,” 340–43.
3. Ben Franklin actually wrote an article, “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly,” which appeared in an October 1730 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. It was a hoax, ridiculing the notion that there are both male and female witches. In many ways, Franklin’s piece reads like a script for a Monty Python episode, with Priests and Gallows and Scales of Justice, and also sailors jumping on the back of an Accused Man to try to sink him. There is a faction of so-called Thinking Spectators who realize that an Accused Woman bound in clothes and tossed into the water will surely drown, and so to be sure of her witchery they plan to test her buoyancy—but only when the weather is warmer and she could be naked. All in all, the article mocks the sublimity of origins.
4. Kammen, People of Paradox, xviii.
5. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke, 217–35.
6. See DesRochers, New Humor in the Progressive Era.
7. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” 13.
8. Stahl, Militainment, Inc, 4.
9. Bernays, “Engineering of Consent,” 115.
10. O’Leary, To Die For, 7.
11. Brydges, Uncle Sam at Home, 164.
12. Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, 126.
13. See Kennedy, Over Here.
14. See Aman, “Edward Harrigan’s Realism of Race.” See also Dormon, “Ethnic Cultures of the Mind.”
15. See Mintz, “Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes.”
16. See Winokur, American Laughter.
17. Basso, Portraits of “The Whiteman,” 44, 82.
18. This is how it was described by Horace Kallen, an antiwar, anti-empire professor of philosophy, writing in The Nation in 1915.
19. Woodrow Wilson, Third Annual Message to Congress, December 7, 1915, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/third-annual-message-19.
20. Zangwill, Melting-Pot, 96.
21. Quoted in Hall, Max Beerbohm Caricatures, 15.
22. Simply, I understand the “state” as a set of governmental organizations and institutions and the “nation” as a national community with common values, histories, traditions, ideals, and more.
23. For more on President Wilson’s transcendentalism, see Stuckey, “‘Domain of Public Conscience.’”
24. Creel, How We Advertised America, 397.
25. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 122.
26. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants you, 17–18.
27. Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 12.
28. US Committee on Public Information, Creel Report, 40.
29. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants you, 7.
30. Morgan, American Icon, 64.
31. Hills, “Cultural Racism,” 115.
32. Maurice and Cooper, History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature, 118.
33. Maurice, “International Wit and Humor,” 263, 264.
34. Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, 327.
35. DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow, 100.
36. See Bartholomew, Cartoons of the Spanish-American War.
37. Lubin, Grand Illusions, 60.
38. Fuchs, “Images of Love and War,” 275.
39. Even further, the image seems a reproduction of an earlier illustration by Flagg that later became a cover to Judge, circa 1908. It displays a tomboyish woman with a hat and similarly open arms over the caption “Yours Truly.”
40. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 39.
41. Hinton, “‘Uncle Sam’ as a Business Man,” 481.
42. O’Leary, To Die For, 230.
43. Creel, How We Advertised America, 226.
44. Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, 432.
45. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 172.
46. Kennedy, Over Here, 51.
47. Creel, How We Advertised America, 5.
48. See Tholas-Disset and Ritzenhoff, Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture.
49. Zieger, America’s Great War, 83.
50. Meyer, James Montgomery Flagg, 51, 53.
51. Ibid., 21.
52. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants you, 6.
53. Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness, 131.
54. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 101–10.
55. See Berlant, “Uncle Sam Needs a Wife.”
56. Lubin, Grand Illusions, 68.
57. Creel, How We Advertised America, 226.
58. James, “Introduction,” 4, 10.
59. Wanzo, Content of Our Caricature, 16.
60. Creel, How We Advertised America, 454.
61. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants you, 43, 135.
62. Sherwood, “Uncle Sam,” 333.
63. Keene, “Images of Racial Pride,” 209.
64. Ibid.
65. Du Bois, “Close Ranks.” It is notable that critics among the Black press dubbed W. E. B. Du Bois a traitor. See Rudwick, “W. E. B. Du Bois.” See also Smith, “Crisis in the Great War.”
66. Du Bois, “African Roots of War.”
67. Du Bois, “Awake, America.”
68. Du Bois, “Superior Race.”
69. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 279.
70. Gallagher, World Wars Through the Female Gaze, 4.
71. Haytock, At Home, at War, xxii.
72. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants you, 95–103.
73. Summerfield, “Gender and War,” 4.
74. Brown, Enlisting Masculinity, 84.
75. Meyer, James Montgomery Flagg, 21, 42.
76. Kitch, Girl on the Magazine Cover, 63.
77. Rourke, American Humor, 19.
78. Ballif, Seduction, Sophistry, 29.
79. Kitch, Girl on the Magazine Cover, 61.
80. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 115.
81. Ibid., 177.
82. Consolati, “Grotesque Bodies, Fragmented Selves,” 44.
83. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 130.
84. Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory, 11.
85. Beard, “Age of Caricature,” 206–7.
86. Creel, How We Advertised America, 184, 242.
87. Lippman, Public Opinion, 96.
88. “Crucible: Life and Death 1918,” The National WWI Museum and Memorial, April 3, 2018–March 10, 2019, https://www.theworldwar.org/explore/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/crucible-life-and-death-1918.
89. Lamb, Drawn to Extremes, 89.
90. Ong, Fighting for Life, 67.
Chapter 2
1. Burroughs, Cat Inside, 33.
2. Ibid., 61.
3. Cahn, “Wonderful World of Dr. Seuss.”
4. Nel, “Was the Cat in the Hat Black?,” 72.
5. Elick, Talking Animals in Children’s Fiction, 30.
6. Wilmes, “Dr. Seuss’ Forgotten Anti-War Book.”
7. See some of the artworks from the so-called “Secret Art” and Archive in the online collections at The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection, available at http://www.drseussart.com/secretandarchive.
8. A number of Dr. Seuss’s most famous characters were based on himself, including the Grinch.
9. Dr. Seuss’s sensible weirdness is perhaps most notable in his famous children’s stories, which are full of adult matters of war, peace, politics, and more. It is also noticeable in his largely uncelebrated taxidermy, as well as the pre–World War II advertising work that help make Dr. Seuss a household name with dinosaur bulldozers called “Dozerpods” and raging radio creatures called “Wild Tones” and germs as picketing Microbes-at-Arms, all of which came before characters like the Once-ler, Horton the Elephant, and Sam-I-Am. His wordplay and weird imagery work together to make up a rhetoric of expanding vocabularies and adopting nonsensical views in order to see that which might not otherwise be seen.
10. Just as Twain saw Man as the only animal capable of indecency, grotesquery, and so on, he also saw Man as the only animal capable of war. See Twain, Letters From the Earth, 179.
11. See Nel, “‘Said a Bird.’” See also Nel, “Dr. Seuss vs. Adolf Hitler.”
12. Morgan and Morgan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, 103.
13. Wilmes, “Dr. Seuss’ Forgotten Anti-War Book.”
14. Connolly, Identity, Difference, 193.
15. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 2.
16. Hazlitt, “Truth About ‘Appeasement.’”
17. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” American Presidency Project, July 2, 1932, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=75174.
18. Luce, “American Century.”
19. MacDonnell, Insidious Foes, 12.
20. Daly, “When the 99% Had a Paper.”
21. Blum, V Was for Victory, 27. See also “Dr. Seuss and PM” in Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War.
22. Bodnar, “Good War” in American Memory, 18.
23. Denning, Cultural Front, xvii (emphasis added).
24. Jenkins, “‘No Matter How Small,’” 195, 196.
25. Denning, Cultural Front, 44.
26. Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War, 121.
27. See Jones, Becoming Dr. Seuss, 140–52.
28. Nel, “Was the Cat in the Hat Black?,” 71.
29. Cohen, Seuss, 224.
30. Nel, Dr. Seuss, 6.
31. Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War, 10.
32. Ibid., 266.
33. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 219.
34. Ernst Gombrich marked animalisms some time ago as archetypal in caricature. But Aristotle even earlier developed a notion of “hylomorphism” around the idea of a combination of form and matter to interrogate how the rhetorical matters of bodies—and bodies politic—take shape. In some ways, though, the cultural knowledge that follows from this concept makes the concept that “like goes with like” something of a distortion of vitalism. In this case, caricatures put forth wild portrayals of national characteristics as at once rhetorical and living matters, and thereby reorder conceptions of collective selfhoods.
35. “The Manly Art of Self-Defense,” The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection, https://www.drseussart.com/secretandarchive/manly-art-of-self-defense.
36. Marcoci, Comic Abstraction, 10.
37. W. G. Rogers, Springfield Union, May 11, 1933. Quoted in Morgan and Morgan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, 305.
38. See Turley, “David Low and America.”
39. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 141.
40. See Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War, 23.
41. Lim, Anti-Intellectual Presidency, 173.
42. See Stuckey, Good Neighbor.
43. Kimball, Juggler, 14, 8.
44. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 68.
45. See Russell, “‘Speaking of Annihilation.’”
46. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 167.
47. Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers, 123.
48. Carson, Silent Spring, 21. See also Russell, War and Nature.
49. Steuter and Wills, At War with Metaphor, 122.
50. Said, “Arabs, Islam, and the Dogmas of the West,” 105.
51. Ibid., 104.
52. Ma, Deathly Embrace, 4.
53. Varisco, Reading Orientalism, 29–39.
54. The insecticide trope resonates, too, with the trope of American waste in so many of Dr. Seuss’s cartoons. In one from September 1941, for instance, Lindbergh appears atop an “Anti-Semite Stink Wagon” driven by a Nazi. The wagon is a dump truck, and Lindbergh wears a mask while standing in a bulging rubbish heap, shoveling rotten fish bones and infected cats out onto America. The caption indicates that racist isolationists like Lindbergh were “Spreading the Lovely Goebbels Stuff” in their America First rhetoric. These so-called interventionists meant that white America was preeminent, a sentiment that prefigured Dr. Seuss’s plea for mental insecticides that might root out racism, chauvinism, and bigotry. Hence Dr. Seuss drew them out of whack in their act of carrying out garbage delivery, not pick-up. As with his references to the spread of disease, these allusions to waste and effluvium carried over into caricatures of “Goebbels Gas,” “disunity gas,” an “Anti-Labor Stink Bomb,” and more. Here again, the toxins of things like race hatred and unthinking nativism were likened to wartime talks of wage freezes, inflation, isolationism, and—simply—foolish American pride.
55. Seldes, Facts and Fascism, 236.
56. Olson, Those Angry Days, 230.
57. Fussell, Wartime, 120.
58. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom, 124.
59. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, 70.
60. Fussell, Wartime, 26.
61. Nel, Dr. Seuss, 183.
Chapter 3
1. Adapted from Spaulding, Art of Storytelling, 50.
2. Inge, Dark Laughter, xi.
3. Ibid.
4. Ivy, “Mordant Satire,” 523.
5. Hughes, introduction, n.p.
6. Dolinar, Black Cultural Front, 177.
7. Inge, Dark Laughter, xx.
8. Eldridge, Chronicles, 218. See also Kercher, Revel with a Cause, 284.
9. Wanzo, Content of Our Caricature, 4.
10. Stevens, “Reflections in a Dark Mirror,” 242.
11. Wanzo, Content of Our Caricature, 31.
12. Ibid., 22.
13. Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 293.
14. Ibid., 295.
15. I borrow this term from Henry Louis Gates Jr., which he uses in Signifying Monkey to characterize the “signifyin(g)” practices of Black culture.
16. See Dwight D. Eisenhower’s so-called “Chance for Peace” speech, which he delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953.
17. Quoted in Horne, End of Empires, 206.
18. Borstelmann, Cold War, 46.
19. Prattis, “Role of the Negro Press,” 279.
20. Ivy, “Mordant Satire,” 523.
21. Kellogg, “Negro Pioneers,” 272.
22. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” 62.
23. Delgado and Stefancic, introduction. Note, too, how this predilection mirrors a problem with rhetorical inventions of foreign enemies in terms of madness, pathology, miscreation, and more.
24. Appy, “Introduction,” 4. See also Borstelmann, Cold War, 83.
25. Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 32.
26. Hepburn, “Educating for Democracy,” 153.
27. Parry-Giles, Rhetorical Presidency, 59.
28. See Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts, 141–42.
29. Beasley, You, the People, 56.
30. Eldridge, Chronicles, 213.
31. Kercher, Revel with a Cause, 282.
32. Lamb, Drawn to Extremes, 104.
33. Von Eschen, “Who’s the Real Ambassador?,” 123.
34. Prattis, “Role of the Negro Press,” 275, 278.
35. Thurston, “‘Bombed in Spain,’” 152.
36. Vogel, introduction, 11.
37. Forss, Black Print, 9.
38. Quoted in Washburn, African American Newspaper, 3.
39. Simmons, African American Press, 46.
40. Washburn, African American Newspaper, 4.
41. Prattis, “Role of the Negro Press,” 273. See also Huspeck, “Transgressive Rhetoric in Deliberative Democracy,” 160, 162.
42. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 4.
43. Kwon, Other Cold War, 42, 146.
44. Dolinar, Black Cultural Front, 194.
45. Ibid., 172.
46. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, 138.
47. Gaines, “From Black Power to Civil Rights,” 261, 268.
48. Harrington, Why I Left America, 68.
49. Kercher, Revel with a Cause, 282.
50. Ellison, “What These Children Are Like,” 555.
51. Mintz, “Changing Face of Children’s Culture,” 39.
52. Levin, “Veins of Humor,” 191.
53. Gates, Signifying Monkey, 121.
54. Badiou, Black, 67.
55. Fauset, “Gift of Laughter,” 515.
56. Wanzo, Content of Our Caricature, 35.
57. Braithwaite, “Negro in Literature,” 205.
58. Maxwell, New Negro, 117.
59. Gates and Jarrett, introduction, 3.
60. Ibid., 10.
61. Watkins, On the Real Side, 12.
62. Boskin, “African-American Humor,” 157.
63. Ibid., 153.
64. Gillota, Ethnic Humor, 2–4, 15.
65. Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill, 4.
66. Ibid., 17.
67. Quoted in Inge, Dark Laughter, xxvii–xxviii.
68. Ibid., xxxix.
69. Ibid.
70. Dudziak, “Desegregation,” 191.
71. Peacock, Innocent Weapons, 7–8.
72. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 35, 4–8.
73. Given the recurrence of Luther’s name and likeness across a number of Harrington’s cartoons, as well as the frequency with which he refers to Bootsie as his uncle, it is likely that Luther is Bootsie’s nephew.
74. Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, 108–9.
75. Weaver, Rhetoric of Racist Humour, 108.
76. Engelhardt, End of Victory Culture, 5.
77. Davenport, “Blowing Flames,” 121.
78. Eskew, But for Birmingham, 271.
79. The Lumbee in Robeson County, North Carolina, were particular targets. See “Bad Medicine” from Life and “2 Klansmen Face Charges in Clash” from the New York Times.
80. Mead, “Genesis,” 268, 269.
81. Cooper, Voice from the South, 157.
82. Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow, 236.
83. Kammen, People of Paradox.
84. LyndPBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/lbj-union66.
85. King, “Last Steep Ascent.”
86. Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s Address at Johns Hopkins University: Peace Without Conquest,” April 7, 1965, LBJ Presidential Library, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/exhibits/the-presidents-address-at-johns-hopkins-university-peace-without-conquest.
87. Quadagno, Color of Welfare, 19.
88. Boskin and Dorinson, “Ethnic Humor,” 81–97.
89. Lyndon B. Johnson, “State of the Union Address, 1969,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/lbj-union69.
90. Harrington, Other America, 204.
91. Wanzo, Content of Our Caricature, 147.
92. Quoted in Ruotsila, British and American Anticommunism, 192.
93. Gombrich and Kris, Caricature, 26.
94. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 125.
95. Brown, “‘Bootsie’ in Berlin,” 364.
96. See “Reviewed Work,” 308. In another telling, the Crow devastates his own silk-cotton tree, which would have been his livelihood and the source of his beautiful plumage. The outcome of muck and waste is the same.
97. Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs, 106.
Chapter 4
1. Bacevich, “Theology of American National Security.”
2. Ibid.
3. Engelhardt, End of Victory Culture, 10, 330.
4. Rostow, Toward Managed Peace, 3.
5. See Bennett and Berenson, “‘Our Big War.’” See also LeBlanc, “Trump Calls Coronavirus a ‘Foreign Virus.’”
6. See Erlanger, “Coronavirus Inflicts Its Own Kind of Terror.”
7. See Gilbert, “Obama the Grotesque.”
8. These labels come variously from staff, former cabinet members, members of the news media, and foreign leaders. What is more, they fill out a generalized sense that President Trump’s idiocy is tied to his relatively infantile approach to brand (or, anger) management and cultural politicking, which is captured in sobriquets like Baby Trump and toddler in chief.
9. This, of course, is notwithstanding wild protestations that President Obama was a would-be tyrant, dictator, or king, a reincarnation of Hitler, and the Joker of The Dark Knight in disguise.
10. Quoted in Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 288. The line originally appeared in an essay entitled “Alice on the Stage” by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Carroll’s birth name) in The Theatre in April 1887.
11. Singh, “This Is What Ancient Greeks.”
12. Costa and Rucker, “Trump Casts Himself as Pandemic Patron.”
13. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 22 (1944) (Jackson J. dissenting opinion).
14. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 78.
15. See Giroux, America at War with Itself.
16. Zulaika, Terrorism, 208.
17. This collection is cataloged online by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and was exhibited as Humor’s Edge by the library in June 2004. See “Humor’s Edge: Cartoons by Ann Telnaes,” Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/telnaes.
18. Klein, Shock Doctrine. See also “‘Coronavirus Capitalism’: Naomi Klein’s Case for Transformative Change Amid Coronavirus Pandemic,” Democracy NOW! March 19, 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/19/naomi_klein_coronavirus_capitalism.
19. Tristram Hunt, “A Puritan on the Warpath,” Guardian, September 1, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/01/highereducation.usa.
20. Kellner, “Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying.”
21. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report, 375. See also, Kellner, “Media and the Crisis of Democracy.”
22. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 240.
23. See Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation.
24. Billig, Banal Nationalism, 96.
25. Ibid., 39.
26. Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 4.
27. Katz, “Banal Terrorism.”
28. See Stahl, Militainment, Inc. See also the edited volumes Allen and Zelizer, Reporting War, and Hauser and Grim, Rhetorical Democracy, as well as Spigel, “Entertainment Wars.”
29. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, xii, 64.
30. Telnaes, Humor’s Edge, 51.
31. Note that this is at least in part an economic phenomenon, with further implications around problems of corporate editorship and changes in the nature of the cartoon medium and its modes of delivery.
32. Lamb, Drawn to Extremes, 7.
33. See Gournelos and Greene, Decade of Dark Humor.
34. Ann Telnaes, “Democracy’s Canary in a Coal Mine,” Bertelsmann Foundation, May 7, 2019, https://www.bfna.org/research/democracys-canary-in-a-coal-mine.
35. Mann, Sovereign Masculinity, 11.
36. Cohn and Enloe, “Conversation with Cynthia Enlo,” 1189–90.
37. Wallace, “Just Asking.”
38. Shane, Madison’s Nightmare, 8.
39. Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 201.
40. Chopra, “Donald Trump and the Looking-Glass War.”
41. Rosenthal and Schulman, “Trump’s Secret War on Terror.”
42. Crowther, Infuriating American, 58–59.
43. Fisher, “Rhetorical Fiction and the Presidency.”
44. Žižek, First as Tragedy, 8.
45. Marx, “Exchange of Letters,” 204.
46. Quoted in Gisbertz, “On Beauty and Its Challenges,” 104. Importantly, Gisbertz articulates how Marx saw comedy as an insufficient rhetorical weapon against the folly of a despotic state, and so turned to farce as the more apt framework for bringing the sublimity of authoritarian politics back to reality.
47. “Thomas Couture: Romans During the Decadence,” Musée d’ Orsay, https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/romans-during-the-decadence-2105.html.
48. See Telnaes’s collection, Dick (2010).
49. See “Right Way in Iraq,” and Hersh, “Stovepipe.” See also “War in the Ruins of Diplomacy.”
50. “Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Assault.”
51. Harrison, “Interview with Ann Telnaes,” 233.
52. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 442.
53. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 365.
54. Boggs, Imperial Delusions, 128.
55. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror,’” 290.
56. Jones, “War Against Women.”
57. See Jones, War Is Not Over; Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone; Selod, Forever Suspect.
58. Harrison, “Interview with Ann Telnaes,” 235.
59. These interpretations include dress codes, curfews, restrictions on movement, and prohibitions from education and healthcare, as well as rapes, kidnappings, and connubial controls. See Dupree, “Afghan Women Under the Taliban.”
60. Khan, “Between Here and There.”
61. Kimble and Olson, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter,” 551.
62. Salime, “War on Terrorism.”
63. Borowitz, “In War of Elton John Lyrics.”
64. “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims October 15 Through October 21, 2017, as National Character Counts Week,” The White House, October 13, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/10/13/president-donald-j-trump-proclaims-october-15-through-october-21-2017-0.
65. Wolcott, “How Donald Trump.”
66. Kennedy, “Ann Telnaes,” 16.
67. Horton, “George W. Bush.”
68. Scher, “Culture War President.”
69. Koppelman, “Trump Farce.”
70. Bacon, “Trump’s Latest Attempt.”
71. Coppins, “False Prophet.”
72. Bergson, “Laughter,” 71.
73. Pak, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
74. Perper, “Bob Woodward.”
75. Ott and Dickinson, Twitter Presidency, ix.
76. Bourke, “Tyranny in Disguise.”
77. Parham, “Depth of Field.”
78. McLees, Baudelaire’s “Argot Plastique,” 5.
79. Shafer, “Trump’s American Emperor Moment.”
80. Hartman, “Culture Wars Are Dead.”
81. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 95.
82. Cottle, “Drop the Curtain on the Trump Follies.”
83. “Bush’s Absurdist Imperialism.”
84. Stevenson, “President Makes It Clear.”
85. Szpunar, Homegrown, 21.
86. See Denevi, “Fear and Loathing.”
87. Astor, “Post-9/11 Review.”
88. Bacevich, “‘Let Them Eat Trump.’”
89. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 15.
Conclusion
1. Shorris, “National Character.”
2. Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 404.
3. Quoted in Faram, Faces of War, 63.
4. “The Road to Victory, 1942,” PhotoEphemera: Poking Through the Dustbin of Photographic History, March 22, 2009, http://photemera.blogspot.com/2009/03/road-to-victory-1942.html.
5. Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 404.
6. Giroux, America at War with Itself, 200.
7. Bhabha, “Commitment to Theory,” 11, 15, 20. See also Bhabha, “Introduction.”
8. McDaniel and Gronbeck, “Through the Looking Glass and Back,” 22.
9. Gramsci, “War is War.”
10. Serwer, “What Americans Do Now.”
11. Heer, “Why the Paper of Record.”
12. Herb Block, “The Cartoon,” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/herblocks-history/cartoon.html.
13. I borrow this language from an exhibition put on by the Library of Congress with support from the Caroline and Erwin Swann Memorial Fund for Caricature and Cartoon in 1998. Comic judgment, for Gillray, was part and parcel of visual mockery, and it dwelled in the uncomfortable spaces of social customs and contradictions as well as political habits and ignominies.
14. Franklin, “Dogood Papers,” 20.
15. Bishara, “Pandemic as a War.”
16. Gilbert, “Complicated Relevance.”
17. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 237.
18. Bierce, “War.”
19. Bierce, “Controversy.”
20. Appel, Nietzsche Contra Democracy, 68.
21. Ibid.
22. Clare Sibthorpe, “Australian Financial Review’s David Rowe Takes out 2017 Political Cartoonist of the Year,” ABC, November 23, 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-24/david-rowe-takes-out-2017-political-cartoonist-of-the-year/9187830.
23. Meredith, “On the Idea of Comedy,” 55.
Coda
1. McKibben, “Trump’s Stupid and Reckless Climate Decision.”
2. Durkee, “Trump Was Warned.”
3. O’Toole, “Donald Trump.”
4. Ibid.
5. See Perkins, “Definition of Caricature.”
6. Perkins, “Definition of Caricature,” 7.
7. Meeker, Comedy of Survival, 21.
8. Perkins, “Definition of Caricature,” 3.
9. Giroux, “COVID-19 Pandemic.”
10. Ibid.
11. Glasser, “Trump O’Clock Follies.”
12. Winston Churchill, “Be Ye Men of Valour,” speech, May 19, 1940, International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/be-ye-men-of-valour.
13. Agamben, “Proper and the Improper.”