The Cartoons of Evansville's Karl Kae Knecht

by James Lachlan MacLeod

  African Americans increasingly moved to Evansville after the Civil War, and they were heavily concentrated in one neighborhood of the city. By the end of the century, “about 50 percent of the new arrivals settled around Eighth and Canal streets and Lincoln Avenue, an area that came to be known as Baptist Town. Living conditions there were poor—some of the shacks were hardly habitable. Drinking water came from uncovered cisterns, there were open privies in backyards, and rats scurried in and out of garbage heaps. The mortality rate was high.”92 This slum area was cleared and a public housing project called Lincoln Gardens was erected between 1936 and 1938—174 buildings were demolished on a thirteen-acre site.93 The project was carried out as part of the New Deal by the Public Works Administration at a cost of over $800,000 and provided 191 living units in 16 buildings.94 One indication of the level of institutional racism that Evansville’s black population encountered can be found in a front-page Courier story on October 7, 1906—nine days into Knecht’s tenure with the paper. The front-page headline is about a series of lynchings and attempted lynchings in locations ranging from Bloomington, Indiana, to Basin, Mississippi. The story describes in detail one that took place near Mobile, Alabama, and there is not a single word of condemnation for the people who carried out the lynching. In fact, the paper calmly says, “The crimes committed [by the lynched men]… were revenged by a party of forty-five men this afternoon.…Robinson, who committed the first crime that startled the people of Mobile and worked them up into a fury was first strung up.”95 The next day’s paper carried a further five front-page stories related to lynch mobs, again without any critical comment.

  Racist images from Art Institute of Chicago, 1905–6. UE/EVPL.

  There can be no denying that racist images appear in Knecht’s work, especially in the early years in his depictions of African Americans and, during World War II, in his depiction of the Japanese. As early as 1905–6, in his Art Institute of Chicago drawings, there is clear evidence of the employment of racist tropes and stereotypes. Astonishingly, two of his first five cartoons for the Courier, and five of the first twenty-seven, involve racist depictions of black people. “You Know What You Eat” on October 1 is bad enough, but “A Shameful Spectacle,” published on October 2, is even worse. In just the fifth cartoon he drew for his Evansville audience, Knecht depicts six African Americans in a manner that is itself “a shameful spectacle”—so stereotyped and crude that the cartoon is hard to look at. His October 24 depiction of prisoners captioned “If You Were Sheriff ” is just as deeply disturbing, as is the cartoon that appeared the following day with the same caption. All these images largely speak for themselves. So, too, do the drawings from his 1909 notebooks, which, with the addition of very unsubtle color and crude rendering of African American speech patterns, seem, if anything, to be even worse.

  “A Shameful Spectacle,” October 2, 1906. UE.

  It did not end there. In 1937, he drew a cartoon that dealt with the construction of the Lincoln Gardens area. The Blue Goose that he references was a tavern in Baptist Town, at Governor and Douglas Streets, once called a “notorious dive” and “disreputable negro joint”; according to the Courier, “The Blue Goose is not only the worst saloon in Evansville. It is in all probability the toughest dive in the state.”96 This cartoon is undeniably racist in its depiction of African American stereotypes; stereotypical language, postures and facial features abound, and many of the tropes that he deployed thirty years earlier are still there.

  “If You Were Sheriff,” October 24, 1906. UE.

  All of these drawings by Knecht fit very much the definition offered by the historian Roger Fischer: “The genre was grandly racist: caricatures replete with grossly exaggerated lips, huge splayed feet, and kinky hair; tortured dialect imitative of minstrelsy; and situational satire that sank…low.”97 The images seem close to the clichés of blackface minstrelsy, “the most popular form of entertainment in the United States in the 19th century,”98 and are very clearly part of a staggeringly universal cultural depiction of African Americans that Joseph Boskin summed up as “Sambo”:

  In journals, weeklies, newspapers, magazines, travel reports, diaries, brochures, and broadsides, there was Sambo, cited for his antics. His style filled the literary field in novels, short stories, children’s tales, dime novels, essays, pamphlets, and leaflets. Visually, Sambo appeared in posters, on sheet music covers, post-cards, wooden pegboards, in illustrations, paintings, cartoons, comic strips, children’s games, on postage stamps, in advertisements, on magazine covers, playing cards.…The material culture was full of him.…It was a testament to his ubiquitous talents that no part of the culture went untouched.99

  Racist images in Knecht’s notebook, August 6, 1909. USI.

  Knecht read a variety of weekly magazines—such as Puck and Judge—that at the turn of the century regularly ran such drawings of “Sambo,” and it is hard to imagine that such racist norms did not bleed into his consciousness as a cartoonist. It would have been the path of least resistance, and it is also fair to say that cartoonists deal in oversimplifications and stereotypes every day. The problem for a white cartoonist using stereotypes while drawing black people, however, is that race becomes the center of the story. In the words of Ruth Thibodeau: “The very human characteristics drawn upon by the cartoonist to portray any individual, regardless of race, are also likely at times to have strong associations with a particular group, such as blacks. For the white cartoonist wishing to portray blacks in nonracist ways, these tenacious associations are bound to be problematic…[and] the possibility of the cartoon assuming a racist tone, at least in the eyes of some viewers, becomes even more probable.”100 Whether the “racist tone” in the cartoons of Karl Kae Knecht is a result of conscious or unconscious racism is hard—indeed impossible—to say, of course, but it reflects a pattern, one that is ultimately damaging. In the words of Roger Fischer, “However benign the intentions of reception of such ethnic caricature, it surely helped create and reinforce over the course of a generation an indelible impression that the droll darky…[was]—by dint of congenital shortcomings of intellect, culture, or character—forever barred from membership in the American family.”101

  Lincoln Gardens to be built, 1937. UE/EVPL.

  The second area of “ethnic caricature” employed by Knecht was very specific to time and situation—it was his portrayal of Japanese people during World War II. The four sample Japanese faces shown on page 47 are almost breathtakingly racist to modern eyes, but they are a very fair representation of his routine portrayal. His April 24, 1943 cartoon represents the Japanese as a rat and has Kay saying, “Once a Jap always a Rat.” Knecht’s September 20, 1944 cartoon depicts the Japanese as an unidentifiable creature swinging in the trees, but the caption reveals it to be an ape—“It’ll Be Harder to Catch an Ape in the Trees Than Out in the Open.” This book could quite literally have been filled with such racist images from this period—of the scores of images Knecht drew of the Japanese during the war, virtually every single one evidenced racial stereotyping.

  Four racist images of Japanese people from World War II. UE/EVPL.

  The Japanese depicted as a rat, April 24, 1943. UE/EVPL.

  It is easy—and justified—to call out the racism evident in these cartoons, but it must also be said that Knecht is working in a context where such things were commonplace and absolutely unremarkable. The immensely popular Admiral Bill Halsey, “a national figure” as the U.S. Navy’s commander of the Third Fleet, could speak in the following terms: “He began early in the war referring to the Japanese as ‘rats.’ ‘Kill Japs, they’re rats,’ he often said. As the war progressed they became ‘bastards’ for a while, and then he switched to ‘monkeys.’ Finally, by war’s end, the Japanese had become to Halsey ‘lousy yellow rat monkey bastards.’102 For influential columnist Walter Winchell, “the Japs are savages,” and Representative John Rankin of Mississippi referred to them—in the congressional record—as “savage apes” and in an Evansvi
lle Press story as “these brutal apes.”103 In 1945, Admiral Halsey was quoted in the Evansville Press (without comment or criticism) saying that he believed that “the Japanese race” originated from sexual intercourse between men and apes.104 Even Hoosier everyman Ernie Pyle, whose columns ran in the Evansville Press, said, “The Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive.”105 Such words translated into action. Japanese bodies were mutilated by American servicemen—ears, teeth, hands, bones and even skulls were taken as trophies, and as recently as 2015, there was at least one garishly decorated Japanese trophy skull residing in Evansville.106

  The Japanese depicted as an ape, September 20, 1944. UE/EVPL.

  Knecht’s cartoons clearly fit into this environment, in which the Japanese were dehumanized and consistently presented as savages, rats and apes. As a cartoonist, he was most definitely not alone, and this racist dehumanization was propagated by some of the most famous names in cartoon history. Herblock, arguably America’s greatest cartoonist of the twentieth century, depicted the Japanese as squinting, grinning and bucktoothed in a comment on the Sino-Japanese war of 1937.107 Theodore Geisel, better known to generations of children as Dr. Seuss, drew “scurrilous” anti-Japanese cartoons in which he portrayed them as, among other things, alley cats and an organ grinder’s monkey. This being Dr. Seuss, there are also various creatures of uncertain provenance, including something that looks like an orangutan with elongated crustacean claws wearing a topcoat and top hat.108 Arthur Szyk, one of the most talented cartoonists of the century, “sank to racist stereotypes when describing the Japanese leadership.…The Japanese, as was the case with Seuss and others, simply fit racial stereotypes.”109 The great David Low drew the “Jap” as a monkey swinging by its tail in two well-known cartoons entitled “East or West?” and “Strain on the Tail” and drew on a host of ethnic stereotypes in a cartoon called “Japanese balancing act,” and the brilliant Leslie Illingworth drew Tojo as a bucktoothed and bespectacled monkey looking ridiculous in an ill-fitting governor’s hat and coat.110 Britain’s most prominent cartoon magazine, Punch, published a famous cartoon in January 1942 of Japanese apes swinging through the jungle.111 And ShiPu Wang has spoken recently of the “many racist representations in the print media that targeted U.S. residents of Japanese descent. These images often featured a similar monolithic representation of Japanese features: squat face, round-rimmed glasses, squinty eyes, and grimacing buckteeth that in some posters look like those of vampires.”112 That description applies perfectly to virtually every single example of Knecht’s portrayal of Japanese people during the war.

  In conclusion, there is no escaping the fact that Karl Kae Knecht drew many cartoons that contain racist imagery. There is also no escape from the fact that the United States in this era was a fundamentally racist country—as were many others—and that he was a product of the times in which he lived. While there is no evidence that he was himself a racist, the uncomfortable racist images that he leaves behind are a powerful and sobering reminder of the country and the world that he spent his life documenting.

  Chapter 3

  A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF THE EDITORIAL CARTOON

  Most leaders consider the cartoon’s ability to undermine political legitimacy a genuine threat. Consequently, the history of the political cartoon is shadowed by attempts to silence their artists. Both Aristotle and Aristophanes describe the torture of a cartoonist named Pauson for his attack on Greek leadership. French artist Honoré Daumier was sentenced to jail for his satirical derision of King Louis Philippe and the aristocracy. Adolf Hitler ordered that the name of English cartoonist David Low be put on the Gestapo’s list of people to be exterminated. More recently, Kurdish cartoonist Dogan Guzal was sentenced to 16 months in high-security prison in August 1998 for depicting his government as weak. One of the most famous silencing of a political cartoonist was the assassination of Naji Ali in 1987 for his criticism of Arab and Palestinian leaders.113

  Like the remarks of Victor Navasky quoted earlier, these words of Ilan Danjoux from 2007 make it clear to us that cartooning is no joke. Cartoons have helped to change the world, and activist cartoonists have earned plaudits and awards; however, their efforts have also brought them criticism, censorship, torture, incarceration and even death.114 In January 2015, this message was made manifest when the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris were attacked and five cartoonists were murdered.115 Many would argue that the existence of cartoons is a sign of a healthy society. The Venezuelan cartoonist Rayma Suprani once said, “Cartoons are a thermometer for a country’s freedoms,”116 and this is true both at a national and a local level. In order to fully understand Karl Kae Knecht, then, it is vital to understand that what he was doing was engaging in a profoundly serious endeavor, one that has been in existence for thousands of years.

  The first cartoonist was probably a caveman mocking his adversaries by daubing on a cave wall, although this is admittedly hard to prove. Karl Kae Knecht, himself keenly interested in the history of the genre, argued in 1940 that “cartoons were a means of expression before man learned to express his thoughts in the form of printed or written symbols…when man expressed himself in crude drawings on cave walls.”117 It seems likely the first one that can be authenticated, albeit with some questions, is the artist who produced an image of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton well over three thousand years ago; there are many other examples on Egyptian sarcophagi, monuments and gravesites.118 The Chinese, the Greeks and the Romans certainly left many examples, and in Europe during the Middle Ages, images that look a lot like cartoons adorned both books and buildings. Medieval cathedrals, for example, often have carved comic and grotesque elements, such as gargoyles; the eleventh-century Lincoln Cathedral’s spectacular Judgment Porch features a cartoon face on the devil’s private parts while elsewhere in the cathedral resides the famous Lincoln Imp, a “grinning imp…carved in a seated position with one leg crossed over the other.”119 It is hard to quantify how many generations of Lincoln Cathedral congregations have giggled with delight on first encountering these visual treasures.

  The religious conflicts of the sixteenth century were when images that look like modern cartoons really began to emerge. Sheri Klein has said, “All humour has the power to disrupt our expectations and associations in both subtle and obvious ways.” This certainly seems to have been the case when Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther and their supporters used shocking visual images to disrupt the way people thought about the Roman Catholic Church, with the church responding in the same way. “Satire mocks art and life with more of a bite than parody,” said Klein. “The aim of satire is to prompt us to re-examine our values, social behaviours and morals. The visual satirist uses the knowledge of the behaviour and conventions of a culture or group to mimic and magnify the ridiculous, as found in caricatures.”120 Woodcuts, posters and broadsheets proliferated, featuring grotesque representations of ecclesiastical opponents that mimicked and magnified their faults and failings, real and imagined; the effect of such visuals must have been great on what was a largely illiterate audience. Luther, “keenly aware of the persuasive power of pictures,”121 worked with a friend, the artist Lucas Cranach, who once drew the pope as the Whore of Babylon from the New Testament Book of Revelation and, on another occasion, depicted the pope being excreted by the devil.122 Erhard Schön’s The Devil with Bagpipes was another striking piece of Protestant cartoon polemic, showing the devil playing a monk as if he were a bagpipe; it is much reproduced and much misinterpreted.123

  Drawings that were “delightfully bawdy and scandalously irreverent” and that are recognizably cartoons had certainly emerged by the eighteenth century, especially in England.124 Some of the most important were created by William Hogarth (1697–1764), an artist who “not only felt the pulse of his age, he quickened it.”125 In the first part of the century, he produced a series of prints that were both amusing and fiercely critical of the social realities of the London in which he lived and worked, “satires on
the follies and vices of the age,”126 such as Gin Lane from 1751. The ability to be both simultaneously extremely serious and very funny seems like a modern phenomenon—like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report—and yet this duality was an essential component of Hogarth’s genius. Harry Mount said of Hogarth’s socially critical prints in 2014, “These days, though, you look at those morality tales and you don’t feel chastened—you smile. The reason why Hogarth’s name lives on is not thanks to his moralising, but because of his wit, and his skill at capturing the British character at its bawdy, drunken, pleasure-loving best and worst.”127 Mount is not quite correct, however; almost three hundred years later, these images retain the power to both shock and amuse.

  Left: The pope is depicted as the Whore of Babylon by Lucas Cranach, 1545; right: The devil is depicted playing a monk as bagpipes by Erhard Schön, circa 1530. Public domain.

  Top: William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751; bottom: James Gillray, The Plumb Pudding in Danger, 1805. Public domain.

  Hogarth died in 1764, and in many ways, the next generation of great English cartoonists form the bridge from the early modern to the modern age of cartooning. James Gillray (1756–1815) also lived in London, where he lived with a publisher and print seller, Hannah Humphrey: “Three decades before cartoons could be served up in newspapers or magazines with any ease or practicality, they supplied an enthusiastic upper-class public with a steady diet of pungent political satire, both political and social.”128 He savagely attacked the royal family, especially King George III, as well as both French and British politicians. His 1805 picture of British prime minister Pitt and French leader Napoleon Bonaparte carving up the world, The Plumb Pudding in Danger, is one of the most influential cartoons ever drawn. Martin Rowson’s comment on the lasting effect of these two cartoonists is apt: