| Drawing your attention Canada has its own history of controversial editorial cartoons. None of them sparked riots, but they did get people's blood boiling ALEXANDRA GILL -- The Globe and Mail February 21, 2006 |
VANCOUVER -- In 1914, a political cartoon published in the Montreal newspaper The Standard, depicted the
German Kaiser Wilhelm II wielding a sword in his hand. Beside him, an Iroquois held up a disembodied head,
dripping with blood. The message is obvious: The atrocities of the German army, then advancing into Belgium,
were as abominable as the cruelties once waged by the so-called savage Iroquois warriors.
If printed today, the cartoon would be deemed as offensive and politically incorrect as the Danish cartoons of
the Prophet Mohammed that are currently causing riots around the world. But in 1914, such blatant stereotypes
were no big deal. The Standard cartoon didn't even elicit a whisper of protest.
Yet two years later, in 1916, when Montreal's La Bataille published an anti-war cartoon that showed Mother
Britannia turning soldiers into cannon fodder, censorship officers raided the newspaper and shut it down. The
offending cartoon did not appear in the paper's later editions that day.
"Often exaggerated, and almost always slanted, [political cartoons] both provoke and reflect public interest in
the events and concerns of the day," Vancouver historian Charles Hou writes in his introduction to Great
Canadian Political Cartoons: 1820 to 1914, which includes the former cartoon.
By their very nature, editorial cartoons are inflammatory. They ridicule the high and mighty. They slap down the
pompous. They often spark cries of outrage. But when do they go too far?
As embassies burn and millions of angry Muslims call for the execution of 12 Danish cartoonists who were
commissioned to draw images of the Prophet by Copenhagen's Jyllands-Posten newspaper as a gesture of free
speech, the power of the political cartoon has never been more controversial.
"I didn't realize how much racism there was in Canada until I started researching these books," says Hou, whose
second volume of political cartoons covers the period from 1915 to 1945.
"Of course, they didn't touch off any riots," says Hou, pointing to some of the cartoons he found from the early
20th century that depict "undesirable" South Asians being raked up and thrown in the trash or bucktoothed
Japanese immigrants crowding around a curious-looking "white man" displayed on stage like an endangered
animal at the zoo. "They tended to reflect the attitudes of the time."
Now that media outlets in the West are debating whether or not to reprint the controversial Danish cartoons
(Calgary's Western Standard magazine did so last week), Hou suggests that those choosing to do should
simultaneously publish some of the anti-Semitic cartoons now circulating in the Arab world.
"Then you'd really have something to compare," says Hou, referring to the counteroffensive cartoons, such as
the one posted on the Arab European League website, that features Adolf Hitler lying in bed with Holocaust
victim Anne Frank. "Write this one in your diary, Anne," reads the caption under Hitler, smoking what appears to
be a postcoital cigarette.
In Canada, the most controversial political cartoon of all time was drawn by Bob Bierman for The Victoria Times
in 1978. The cartoon depicted the former British Columbia cabinet (and later premier) Bill Vander Zalm gleefully
pulling the wings off a fly, after the then-minister of human resources advised native youngsters hanging
around downtown Vancouver to return to their reserves where he said they had better opportunities.
The B.C. appeal court overturned an earlier ruling that deemed the cartoon libellous, arguing that the trial judge
had failed to take into account "the symbolism, allegory or satire and usual exaggeration to be found in
cartoons."
In Canada, the first wave of political cartoons began appearing in the 1870s, most notably with J.W. Bengough,
creator of a satirical magazine called Grip. Bengough, who was inspired by the perceived follies of Sir John A.
Macdonald (the magazine died the same year the former prime minister did) was largely influenced by the
leading U.S. caricaturist, German-born Thomas Nast, who was then busy elevating caricature into a deadly
political weapon.
In the 1870s, a New York politician named William Tweed became embroiled in a scandal known as the Tammany
Ring that cost taxpayers $200-million. Nast launched a series of cartoons in Harper's Weekly that eventually cost
Tweed his career.
"Stop them damned pictures," the politician is said to have exclaimed. "I don't care so much what the papers say
about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures." It wasn't until after the Second World
War that a distinct style of cartooning appeared in Canada. Led by Duncan Macpherson at The Toronto Star, the
drawings became sharper and even more pointed than U.S. cartoons, which tended to be allegorical. Canadian
cartoonists also began wielding much more editorial independence than their U.S. counterparts, largely thanks
to Macpherson, who was never afraid to contradict the positions of the Star's editorial board. His most
celebrated cartoon, one caricaturizing John Diefenbaker as a toothy, bejewelled Marie Antoinette crying "Let
'em eat cake" during the 1959 Avro Arrow crisis, is thought by some to have destroyed the former prime minister.
"Diefenbaker had been revered up until then," historian Pierre Berton once said. "Macpherson turned him into
a clown."
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, wrote in his book Drawn & Quartered:
The History of American Political Cartoons: "There's something basically healthy about a society that has
hard-hitting, clever, smart, fresh cartoonists. The political cartoon is the embodiment of the American form of
government."
Recently, however, the free and independent staff cartoonist has come under attack, with many chain
newspapers casting them aside for freelancers or syndicates, which are cheaper and often less dangerous. In
Canada, only 30 per cent of newspapers have full-time cartoonists, according to a recent study by a journalism
student at the University of Western Ontario.
"As newspapers become more corporate rather than family-owned voices, there's a blanding out in all
journalism, not just cartoons," The Globe and Mail's Brian Gable, one of the paper's two staff cartoonists, said in
a recent article on the subject in The Ryerson Review of Journalism. "As long as people keep buying the
newspaper, why run a cartoon that's going to cause a demonstration in front of your building?"
There are nevertheless certain subjects that are more sensitive than others, says David Spencer, a professor of
media and information studies at the University of Western Ontario. And even now, as many commentators
denounce the overblown reaction to the Danish cartoons, there are certain areas where many U.S. papers still
dare not tread.
"Any comment on the U.S. military has to be done with a great deal of delicacy," says Spencer, who was himself
deluged with angry letters and accused of being disloyal when he wrote an article called Visions of Violence: A
Cartoon Study of America and War for American Journalism, an academic journal.
One of the most infamous examples in recent times of a cartoon being blown out of context was when the U.S.
Secret Service paid a visit to The Los Angeles Times in July, 2003, after the paper had printed a cartoon by
Michael Ramirez. In it, a man pointed a gun at a caricature of President Bush. The cartoon was a takeoff of the
famous 1968 photograph from the Vietnam War that showed a Vietnamese police officer shooting a Viet Cong in
the temple on the streets of Saigon.
As Ramirez, a conservative cartoonist, later explained, the drawing was meant to be a defence of George Bush,
not an attack. He was actually trying to say that the president was being undermined by anti-war demonstrators
who thought the president overstated the threat posed by Iraq. The metaphor was obviously too subtle for the
Secret Service, which dispatched an agent to the L.A. Times to question Ramirez.
Another controversial cartoon that went seriously awry was published by The Arizona Republic in 1997. The
cartoon by Steve Benson was critical of the death penalty. The drawing was based on an iconic photograph from
the Oklahoma City bombing in which a fireman cradled a dying child. In Benson's cartoon, the child was saying,
"Please, no more killing," to which the fireman, labelled "Death Penalty Fanatics" responds, "Oh, stop your
whining!" Firefighters across the country -- and the mother of the child in the photo -- complained bitterly.
Benson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, refused to back down, even after his newspaper issued an
apology for creating "unintentional distress."
So did the Danish newspaper that commissioned the 12 caricatures of the Prophet go too far? And what about
the media outlets -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, Austria's daily Kleine Zeitung, Calgary's Western Standard and
several in Quebec -- that are now reprinting the images and inciting even more protest?
MSNBC.com editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle argues that this worldwide catastrophe -- fanned by some other
images that are being distributed along with the original ones -- has nothing to do with free speech or political
cartooning.
"Political cartoonists don't take editorial direction," says Cagle. "These 12 artists were commissioned by the
Danish newspaper and paid $75 [U.S.] a drawing. I'm sure they had no idea people would get so mad and I
certainly pity them. But they're not political cartoonists. I'd call them illustrators for hire."
German Kaiser Wilhelm II wielding a sword in his hand. Beside him, an Iroquois held up a disembodied head,
dripping with blood. The message is obvious: The atrocities of the German army, then advancing into Belgium,
were as abominable as the cruelties once waged by the so-called savage Iroquois warriors.
If printed today, the cartoon would be deemed as offensive and politically incorrect as the Danish cartoons of
the Prophet Mohammed that are currently causing riots around the world. But in 1914, such blatant stereotypes
were no big deal. The Standard cartoon didn't even elicit a whisper of protest.
Yet two years later, in 1916, when Montreal's La Bataille published an anti-war cartoon that showed Mother
Britannia turning soldiers into cannon fodder, censorship officers raided the newspaper and shut it down. The
offending cartoon did not appear in the paper's later editions that day.
"Often exaggerated, and almost always slanted, [political cartoons] both provoke and reflect public interest in
the events and concerns of the day," Vancouver historian Charles Hou writes in his introduction to Great
Canadian Political Cartoons: 1820 to 1914, which includes the former cartoon.
By their very nature, editorial cartoons are inflammatory. They ridicule the high and mighty. They slap down the
pompous. They often spark cries of outrage. But when do they go too far?
As embassies burn and millions of angry Muslims call for the execution of 12 Danish cartoonists who were
commissioned to draw images of the Prophet by Copenhagen's Jyllands-Posten newspaper as a gesture of free
speech, the power of the political cartoon has never been more controversial.
"I didn't realize how much racism there was in Canada until I started researching these books," says Hou, whose
second volume of political cartoons covers the period from 1915 to 1945.
"Of course, they didn't touch off any riots," says Hou, pointing to some of the cartoons he found from the early
20th century that depict "undesirable" South Asians being raked up and thrown in the trash or bucktoothed
Japanese immigrants crowding around a curious-looking "white man" displayed on stage like an endangered
animal at the zoo. "They tended to reflect the attitudes of the time."
Now that media outlets in the West are debating whether or not to reprint the controversial Danish cartoons
(Calgary's Western Standard magazine did so last week), Hou suggests that those choosing to do should
simultaneously publish some of the anti-Semitic cartoons now circulating in the Arab world.
"Then you'd really have something to compare," says Hou, referring to the counteroffensive cartoons, such as
the one posted on the Arab European League website, that features Adolf Hitler lying in bed with Holocaust
victim Anne Frank. "Write this one in your diary, Anne," reads the caption under Hitler, smoking what appears to
be a postcoital cigarette.
In Canada, the most controversial political cartoon of all time was drawn by Bob Bierman for The Victoria Times
in 1978. The cartoon depicted the former British Columbia cabinet (and later premier) Bill Vander Zalm gleefully
pulling the wings off a fly, after the then-minister of human resources advised native youngsters hanging
around downtown Vancouver to return to their reserves where he said they had better opportunities.
The B.C. appeal court overturned an earlier ruling that deemed the cartoon libellous, arguing that the trial judge
had failed to take into account "the symbolism, allegory or satire and usual exaggeration to be found in
cartoons."
In Canada, the first wave of political cartoons began appearing in the 1870s, most notably with J.W. Bengough,
creator of a satirical magazine called Grip. Bengough, who was inspired by the perceived follies of Sir John A.
Macdonald (the magazine died the same year the former prime minister did) was largely influenced by the
leading U.S. caricaturist, German-born Thomas Nast, who was then busy elevating caricature into a deadly
political weapon.
In the 1870s, a New York politician named William Tweed became embroiled in a scandal known as the Tammany
Ring that cost taxpayers $200-million. Nast launched a series of cartoons in Harper's Weekly that eventually cost
Tweed his career.
"Stop them damned pictures," the politician is said to have exclaimed. "I don't care so much what the papers say
about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures." It wasn't until after the Second World
War that a distinct style of cartooning appeared in Canada. Led by Duncan Macpherson at The Toronto Star, the
drawings became sharper and even more pointed than U.S. cartoons, which tended to be allegorical. Canadian
cartoonists also began wielding much more editorial independence than their U.S. counterparts, largely thanks
to Macpherson, who was never afraid to contradict the positions of the Star's editorial board. His most
celebrated cartoon, one caricaturizing John Diefenbaker as a toothy, bejewelled Marie Antoinette crying "Let
'em eat cake" during the 1959 Avro Arrow crisis, is thought by some to have destroyed the former prime minister.
"Diefenbaker had been revered up until then," historian Pierre Berton once said. "Macpherson turned him into
a clown."
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, wrote in his book Drawn & Quartered:
The History of American Political Cartoons: "There's something basically healthy about a society that has
hard-hitting, clever, smart, fresh cartoonists. The political cartoon is the embodiment of the American form of
government."
Recently, however, the free and independent staff cartoonist has come under attack, with many chain
newspapers casting them aside for freelancers or syndicates, which are cheaper and often less dangerous. In
Canada, only 30 per cent of newspapers have full-time cartoonists, according to a recent study by a journalism
student at the University of Western Ontario.
"As newspapers become more corporate rather than family-owned voices, there's a blanding out in all
journalism, not just cartoons," The Globe and Mail's Brian Gable, one of the paper's two staff cartoonists, said in
a recent article on the subject in The Ryerson Review of Journalism. "As long as people keep buying the
newspaper, why run a cartoon that's going to cause a demonstration in front of your building?"
There are nevertheless certain subjects that are more sensitive than others, says David Spencer, a professor of
media and information studies at the University of Western Ontario. And even now, as many commentators
denounce the overblown reaction to the Danish cartoons, there are certain areas where many U.S. papers still
dare not tread.
"Any comment on the U.S. military has to be done with a great deal of delicacy," says Spencer, who was himself
deluged with angry letters and accused of being disloyal when he wrote an article called Visions of Violence: A
Cartoon Study of America and War for American Journalism, an academic journal.
One of the most infamous examples in recent times of a cartoon being blown out of context was when the U.S.
Secret Service paid a visit to The Los Angeles Times in July, 2003, after the paper had printed a cartoon by
Michael Ramirez. In it, a man pointed a gun at a caricature of President Bush. The cartoon was a takeoff of the
famous 1968 photograph from the Vietnam War that showed a Vietnamese police officer shooting a Viet Cong in
the temple on the streets of Saigon.
As Ramirez, a conservative cartoonist, later explained, the drawing was meant to be a defence of George Bush,
not an attack. He was actually trying to say that the president was being undermined by anti-war demonstrators
who thought the president overstated the threat posed by Iraq. The metaphor was obviously too subtle for the
Secret Service, which dispatched an agent to the L.A. Times to question Ramirez.
Another controversial cartoon that went seriously awry was published by The Arizona Republic in 1997. The
cartoon by Steve Benson was critical of the death penalty. The drawing was based on an iconic photograph from
the Oklahoma City bombing in which a fireman cradled a dying child. In Benson's cartoon, the child was saying,
"Please, no more killing," to which the fireman, labelled "Death Penalty Fanatics" responds, "Oh, stop your
whining!" Firefighters across the country -- and the mother of the child in the photo -- complained bitterly.
Benson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, refused to back down, even after his newspaper issued an
apology for creating "unintentional distress."
So did the Danish newspaper that commissioned the 12 caricatures of the Prophet go too far? And what about
the media outlets -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, Austria's daily Kleine Zeitung, Calgary's Western Standard and
several in Quebec -- that are now reprinting the images and inciting even more protest?
MSNBC.com editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle argues that this worldwide catastrophe -- fanned by some other
images that are being distributed along with the original ones -- has nothing to do with free speech or political
cartooning.
"Political cartoonists don't take editorial direction," says Cagle. "These 12 artists were commissioned by the
Danish newspaper and paid $75 [U.S.] a drawing. I'm sure they had no idea people would get so mad and I
certainly pity them. But they're not political cartoonists. I'd call them illustrators for hire."