All You Direct - Book Reviews

By Donald Dewey

Since the time of the American Revolution, a rowdy band of hangers-on has lurked along the fringes of the nation’s political life, convinced they are unmasking the outrageous, lampooning the ridiculous and puncturing the pompous.

They are political cartoonists, whose lambastes of public affairs and public officials have metamorphosed through more than two centuries of communications technology from the woodcut to the Web.

Over those years, they have poured millions of drawings into the daily give-and-take of politics, even though they themselves have never had a secure sense of the real role they play in that process: Do their cartoons really shape public opinion and policies, or do they merely provide an evanescent garnish to the onrushing tide of events?

New York writer Donald Dewey examines the question with the unblinking skepticism of an outsider in his new history of American political cartooning, “The Art of Ill Will.” (The title derives from cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s observation that the essential tools of a cartoonist are “basic intelligence” and “ill will.”)

Hand-wringing about the state of the cartoon medium, Dewey notes, now has a long history, but many of the questions, he contends, are legitimate: Are cartoons losing ideological punch in favor of wan topical humor? Do cartoons preach meaningfully to anyone but their own choirs? Is the medium suited to the accelerating evolution in digital communication?

He ends the thoroughly researched but concise (73-page) summary history of American cartoons that makes up the first part of the book on a guardedly hopeful note: Cartooning can survive as a medium, he contends, as long as there are cartoonists “politically savvy enough” and “graphically original enough to move even one odd reader every once in a while beyond the social attitudes he brought to the newsstand.”

In the bulk of “Art of Ill Will” that follows, however, Dewey turns from sardonic analyst to enthusiastic aficionado, with a collection of more than 200 cartoons, sorted by general subject matter, that make a striking panorama of the unruly history of the American cartoonist’s trade. (He makes good use of the vast Granger Collection in New York, which provided most of the images.)

“The Art of Ill Will” is the first comprehensive historical survey of American political cartooning since Stephen Hess’ and Milton Kaplan’s “The Ungentlemanly Art” in 1975, and though both books offer a feast of historical cartoons, Dewey’s adds a welcome dose of sobering analysis of a medium in search of a future.