The Cartoons of Evansville's Karl Kae Knecht

by James Lachlan MacLeod

  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2017 by James Lachlan MacLeod

  All rights reserved

  First published 2017

  e-book edition 2017

  ISBN 978.1.43965.945.8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953494

  print edition ISBN 978.1.62585.838.2

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For Jessica, Eilidh, Calum and Gavin, the loves of my life.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. The Life of Karl Kae Knecht

  2. Racial Stereotypes in the Cartoons of Karl Kae Knecht

  3. A Very Brief History of the Editorial Cartoon

  4. Cartoons 1903–39

  5. Cartoons 1939–45

  6. Cartoons 1946–60

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book was only possible with the help of those local archivists who protect our precious historical legacy. I would like to acknowledge Tom Lonnberg, Pat Sides, Kathy Bartelt, Shane White, Steven Mussett and Jennifer Greene, all of whom have graciously helped at various stages of this project. This book is built on the pioneering work of Dr Phil Ensley, which was what first drew my attention to Karl Kae Knecht.

  The Karl Kae Knecht Collection at the University of Evansville Archives was an incredible and essential source for this work. I also acknowledge the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library; the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science; the Willard Library; and the University of Southern Indiana, whose physical and digitized collections of local newspapers, artifacts, photographs and cartoons from this period made this research practical. I am extremely grateful to them all for permission to reproduce the images that appear in this book.

  I would also like to thank my colleagues in the History Department of the University of Evansville and Dr. Ray Lutgring, dean of arts and sciences, for their advice, support and encouragement. An arts, research and teaching grant from the University of Evansville supported some of my research. Drew Robards was a wonderful research assistant, working on the World War II cartoons, and Ed Mack has been a thoughtful and helpful editor at The History Press.

  Most of all, I want to thank my own family, who now know more about Karl Kae Knecht than they ever wanted to. To the four of you, with my warmest love, this book is dedicated.

  It goes without saying that any errors in this book are my own responsibility.

  INTRODUCTION

  The great American cartoonist Syd Hoff once said, “Not everybody can love a political cartoonist. If you want to be loved by everybody, don’t become a political cartoonist.”1 This certainly seems to be advice that applies in almost every case, but one clear exception to this rule is the Evansville Courier’s editorial cartoonist Karl Kae Knecht. “An intensely human man who never let praise go to his head,”2 Knecht seems to have been someone who was loved by everybody; indeed, the editorial comment in the Sunday Courier and Press the day he died began with the words, “I never heard anybody say a word against him.”3 On “Karl Kae Knecht Day” in Evansville, July 21, 1954, nearly five hundred people at the Vendome Hotel came to their feet and roared their approval when the Evansville Press columnist Bish Thompson declared, “Through his newspaper work, a daily visitor in our homes for 48 years, Karl Kae Knecht, friend to all men, friend to all animals; a man who never did a mean thing, or said a mean word, in his life…without a doubt, [he is] Evansville’s most beloved citizen.”4

  What makes this truly remarkable is that Karl Kae Knecht was engaged for his entire professional life in a career that is almost synonymous with meanness and nastiness—a profession that has been called, among other things, “the art of ill will” and “the ungentlemanly art.”5 “It’s my job, as a satirical cartoonist,” said Martin Rowson, “to give offence.”6 On another occasion, Rowson said, “The idea of giving offence is integral to the medium.”7 Victor Navasky perhaps expressed it best:

  Under certain circumstances cartoons and caricatures have historically had and continue to have a unique emotional power and capacity to enrage, upset and discombobulate otherwise rational people and groups and drive them to disproportionate-to-the-occasion, sometimes violent, emotionally charged behavior. I’m talking about everything from overheated and irrational letters to the editor and subscription cancellations to censorship, prosecution, incarceration, and…violence and murder.8

  Knecht’s output of editorial cartoons was prodigious—he had created at least eighteen thousand by the time he retired—and furthermore, he drew the vast majority of these cartoons for one newspaper in one city. It seems almost incredible that this could be done without making lifelong enemies in a city that was at times famous for its dirty and ruthless politics, and yet Karl Kae Knecht managed to do it.

  He drew his first daily Evansville cartoon for the Evansville Courier on September 29, 1906, and his last regular one on June 1, 1960, and during the fifty-four years in between, his cartoons became an integral part of public life in the city. One of his obituaries stated that his “Triple-K Initialed cartoons were synonymous with The Courier for more than 50 years.”9 He was widely known as “the dean of American cartoonists” and was, for example, introduced that way at the 1960 meeting of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.10 Knecht’s cartoons appeared on the front page of the newspaper nearly every day until 1952, thereafter running inside, usually on the editorial page. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in cartooning in 1944–45, and according to the historian Phil Ensley, “his fifty-four year career with [the Courier] was the longest tenure of any cartoonist drawing for a single newspaper in the history of American cartooning.”11 The collections of the presidential libraries of Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower all include Knecht cartoons; the Truman Library has thirty-six of his cartoons in its collection. A recent edited collection of Truman cartoons from distinguished cartoonists based all over the country includes no fewer than nine by Knecht.12 As can be seen, Truman wrote to Knecht to thank him for the gift of one particular cartoon in 1948. His scrapbooks contain letters of appreciation from the British queen, senior White House officials, governors, congressmen and judges, as well as notes signed by H.M. Warner of Warner Brothers, Nelson D. Rockefeller and Jimmy Hoffa. He might well be the only person who ever received complimentary letters from both Rockefeller and Hoffa. David Low, then of the Manchester Guardian and quite possibly the greatest cartoonist of the twentieth century, said of him in 1954, “Long may he continue to enjoy the regard and appreciation earned by his kindly personality and long career as [a] political cartoonist.”13

  Karl Kae Knecht at his desk, 1906. University of Evansville Archives (UE).

  A letter from Truman in response to one of Knecht’s cartoons, December 1948. UE/ Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library (EVPL).

  What made Karl Kae Knecht such a remarkable man was that he was a rare polymath who excelled in many different areas. He was not just a cartoonist, then, but also a p
ioneering photographer, a fluent writer, a circus enthusiast, a zoo proponent, a champion of air travel, an effective organizer and a successful campaigner. He had a “phenomenal” memory—his friend and colleague Courier columnist Joe Aaron said of him in 1960, “He comes as close to being a walking encyclopedia as any person I have ever met. He is a complete reference book on Evansville, dating back more than half a century.”14 He even ran for the Indiana legislature in 1928 as a Democrat; it is perhaps fortunate for Evansville that this was the year of the infamous Hoover landslide, as Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, a Roman Catholic who opposed Prohibition, led the party ticket to ignominious defeat nationwide.15 It might be argued that his failing to achieve elected office was the best thing that could have happened for Evansville, as it allowed Knecht to focus on all the other things he was to do.

  As much as anything, Karl Kae Knecht was an extremely potent activist for the interests of the city of Evansville. His good friend, the great Evansville civic leader Benjamin Bosse—mayor from 1912 until 1922—famously said, “When everybody boosts, everybody wins,” and Knecht was a lifelong booster for his adopted city.16 When Knecht boosted, everybody in Evansville won. Phil Ensley said in a 1995 interview, “Although he was a remarkable cartoonist, I would say that Karl Kae Knecht’s greatest contribution was not to the world of cartooning, but to the city of Evansville. He supported almost every major civic organization and institution in Evansville—partially through his cartoon work—but also in his life. He was a ‘booster’ in the real sense of the word.”17 On his death, the Sunday Courier and Press observed:

  During his 53 years as a cartoonist for The Evansville Courier, Mr. Knecht toiled incessantly for the benefit of Evansville and the Tri-State area. His accomplishments were so manifold casual acquaintances found it difficult [to believe that] they all stemmed from this slight, gentle man who somehow found time from his regular chores at the newspaper to found an international organization of circus fans, help start and develop Mesker Zoo, serve on various city and civic boards, travel extensively and become involved in scores of projects for the betterment of man.18

  It is quite possible that his only flaw in the eyes of those who knew him was sending illegible editorial copy to the Courier composing room—the printers’ committee complained in 1952 about trying to read “some of the copy Knecht sent out which was first typed and then changed in many places in longhand.”19

  Karl Kae Knecht, who had a lifelong love of elephants, was so well known in his adopted city that in 1936 a piece of mail was received at the post office that simply had a drawing of an elephant on the front, along with the names of the city and the state: “With naught but an elephant, it was delivered to Karl Kae Knecht, the Courier cartoonist.”20 He was active in many different aspects of public life, but it is as a cartoonist that he is best remembered. And it is his cartoons that are the focus of this book. His professional cartooning career spanned a remarkable time in history, beginning in the Progressive era and not ending until the birth of the modern age in 1960, with Prohibition, the Great Depression, the two world wars, the Cold War and much else in between. In 1995, it was said of his work:

  Karl Kae Knecht’s drawings, graphic and full of detail, moved Evansville Courier readers with pictures of human frailty and need. He scolded bad drivers and spotlighted corruption. He poked fun at current events, boosted the community when things were bad, and alarmed the public to issues that affected their health. Knecht pressed many an issue in his 54 years with the newspaper. During wartimes he caricatured national leaders and commented on world politics. During campaigns and elections, he depicted local and national figures as he saw them, making observations on what they stood for.21

  The world that he entered as a cartoonist in 1906 was almost unrecognizable by the time he put away his pens, brushes and drawing table in 1960, and his cartoons are an enduring and important contemporary record of a changing world.

  It might indeed be more accurate to say “worlds” rather than “world” because in many ways, Karl Kae Knecht was observing and commenting on three concentric worlds: Evansville, the United States and the wider global community. Sometimes his Evansville material paid no attention to the other two worlds—it could be intensely inward looking and local. As he wisecracked in 1955, “The average reader often loses interest in the United Nations or the cold war, but he’s always interested when people start wearing shorts on downtown streets, etc.”22 Some of his cartoons dealt with American issues but had no international scope, while at other times, he took as his topic a foreign issue that seemed not to involve the United States at all. There were also moments when he spoke as a citizen of the world and did so eloquently and memorably—such as his cartoon from 1911 commenting on the sheer scale of modern oceangoing ships, in which a Titanic-style liner towers over the ghost of Columbus’s Santa Maria. Another striking example is the January 31, 1948 drawing that marked the assassination of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi: a plain white cloth with one bloodstain ascends to the heavens from India on beams of light. Of course his cartoons frequently straddled more than one of these worlds, as many of his local cartoons were also a reflection of wider state or national or even international issues.

  A vast modern ship contrasted with old ships, 1911. UE/EVPL.

  And then there were these moments when he managed to make the three worlds merge almost seamlessly. This is most unmistakably seen during the period that might well be Knecht’s golden age—World War II—when he clearly believed that the smallest action taking place in Evansville was helping with the American war effort and, by extension, affecting the shape of the world that was to emerge from the war. Knecht’s editorial cartoons during the war reflected a belief that the stakes were extremely high, and indeed, over the duration of the war his cartoons focused on the conflict almost every single day. They promoted activism in the sense that they frequently pointed out what readers could do and strongly urged them to do it. Crushing cans, collecting scrap metal, driving in a way that conserved tires, buying war bonds and even being quiet to allow night-shift workers to sleep were all things that he encouraged his fellow citizens to do to help ensure that the Evansville war effort, and therefore the American war effort, were successful and that the triple threats of Italian fascism, Japanese militarism and German Nazism would be defeated.

  A bloodstained cloth marking the assassination of Gandhi, January 31, 1948. UE/EVPL.

  There was never any ambiguity about his view of these three enemies, either; the very first cartoon that he drew of all three after Pearl Harbor appeared on December 12, 1941, and depicted them as three of the most nefarious villains in literary history, under the caption “‘Double, Double Toil And Trouble: Fire Burn, And Cauldron Bubble.’—Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.” It was a powerful and memorable image that underlined the seriousness of the situation; while many of his later cartoons would mock and belittle the three dictators mercilessly, this one emphasized the ominous power that they represented. Far from being objects of fun or derision, the three enemy leaders were sinister and terrifying; Hirohito and Mussolini in particular were the stuff of nightmares. This war, Knecht seemed to be saying to his readers, was going to be a battle against the forces of darkness. And there was no guarantee offered in this cartoon that the battle would be won.

  As has been said, however, Knecht frequently lampooned the three dictators, presenting them as comic and unthreatening objects of ridicule, and this ability to project different tones at different times was certainly one of Knecht’s greatest talents. Over the course of thousands of drawings and over seven decades, his cartoons were at times light and gentle and at others dark and harsh. He could be an impishly enthusiastic booster for the city and the country, but he could also be a fierce and relentless critic. He wrestled with the great serious issues of his time—war, the Great Depression, needless accidents, disease, Prohibition and political corruption—but he also drew numerous cartoons that celebrated c
ivic pride, advertised local events and commented on whimsical little tidbits of trivia. And even on the most serious days, his trademark little elephant, named Kay, adorned a corner with an often funny comment or posture; she appeared almost every day from October 1928 onward.

  “‘Double, Double Toil And Trouble: Fire Burn, And Cauldron Bubble.’—Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth,” December 12, 1941. UE/EVPL.

  A wonderful example of this is his first cartoon after Pearl Harbor, published on December 9, 1941, and captioned “Now then—All together.” It is a powerful and prophetic image showing Uncle Sam, President Roosevelt and Knecht’s Evansville everyman, Mr. Public—who for this occasion is labeled “Every American”—working in a blacksmith shop. Sleeves are rolled up, and their faces are stern as they labor in front of the fiery forge of war. Uncle Sam holds steady a piece of sheet metal that is labeled “Blue, White and Red” while FDR and “Every American” strike the metal with hammers. It should be noted how rugged the individuals look and that Uncle Sam and FDR appear to be much larger in height than “Every American.” The cartoon is an excellent encapsulation of how the American war effort would indeed unfold—the country, the public and the federal government would roll their sleeves up and get on with the extremely difficult job of winning the war. This was particularly true in Evansville, where politicians, businesses, organized labor and regular people worked together extremely effectively to get a complex and challenging job done.23 And down in the bottom right corner is Kay the elephant. She, too, is rolling her sleeves up and getting ready to help. It is a moment of gentle humor in a cartoon of considerable gravitas, easing the tension but also adding emphasis to the central point of the cartoon. It is classic example of Karl Kae Knecht’s art.