by Philip Nel
Krauss’s anthropological interests focused on language. She was intrigued that all of the Blackfeet she met “had ‘European’ first names,” like Joe Yellow Owl and Louie Littleplume. At “an owl-dance,” Ruth danced “with a studious looking Blackfoot,” Samuel Chicken Fast Buffalo Horse. She noted that her accent and inability to speak their language marked her as different, sometimes to her disadvantage: “I even got my first and last dog bite out on the reservation. Louie Littleplume and his family were going by and their dog was going along with them, and all I said was ‘hello doggie,’ and he rushed over and bit me in the calf. Possibly he was not accustomed to my Eastern voice, as most of the Blackfeet have some sort of ‘accent,’ that is those who speak English at all. There are varying degrees of both English-speaking and of accent.” The trip and work in anthropology broadened Krauss’s perceptions.5
If Marxism lay at the root of Crockett Johnson’s political awakening, anthropology did the same for Ruth Krauss. The trip and the anthropology courses she took at Columbia showed her the ways in which social structures push people around and pressed her to consider more equitable ways of organizing a society. As Benedict wrote in a 1942 Atlantic Monthly article, the Blackfeet shared their resources with one another not out of charity for the less fortunate but as a consequence of a belief that sharing is mutually beneficial. In the Blackfeet nation, according to Benedict, “no man goes hungry while there is food in the community, and he exercises this right to subsistence not as a claim on charity but as a civil liberty which all tribesmen share.” Leaders took care of their followers, and an individual with ability could enter any profession. This distribution of power and opportunity, Benedict said, gave them true freedom: “They have been able to unite the whole society into a kind of joint-stock company where any denial of rights is a threat to each and every member. It is the basis upon which strong and zestful societies are built and the basis for the individual’s sense of inner freedom.” In the 1940s, her progressive views would make Benedict a target of anticommunist zealots, but the 1939 summer expedition attracted no such attention.6
When the expedition ended in August, Krauss returned to New York, where she considered which anthropology courses to take in the fall. Four weeks before the term began, Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II. Four blocks east of Ruth’s apartment, New Masses editors were in their new offices at 461 Fourth Avenue, trying to explain why the nonaggression pact between the Nazis and the Soviets did not mean that communists supported fascism: The USSR had signed the pact out of necessity. The Soviets lacked European allies, and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier had been tacitly encouraging Hitler to take his war east. If and when Germany attacked, the Soviet Union would defend itself. A nearly wordless Crockett Johnson cartoon from 5 September 1939 dramatizes the editors’ point of view. In the first three scenes, Chamberlain and Daladier point Hitler’s attention to the east. In the fourth and fifth panels, Hitler encounters a mighty Soviet soldier and thinks better of fighting what would be a losing battle. Instead, Hitler chases after Chamberlain and Daladier. In the final scene, the British and French leaders flee, shouting, “That dirty Russian deserted us!”7
Crockett Johnson, Ruth Krauss, and their dogs, Sean and Gonsel, Darien, Connecticut, 1944. This is the first photograph in which Johnson and Krauss appear together. Photo by Frank Gerratana, from the Bridgeport Sunday Herald, 1 October 1944. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
While Johnson defended Soviet foreign policy, Krauss was beginning her formal study of anthropology. As when struggling with dynamic symmetry at Parsons, Krauss was both confused by this new subject and determined to master it. Some of the discipline’s “technical lingo” initially baffled her. She did not know about acculturation, or about the difference between matrilineal and patrilineal, or what gestalt psychology was. So she “spent a lot of time learning and, in order to translate it so I could understand it, unlearning anthropological terminology.”8
Crockett Johnson, “Alarm Clock,” Collier’s, 14 September 1940. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
That fall, at a party in Greenwich Village or on Fire Island, the outgoing, energetic Ruth met the wry, laconic Dave. He was tall and taciturn. Seven inches shorter, she was slim, exuberant, and ready to speak her mind. Her exuberance drew him out of his natural reticence and into conversation. His calm, grounded personality balanced her turbulent energy. They were complementary opposites who felt an immediate attraction toward one another. As Ruth liked to say, “We met and that was it!”9
When they began dating, Dave was considering leaving New Masses and pursuing a career as a cartoonist. In late 1939, he invented a nearly wordless strip starring a little man who offered comic observations on life’s daily absurdities through the movement of his eyes. He submitted it to Collier’s. While Dave waited for a response, he continued to work at New Masses. His 2 January 1940 cartoon, “Wonderfullums Inc.,” criticized the racist assumptions of Gone with the Wind (1939), imagining a rather different Civil War story in which a Union Army soldier is the hero and an abolitionist is the heroine.10
Later in the month, Gurney Williams, the soft-spoken man who bought cartoons for Collier’s, offered to run Johnson’s new strip every week. With the obligation to turn out a weekly comic, Johnson decided to step down as the art editor for New Masses and asked his friend Mischa Richter if he would like the job. Richter took over in February.11
Crockett Johnson, “A Liberal at the Crossroads,” New Masses, 14 May 1940; reprinted in Joseph North, New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New York: International, 1969). Used by permission of International Publishers, New York.
Johnson’s Little Man with the Eyes comic strip debuted in Collier’s on 9 March 1940.12 Recalling Otto Soglow’s The Little King in both its economy of line and gently humorous tone, Little Man was largely apolitical. Because the strip has no words other than the caption, the joke is delivered entirely through slight shifts in perspective. In the first strip, “Table Tennis,” panels show the little man’s eyes alternating between looking left and right. “Alarm Clock” makes its joke a bit more obvious: The little man goes from sleep to wakefulness to determined sleep to eyes open and finally to a last act of resistance, placing the pillow over his head.
With only small changes between panels, the strip was ideal for a man who professed to dislike drawing. To save himself labor, Johnson made one “key drawing” for each strip that contained all the necessary elements he needed for his narrative. Then he made multiple photostats and used ink and white-out to alter the images before pasting together the final sequence. For a strip in which the little man is startled awake and then resumes sleep when he realizes it was “Only the Cat,” Johnson drew a single panel of the man’s head on his pillow, covers pulled up to his chin, one eye wide open and the other closed. With minute alterations to copies of the image, the little man’s eyes stay closed in the first panel, pop wide open in the second, and relax at half-open in the third before returning to closed in the fourth panel. In the nearly three years that he drew the strip, Johnson created 134 Little Man cartoons, and they were popular enough that Ford used them in an advertising campaign later in the decade.13
Work on Little Man kept Johnson from doing much for New Masses in 1940, but he did what he could. In April, he helped raise money for the financially strapped magazine by donating original artwork to an auction, which also featured work by William Gropper and Rockwell Kent. Auctioneers included New Masses contributors and editors Ruth McKenney, author of the best-selling My Sister Eileen (1938); and her husband, Richard Bransten, who wrote under the pen name Bruce Minton. In May, New Masses printed Johnson’s final cartoon as a regular contributor: “A Liberal at the Crossroads” announced that war was coming and that liberals needed to face facts before it was too late.14
President Franklin Delano Rooseve
lt had reached the same conclusion. In September 1940, he signed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime conscription in American history. At thirty-three years old, Dave was not required to register, but he did. The military recorded that he was employed by McGraw-Hill; was five feet, eleven inches tall, and weighed 215 pounds; and had blue eyes and blond hair that was “thin in front,” a feature he comically exaggerated in a self-caricature he did the following month.15
Crockett Johnson, self-portrait, The accompanying note begins, “Crockett Johnson did this caricature of himself to prove that he doesn’t look like the Little Man who has delighted Collier’s readers for the past two years. Besides, he’s six feet tall, weighs two hundred and ten and has several hairs on his head.” Collier’s, 16 November 1940. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
The Collier’s profile makes no mention of Ruth, but she and Dave had become quite smitten. He was steady, easygoing, reliable. Ruth could count on him. She was passionate, spontaneous, original. Dave enjoyed her verve, her energy. They made each other laugh. In late 1940, Ruth moved into Dave’s apartment at 36 Grove Street, in the West Village. Though they did not legally wed for several more years, both later claimed 1940 as the date of their marriage; for them, sharing the same address confirmed their mutual commitment. Soon after she moved in, Dave was looking for a rag to clean up a mess he had made. He asked Ruth, “Where are your rags?” Ruth replied, “You mean, where are our rags?” Dave quickly learned to correct his assumption that only the woman knew where the cleaning materials were.16
While Ruth studied anthropology, Dave continued his fight against fascism, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war. The military rejected Dave for service, but in January 1942, he helped found the American Society of Magazine Cartoonists’ Committee on War Cartoons, which included J. A. Blackmer and Mel Casson and was chaired by Greg d’Alessio. Making its debut at the Art Students League the following month, the committee’s Artists against the Axis show featured some of the best cartoonists then working in the United States: Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Maurice Becker, William Gropper, John Groth, Syd Hoff, Charles Martin, Garret Price, Gardner Rea, Ad Reinhardt, Carl Rose, Saul Steinberg, Arthur Szyk, and Barney Tobey as well as Casson and Johnson.17
Addams drew hungry wolves pursuing a car full of Nazis, one of whom looks back in alarm. Hoff showed a child standing in his crib and asking his mother, “The Three Bears nertz—when are we gonna beat the Axis?” One of Johnson’s contributions showed Hideki Tojo marching behind Benito Mussolini, who is carrying a sign reading “Follow the Leader,” while Hitler sprints in the opposite direction. Another Johnson cartoon depicts a worried Hitler, shifting his glance between a ticking clock and a globe with flags marking Axis victories. To counter his fear that time is running out, he reaches up and stops the clock’s pendulum. Artists against the Axis subsequently moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then toured the country, helping raise money for the war effort.18
Dave was well positioned to coordinate cartoonists’ contributions because he knew and mixed socially with so many artists. He and Ruth were among the select few guests at a birthday party for the great political cartoonist Art Young. After a delicious dinner of ham and baked acorn squash, Ruth fell forward into her plate, asleep. This after-dinner narcolepsy afflicted Ruth throughout her life. Dave initially worried that their friends would be insulted, but he came to understand that Ruth could not stay awake and accepted her evening naps.19
Crockett Johnson, “Follow the Leader,” from Artists Against the Axis, February 1942. Image courtesy of the Terry-D’Alessio Collection, Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Johnson began to conceive of a new strip with a wider scope than the Little Man with the Eyes. In May 1941, he and George Annand formed Colored Continuities with the goal of syndicating Dave’s new comic and Annand’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not–style strip. When that plan failed, Johnson resumed seeking a syndicate for his strip. He believed that a move to the country would help him concentrate on this new project, so he and Ruth decided to relocate. Though a convenient one-hour commute from the city, Darien, Connecticut, was smaller, with far fewer distractions. In addition, he could escape New York City’s dust and pollution, which triggered his allergies. Dave and Ruth rented a small house at 122 Five Mile River Road from Judson H. Williamson, a bandy-legged seaman and avid Republican. Dave, able to get along with anyone, avoided discussing politics with his landlord and stuck to their mutual love of boats.20
Dave soon discovered that he found it no easier to concentrate outside the city and was no less allergic to country dust. He told an interviewer in late 1942, “In New York, I used to go out in the park and watch the kids play. I’d wander around the streets watching people. I’d spend hours washing my paint brushes. But now I go down to the beach and watch the tide come in or I watch the grass grow—in season. And I spend a lot of time coddling the furnace.” He also spent time visiting friends in Darien, including Annand and his daughter, Alice, and Richter and his wife, Helen (Alice’s sister), and their son, Dan.21
While still in New York, Johnson had decided to build his new comic strip around a precocious five-year-old boy living in a proper suburban home, and he eventually discovered that he had begun to think of the boy as “Barnaby.” As he worked on the comic in Connecticut, however, he realized that the boy alone was not enough to sustain the strip. So he added Mr. O’Malley, Barnaby’s pink-winged, cigar-champing fairy godfather, a character seen by the strip’s children but almost never by the adults. He later recalled, “I fumbled around, just like O’Malley, and O’Malley came in by himself.”22
8
BARNABY
Cushlamochree! Broke my magic wand! You wished for a Godparent who could grant wishes? Lucky boy! Your wish is granted! I’m your Fairy Godfather.
—MR. O’MALLEY, Barnaby, 21 april 1942
Crockett Johnson tried for more than two years to find a home for Barnaby. In addition to the abortive effort at self-syndication, Johnson’s idea was rejected by Collier’s. But shortly after the move to Darien, Charles Martin, Johnson’s friend and the art editor of the new PM, came to visit and saw a half-page color Sunday Barnaby strip. He offered the strip to King Features, which rejected it. But PM’s comics editor, Hannah Baker, loved it.1
Founded in 1940 by former Time editor Ralph Ingersoll, PM was a Popular Front newspaper. Original plans for the publication did not include comics, but Dante Quinterno’s Patoruzu began running in August 1941, followed in December by the antifascist adventure strip Vic Jordan by Paine (the pseudonym of Kermit Jaediker and Charles Zerner). The progressive paper’s readers included Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace, bandleader Duke Ellington, and writer Dorothy Parker. It printed writings by future Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, and Erskine Caldwell; photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and Weegee (Arthur Fellig); maps by George Annand; and cartoons by Carl Rose, Don Freeman, and Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss).2
PM was pro–New Deal, anti–poll tax, and antifascist. When the newspaper received criticism for its leftist politics or its failure to gain a wider circulation, Geisel rose to its defense, praising it as a courageous voice amid an otherwise docile domestic news media. In March 1942, he wrote, “Give this paper a break—remember that for almost a year it was a lone voice in American journalism sounding the alarm that America would be attacked.” To avoid compromising its editorial judgment, the paper refused to run ads, relying instead on subscriptions and on department store heir Marshall Field III and other progressive investors to pay the bills.3
Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 20 April 1942. Image courtesy of Rosebud Archives. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. E
delstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 21 April 1942. Image courtesy of Rosebud Archives. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
PM’s readers met Barnaby Baxter on 14 April 1942 in an advertisement that shows him walking, looking up, and calling “Mr. O’Malley!” Several more ads followed before the strip made its debut on 20 April.
Johnson always claimed that O’Malley was not based on any particular person. Eight months after the strip’s debut, Johnson said, “None of my friends, in spite of what their friends have been saying, is Mr. O’Malley.” He continued, “O’Malley is at least a hundred different people. A lot of people think he’s W. C. Fields, but he isn’t. Still you couldn’t live in America and not put some of Fields into O’Malley. O’Malley is partly [New York] Mayor [Fiorello] La Guardia and his cigar and eyes are occasionally borrowed from Jimmy Savo,” a vaudeville comic and singer.4
For all the attention that Mr. O’Malley would ultimately receive, Johnson always considered Barnaby the star: “Even if Mr. O’Malley gets all the notice, it’s still Barnaby who is the hero. We’re all looking at Mr. O’Malley through Barnaby. He couldn’t exist without The Kid.” In late 1943, he answered the question of who had inspired Barnaby: “I don’t get anything much from kids. How can you? They are all different. And I don’t draw or write Barnaby for children. People who write for children usually write down to them. I don’t believe in that…. [W]hen it comes to knowing about children, it’s a terribly old thing to say, but everyone was once a child himself.”5
