Apples for the Unemployed

Having -- like most of the rest of the country -- concluded that the newly-born depression was no big deal, The New Yorker, managed to virtually ignore it until November 1930. Then, suddenly, the paper was FULL of depression references...to apple sellers.

Cartoons. Comments. Little snipes in otherwise unrelated articles. I don't know if the apple seller scheme -- the International Apple Shippers Association sold apples to the unemployed at a loss, putting an "apples for the unemployed" vendor on virtually every New York street corner -- actually worked, but it certainly seemed to put a visible face on the worsening depression, and it also annoyed a lot of pedestrians in the city. Those with jobs, anyway.

Another source of depression news in the paper were the ever-present full-page advertisements for the Evening Standard, which basically said "These troubles will be over soon, and the only firms which will survive are the ones which continue to advertise!" The Evening Standard was truly making lemonade in response to the lemons...or at least grinning while eating the lemons raw.

I leave you with a poem called "Confession" by Richard Peckham, from the November 29, 1930 issue:

It may be shameful to avoid
The apples of the unemployed
But, since they've been on every corner,
I have become an apple-scorner.
Snow, McIntosh, and Northern Spy
Are now as painful to my eye
As pencils and shoelaces were
When apples were uncommoner.
An antisocial state of things,
I know. It will not earn me wings.
But why, when wits were being deployed
To get the unemployed employed,
Did no one, to whom things were clear,
Distribute, say, light wines and beer?

Long Weekend Cartoon by Peter Arno

They Gave a New Thrill -- That's Why They Got There....So Quickly

During 1930, the cigarette manufacturers continue to aim their advertisements at the Gay Young Things. It was a market that Murad had long courted (by 1930 they were in the midst of a long and tiresome pidgin-French campaign), Lucky Strikes had graduated from flippant "Happy Go-Luckies" to paranoia about weight (a reaction to a candy manufacturer's campaign that told readers to eat candy instead of smoke), and Spud was still hammering the "Smoke a Spud When You're Freaking Out" storyline (after briefly flirting with bogus science).

What about Old Gold? Last time I mentioned them in this blog they were in the midst of a rickety vaudeville promotion, and since then they've continued with the "Not a Cough in a Carload" tagline by hiring John Held Jr. to create his signature Victorian woodcut cartoons (the joke is usually about a male Victorian stereotype being berated for his rough smoker's voice).

But I suspect they felt the need to capture the same flapper audience that the other manufacturers were targeting, so in September 27, 1930 there's a full-page advertisement with a new angle, which I paraphrase as Old Gold is a plucky newcomer who became instantly popular because of its exceptionality, just like This Famous Broadway Star!

I'm sure this is the first in a long line. This time the star is Marilyn Miller:

From her grandmother's cellar...to Ziegfeld's Roof...in just the twinkle of a toe. She really was the "Sally"...of the alley called Broadway.

How to explain the miracle of Marilyn's success?...Nature simply blessed her with a charm all her own.

The real interesting part of the advertisement, however, is the huge picture of Marilyn dancing in a dirty basement.


I've mentioned before that some design elements in The New Yorker reflect a shift from the "modern" 20s to a new 30s style. This is definitely one of them. As an added bonus here's the caption:

"Mar'lyn, chile, shake yo' feet!" Grandmother's kinky-haired old furnaceman was first to educate Marilyn Miller's feet. At those same feet, a few years later, old New York laid its heart.

Ah, the kindly kinky-haired drudge with his native rhythm. There's also a reproduction of the moment when Old Gold's supposedly first arrived in Waikiki, but the quality is so poor I won't bother posting it. Which is a shame because it looks really bizarre.

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Anachronism" by Peggy Bacon

From the September 27, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, here's "Anachronism," written by a poetess with the rather unpoetic name of Peggy Bacon.

In the mummy-case the queen--
brittle toes and matted hair!
Her compelling portrait seen
on the lid, returns a stare.

Through millenniums enduring
as a relic, for a while
she was laughing and alluring
as a siren by the Nile.

Bead and bauble, tool and chattel,
symbol, amulet, and token,
effigies of sacred cattle
lie beside her, chipped or broken.

In the Bowery I meet
Sadie, similarly fair,
flashy sandals on her feet,
bangle, bead, and busy hair

(mummy-matted, tonsor twirled,
tinted with a dubious dye),
and a little serpent curled
in the angle of her eye.

Who was Peggy Bacon? She wrote poetry (and later fiction) for The New Yorker from the first month of publication up to the 1950s, and she even drew a few illustrations along the way:


You can find out much more online, starting here. She seems to have been a remarkable person.

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "French Flit"

When I say repeatedly that the early New Yorker magazine didn't usually tackle serious subjects, I was obviously lying, because here is Dr. Seuss referencing the London Naval Treaty.

Okay, okay, the magazine HAD mentioned the treaty in the past, but only in the context of goofy wordplay or in "The Wayward Press," their semi-regular column about what OTHER periodicals were printing. Written by Guy Fawkes, this was a bitchy take-down of New York's newspapers, often criticizing inaccuracies, inconsistencies between papers, yellow journalism, or -- Fawkes' personal beef -- the misleading elevation of minor, trivial occurrences into headline-breaking NEWS!!!

So although The New Yorker never REALLY covered the London Naval Treaty, their treatment of it probably reflected the mood of the people at the time: that it was a blustery piece of diplomacy which never seemed to end and which would ultimately achieve nothing.

I particularly remember Fawkes' article about it, where he took newspapers to task for sending hordes of reporters over to London where they...sat around and did nothing. The conference was so long and clandestine that the London-based reporters would send back stories about the weather or about the niece of some minor figurehead learning to ride a horse, but the papers would trumpet this stuff as NEWS!!!!!!

Anyway, Dr. Seuss doesn't seem to be taking these issues on in his cartoon. He's just drawing funny Frenchmen. Bless him.

Not Much Has Changed in Eighty Years: Sunday Afternoon Cartoon

(From the June 14, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, by Art Young)

A Cigar for the Battered Husband

The P. Lorillard Company advertised these "little cigars" with an amusing ad campaign. While the name "Between the Acts" suggested a person who wanted a quick smoke during a theater intermission, the advertisements focused on more entertaining moments when the protagonist had very little time to spare.

I can't remember any of the previous ones right now, but I get a kick out of this one from May 17, 1930. There are so many cute symbols involved. I'm not sure why he has a feather in his tophat, but he's obviously the drunk husband coming home and trying to sneak into the apartment without his wife seeing him. He's holding his shoes in his hand so he can move silently, and because he's smoking a "Between the Acts" cigar we know he only has a few seconds before his wife clobbers him with her rolling pin.

I particularly like the way she's rolling up her sleeve in the background, and the fact that you can't see her face. This is such a fun, ominous, and perfectly-designed image!

PS: When will people stop recognizing the rolling pin as a weapon wielded by disgruntled housewives? I'm not even sure how *I* recognize it, except that it was probably a staple of cartoons throughout the '40s and '50s. Like so many symbols of the times, the cartoons serve as an unintended method of feeding the public consciousness. Someday children will only recognize trees because they saw them in Merrie Melodies.

PPS: Who was the mysterious artist "F.G.C."? I'm unable to find out. I've certainly seen his/her work elsewhere in the magazine, and you can find a few references to his advertising copy online, but other than that...

Monday Morning Cartoon

"God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton

The New Yorker panned this book, but it sounded so interesting that I couldn't resist finding a copy: "God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton, published in 1929. As you can see by the tag list for this post, it contains elements of pretty much everything I talk about in this blog.

Barton was a popular '20s cartoonist and caricaturist, and he seemed to be trying to establish himself as a writer before his manic-depression prompted his suicide in 1931. I'm not surprised that he killed himself two years after writing this book. "God's Country" is a bitter thing indeed.

It's a satirical, absurd history of the United States, beginning with Christopher Columbus and ending with a bizarre dystopia in which women have taken over the government, radio advertisers have inadvertently caused widespread looting and domestic terror, and poison gas has destroyed everybody except for eight criminals who -- following the intentions of the pilgrims from the beginning of the book -- set out to wreck everything all over again.

Oooo, it's nasty. Barton has equal loathing for Democrats and Republicans (known in the book as "Uniboodlists" and "Multiboodlists" for reasons I didn't understand), Presidents ("Misters"), businessmen ("Interests"), newspapers (who dictate "Public Opinion"), and the everyday citizens who allow the aforementioned to get away with everything they do, over and over again, throughout the entire history of democracy.

Is there anybody Barton doesn't hate? He appears to have sympathy for Native Americans, he finds few unpleasant things to say about Abraham Lincoln, and he goes out of his way to avoid lampooning African Americans, but for the most part "God's Country" is a relentless, snarky skewering of EVERYBODY. And that means you too, reader. And me.

You can imagine how tedious such a book can be. It's especially tedious to somebody (like me) who doesn't know the finer points of every President -- errr, Mister -- in American history. Barton goes through them all, giving them the names of monarchs ("St. Abraham," "Franklin the Debonaire") to highlight one going theme throughout the book: the American obsession with electing "jus' plain folk" who are -- in actual fact -- part of the social elite who have been carefully groomed to appear otherwise.

This obsession is one element of the book that still holds true today (see Palin, Sarah). Another element is the reliance on FEAR to manipulate public opinion, as formented by business requirements and amplified by the newspapers. We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the disgusting collusion of politics, business, and media is a relatively new phenomenon. "God's Country" will tell you different.

After 250 pages of spot-on satire, Barton comes to women's suffrage and temperance activism. I can only assume that he really, really didn't like women, as the book tips from "cutting satire" to "cruel stereotype" in the space of a few pages, detailing a world where women with "blacksnake whips" run around emasculating everybody and turning them into "ex-males." They conceive arbitrary rules and devise irrational schemes to enforce them, finally bringing about the downfall of the already-tottering country. It's ludicrous and leaves a bad impression, and is probably one of the reasons The New Yorker reviewer panned it.

But there are great moments, especially near the end when everything goes completely off the rails. The businessmen are discovered to have retreated into a secret society with its own language ("Six huh pcent a fi million dollas is thutty million dollas. Fiscal.") and in a mysterious desert pilgrimage they invent golf. This presentation of Big Business as a totally self-interested, self-contained, and illogical cabal is ominous in light of the subsequent financial collapse.

When the new breed of radio announcers start to amuse themselves by shouting demands like "Desire to see a prize fight!" and "Long to see a movie about Arabs!", the book provides an amazing insight into '20s popular culture. It's like reading a Readers Digest Condensed Version of The New Yorker between 1925 and 1929:

[They were] soon being ordered to deodorize, to smear mud on their faces, to hate New York, to play Mah Jong, to do cross-word puzzles, to ask each other questions, to bathe in violet rays, to develop personalities, to practice numerology, to adore the Russians, the negroes and aviators, to eat Eskimo Pie, to throw bits of paper out the window, to have themselves psychoanalyzed, to engage in Marathon contests, to eat liver and to perform a thousand other like obediences.

When "God's Country" is good, it's very, very good, but most of it is the 1920s brand of screwball, sledgehammer burlesque that leaves me exhausted, alternating with some surprisingly dry historical dissection.

More importantly, however, it is a clear expression of the immense disgust that an intelligent, educated, creative, and mentally-tortured man had for all the things he saw in the world around him. If he'd had a more balanced view of human nature then "God's Country" would be an easier book to read, but it never would have been written in the first place.

Someday...

(In reference to Reuben's practice of naming sandwiches after Broadway stars..."The Eddie Cantor Chicken Club," etc. The artist is Leonard Dove.)

...

Everybody needs a great cartoon on a Friday morning.



(The cartoon -- from December 28, 1929 -- by Leonard Dove, a frequent contributor of covers and cartoons to The New Yorker until the early '60s. As is usual with artists and poets of the time I can't find a biography for him)

I Totally Understand

"Oh the rent--the rent! What about my career!"

(It's by William Crawford Galbraith, who did a lot of artwork for The New Yorker but appears to be otherwise forgotten).

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "Consideration"

This episode of "Dr. Seuss and Flit" is a bit unusual, because it comes in comic strip form.


Have you noticed that comic axes always have little notches in their blades? I suppose this is to represent that they're "used often," and maybe also to add some interest to the picture.

Most interesting, however, is the tibia that somebody chained to the wall. Bad tibia!

Wednesday Morning Humour

(By the always-odd Peter Arno).

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "Good Pilgrim Stock"

Here's the one from the June 22, 1929 issue of The New Yorker. Note the ubiquitous presence of "The Cat in the Capotain." I'm a bit confused about the pilgrim couple in the background...maybe a reference to the country being founded on "the gun and the bible?"

"Step Inside and See the Strange People"

(From the June 22, 1929 New Yorker, by John Reynolds)

Appreciating the Chorus Girl

The New Yorker, May 12, 1929.

The artist was John Reynolds. He created a real flurry of cartoons for the magazine between 1928 and 1930, but appears to have been subsequently forgotten.

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "Cupid"

From the March 30, 1929 issue of The New Yorker:


I don't blame the confirmed bachelor's anger because I have seen Erasure's video for "Heavenly Action," and nobody wants to be forced to fall in love with a dog.

Dr. Seuss Inhales Flit

From the July 14, 1928 issue of The New Yorker:

We now know Dr. Seuss was inspired by the same drug the "Betty Boop" cartoonists were using: pure, uncut Flit, right up the nose.

(Kids, don't inhale Flit, seriously).

Golf Sweaters, Plus New Yorker Racism

Hmmm. There are a few things to be said about this June 30, 1928 advertisement from The New Yorker.
First, there was simply no escaping this black caricature in the '20s press. The cartoons always showed these big-eyed, slope-headed, huge-lipped creatures, usually scuttling in the background and carrying somebody's bags. Even when the cartoon's joke did NOT involve the servile black character (and it rarely did), he was invariably drawn in this way.

At first I was shocked, but after three years of New Yorker cartoons I'm gradually realizing that the cartoonists of the time -- whatever their own beliefs -- were largely drawing in an accepted style, the same way that all chorus girls were distinct in their comparative bustiness, all businessmen were fat, and all Jewish characters had big curly beards and glasses.

So in this illustration featuring the dignified golfer and the servile caddy, the black character has the additional indignity of wearing the offensive golf shirt. Peck & Peck tell us that the days of "bold, bad checks and Chuck Connor stripes" are gone, and that "good taste" is now the order of the day. That was 1928, mind you.

The question (other than "who was Chuck Connor?") is...why do people continue to wear ugly golf sweaters, eighty years later. Are some just taking an awful long time to transition? Much like the "ugly car salesman suit," the "ugly golf sweater" is a long-standing joke with more than a kernel of truth.

Is this because the stereotypical dedicated golfer -- like the stereotypical car salesman -- is clueless and reactionary, meaning that they're forever out of style? I wonder how this fashion trend started, what defines it, and why it continues today. Since I have never actually golfed I'm afraid the answer eludes me.