“Them Damn Pictures”: Americanization and the Comic Strip in the Progressive Era

Abstract

As William Tweed noted over a century ago, the cartoon, with its combination of graphic and text, can be a dangerous political weapon. Indeed, the Tammany Hall boss's career was destroyed when he was arrested for kidnapping in 1875 — an arrest made by a police officer who recognized Tweed from a newspaper cartoon. Likewise, when comic strips first appeared in the American sensation papers of the 1890s, they too were seen as having important, and potentially threatening, political and social ramifications. Journalists such as Oswald Villard condemned newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst for using the comic strip as a cheap ploy to boost circulation, claiming that it compromised journalistic integrity. Meanwhile, genteel reformers waged their own war against comic strips, worried that the slapstick action and irreverent content would erode middle-class American values and “foster a spirit of disrespect and insubordination… by their glorification of cheeky, iconoclastic urchins.”