Political cartoons can be as powerful as a good speech, but can be read in an instant. They are windows to the past, but unlike photos, which tell the facts, misleading though they may be, or letters, which show the opinion of one person in great length, political cartoons compress a person’s opinion, usually negative, on an aspect of the times (usually the kind of opinions that take pages to explain in full, with context) into a picture and a few words.
In an interesting way, political cartoons are top-down history looked at from the bottom. Instead of being what one person thought about life during the period, or what actually happened, cartoons show how people viewed what was going on around them. For example, instead of a book about hiring discrimination in the sixties, regular top down history, there is a cartoon from 1963 showing a black doctor trying to get hired and being told he has an incurable skin condition. While less precise, the cartoon gets the message across somewhat more viscerally, and inarguably faster.
The problem is that one needs to already know the history to appreciate the view. Without context any event is meaningless, and unlike a book, which is fully capable of describing the events surrounding the event in question, cartoons can’t give context efficiently. A raggedy person labeled undesirable with a bomb for a head is walking through a gate labeled immigration restrictions with a caption “close the gate”. What can one deduce, given just that? The author believes immigration is bad, that there should be restrictions, and immigrants are poor. What was just described has been the opinion of a huge number of people over a large range of time. It doesn’t really say anything about history; however, knowing it was released during the first red scare as immigration restrictions were repeatedly getting vetoed by the president, that people were really afraid of immigrants being communists and suddenly the bomb becomes communism and poverty, and the cartoon itself becomes a plea to either the president or the voters to stop vetoing or lean on their congressmen respectively. Context, backed by research, is what this blog is here for. From Uncle Sam riding a bike made of currency to the globe being invaded by an alcohol octopus, all will be made to make sense, in some way or another.
Another problem is that they, almost by definition, condense a complicated issue into a simple opinion. This masks most other viewpoints, except as objects of ridicule. While public opinion is rarely one hundred percent in favor of something or one hundred percent against it, political cartoons rarely aren't, and one needs to be wary of this when reading them.
The relevance, then, of political cartoons to modern history is similar to that of photographs or letters; it is that of snapshot of time with a different format than letters and a much less objective, but wider reaching message than photos. Just as we read letters to learn about the daily lives of people in the past and their feelings about those lives, and we “read” a photo to learn about the events of the past, we can read a cartoon to analyze their negative feelings about the events; no one writes cartoons about how great everything is, but instead they write about pressing problems on their minds.
In an interesting way, political cartoons are top-down history looked at from the bottom. Instead of being what one person thought about life during the period, or what actually happened, cartoons show how people viewed what was going on around them. For example, instead of a book about hiring discrimination in the sixties, regular top down history, there is a cartoon from 1963 showing a black doctor trying to get hired and being told he has an incurable skin condition. While less precise, the cartoon gets the message across somewhat more viscerally, and inarguably faster.
The problem is that one needs to already know the history to appreciate the view. Without context any event is meaningless, and unlike a book, which is fully capable of describing the events surrounding the event in question, cartoons can’t give context efficiently. A raggedy person labeled undesirable with a bomb for a head is walking through a gate labeled immigration restrictions with a caption “close the gate”. What can one deduce, given just that? The author believes immigration is bad, that there should be restrictions, and immigrants are poor. What was just described has been the opinion of a huge number of people over a large range of time. It doesn’t really say anything about history; however, knowing it was released during the first red scare as immigration restrictions were repeatedly getting vetoed by the president, that people were really afraid of immigrants being communists and suddenly the bomb becomes communism and poverty, and the cartoon itself becomes a plea to either the president or the voters to stop vetoing or lean on their congressmen respectively. Context, backed by research, is what this blog is here for. From Uncle Sam riding a bike made of currency to the globe being invaded by an alcohol octopus, all will be made to make sense, in some way or another.
Another problem is that they, almost by definition, condense a complicated issue into a simple opinion. This masks most other viewpoints, except as objects of ridicule. While public opinion is rarely one hundred percent in favor of something or one hundred percent against it, political cartoons rarely aren't, and one needs to be wary of this when reading them.
The relevance, then, of political cartoons to modern history is similar to that of photographs or letters; it is that of snapshot of time with a different format than letters and a much less objective, but wider reaching message than photos. Just as we read letters to learn about the daily lives of people in the past and their feelings about those lives, and we “read” a photo to learn about the events of the past, we can read a cartoon to analyze their negative feelings about the events; no one writes cartoons about how great everything is, but instead they write about pressing problems on their minds.