The Cartoons of Evansville's Karl Kae Knecht

by James Lachlan MacLeod

  It can be seen then, that understanding the work of Karl Kae Knecht involves the minute examination of his cartoons all the way down to scrutinizing what Kay the elephant is up to in the corner. To fully appreciate his work, however, it is essential to step much farther back and locate him in a wider context. In order to do so, this book will briefly discuss the history of editorial cartooning and will examine the work of some of the giants in the field. It will then consider Knecht’s cartoons in a roughly chronological manner, dividing his career into three stages: the first section will examine his work from the Art Institute of Chicago through his start with the Evansville Courier in 1906 until the late 1930s; the third section will study his art from 1946 until his last daily cartoon in 1960; and in between will be an analysis of his cartoon output during his golden age of 1939–45. As will be argued, this relatively short period was the most important of Karl Kae Knecht’s professional life and, as such, deserves a more concentrated study than the other, longer periods. There will also be a discussion of Knecht’s use of racist stereotypes in some of his cartoons and the context for that. Before any of this is considered, however, it is important to provide an account of his life and career, and it is with a brief biography that this book will start.

  “Now then—All together,” December 9, 1941. UE/EVPL.

  Chapter 1

  THE LIFE OF KARL KAE KNECHT

  The son of Harry and Briget Knecht, Karl Kae Knecht was born on December 4, 1883, in Iroquois, South Dakota, a fact of which he was proud and to which he referred several times in his published art. His uncle Charles ran the general store, and his father—a quite accomplished artist—worked there; it is said that Karl was “the first white boy born after the town was started.” The Dakotas were territories at the time and did not become states until six years after his birth.24 He grew up and was educated in Freeport, Illinois, his father’s hometown. Graduating high school in 1902, he moved to Chicago, where he worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. He then saved up his money to enroll in a course of study at the highly prestigious Art Institute of Chicago; he was to study there, with interruptions, between 1903 and 1906, and he published his first-ever political cartoon in the Freeport Standard on April 1, 1905.25 On completion of the course, Knecht went to work on the night shift with the Wabash Railroad in Danville, Illinois. According to Ruth Ann Gregory, “During the days he slept little; [he] spent most of his time drawing up batches of cartoons which he mailed to newspaper editors all over the Middle West. One batch went to Victor Rosewater, editor of the Omaha [Nebraska] Bee, who recalled that Percy P. Carroll, Sunday editor of The Courier, was looking for a cartoonist. That’s how Mr. K. and The Courier got together.”26 The editor told him that he liked his work and invited him to Evansville in September 1906.

  Arriving at the rail depot at Eighth and Main Streets, he rode in a horse-drawn omnibus to the St. George Hotel with “nary an auto in sight.” He spent his first evening in Evansville at the theater—the Grand—to see a stage show called In Old Kentucky.27 It was his first Evansville theater experience, but it certainly was not to be the last. Since he found himself at a paper where “the staff was small and everyone became a jack of all trades,”28 he had to produce line drawings to illustrate news stories and features in addition to cartoons. Interestingly, the “first staff political cartoonist on a national morning paper” in Great Britain was hired just two years earlier. This was William Kerridge Haselden, who played a significant role in making the Daily Mirror a success;29 Knecht was to have a similar effect at the Courier. In 1933, Percy Carroll would say, “We engaged Karl Kae Knecht and I was always pleased, [as] no small part of the success of the Courier may be attributed to his cartoons. They are without a headache and good to the last drop.”30

  Knecht’s first published cartoon, April 1, 1905. UE.

  The first drop—Knecht’s historic first cartoon for the Courier, published on September 29, 1906—showed an Evansville congressional candidate, John H. Foster, being pulled up by President Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” into a hot air balloon labeled “To Washington.” Given his own subsequent interest in flight, it is interesting that his first cartoon featured a flight over the city; in 1913, he became probably the first person in Evansville to fly in an airplane, and six years later, he was to take the first aerial photograph of the city.31 This cartoon was the first of many Karl Kae Knecht cartoons to feature a caricature of a president, a politician who was “God’s gift to cartoonists…with his toothy grin and macho exuberance.”32 It was also the first of many to display—albeit crudely—an aerial view of the city of Evansville. Captioned “His Only Hope,” it was signed simply “Knecht.”33 Fascinatingly, unlike almost all of his eighteen thousand published cartoons, the original rough draft of this cartoon survives in the Archives at the University of Evansville. The four key components of the eventual published cartoon are identified with simple labels: “Balloon,” “Teddy in Basket,” “Teddy’s Big Stick” and “Foster.” Knecht himself later labeled the drawing “My First One.” As a start to his editorial cartooning career in Evansville, it was auspicious. In contrast to the printed cartoon, Knecht’s rough sketch is fluid and vibrant, as almost all of his hand-drawn pieces were. The fact that there is a dynamic quality to the sketch that is missing in the published version is perhaps a result of the fact that for the newspaper version he was using the chalk plate technique.

  Knecht’s first Courier cartoon, September 29, 1906. UE.

  Knecht’s first cartoon sketch, September 29, 1906. UE/EVPL.

  Chalk plate was a laborious, old-fashioned and difficult technique with which Knecht was largely unfamiliar. Although he had seen his father use chalk plates, he had never used the method himself until he arrived in Evansville. It involved what amounted to engraving an image on “a baked solution of chalk and sodium silicate”34 on a steel plate; this served as a mold from which a metal cast called a stereotype could be made, and as Charles William Hackleman said, “the quality and character of the results obtained in printing from stereotypes made from chalk plates depends entirely upon the artists’ ability to sketch or engrave the design upon the plate.”35 The engraving was done with special steel tools, although Knecht once said, “I’ve used a hat pin when I was hard pressed.”36 Some fifty years later, he described the cartoon-making process in these early years with words so vivid that the reader can almost feel that they are looking over his shoulder at the dingy old Courier offices at 125–27 Main Street:

  I would make my cartoon on copy paper, exact size, just a pencil dummy sketchy style. Get an o.k. or if “NO*Kay,” submit others or use [Courier editor Percy] Carroll’s idea—if suggested. Placing that over a “chalk plate” I would go over the lines with pencil, lightly. That would make a faint impression on chalk. Then with steel pointed “styluses”…of varied size points from fine one, ⅛ to ¼ inch or more. The chalk [was] about ¼ inch thick. I would then cut lines through chalk to steel base but not enough to scratch steel. Could cross-hatch, shade, etc. to heart’s content, or with wide points make solids. Faint chalk left often gave crayon effect. Blowing chalk all the while. Had an ordinary apron. Later one like a dentist or MD uses with high neck and tied in back. Could not smoke as you worked…too much blowing. Results would surprise—lines sharp and clear. Rarely was a plate faulty—if so would break off in spots. I even patched some such with saliva and chalk dust. Finished, would take to the stereotypers. They warmed plate on edge of molten metal pot. Then placed it in casting box, just as they do matrix. Poured molten metal in and presto there was the metal cut.37

  There were not many newspapers still using this technique by 1906. Phil Ensley has said that Knecht was “one of the last to use chalk plate,” and according to the distinguished historian of cartooning Richard E. Marschall, the printed cartoons that emerged from the chalk plate technique “were a confusion of awkward, angular lines.” The Courier was to use chalk plates until about 1920.38 Almost all of Karl Kae Knecht’s early print
ed cartoons in the Courier look somewhat awkward and stiff, and it seems that although this might partly be explained by the roughness of a young artist’s earliest work, at least some of the blame for that can be laid on the unfamiliar and challenging medium with which he was being asked to work. The artist himself acknowledged both aspects; a small handwritten note in the scrapbook of his early cartoons says by way of explanation, “These all on ‘chalk plates.’ Attribute some to crudeness.”39 And like all great artists, he mastered his craft. Twenty-five years later, former Courier co-owner H.C. Murphy observed, “With the passage of time…the K.K.K. creations adorning the first page became surer; as the artist’s technique grew more perfect and his interpretation of significant local events became more acute and accurate.”40

  One of Knecht’s hand-drawn journals, May 14, 1909. University of Southern Indiana Archives (USI).

  After two years in Evansville, Knecht met Jannie Ellwood Moore, and ten years later, they married; the marriage was to last until his death, fifty-four years later. They had met “after Mr. K peevishly cartooned Jannie and her friend the morning after they’d appeared at the Majestic Theater wearing the enormous picture hats that annoyed him so on lady showgoers.”41 Cartoons, clearly, can have powerful and presumably unintended consequences. Throughout 1909, Knecht kept an almost daily visual journal, each day marked by beautiful little hand-drawn and water-colored images, most of which revolve around his relationship with Jannie.42 They got married on August 22, 1918, in a simple early morning ceremony at her parents’ home that “was marked by the absence of music and attendants and the usual pomp and circumstance of weddings” and was attended only by their immediate families.43 In a cartoon published the day after their wedding, he depicted Cupid at his Courier drawing desk, pointing to a series of sketches of hearts, arrows and lovebirds, with a little drawing of the couple on their wedding day. Pinned to the wall behind the desk is a real photo of Jannie and their dog. Phil Ensley believes that “it was her loyalty to family in Evansville that may have kept Karl here in spite of offers of better jobs elsewhere. If her happiness lay in being here, that was where he wanted to be; for him it was not a sacrifice.”44 Marie Horton Woods, who worked with Knecht for thirty-five years, said that of all his many interests, “the first of these was Jannie.” She described her as “the lovely lady who has been his understanding companion, and his sweetheart across the years.”45 They lived at 31 Adams Avenue, in what is now called the Haynie’s Corner Arts District. The couple had no children and were able to travel widely both in the United States and abroad. Jannie died in 1979 at the age of ninety.46

  Cupid at Knecht’s drawing desk the day after his wedding, August 23, 1918. UE/EVPL.

  In 1908, he began taking his art on the road, with his immensely popular Chalk Talks; these shows—during which Knecht drew “funny pictures and cartoons with colored crayons”47—were a regular event around the tristate area until his materials were lost in the 1937 Evansville flood. He delivered these performances to numerous schools, organizations, businesses, churches and civic groups, including in 1918 to the Evansville Woman’s Rotary Club; this was, said Knecht, “my first before an audience composed entirely of ladies.” He described what the performance involved: “They put me right to work. I told them how cartoons are made and what wonderful men the cartoonists are and all that—and then I drew some pictures for them, patriotic and a number pertaining to ladies. They laughed and applauded and I guess I pleased for Miss Edythe Wells, the president, thanked me on behalf of the club. It was doubly kind of her for I had dared to sketch a caricature of her—the only local sketch.”48 In 1949, on a trip during which he met President Truman and sketched him in the Rose Garden of the White House, he delivered a Chalk Talk at the Library of Congress Auditorium in Washington, D.C.49

  Knecht draws “Mr. Public” during one of his Chalk Talks, circa 1933. Willard Library (WL).

  He resurrected the Chalk Talks to entertain healthy American soldiers in 1943 and injured servicemen in 1944, but this was far from his first effort on behalf of America’s wounded warriors. He had performed Chalk Talks for the wounded during World War I, at the West Baden hospital near French Lick, at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Hospital at Boehne Camp and at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Evansville.50 In 1918, he had launched an appeal for canes to help wounded men and had gathered over three hundred by December. As the Courier reported, “The wounded soldiers who are at the government hospital at West Baden, Ind., formerly the big hotel at the resort, are now hobbling about or walking over the pretty grounds swinging canes which the people of Evansville and nearby towns sent them through the appeal of Courier’s cartoonist K. K. Knecht.”51 The canes, which were “for the most part, good, heavy, substantial ones” and which sometimes came from prominent local families, were also later handed out as Christmas gifts to the wounded men.52 During World War II, in addition to drawing over one thousand cartoons that certainly could be said to contribute to the war effort, he performed at the USO club at Eighth and Main Streets, in what was described as “one of the more popular of the Sunday evening entertainment series.”53 Strikingly, Knecht also delivered a Chalk Talk to the Lincoln USO, which in heavily segregated Evansville was located in the traditional black neighborhood and was for African American servicemen only.54 The station hospital at Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, witnessed a Chalk Talk for “ambulatory patients” in February 1944, and in October, he presented one at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and another at the veteran’s administration facility in Danville, Illinois, that was described as “a grand success.”55

  In 1910, Karl Kae Knecht created a figure to represent the common everyman—a figure called “Mr. Public” who, albeit with some evolution in terms of appearance, would go on to appear in hundreds of his cartoons. Bald, bespectacled and usually wearing a hat, he would become one of Knecht’s most distinctive creations. Most of the time, he would represent Evansville, but he often stood in for a wider American population. He first appeared on March 1, 1910. It is particularly interesting because the person who often gets the credit for inventing such a cartoon everyman is Vaughn Shoemaker, who, according to the New York Times, was “an editorial cartoonist who created the character John Q. Public…[who] represented the beleaguered American taxpayer. The character appeared first in The Chicago Daily News, the paper on which Mr. Shoemaker began his career in 1922.”56 In turn, Shoemaker was probably drawing on a character created in 1900 for the Hearst newspapers by Frederick Burr Opper called “Mr. Common People”—a “meek, little, puppet-like figure…a foolish, frightened, insignificant dwarf ” forever oppressed and preyed upon by the greedy and the powerful.57 What makes Knecht’s Mr. Public distinctive is that while Opper and Shoemaker’s figures were rather weak—“perennially suspended between bewilderment that their left pants pocket had been picked and dread that their right was about to go next”58—Knecht’s was often a proactive and dynamic player. He plays an equal role with FDR and Uncle Sam in the first post–Pearl Harbor cartoon discussed earlier and in one of Knecht’s most famous cartoons, published on February 10, 1937, he takes the lead in the battle to clean up the city after the devastating flood of 1937. Far from being weak, here Mr. Public displays his bulging biceps; he has “3…2…1” tattooed on one arm and “THE WILL” tattooed on the other. He holds two mops and boldly challenges the reader—into whose eyes he is looking directly—by saying, “Now, watch me go to it.”

  “Mr. Public” cleans up after the flood, February 10, 1937. UE/EVPL.

  Knecht used his art to speak as an activist on behalf of a host of local causes, and it is hard to imagine that they could have had a more prominent advocate than the man whose cartoon appeared in the middle of the front page of the newspaper virtually every day from 1906 to 1952. Just to cite one representative example, he was a lifelong supporter of the American Red Cross from its earliest days in Evansville. “When the Evansville Chapter was established in 1917, Knecht drew ‘Fall In,’…a cartoon emphasizing the need fo
r Red Cross members. As the years passed, Knecht took an interest in the various services the Red Cross provided and published cartoons which helped increase emergency funding…Through his cartoons Knecht stressed what individuals could do to help the agency, and people reacted by giving to the Red Cross Relief Fund.”59 On his retirement in 1960, the executive director of the Evansville chapter said to him, “Your messages were always very impressive. Thank you for all the times you have told the Red Cross story.”60 His cartoons brought welcome attention—and funds—to local events, churches, clubs, organizations and causes both large and small.61

  Between the two world wars, Knecht made two enormous contributions to the permanent shape of Evansville through his activism on behalf of the establishment of two of the great and enduring institutions of the city—the University of Evansville (then Evansville College) and Mesker Park Zoo. When Evansville was attempting to get a college in 1917—in fact to move an existing college from Moores Hill, Indiana, to Evansville—the key event was a remarkable public fundraising drive that raised $500,000 between April 15 and May 3.62 Knecht threw his weight behind the campaign in an extraordinary way, drawing cartoons related to the campaign on thirteen successive days, from April 23 to May 5. It was almost certainly the most focused cartoon campaign on a single subject of his fifty-four-year career. The cartoons made a very powerful argument for the necessity of a college in the city—indeed, the first one, which showed the “kick-off ” of the campaign, was starkly captioned “A Game We Must Win.” Amusingly, the final cartoon in the series, after the dramatic but successful completion of the campaign, was entitled “Now Then—Back to Other Things” and showed a variety of other potential cartoon topics—“The War, The Garden, Baseball, Etc.” ringing the doorbell and waiting impatiently for a figure called “Evansville” to emerge from where he was admiring his new “College” mortarboard. It is, of course, impossible to quantify exactly how important a role Knecht’s activism played in the successful execution of Evansville’s most noteworthy fundraising effort—the biggest one before this was a mere $150,000—but it is fair to say that his cartoons communicated the message in the clearest way possible.63 In 1953, the grateful college granted him an honorary doctorate, and in the citation, it was said that he had been “in the vanguard of that courageous group together with George Clifford, Benjamin Bosse, Howard Roosa, Alfred F. Hughes and many others who had the vision to bring the College to Evansville.”64