"The Rivals”: Socialist Political Satire from Good Morning magazine

TODAY’S GUEST POST IS FROM JACOB LELAND (SEE FULL BIO, BELOW)

One hundred years ago today … The cover of the twice-monthly Good Morning featured Art Young’s cartoon, "The Rivals."

It shows a colossal figure, its torso crisscrossed with belts reading "Wall Street" and "Militarism," seated in a shoeshine chair. Bent over its right foot, applying "Patriotic Polish" to its boot, is a figure for the Democratic Party ("Boot Black and Foot Specialist"), while his twin, the Republican Party ("Boots Shined and Chiropodist Heels a Specialty)," labors over an enormous, bare left foot—either erasing or inscribing "Democratic Mistakes."

From "The Rivals" it seems that in an election year 100 years ago, socialists believed that the two parties were only superficially distinct in their relationship to the twin forces of capitalism and militarism—whose tools of oppression they efficiently and simultaneously prepared. Their apparent differences—the Democratic Party works on the right foot, the Republican the left–result in the boots being shined and ready for workers' backs that much faster.

The cartoon was a timely statement, appearing in the interim period between the 1920 Republican (June 8–12) and Democratic (June 28–July 6) National Conventions.

The two parties, of course, have continued to provide fodder for sharp satire. In 1996, The Simpsons would make a similar joke in a Halloween episode: The malevolent aliens Kang and Kodos inhabit the bodies of the Democratic and Republican candidates for President.

Good Morning was published out of 7 East 15th Street, a building owned by an organization called the Society of the Commonwealth Center, Inc., which housed Socialist Party Headquarters and the Rand School for Social Science. [Editor: See our posts of January 8 and March 25, respectively.] The magazine ran from May 1919 to October 1921. It was briefly revived the next year as the Art Young Quarterly, after its publisher and main creative force, and again in 2015, in print and online.

Young’s satire of the presidential race continued throughout 1920.

Young himself was a prolific cartoonist whose work appeared in nearly all the publications of the radical left. He justified the initial investment in one of his own, recalling the purpose of launching Good Morning: "We thought it time to satirize the whole capitalistic works . . . Not with subtle analysis of conditions in essays and the like, but with straightforward exposé in cartoons and comment, and with comedy rampant" (quoted in Cohen, 43). The ostensible (or performative) anti-intellectualism here aside, the body of Young's critique is as sophisticated as any essay you're likely to find in contemporary issues of New Masses or the Nation from the same moment. The Good Morning archives are replete with single-panel cartoons whose radicalism is at once complex and accessible, attacking liberal and conservative ideology alike.

Young’s career has been the source of renewed interest in recent years; the Art Young Gallery opened in 2015.

Source/further reading: Cohen, Michael. "Cartooning Capitalism: Radical Cartooning and the Making of American Popular Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century." International Review of Social History, 52:15. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

WRITTEN BY JACOB LELAND, JUNE 15, 2020.

Jacob Leland is an educator, musician, and writer. He lives in Oakland, California, and he tweets at @mrdrleland.

TAGS: political cartoon, two-party system, Art Young, Good Morning, cartoon