Comic empires: Imperialism in cartoons, caricature, and satirical art 9781526142955

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: the importance of cartoons, caricature, and satirical art in imperial contexts
PART I: High imperialism and colonialism
Courting the colonies: Linley Sambourne, Punch, and imperial allegory
‘Master Jonathan’ in Cuba: a case study in colonial Bildungskarikatur
‘The international Siamese twins’: the iconography of Anglo-American inter-imperialism
‘“Every dog” (no distinction of color) “has his day”’: Thomas Nast and the colonisation of the American West
PART II: The critique of empire and the context of decolonisation
The making of harmony and war, from New Year Prints to propaganda cartoons during China’s Second Sino-Japanese War
David Low and India
Between imagined and ‘real’: Sarukhan’s al-Masri Effendi cartoons in the first half of the 1930s
The iconography of decolonisation in the cartoons of the Suez Crisis, 1956
Punch and the Cyprus emergency, 1955–1959
PART III: Ambiguities of empire
Outrage and imperialism, confusion and indifference: Punch and the Armenian massacres of 1894–1896
Ambiguities in the fight waged by the socialist satirical review Der Wahre Jacob against militarism and imperialism
The ‘confounded socialists’ and the ‘Commonwealth Co-operative Society’: cartoons and British imperialism during the Attlee Labour government
Australian cartoonists at the end of empire: no more ‘Australia for the White Man’
Index

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General editors: Andrew S. Thompson and Alan Lester Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Comic empires

SE L ECT E D T IT L E S AV AIL AB LE IN T HE SER IES WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES ed. Andrew S. Thompson GENDERED TRANSACTIONS Indrani Sen

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EXHIBITING THE EMPIRE ed. John M. MacKenzie and John McAleer BANISHED POTENTATES Robert Aldrich MISTRESS OF EVERYTHING ed. Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent BRITAIN AND THE FORMATION OF THE GULF STATES Shohei Sato CULTURES OF DECOLONISATION ed. Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle HONG KONG AND BRITISH CULTURE, 1945–97 Mark Hampton

Comic empires Imperialism

in cartoons, caricature,

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and satirical art Edited by Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava

M AN CHE S T E R UN IV E R S IT Y P R ESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 4294 8  hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Vintage World Map, 2015 © Michal Bednarek, bednarek-art.com Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

C ONT E NT S

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List of figures—page vii List of contributors—xvi Acknowledgements—xxi 1 Introduction: the importance of cartoons, caricature, and satirical art in imperial contexts Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava

1

PART I – High imperialism and colonialism 2 Courting the colonies: Linley Sambourne, Punch, and imperial allegory Robert Dingley and Richard Scully

31

3 ‘Master Jonathan’ in Cuba: a case study in colonial Bildungskarikatur 66 Albert D. Pionke and Frederick Whiting 4 ‘The international Siamese twins’: the iconography of Anglo-American inter-imperialism Stephen Tuffnell 5 ‘“Every dog” (no distinction of color) “has his day”’: Thomas Nast and the colonisation of the American West Fiona Halloran

92

134

PART II – The critique of empire and the context of decolonisation 6 The making of harmony and war, from New Year Prints to propaganda cartoons during China’s Second Sino-Japanese War Shaoqian Zhang 7 David Low and India David Lockwood

161 192

8 Between imagined and ‘real’: Sarukhan’s al-Masri Effendi cartoons in the first half of the 1930s Keren Zdafee [v]

216

C O N TEN TS

9 The iconography of decolonisation in the cartoons of the Suez Crisis, 1956 Stefanie Wichhart 10 Punch and the Cyprus emergency, 1955–1959 Andrekos Varnava and Casey Raeside

242 277

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PART III – Ambiguities of empire 11 Outrage and imperialism, confusion and indifference: Punch and the Armenian massacres of 1894–1896 Leslie Rogne Schumacher 12 Ambiguities in the fight waged by the socialist satirical review Der Wahre Jacob against militarism and imperialism Jean-Claude Gardes 13 The ‘confounded socialists’ and the ‘Commonwealth Co-operative Society’: cartoons and British imperialism during the Attlee Labour government Charlotte Lydia Riley 14 Australian cartoonists at the end of empire: no more ‘Australia for the White Man’ David Olds and Robert Phiddian Index—426

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2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 3.1 3.2

Linley Sambourne, ‘The Rhodes Colossus’, Punch, 10 December 1892, p. 266. page 2 Thomas Theodor Heine, ‘Kolonialmächte’, Simplicissimus, 9 (6), May 1904, p. 55. 4 Linley Sambourne, ‘The Tryst’, Punch, 6 June 1891, p. 266. 34 Linley Sambourne, ‘Wooing the African Venus’, Punch, 22 September 1888, p. 134. 36 Linley Sambourne, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Punch, 13 May 1893, p. 218. 40 Linley Sambourne, ‘Hands Off!’, Punch, 9 February 1889, p. 62. 44 Linley Sambourne, ‘The Tug of – Peace’, Punch, 26 April 1899, p. 194. 46 Linley Sambourne, ‘Good-bye Samoa!’, Punch, 15 November 1899, p. 230. 48 Linley Sambourne, ‘The Garden of Sleep’, Punch, 2 May 1891, p. 206. 50 Sir John Tenniel, ‘An Appeal’, Punch, 13 June 1896, p. 283. 51 Linley Sambourne, ‘Mr. Punch’s Notes for August’, Punch, 7 September 1889, p. 110. 53 Linley Sambourne, ‘Miss Reid’, photographed 17 July 1901. 55 ‘Zimbabwe kaffir girls’ – archival photograph from collection of Linley Sambourne. ‘Africa Women’ ST/PR/1-1051A/92. 56 ‘Natives of Intuila’ – archival photograph from collection of Linley Sambourne. ‘Samoa’ ST/PR/1-1043/92. 57 Linley Sambourne, photographic study for ‘The Tug of – Peace’, 21 April 1899. ST/PR/2-2070/99. 58 Linley Sambourne, photographic study for ‘The Tug of – Peace’, 21 April 1899. Not numbered. 59 John Leech, ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’, Punch, 17, 1850, p. 247. 71 John Leech, ‘Master Jonathan tries to smoke a Cuba, but it doesn’t agree with him!!’, Punch, 18, 1850, p. 243. 78 [ vii ]

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4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16

‘Now, Little Man, I’ll See What I Can Do for You’, New York Journal, 20 April 1898. 84 Joseph Keppler, ‘Encouraging the Child’, Puck, 27 February 1901, cover. 85 ‘More Trouble for Uncle’, Minneapolis Journal, 18 November 1902. 86 ‘Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child’, The Charleston News and Courier, 1 January 1960. 87 John S. Pughe, ‘Greedie Johnie’, Puck, 19 February 1896, cover. 95 Wilbur Steele, ‘The Tory is Still Here’, Rocky Mountain News [Denver, CO], 16 June 1895, p. 1. 96 Joseph Keppler, ‘British Benevolence’, Puck, 19 July 1882, cover. 98 Udo Keppler, ‘A Pretty Tough Mouthful to Swallow’, Puck, 11 October 1899, cover. 99 Udo Keppler, ‘A Tempting Opportunity’, Puck, 15 November 1899, cover. 100 Louis Dalrymple, ‘The Bull in the China Shop’, Puck, 9 March 1898, centrefold. 102 John S. Pughe, ‘Business is Business’, Puck, 22 June 1898, centrefold. 103 Udo Keppler, ‘The Two Drummers’, Puck, 12 July 1899, cover. 105 Louis Dalrymple, ‘A Rival Who Has Come to Stay’, Puck, 24 July 1895, centrefold. 107 John S. Pughe, ‘The Greatest Department Store on Earth’, Puck, 29 November 1899, centrefold. 108 Louis Dalrymple, ‘After Many Years’, Puck, 15 June 1898, centrefold. 113 Donaldson Lithograph Co., ‘A Union in the Interest of Humanity’, 1898. 114 F. G. Attwood, ‘Dear Me, it was Not Always Thus!’, Life, 19 May 1898, cover. 115 Louis Dalrymple, ‘United We Stand For Civilization and Peace’, Puck, 8 June 1898, cover. 117 Louis Dalrymple, ‘Wireless Telegraphy’, Puck, 29 November 1899, cover. 118 Victor F. Gillam, ‘It Ought to be a Happy New Year’, Judge, 7 January 1899, cover. Courtesy of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Ohio State University. 119 [ viii ]

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4.18

4.19 4.20 4.21 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

5.7 5.8 6.1

6.2

Victor F. Gillam, ‘The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)’, Judge, 1 April 1899, pp. 200–201. Courtesy of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Ohio State University. 122 ‘Uncle Sam’s Burden (with apologies to Mr. Kipling)’, c.29 June 1903. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b07656, accessed 30 March 2017. 123 Louis Dalrymple, ‘Misery Loves Company’, Puck, 20 March 1901, cover. 125 Udo Keppler, ‘The Duty of Great Nations’, Puck, 15 February 1899, centrefold. 126 Frederick Opper, ‘They Can’t Fight’, Puck, 15 January 1896, cover. 128 Thomas Nast, ‘Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,’ Harper’s Weekly, 10 November 1869. 139 Thomas Nast, ‘“Every Dog” (No Distinction of Color) “Has His Day”’, Harper’s Weekly, 8 February 1879. 141 Thomas Nast, ‘Give the Red Man a Chance’, Harper’s Weekly, 24 September 1881. 143 Thomas Nast, ‘Making White Men “Good”’, Harper’s Weekly, 6 December 1879. 145 George Frederick Keller, ‘The Three Troublesome Children’, The Wasp, 16 December 1881. 146 Thomas Nast, ‘Religious Liberty Is Guaranteed’, unpublished pen and ink drawing. Library of Congress, at: www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010717281/, accessed April 2019. 149 Thomas Nast, ‘The Noble Red Man’, Harper’s Weekly, 10 August 1878. 151 Thomas Nast, ‘After Mother Country’s Scalp’, Harper’s Weekly, 17 July 1886. 152 Nianhua ‘Jiaominbang 教民榜 [Education Board].’ woodblock print, c.1661–1772, in: Wang Shucun 王樹村, Zhongguo nianhua shi 中國年畫史 [History of Chinese New Year Pictures], Beijing: Beijing gongyi meishu chubanshe, 2002, p. 114. 164 Map with illustrations of various nations, text in Japanese, Chinese, and English. Tokyo: Hakugakan, 1914–1918. Lithography, 21 × 15 inches. Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University. 165 [ ix ]

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6.11 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

James See 謝纘泰 (attrib.), ‘Shijutu 時局圖 [Picture of the Current Situation]’, first published in furen wenshe shekan 輔仁文社社刊, July 1898. Hong Kong Education City Archive. 166 Nianhua ‘Zhong Kui’, woodblock print, 13 × 17 in. Yangliuqing. Author’s Collection. 170 ‘There will be persistent big chaos if the red demon does not die’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 40 × 30 in. c.1937–1940. Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University. 171 ‘Sima Guang Breaking the Vet’, in Jiang Weijie 蔣維介 et. al. (eds), Zuixin chudeng xiaoxue jiaokeshu 新初等小學國文教科書 [The Newest Edition of Chinese Literature Textbook for Elementary School], Vol. 2, Shanghai: The Commercial Press, October 1910, p. 11. 174–175 ‘China and Japan Are Like Brothers that Build East Asian Peace Together’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 31 × 21 in., c.1938–1939. Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives, Stanford University. 176 ‘People Make Efforts to Build a New Paradise’, text in Chinese, poster– lithography, 31 × 21 in., c.1938–1939. Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives, Stanford University. 177 ‘Excellent Youth, Join the Air Force’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 31 × 21 in., c.1938–1942. Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives, Stanford University. 180 ‘The More I Fight, the Stronger I Become’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 17 × 22 in., c.1938–1942. Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives, Stanford University. 182 Wenyuan Zhang, ‘Congratulations on the New Year’, text in Chinese, poster – woodblock print, 17 × 22 in., c.1940. 184 David Low, ‘Progress to Liberty – Amritsar style’, The Star, 16 December 1919. 195 David Low, ‘Housing Problem in India’, Evening Standard, 27 May 1930. 198 David Low, ‘The Determined Martyr’, Evening Standard, 6 May 1930. 198 David Low, ‘By-Election Support for the Churchill Party’, Evening Standard, 1 March 1935. 200 [x]

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7.9 7.10 8.1 8.2

8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7

David Low, ‘Alternative’, Evening Standard, 16 March 1942. 207 David Low, ‘A Shroud for Liberty’, Evening Standard, 11 August 1942. 208 David Low, ‘Passing Shadow’, Evening Standard, 8 May 1944. 209 David Low, ‘Unrest in India’, Evening Standard, 26 September 1945. 210 David Low, ‘The Open Road’, Evening Standard, 15 August 1947. 211 David Low, ‘Touch of a Vanished Hand’, Evening Standard, 3 February 1948. 211 Iskandar Sarukhan (?), ‘With our Blood, and through our Arms’, Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 129, 27 December 1936, p. 9. 217 Iskandar Sarukhan, ‘Contradicting News Regarding the Negotiations Last Week, and Their Effects on One of the Readers’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 5, 13 May 1930, p. 9. 220 (Unknown cartoonist), ‘Egypt in Fifty Years’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 289, 29 October 1934, p. 7. 227 Ihab Khouloussy, ‘The Leaders of the Nation – Great Win for the Egyptian Cause’, al-Lataʾif al-Musawwara, 257, 12 January 1920, p. 1. 228 Iskandar Sarukhan, ‘The Policy of Distress is what Taught Us’, Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 78, 5 January 1936, p. 7. 230 Iskandar Sarukhan (?), Untitled cartoon, Ruz al-Yusuf, 217, 11 April 1932, p. 1. 233 Leslie Illingworth, ‘Mark Antony Eden: “I am dying, Egypt, dying”’, Punch, 21 March 1956, p. 327. 245 Bernard Partridge, ‘To All Whom it Concerns’, Punch, 3 December 1924, p. 631. 248 Pol Ferjac, ‘Le Triomphe de Nasser’, Le Canard enchaîné, 25 June 1956, cover. 252 Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, ‘The “mortar” that will build the High Dam’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 30 July 1956, p. 3. 253 John Tenniel, ‘Mosé in Egitto!!!’, Punch, 11 December 1875, p. 245. 255 Leslie Illingworth, ‘Mosé in Egitto!!!’, Punch, 25 February 1953. 256 Pol Ferjac, Untitled, Le Canard enchaîné, 8 August 1956. 259 [ xi ]

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9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 9.17 9.18 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

Leslie Illingworth, ‘The Burghers of Suez by Gamal Nasser after Rodin’, Punch, 5 September 1956. 261 Salah Jaheen, Untitled, Ruz al-Yusuf, 5 November 1956, cover. 263 Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, ‘I thought I was bigger than that …’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 5 November 1956, p. 4. 264 Pol Ferjac, ‘La Bataille des Pyramides’, Le Canard enchaîné, 7 November 1956. 265 Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, Retreat, Ruz al-Yusuf, 19 November 1956. 266 Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, Untitled, Ruz al-Yusuf, 24 December 1956. 267 Salah Jahin, Untitled, Ruz al-Yusuf, 7 January 1957. 268 Pol Ferjac, ‘Le Bourgeois de Calais (version 1956)’, Le Canard enchaîné, 28 November 1956. 269 Salah Jahin, ‘The Masses destroy the De Lesseps Statue’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 24 December 1956. 270 Pol Ferjac, ‘Dans La Cage’, Le Canard enchaîné, 10 April 1957. 271 Leslie Illingworth, ‘Britannia in Decline’, Punch, 9 January 1957. 272 Michael Cummings, ‘Mr Griffiths’, Punch, 14 December 1955, p. 712. 282 Mervyn Wilson, ‘The Grivas Diaries’, Punch, 12 September 1956, p. 294. 286 Norman Mansbridge, ‘Next Round in Cyprus’, Punch, 25 June 1958, p. 829. 288 Norman Mansbridge, ‘And Passed By on the Other Side’, Punch, 16 July 1958, p. 67. 291 Ronald Searle, ‘Summit’, Punch, 30 July 1958, p. 131. 294 Norman Mansbridge, ‘Hello, what’s this?’ Punch, 25 February 1959, p. 275. 296 Sir John Tenniel, ‘An Old Offender’, Punch, 15 December 1894, p. 283. 309 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Disturbed!’, Punch, 9 March 1895, p. 115. 311 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Deeds – Not Words!’, Punch, 15 June 1895, p. 283. 313 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Rescue!’, Punch, 26 October 1895, p. 199. 315 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Armenia’s Appeal’, Punch, 21 December 1895, p. 295. 316 [ xii ]

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11.6

Linley Sambourne, ‘Nurse Bruin’, Punch, 29 February 1896, p. 98. 11.7 Sir John Tenniel, ‘The Man for the Job!’, Punch, 12 September 1896, p. 127. 11.8 E. T. Reed, ‘Design for Proposed Statue to be Erected in Constantinople. (Subscription Invited)’, Punch, 26 September 1896, p. 146. 11.9 Sir John Tenniel, ‘A Strong Appeal’, Punch, 26 September 1896, p. 151. 11.10 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Waiting the Signal’, Punch, 17 October 1896, p. 187. 12.1 Unknown artist, Der Wahre Jacob, 1, 1884, cover. 12.2 Rata Langa (Galantara), ‘Internationale Revue.’, including ‘John Bulls Sabbathfeier’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 17 July 1900, p. 3288. 12.3 Erich Schilling, ‘Die Firma Krupp und die Kornwalzen’, Der Wahre Jacob, 707, 23 August 1913, p. 8035. 12.4 Willy Steinert, ‘Der kleine Katechismus des Soldaten’, Der Wahre Jacob, 711, 18 October 1913, p. 8099. 12.5 Unknown cartoonist, ‘Der Friedensengel des Imperialismus’, Der Wahre Jacob, 546, 25 June 1907, p. 5440. 12.6 Rata Langa, ‘Aus Deutschlands Zukunft’, Der Wahre Jacob, 364, 3 July 1900, p. 3277. 12.7 Rata Langa, details from ‘Negerfrisur am Kongo’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 17 July 1900, p. 3288. 12.8 Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, ‘Das europäische Gleichgewicht’, Der Wahre Jacob, 663, 2 December 1911, p. 7321. 12.9 Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, ‘Mai-Feier’, Der Wahre Jacob, 385, 23 April 1901, p. 3485. 12.10 Arthur Krüger, ‘Der Militarismus auf der Anklagebank. Aus dem Prozeß Rosa Luxemburg’, Der Wahre Jacob, 731, 25 July 1914, p. 8417. 12.11 Unknown cartoonist, ‘Nun, kinder, drauf los! Zekt hilft nur noch das Dreschen’, Der Wahre Jacob, 733, 28 August 1914, p. 8441. 13.1 Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 27 August 1945. ILW0967, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. 13.2 Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 23 June 1947. ILW1266, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. [ xiii ]

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13.13 13.14 13.15 13.16 13.17

NEB [Ronald Niebour], Untitled, Daily Mail, 29 October 1948. NEB0629, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Joseph Lee, ‘Terrifying Days’, Evening News, 20 July 1949. JL4121, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Michael Cummings, Untitled, Daily Express, 12 December 1949. CU0057, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Michael Cummings, Untitled, Daily Express, 17 February 1950. David Low, ‘One Thing Leads to Another’, Evening Standard, 18 June 1947. DL2730, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Philip Zec, Untitled, Daily Mirror, 21 September 1945, p. 2. David Low, ‘Heads in the Sand’, Evening Standard, 10 May 1946. DL2571. British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Philip Zec, ‘All Empire Roads Lead Home’, Daily Mirror, 5 September 1945, p. 2. Joseph Lee, ‘London Laughs: Nut Collection for Britain’, Evening News, 26 March 1946. JL3282, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. David Low, ‘And now what about trying to grow some nuts?’, Evening Standard, 3 November 1949. DL3082, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. David Low, ‘Old Low’s Almanack – Prophecies for 1950’, Evening Standard, 9 December 1949. DL3097, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Joseph Lee, ‘London Laughs: Topical Gags like Groundnuts’, Evening News, 8 November 1949. JL4211, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. NEB [Ronald Niebour], Untitled, Daily Mail, 1 March 1951. NEB0802, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Leslie Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 21 November 1949. ILW1690, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Ronald Niebour, Untitled, Daily Mail, 22 December 1949. NEB0696, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. [ xiv ]

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Phil May, ‘The Mongolian Octopus – His Grip on Australia’, The Bulletin, 21 August 1886, pp. 12–13. Norman Lindsay, ‘Nearer, Clearer, Deadlier …’, The Bulletin, 7 June 1950, p. 5. William McLeod, ‘The Germans and British in New Guinea’, The Bulletin, 10 January 1885 [reprinted 17 May 1964, The Bulletin, p. 10]. Ted Scorfield, ‘Going my way – on a full petrol-tank?’, The Bulletin, 30 November 1949, p. 5. Ted Scorfield, ‘The More It Changes the More He Remains the Same’, The Bulletin, 23 April 1952, p. 5. Les Tanner, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, The Bulletin, 5 August 1961, p. 7. Les Tanner, ‘The Americans have a better prose style’, The Bulletin, 12 August 1961, p. 7. Les Tanner, ‘It’s difficult to approve of you Asians …’, The Bulletin, 30 September 1961, p. 7. Les Tanner, ‘Colonists and Imperialists …’, The Bulletin, 2 February 1963, pp. 4–5. Les Tanner, ‘That’s Carmichael our commitment to Malaysia …’, The Bulletin, 14 November 1964, p. 12. Les Tanner, ‘Sheer McCarthyism …’, The Bulletin, 31 July 1965, p. 12. Bruce Petty, ‘President Sukharno …’, An Australian Artist in South East Asia; Introduction by Ronald Searle, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962, p. 86. Bruce Petty, ‘4 Viet Cong prisoners …’, An Australian Artist in South East Asia; Introduction by Ronald Searle, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962, p. 89. Bruce Petty, ‘Political Influences Problems’, An Australian Artist in South East Asia; Introduction by Ronald Searle, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962, p. 80. Bruce Petty, ‘Petty’s Comment’, The Australian, 17 July 1964, p. 6. Bruce Petty, ‘Petty’s Comment’, The Australian, 22 July 1964, p. 8. Bruce Petty, ‘Food for Thought’, The Australian, 3 September 1964, p. 10. Bruce Petty, ‘International Affairs’, The Australian, 7 May 1966, p. 6. [ xv ]

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C ONT R IB UTO RS Dr Robert Dingley was, until his retirement, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New England, NSW. He has edited George Augustus Sala’s The Land of the Golden Fleece (1995) and (with Alan Sandison) Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction (2000). He has published extensively on nineteenth-century British and Australian culture in Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, Victorian Literature and Culture, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, Australian Literary Studies, and elsewhere. His most recent publications have been on George Eliot’s politics for George Eliot in Context (edited by Margaret Harris (Cambridge University Press, 2013); on the early history of English Studies for a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly (2014); and on the representation of Australia in nineteenthcentury writing for The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Blackwell, 2015). Professor Jean-Claude Gardes is a member of the Department of German at the University of Western Brittany (Brest, France). Since graduating with a doctorate from the University of Paris XIII (1981) – and particularly as co-convenor of EIRIS (Équipe interdisciplinaire de recherche sur l’image Satirique) – he has published widely on the history and theory of the political cartoon and satirical image. Gardes regularly edits the team’s annual scholarly journal – Ridiculosa – and convenes the Parisbased conference. With Angelika Schober, he co-edited Ridiculosa’s 2013 special issue La presse satirique dans le monde, a collection of 20 essays examining the satirical presses of various national and transnational contexts. Dr Fiona Halloran is the author of Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) and a contributor to Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence (Monash University ePress, 2009). She holds a PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a research fellow at the Huntington Library and the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. Previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bates College, and an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University, Halloran currently teaches American history at Rowland Hall-St Mark’s School in Salt Lake City. David Lockwood is a specialist in the modern history and politics of India as well Soviet history. He is especially interested in the role of [ xvi ]

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the bourgeoisie in historical development. He combines this with work in the broad areas of the role of the state in economic development; the transition from state-controlled to market economies; and the effects of globalisation on nation-states. Until his retirement, David was an Associate Professor of History at the Flinders University (serving as a long-time head of the department), and is now an adjunct at the University of Adelaide. His most recent book is Calcutta under Fire: The Second World War Years (2019). Dr David Olds completed his PhD at the Flinders University of South Australia in 2016, exploring the history and development of the Nation Review (1970–1981). Professor Robert Phiddian – BA (Hons) and PhD (University of Melbourne) – teaches Renaissance and eighteenth-century literature at the Flinders University of South Australia, and has a special interest in political satire, parody, and humour. He researches political satire, especially current Australian political cartoons with Haydon Manning (with whom he edited the 2008 collection Comic Commentators: Contemporary Political Cartooning in Australia). Robert was Deputy Dean of the School of Humanities and Creative Arts, Chair of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, Director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres, and has a particular interest in the quality of public language and in writers’ festivals. Albert D. Pionke is Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He is author of Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (Ohio State University Press, 2004) and The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals: Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838–1877 (Ashgate, 2013); co-editor of Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment (Ashgate, 2010), and Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018); and principal investigator of Mill Marginalia Online (millmarginalia. org). Casey Raeside is a PhD candidate at Flinders University. His thesis looks at the development of humanitarian views in Britain in relation to three nineteenth-century case studies: the Indian ‘Mutiny’, the Jamaican ‘rebellion’ (Morant Bay), and the Bulgarian ‘Horrors’. Dr Charlotte Lydia Riley is a Lecturer in Twentieth-century British History at the University of Southampton. She completed her PhD, which explored the Attlee government’s approach to colonial development programmes in British Africa, at UCL in 2013. Her work explores British political culture, especially the history of the Labour Party, [ xvii ]

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British overseas aid and development programmes, and decolonisation. She is also interested more broadly in cultural and social responses to British politics, the way that British people experienced the end of empire, and wider issues around the history of British identity, especially issues around gender politics and the British state. Leslie Rogne Schumacher, PhD, FRSA is the David H. Burton Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University. His research is on the Eastern Question and its associated issues, particularly the British–Ottoman relationship, imperialism in the Near and Middle East, and the growth of nationalism in nineteenth-century Mediterranean societies. He is currently working on a project that rethinks the east–west relationship by means of examining modern Mediterranean sociocultural, political, and economic networks. Dr Schumacher sits on the Board of Directors of Britain & the World, the Editorial Board of the Marmara Journal of European Studies, and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Dr Richard Scully obtained his BA (Hons) from Monash University (2003), and also his PhD (2008). He is the author of Eminent Victorian Cartoonists (The Political Cartoon Society, 2018) and British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism, and Ambivalence, 1860–1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, Britain and the World series, 2012). He co-edited Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence (Monash University ePress, 2009) with Marian Quartly. His chief research interest – the history of political cartoons, satirical art, and caricature – has found an outlet in numerous articles, including in the Journal of Victorian Culture (2011), Victorian Periodicals Review (2011, 2013), German Studies Review (2012), the International Journal of Comic Art (2011, 2012, 2013), and Ridiculosa (2013). He has also published on the history of Anglo-German relations, and in particular on the relationship between British and German cartographers in the later nineteenth century (Imago Mundi, 2010). Richard was Assistant Lecturer at Monash University (2008), before being appointed Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW (2009), where he is now Associate Professor. Richard was the recipient of a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, courtesy of the Australian Research Council (a three-year fellowship examining the global history of the political cartoon). Shaoqian Zhang is an Associate Professor of Art History, specialising in East Asian art and architecture at Oklahoma State University. She received her BA in traditional Chinese architecture from Beijing [ xviii ]

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University, and her MA and PhD in art history from Northwestern University. Shaoqian Zhang received the 2017 Oklahoma State University College of Arts and Sciences Junior Faculty Award for Scholarly Excellence. With the primary focus on early twentieth-century Chinese art and architecture, Zhang also has published a number of articles that reflect her interests in print culture, political history, party-state, medium specificity and spectatorship in China’s modern period – appearing in journals such as Modern Art Asia, Transcultural Studies, Twentieth Century China, and Art in Print. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, her other interests include the relationship between architectural representation and different religious forces in East Asia; body politics in visual presentation in modern China; and contemporary Chinese art by female artists, resulting in publications in journals such as Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Architext, and others. Stephen Tuffnell is Associate Professor of Modern US History at the University of Oxford and Fellow in History at St Peter’s College. He is currently completing his first monograph – Emigrant Foreign Relations: Independence and Interdependence in the Atlantic, 1790–1902 – and is working on a second project that examines the United States’ transimperial entanglement with Britain’s African colonies between 1867 and 1937. He is the editor, with Benjamin Mountford, of A Global History of Gold Rushes (California University Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Diplomatic History, the Journal of Global History, and Britain and the World. Andrekos Varnava obtained a BA (Hons) from Monash University (2001) and his PhD from the University of Melbourne (2006), and is currently Associate Professor in Imperial and Military History at Flinders University. He is the author of British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (Manchester University Press, 2009; paperback 2012); and co-editor of Reunifying Cyprus: The Annan Plan and Beyond (I. B. Tauris, 2009; paperback 2011); The Minorities of Cyprus: Development Patterns and the Identity of the Internal-Exclusion (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); and The Archbishops of Cyprus in the Modern Age: The Changing Role of the Archbishop-Ethnarch, their Identities and Politics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). He has published and has forthcoming articles in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (2005), The Cyprus Review (2005 and 2x 2010), Journal of Military History (2010), War in History (2012 and 2015), Historical Research (2014), Itenerario (2014), and The Historical Journal (2015). In 2011 he became the series editor of Cyprus Historical and Contemporary Studies for Cambridge Scholars Publishing. [ xix ]

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Frederick Whiting is Director of the Blount Scholars Program and Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He has published articles on sexuality, subjectivity, and American literature, and is currently at work on a book that examines twentieth-century transformations in concepts of human and novelistic form under the sign of pathology. Stefanie Wichhart obtained her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin (2007) and is currently an Associate Professor of History at Niagara University, a small liberal-arts college in western New York. Her main area of research is the British Empire in the Middle East. She has published articles on Iraq during the Second World War in The Journal of Contemporary History (2013) and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (2011), and contributed a chapter on political cartoons in Iraq to the edited collection Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence (Monash University ePress, 2009). She is currently working on a book entitled The Shadow of Power: Britain, Egypt, and Iraq during the Second World War. Keren Zdafee is an Islamic art historian and an educator. She is currently teaching in the Department of Art History at the Tel Aviv University, and in the Art Teaching Track at Talpiot College, Hulon. She received a PhD in Islamic art history from the Tel Aviv University in 2016. Her PhD dissertation – ‘Printed Visual Culture in Egypt: The Caricature in the Interwar Egyptian Press (1916–1936)’ – examined aspects of cultural transfer and cosmopolitanism in the visual satirical imagery from interwar Egypt in the context of the country’s struggle for independence from the British conqueror. She is currently at work on a book, Cartooning for Egypt, which will explore the ways in which the insider-as-outsider gaze of Egyptian cosmopolitan artists and entrepreneurs shaped satirical imagery and the platforms on which it was distributed.

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Foundational to this project has been the funding and support provided to Richard Scully by the Australian Research Council and Australian government, as part of the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2013–2015) ‘The cartoon empire: The Anglo-American tradition of political Satire and Comic Art, 1720–2020’. Thanks also to the Australian Academy of the Humanities for their support of this publication. At Manchester University Press, particular thanks are due to: Emma Brennan, Paul Clarke, John M. MacKenzie (Founding Editor, ‘Studies in Imperialism’), and Andrew Thompson. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of the proposal and the manuscript. Colleagues at the editors’ home institutions – the University of New England (UNE) and the Flinders University of South Australia – have provided tremendous support over the course of the project. At UNE, particular thanks are owing to Lloyd Weeks; as well as Gina Butler, Heiko Daniel, Kath Dougall, Claire Girvin, Libby Magann, Sharon Marshall, Melissa Pearce, Shirley Rickard, Meg Travers, Fiona Utley, and Trish Wright. At Flinders, thanks to the document delivery team and administration staff in the School of History and International Relations. Thanks also to the organisers of the 21st Australasian Humour Studies Network Conference 2015, Flinders University, Adelaide (4–6 February 2015) where Andrekos Varnava and Casey Raeside presented their chapter as a paper. Thanks are also due to those other scholars who have connected with the project, and helped drive it in key directions, including: Timothy S. Benson (Political Cartoon Society, London), Mark Bryant (independent scholar), Jane Chapman (University of Lincoln), Fintan Cullen (University of Nottingham), Jules Faber (President, Australian Cartoonists Association), Richard A. Gaunt (University of Nottingham), Hans Harder (Heidelberg University), Reto Hoffman (University of Melbourne), Chris Holdridge (Monash University), Funie Hsu (University of California, Berkeley), Alison Hulme (University College, Dublin), Samuel Hyde (Edge Hill University), Ritu Khanduri (University of Texas, Arlington), Ursula E. Koch (independent scholar), László Kurti (University of Miskolc), John A. Lent (Temple University; and Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Comic Art), Barbara Mittler (Heidelberg University), John R. Moores (University of York), Annick Pellegrin (University of Sydney), Christopher Rea (University of British Columbia), and Margaret A. Rose (University of Cambridge). Particular thanks is also [ xxi ]

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due to those institutions and individuals who granted permission for the use of their intellectual property in this volume. Every effort has been made to trace the rights holders of visual and other material quoted or otherwise included in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, then the publishers and editors will be happy to make appropriate arrangements to remedy the situation. Lastly – to our families: Helen, Barnabas, and Maria Varnava, Helena Menih, Patrick and Arthur Scully. We are sustained by your love and support every day. To Natashia Josephine Scully (1981–2016) – you continue to be an inspiration. Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava, 2019

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C HAP T E R ON E

Introduction: the importance of cartoons, caricature, and satirical art in imperial contexts Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava

On the evening of Wednesday, 30 November 1892, the cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne freshened himself up with a Turkish bath before departing as usual for his regular editorial dinner meeting at Punch.1 The permanent staff and proprietors of the London Charivari had held such meetings almost since the birth of the magazine in 1841, and around the mahogany table in the upstairs room, all manner of discussions were to be had, and decisions to be made, as to the content of the coming week’s issue.2 While key staff members were responsible for particular aspects of the magazine, the ebb and flow of conversation around the table meant that much of what appeared in Punch was a collective effort, by a group of men (and they were all men) of differing opinions and personalities. Sambourne – the junior cartoonist in a hierarchy headed by Punch’s great master, John Tenniel – was particularly conscious of this culture and, more often than not, had the subject matter of his weekly cut decided for him. That evening was no exception, and at some time during the food service or after-dinner drinks, it was suggested that Sambourne take as his subject a recent speech by Cecil Rhodes, given at a reception at the City Terminus Hotel, and reported in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion in that morning’s Times.3 Over the course of the next few days, Sambourne worked hard at his commission, sent his finished version off to be engraved and printed by other hands, and, in the number published for 10 December 1892, there appeared what can only be described as a masterpiece of comic art: ‘The Rhodes Colossus’ (Figure 1.1); as enduring an image of British imperialism as has ever been created by an artist or artists, serious or comic.4 The image of Cecil Rhodes in his safari suit, bestriding the African continent from Cape to Cairo, is a fixture of innumerable textbooks, [1]

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Figure 1.1  Linley Sambourne, ‘The Rhodes Colossus’, Punch, 10 December 1892, p. 266.

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atlases, encyclopaedias, and histories (scholarly and popular).5 And yet, very few such works have sought to employ the cartoon as anything other than a useful illustration (often a cover illustration), a visual affirmation of other evidence, or an attractive means of breaking up the dense text of a monograph. This has largely been the fate of cartoons when used (if at all) in historical scholarship; and this despite a long-held regard for cartoons and their creators as makers of history, perhaps best epitomised by Arthur Balfour, in his speech at the retirement dinner of Sir John Tenniel himself.6 The work of that ‘great artist and great gentleman’, Balfour asserted, was destined to be among ‘the great sources from which to judge of the trend and character of English thought and life in the latter half of the nineteenth century’.7 Appearing on a weekly basis in magazines like Punch, and its chief rivals of the period – including Fun, Judy, and Moonshine – cartoons were a key means by which British readers encountered and engaged with issues of empire and imperialism. Across the Channel, the immense power of French satirical art also sustained a particular focus on matters imperial (via Le Charivari and its imitators); and in Germany, the cartoonists of Kladderadatsch, Die Fliegende Blätter, and Simplicissimus intervened regularly in the debates over overseas expansion that characterised the period of the ‘New Imperialism’. Indeed, in Thomas Theodor Heine’s ‘Kolonialmächte [Colonial Powers]’ from Simplicissimus’s special 1904 number on ‘the colonies’ (Figure 1.2), one finds perhaps the only rival to Sambourne’s comment on European imperialism in terms of visibility and enduring influence.8 So too, in the rising power that was urged to ‘take up the white man’s burden’ (and which perhaps survives today as the only imperial power left from the ‘Age of Empire’), the US cartoonists of Puck and Judge (and countless other magazines and newspapers) critiqued foreign imperialism, while also supporting their nation’s expansion into ‘the West’, the Pacific, and Asia (as well as hegemony over the Caribbean and Latin America made possible by American economic preponderance). As the ubiquity of cartoons like ‘The Rhodes Colossus’ indicates, Balfour’s opinion (despite the context for his speech lending itself to exaggeration and overenthusiasm) has been paid lip service ever since. Kent Worcester noted recently – in his Preface to one of the more ground-breaking works of comics scholarship – that there exists a ‘compelling case for incorporating the study of comics and cartoons into the professional toolkit of the modern historian’.9 But regardless of appearances, and notwithstanding their visibility and accessibility, cartoons and caricature have not been accorded a ‘place in the sun’ among the traditional ‘great sources’ for historical inquiry; nor are they a prime choice among the new sources of evidence that have so enriched [3]

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Figure 1.2  Thomas Theodor Heine, ‘Kolonialmächte’, Simplicissimus, 9 (6), May 1904, p. 55.

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the cultural turn in the history of imperialism. As such, although there have been some valuable surveys by Roy Douglas and Mark Bryant, the scholarly appreciation for the function of graphic satire in sustaining – as well as challenging – imperialism, is haphazard at best.10 One can find excellent usage of cartoons in recent works by Bradley Deane, Neil Hultgren, and others, but in the main these are isolated.11 Other visual and material sources – commercial advertising, print capitalism, travel and tourist literature, and other cultural forms (such as film) – have been the basis for a wealth of insightful, dedicated analyses.12 But it remains the case that cartoons and comic images are still not taken seriously.13 Cartoons are sources that are ‘laden with clues to the social and political dynamics of any given time and culture’; and these clues and dynamics are often more revealing of what the past was ‘really like’ than the written word.14 In part because of their emotive nature, their relative immediacy, and their many-layered meanings, cartoons are an excellent way of accessing past attitudes: ‘With some lines and a few words, we are instantly back in the midst of the conflicts and personalities of the day.’15 While some see in their form and content a devastating weapon that can sway public opinion, their true value for the historian lies in the way they reflect the ideas and prejudices of their creators and intended audiences.16 This extends to far deeper and richer appreciations of historical contexts available if one goes beyond the image, to explore cartoons as material culture; and, as pointed out so ably by Nicholas Hiley, there is an enormous amount to be gained by: analysing the complex industries which created these images; the processes by which they were made and printed; the relationship between the cartoonist and the publication for which they worked; the circulation and readership of that publication; and the impact of those cartoons upon readers.17

But as Hiley also implied, perhaps the sheer hard work involved in exploring all these rich contexts has actually been an impediment to the proper use of cartoons by historians. More therefore needs to be said about the value of cartoons, to justify their importance as sources (and to justify all that hard, scholarly work). To paraphrase one of the greatest scholars to have worked in this field – Lewis Perry Curtis, Jr – why do cartoons matter?18 Cartoons were (and are) not ‘passive reflectors of reality’; nor were they (or are they) ‘passively received by readers’.19 Rather, they help to crystallise attitudes, and express in pithy and succinct fashion the thinking of a broad segment of society (past as well as present). It is this ability to simplify and essentialise that makes the cartoon so [5]

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powerful an art form. Most importantly for the study of imperialisms is the way cartoonists have always ‘devoted much time and talent to mocking or laughing at people far beyond their own class and ethnicity – namely, the Other’.20 Comic artists do not create such images anew, but they can give singular form to the multiple, more nebulous conceptions on which they draw for inspiration, and then disseminate those images to mass readerships. While it is difficult to observe instances when cartoons have changed the political landscape, impacted voting patterns, or toppled governments, it is possible to point to a historical fear that cartoons might achieve such things. So dangerous did the cartoon seem to the regime of Napoleon III, for instance, that the Emperor of the French inaugurated a censorship apparatus directed specifically at curbing its influence.21 Across the Atlantic, the Tammany-Hall politician William M. ‘Boss’ Tweed was so fearful of cartoonist Thomas Nast that he is famously said to have remarked: Let’s stop them damned pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me – my constituents can’t read; but damn it, they can see pictures.22

Despite resorting to bribery, Tweed failed to halt Nast’s caricaturing of him (for example) as a corrupt, Neronian Roman Emperor, taking pleasure in the ravishing of Columbia by the ‘Tammany Tiger’.23 It is widely accepted by the scholarship that, yes, Nast did play a key role in the demolition of Tweed’s personal standing, and helped end his career.24 In so doing (and via his later defence of incumbent Republican, Ulysses S. Grant, against the Democratic challenger, Horace Greeley; and his popularisation of the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant), Nast helped to elevate the status of the cartoonist to that of an important political actor.25 A recognition of the cartoonist as a serious artist was not to be far behind. It was those arch-imperialists – the Victorians – who had first begun to appreciate the importance of cartoons and caricature as art forms and shapers of opinion. The death in 1864 of John Leech – Punch’s principal cartoonist since the 1840s – occasioned a significant outpouring of public grief, and a greater appreciation for his amusing little blackand-white sketches of everyday life as constituting real art.26 A long-time admirer of Leech, John Ruskin linked the thriving Punch school of cartooning (epitomised by Leech’s successors, Tenniel and George Du Maurier) to the great masters of the past.27 That same British tradition was celebrated by R. W. Buss in 1874, just as the ‘New Imperialism’ was germinating; and by the 1890s, Graham Everitt and Gleeson White had joined Ruskin and Buss in heaping praise on those cartoonists who [6]

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so skilfully combined the art of graphic humour with more serious book and periodical illustration.28 The recognition of black-and-white art – as such – gathered strength with the sponsorship of M. H. Spielmann, the powerful arbiter of late-Victorian taste, who championed it via his Magazine of Art, and also wrote the first full-scale history of Punch.29 Where the art world was perhaps a little slow to pick up on the importance of cartoons and cartoonists, the same cannot be said for politicians. Benjamin Disraeli did his best to ingratiate himself with John Leech in the 1840s; while his great rival, W. E. Gladstone, was honoured to accept an invitation to dine at the Punch table in 1889.30 Indeed, it was eventually Gladstone who acted on his Tory predecessors’ recommendation that John Tenniel be granted a knighthood in 1893; and this underscored the importance of cartoonists in national life just as matters imperial reached their apogee.31 Knighthoods for his successors as the senior British cartoonists of the day – including Bernard Partridge in 1925 (a staunch imperialist) and David Low in 1962 (a fierce critic of empire) – could follow without occasioning much controversy. Via his wartime study of the British comic art tradition, and his later autobiography, Low did much to cement in place the importance of the cartoon as art form.32 If cartoons were appreciated as a form of art just as imperialism reached its high-water mark, then it was as the age of imperialism was ending that the first steps were taken to study comic art for its own sake. Scattered studies and appreciations of the power and importance of comic art had appeared earlier, but the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the beginnings of a scholarly appreciation of the myriad art forms that – in combining text and image in either single-frame, or sequential form – came to constitute the stuff of ‘comics studies’. Arguably, the foundational stage was the completion (by M. Dorothy George) of the British Library’s catalogue of prints (an undertaking begun as long ago as 1870).33 This gave the cartoonist and collector Draper Hill the basis for his ground-breaking study of the eighteenth-century master, James Gillray (which he dedicated to George herself).34 And this in turn attracted the attention of the great Austrian-born art historian E. H. Gombrich, who had recently given academic respectability to the study of cartoons in his essay ‘The Cartoonist’s Armory’ of 1963.35 Around the same time, French cultural theorist Roland Barthes was the first serious critic to even acknowledge the existence of the comic strip, when he mused on the function of the text-balloon in ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ (1964).36 By then, Umberto Eco had also turned his attention to comic art (specifically Superman, and Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts), lending enormous weight to the interrogation of the art forms at a time when American cultural imperialism seemed unstoppable.37 [7]

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By the middle of the 1960s, L. H. Streicher was calling for a unified theoretical framework for cartoons as historical sources; and W. A. Coupe had commenced his long and distinguished career as a historian of German graphic satires.38 Then in 1970 – via a backhanded aside in his essay ‘The Third Meaning’ – Barthes reluctantly accepted the emergence of the comic strip as a new form of art, despite it having been ‘born in the lower depths of high culture’, and being largely a ‘derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical [form] of consumer subculture’.39 Matters then began to develop rather rapidly, as the California-based David Kunzle produced his first great volume of historical analysis (The Early Comic Strip); T. M. Kemnitz asserted the validity of ‘The Cartoon as a Historical Source’; and academic attention was drawn to cartoons and comics in several important special issues of scholarly journals.40 Institutional status was bestowed on cartoons, caricature, and comic art more generally, via the establishment of the British Cartoon Archive (University of Kent at Canterbury, 1973), the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (State University of Ohio, 1977), and the Caroline and Erwin Swann Collection (Library of Congress, 1977).41 The criticism of Eco and Barthes was translated (in part) into English around the same time, opening up new vistas for analysis and appreciation in the prime territories of modern comic art. But while teaching classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (from 1973), the cartoonist Will Eisner found a dearth of scholarly literature and critical appreciation, and so embarked on his own account.42 Published as Comics and Sequential Art in 1985, it joined Charles Press’s The Political Cartoon (1981) as the fundamental bases for a new scholarly field of ‘comics studies’.43 This kind of serious attention had significant appeal to the thenmaturing ‘Generation X’, for whom comics were a major touchstone (especially males searching for new and subversive literatures).44 This coincided with a noticeable shift towards the darker imagery and more serious storytelling that pervaded the comic book as a form of literature, and led to the rise of what is commonly called the ‘graphic novel’.45 Such a self-conscious transition towards serious literature prompted several promising starts in terms of a dedicated academic scholarship – including the journals Comics Anno: Jahrbuch der Forschung zu populär-visuellen Medien (1991–1995); Ridiculosa (1994–present); 9e Art: Les Cahiers du Musée de la bande dessinée (1996–present); and Inks: Cartoon and Comic Arts Studies (1994–1997); and Scott McCloud’s ground-breaking Understanding Comics (1994) – before the advent of the Internet forever altered the landscape, and led to an explosion in interest in cartoons and comic art. Although eschewing the online form, the most enduring and important scholarly venue has been John [8]

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A. Lent’s International Journal of Comic Art (1999–present); and it has been joined by Deutsche Comicforschung (since 2005), European Comic Art (since 2008), as well as Studies in Comics (since 2010), and Comicalités: Études de culture graphique (since 2013). In addition to reviving Inks in 2017, the Ohio State University Press has also launched a dedicated scholarly book series – ‘Studies in Comics and Cartoon’ (from 2013) – and the Australian Research Council, as well as the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, have recently funded major multi-year research grants on comics and cartoons.46 While comics studies is therefore reaching a point of maturation in the early twenty-first century, the seeking of a broader relevance of the various comic art forms has a longer history. Already, by the end of the 1970s, some significant assertions were being made about the connection between a satirical comic press and the flourishing of democratic institutions.47 The long battle of the cartoonist against censorship became the raison d’être for much of the work of Robert Justin Goldstein and the community of likeminded scholars who have followed his lead (in the years since the bicentenary of the French Revolution first inspired him).48 Since the era of rapid decolonisation, such assertions have perhaps been less ground-breaking when applied to the metropolitan contexts of Britain, the United States, and Western Europe, than when they have been observed and championed in colonial and postcolonial contexts.49 Indeed, it has become something of a truism that in postcolonial Africa, the health or otherwise of democratic regimes can (in part) be measured by the cultures of political satire they sustain.50 In states where liberal democracy has been a fundamental aspect of developing national identity and national life – for instance in the United States – the connection between cartoons, comics, and liberty has seemed straightforward.51 Yet at the same time as he himself was exploring such connections, Charles Press warned against too romantic a view of cartoonists ‘as staunch defenders of freedom’.52 Press was writing as the Cold War hotted up, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the election of Ronald Reagan. He was joined by Chris Lamb from around 1983 (in three articles for Target: the Political Cartoon Quarterly), who then continued his postgraduate work as the naivety of post-Cold War consensus was being exposed to the fallout from 9/11, and the Bush invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.53 Lamb feared the decline of the once-mighty art that had challenged presidents and potentates in the new context of the twenty-first century: in which the controversies over the Jyllands-Posten ‘Muhammad’ caricatures (2005), and the Charlie Hebdo massacre (2015), have paradoxically reinforced the power and importance of the cartoon, but also begun to prompt some reflection on the limits of civility and freedom of expression in an [9]

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increasingly globalised world (and one which still relies on Orientalist stereotypes for the communication of political messages).54 Yet even now, while even those most convinced of the way the cartoon can be seen as ‘the embodiment of … Democracy’ are willing to admit that cartoons and cartoonists have had negative impacts on minorities or subaltern groups at times, such instances have generally been subordinated to a Whiggish narrative of liberal-democratic progress (e.g. by the self-confessed ‘free-speech absolutist’ Victor Navasky).55 While much attention has been given over to the function of cartoons as being subversive of empire, supportive of national self-determination, and inimical to tyranny, little has been said about the ways they have also supported and sustained forms of inequality and imperialism (and the various threads of gender, class, and other politics that have been essential components of imperial enterprises).56 Rather than emphasising cartoons and comics as inherently democratic forms of art, it is perhaps more appropriate to view them as being inherently imperial. It is surely no coincidence that Ohio State’s first dedicated ‘Studies in Comics and Cartoon’ volume (mentioned above) focuses on matters imperial: Mark McKinney’s Redrawing French Empire in Comics.57 For, at their genesis in Europe’s print revolution, caricatures and cartoons were mobilised as weapons in the struggles over imperial forms of authority in Central Europe, during the Renaissance and the Reformation.58 But – as is widely accepted in the scholarship – it was to be in the context of a rapidly expanding British Empire that the cartoon truly came into its own.59 As Richard Scully has shown recently, the traditions that have been the critical touchstone for global cartoons and comic art – the British and American (or even a single ‘Anglo-American’ tradition) – may have been based in the liberalising press cultures of the day, but, just as importantly, they were themselves born from an imperial, transatlantic relationship.60 William Hogarth’s groundbreaking Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme (1721) dealt with matters of international trade and empire, and (arguably) helped establish English graphic satire in its modern form.61 A generation later, George Townshend (1724–1807) imported British-style caricature to the North American continent during the Seven Years War (1754–1763), but also adapted it. What had been an art form based on allegory (in the manner of Hogarth) was transformed into one which depicted actual people and political figures (in Townshend’s case, his original barbs were directed at his superior, General James Wolfe; his later works at a variety of political enemies).62 This helped lay the foundations for what was achieved subsequently by the likes of James Gillray (1756–1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827). This was the critical moment of development for E. H. Gombrich, but a Whiggish and nationalist [ 10 ]

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narrative of metropolitan British affinity with cartooning obscures a broader story.63 For at precisely the same time as Townshend first drew – and in the same imperial context – Benjamin Franklin published ‘Join, or Die’ in the 9 May 1754 edition of his Pennsylvania Gazette, urging the colonies of British America to unite and cooperate more closely in the face of pressure from Native Americans and French imperialism to their west and north. A decade later – during the furore over the Stamp Act (1765) – Franklin and Townshend were actually in direct competition with one another in the burgeoning marketplace for caricature in the imperial capital. Townshend’s comment may have sold around 2,000 copies, but it has been Franklin’s nightmare vision of imperial dismemberment – Magna Britannia: Her Colonies Reduc’d (1766) – that has lived longest in the popular and scholarly imagination.64 Such a history of development underscores the decidedly imperial and transnational nature of eighteenth-century caricature. This is the best-studied and best-appreciated period in scholarly terms (not least for its scatological and sexual humour), and caricature and cartoons have been deployed as sources in some of the best studies of the period. Linda Colley drew on caricature for her classic study of British national identity and its imperial component; and Douglas Fordham noted the importance of satirical prints in the eighteenth century as underscoring a sense of an imperial, cartographic worldview.65 The public perception of Britain’s chief instrument of imperial control – the Royal Navy – was also mediated through caricature to a considerable degree (both at home and abroad).66 So too, Marcus Wood’s studies of the main economic driver of the ‘First’ British Empire – chattel slavery – have taken satirical imagery and comic art as their fundamental organising principal.67 But despite the importance of the eighteenth century for the development of political cartoons as an art form, it was in the under-studied nineteenth century that the forces of imperialism and colonialism made it into the near-universal form of expression that characterised the twentieth century. The global reach of British-style humour magazines – both within the formal empire and via the informal empire of commerce and information-exchange – was a fundamental driver of the art form in the nineteenth century.68 In this, they formed an essential aspect of that globalising of the mass media that has been explored so ably by Simon Potter.69 As key nodes in that network, ‘Greater Britain’s’ imperial relationships were mediated, critiqued, and sustained in important ways via cartoons and cartoonists well into the twentieth century. Lewis Perry Curtis can almost have been said to have founded a whole new field with his studies of Ireland and the Irish in caricature and the periodical press: a field that still inspires debate in a decidedly [ 11 ]

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un-postcolonial context.70 The direct descendants of the British tradition found in Australasia, Canada, and South Africa, moreover, have gone from providing bastions of ‘Britishness’ for the aspirational settler societies they sustained, to assertive and world-leading traditions derived from and helping construct a variety of contested, postcolonial nationalisms.71 In Canada, the parallel importation of the French and British inheritances led to a flowering of comic art in Quebec, and this melding of the two major western traditions was also seen elsewhere.72 Although derived from Iberian traditions that were themselves under constant pressure from censorship regimes, the earliest examples of SpanishAmerican and Brazilian cartooning and comic art owed just as much to ‘informal’ French and British forebears and imperial influences. In the Brazilian case, the Regency established for Emperor Pedro II was targeted by Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre, who collaborated on Niterói: Revista Brasileira from his base in Paris; while in the case of Argentina, criticism of the ‘informal’ relationship with Britain was a major focus for the French-style comic weekly Caras y caretas from 1898.73 Thereafter, the bulk of Latin American comment has been focused on postcolonial domestic affairs, or the ongoing neo-colonialism of the United States. In metropolitan Europe’s post-imperial period, comic artists have been key interpreters of the imperial legacy, in all manner of forms: from the ‘empire-as-charity-concern’ kind of ‘gutter patriotism’ that so irritated George Orwell; to an uneasy perpetuation of nationalist and imperialist ideologies found in ‘Dan Dare’ (in the Eagle, 1950–1967); down to much deeper critiques, more removed in time from the period itself (such as in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 1999–2007).74 Images of empire and imperialism from the past have been a ready-made source of material for political cartoonists down to the present day, serving as a perfect means of critiquing neo-imperialist tendencies. Similarly, the desire to contest royal and imperial authority shaped the French form of satirical art from the outset.75 In subtle ways, cartoonists have often sought to appropriate and transfer that authority, rather than simply to abolish or weaken it. Just as has been the case in Britain, French comic artists and cartoonists have maintained an uneasy relationship with the colonial past, imagining imperialism as: tragedy, farce, or epic struggle; deeply flawed and doomed to failure from the start or potentially recuperable at key points; a heroic narrative of sacrifice and redemption or a grotesque descent into human depravity; and a closed chapter of history or a force that reaches into the present76

Countless other examples serve to reinforce the point (including Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin running the full gamut from the arch-imperialism [ 12 ]

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of 1930s Tintin au Congo, through to the more enlightened attitudes of the postcolonial period).77 Another example is the French comic strip series Asterix (begun in October 1959), whose creators René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo rejected the idea of any encoded social or political significance in the strip and its characters; yet one cannot ignore the story of a small community trying to hold out against the might of the Roman Empire as being anything but an anti-imperial statement (and this at a time of acute colonial crisis for the French republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s).78 Cartoons and comics therefore serve as such useful sources for understanding imperialism because they themselves emerged from imperial contexts. When indigenous traditions of comic art came into contact with western forms, local artists rapidly subverted the style, content, and form thereof, and began to utilise the imported methods and technologies to pursue anti-imperial (often proto-national) agendas. In part to battle corruption in his own government, but also to combat foreign infiltration, King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) of Siam (1910–1925) formalised the status of satirical cartoons as phap lo in the Thai language, and took the lead in drawing cartoons for his own royal gazettes and newspapers.79 The importation of western-style comic art to Meiji-era Japan has been perhaps one of the most important such cultural and artistic transfers. A great many aficionados and scholars have traced the origins of today’s Manga and Anime to this key moment of contact – to say nothing of the more specific origins of Japanese political cartooning occasioned by the merging of indigenous art forms with the ‘Ponchi-e’ picture (literally the ‘Punch picture’).80 The intersection of indigenous art forms and western graphic satires in the multitude of African contexts is only now beginning to be appreciated.81 So too the crucibles of formal and informal empire have been critical to the forging of a distinct Chinese culture of comics and cartooning.82 The same can be said for the Middle Eastern, as well as the Russian, traditions of comic art, where the arrival of western cartoon styles played a transformative role in the merging of existing cultures of graphic satire with newer forms, and created a globalising convergence.83 This (necessarily brief) summary of the development of comics studies – and of imperial contexts for cartooning – characterises a still-new groundswell of innovative scholarship that is beginning to change the intellectual landscape. The contents of the present volume aim to provide still further coherence to an otherwise disparate field (or set of fields and sub-fields), in part by building on excellent early work from only the last decade or so: on the Irish and other contexts noted above, as well as on Cuba, Korea, Cyprus, and the Philippines.84 Given the over-emphasis on the caricature and cartoons of the eighteenth [ 13 ]

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century, Comic Empires is focused deliberately on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: when imperialism made the cartoon a global form, and when it was deployed so readily as a weapon of decolonisation. The concentration on the chosen time period is just one means of combating the disparate nature of much of the scholarship; it also provides a useful comparative means of appreciating the connections between and across national contexts. The chapters that comprise Comic Empires are also divided up among three distinct parts. The chapters of Part I are grouped around the major theme of ‘High imperialism and colonialism’. In general terms, these studies deal with cartoons that were produced at the imperial centre, and which assisted in the dissemination of imperialism as an ideology. The metropole of the British Empire seems the logical place to commence such a collection. In ‘Courting the colonies’, Robert Dingley and Richard Scully begin the investigation of imperialism in British cartoons and caricature in the same place as this Introduction has done: with Linley Sambourne of Punch, and an appreciation of his use of imperial allegory (in particular related to colonial adventuring in Africa and the South Pacific). Appropriately – given the importance of the American tradition to the development of comic art and the cartoon in particular – imperialism in US contexts also gives a strong showing in the following pages. Albert Pionke and Fred Whiting build on recent interest in cartoons of US involvement in Cuba (where new American imperialism clashed with the older, Spanish regime), and advance a compelling case for the way the American self-image was fostered in that context. Similarly, Stephen Tuffnell observes how the image of an ‘imperial’ United States was inherently bound up with its iconographical relationship with imperial Britain. In focusing on the prime sites for the United States’ expression of colonial-imperial ‘Manifest Destiny’, Fiona Halloran builds on her comprehensive work on US cartoonist Thomas Nast by exploring the interplay of race and empire in images of the American West. In Part II, the focus is on the ‘Critique of empire and the context of decolonisation’, and therein, Shaoqian Zhang adds to our knowledge of China’s struggle with Imperial Japan in the twentieth century. David Lockwood’s chapter then engages with one of the most important contexts for analysis of cartoons and empire characterising the current scholarship. The cartoons and cartoonists of the Indian subcontinent have provided a logical ‘way in’ for those seeking to explore the representation of colonial cultures in metropolitan contexts, but also the way subaltern cartoonists appropriated and subverted the metropolitan original for their own purposes. As Partha Mitter, Mushirul Hasan, and Ritu Khanduri have shown in recent years, in India this ranged from something as simple as the tracing of the contents of Punch, [ 14 ]

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Judy, or Fun, and altering the captions and meanings, down to the more sophisticated productions that helped found India’s flourishing tradition of comic art.85 In the broader subcontinent, similar patterns characterised Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan developments (although these were somewhat delayed when compared with the key context of India and Pakistan).86 Lockwood explores how the New Zealand-born cartoonist David Low critiqued Britain’s delayed exit from India, and engages with some of the key issues addressed in this Introduction: what was the effect of such cartoons on the intended readership? And what do they reveal about broader knowledge of, and support for, the empire in British society? The context of Egypt (and, particularly, Egyptian cartoons and cartoonists) is of particular note also in the chapters in Part II, just as it has been in the broader scholarship. Herein, major contributions will be found in Keren Zdafee’s examination of Sarukhan’s al-Masri Effendi cartoons of the 1930s, and Stefanie Wichhart’s engagement with the iconography of decolonisation in the Suez Crisis. In this, they add to the sterling early work of Tim Benson and Anthony Gorst, whose 2006 volume Suezcide shed much new light on the cartoonists’ response to that flashpoint of decolonisation in Egypt.87 They also tap into the important recent work of Marilyn Booth, and Eliane Ursula Ettmueller, whose focus on the hitherto-neglected Punches of Egypt is taking the field in new directions.88 Intimately linked to the turmoil of Suez, the Cyprus Emergency of 1955–1959 is the focus of Andrekos Varnava and Casey Raeside’s chapter; they build on earlier work that observes the subtle, yet multifaceted attitude of the London Punch to Britain’s ‘inconsequential possession’. The chapters of Part III explore contexts where the distinction between support for, or opposition to, empire are not so clear-cut. Leslie Rogne Schumacher’s chapter deals with the way in which one imperial power critiqued the imperialism of another. Connected to the Middle Eastern context by more than one layer of imperialism, his examination of the way a pro-imperial Punch engaged with the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire sheds light on a number of tensions, as well as contributing to the sense of timeliness of this volume as a whole (just as in the case of Egypt – noted above – Ottoman cartooning has also been a feature of the recent scholarship).89 In their chapters, both Jean-Claude Gardes and Charlotte Riley engage with key left-wing critiques of empire and imperialism: from the perspective of Germany’s supposedly anti-imperialist, socialist paper Der Wahre Jacob; and the ambivalence towards empire displayed during the Attlee years in Britain (1945–1951). Then, rounding out the collection, David Olds and Robert Phiddian explore the Australia of the 1960s, when the [ 15 ]

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cartoonists of the Commonwealth sought to move away from their British roots and towards a newer form of national identity (often expressed consciously in opposition to imperial ties). The contents of Comic Empires is therefore representative of a multitude of different historical and geographical contexts, penned by scholars from all manner of backgrounds. In this, the volume takes a collaborative approach to the subject matter that is developing as a model of best practice in the field.90 Such an approach has many merits; not the least of which is that it engages simultaneously with several general scholarly literatures (including history, literary studies, comics studies, and art history), at the same time as with the particular imperial contexts that have so fascinated each of the contributors. Other aspects of this ongoing collaborative project – published as a symposium in the International Journal of Comic Art – have laid important foundations already.91 As was noted therein, the construction of important scholarly bridges between individuals, fields, disciplines, and institutions is best undertaken in this collaborative fashion.92 The approach taken can often seem very broad, with a wide range of chosen subject matter, and an often disparate set of approaches from overlapping disciplines and fields. But, as with the building of any bridge (literally as well as metaphorically), the first stage is often simply to throw in as much foundational material as possible, creating a causeway, allowing later work to construct a more purposeful, imposing, and refined superstructure, via which a freer flow of scholarly ideas and practices can occur in the future. Despite its variegated contents, therefore – being divided into three parts, and each chapter taking a different case study as its focus – Comic Empires also serves to synthesise and bring together various contextual strands and major themes that are common across the study of cartoons and imperialism. Most notable (and as has been perhaps the most persistent reason for studying these important sources since the 1960s), is the function of the cartoon in creating and disseminating an image of ‘the Other’, and its inevitable fostering of an auto-image by contrast. This is not only a function of the stereotyping of subaltern, colonised peoples (as in the case of Sambourne’s ‘Samoa’; Nast’s Chinese railroad workers in the American West; or the Irish apes so expertly dissected by Curtis) as inferiors to an imperial norm or superior type. It is also bound up with the construction of images of imperial competitors or opponents. Scully and Dingley explore this in literal form via the cartoons of Linley Sambourne, who imagined John Bull, Uncle Sam, and other great powers as suitors courting and competing for the affections of feminised colonial characters. Leslie Rogne Schumacher sees in Punch’s critique of Ottoman policies towards their Armenian subjects an indirect [ 16 ]

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but inherent endorsement of Britain’s (supposedly) different attitude to subject peoples. So too, Stephen Tuffnell locates the growth of an imperial self-image in the United States in long-standing imaginings of Britain (John Bull in particular) as a competitor, but also as a model and fellow traveller. In this, the contents of this volume converge with the most recent work that highlights the importance of cartoons and caricature in particular as a means of mass-dissemination of auto-imagery: Maren Jung-Diestelmeier’s examination of German images of Britain.93 So too, the development of an auto-image in contrast to the imperial oppressor – and its dissemination via mass print media – was fundamental to emerging national consciousnesses from China to the Middle East and beyond. As Keren Zdafee shows, Egypt’s al-Masri Effendi character fulfilled this important function in ‘his’ later-colonial context; Stefanie Wichhart shows how something similar was done in Egypt’s postcolonial/ decolonising period. Where Wichhart (as well as Varnava and Raeside, Lockwood, Zhang, and others) is most innovative for the field, however, is in showing how the critique of empire also facilitated or tapped into a shift in national identity in the imperial metropoles themselves. But of course, the way in which a positive auto-image was dependent on negative stereotyping of the ‘Other’ (whether subject or oppressor; partner or competitor) has always underscored how fluid and nebulous are the dividing lines between the one and the other. Suffusing many of the chapters – but especially those in Part III – one is shown again and again that the simple distinction between being anti-imperial or pro-imperial falls down when ambiguity and ambivalence are uncovered.94 Gardes sees this in a German context; Riley in a British one; and then – in the final chapter of the collection – David Olds and Robert Phiddian explore a context that was paradoxically both characteristic of an imperial metropole, as well as being a venue for decolonisation: the settler-colonial self-image of white, ‘British’, Australia in the 1960s. Beyond these ‘big picture’ themes, the collection also seeks to highlight the importance of key publications in providing important venues for debates around empire in the public sphere. Of all the publications examined and dissected in this volume, one stands head-and-shoulders above the others: Punch, or the London Charivari. The key venue for British graphic satire and comic art for more than a century and a half, Punch has been a ‘go-to’ source for historians looking for useful illustrative material for the 1841–1992 period (as well as for the period of its brief revivification by Mohammed Al-Fayed between 1996 and 2002). While Balfour’s prediction of it being one of the ‘great sources’ has not quite been fulfilled (for the reasons outlined above), the London Charivari is better understood as a publication than almost any other; and its contributors better understood than perhaps any other cohort of [ 17 ]

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humorists. Certainly, too singular a focus on Punch alone can be counterproductive (as Henry J. Miller and Richard Scully have emphasised recently).95 Miller in particular cautioned against making too close a link between the opinions of Punch and ‘public opinion’ in Britain (in particular opinion outside the metropolis of London, where there were Tory and Liberal counterparts to Punch in Judy and Fun), but recent research by Patrick Leary has shown quite convincingly that – in the middle decades of the nineteenth century – the staff sought to tailor their weekly comment to the assumed sensibilities and shared culture of their target, middle-class readership.96 At that stage of its long life, Punch was gravitating away from the radical stance it had maintained in its first decade (so memorably chronicled by Richard D. Altick), and was adopting a more ‘respectable’ position.97 While increasingly aligning itself with the politics of the emergent Liberal Party (as noted above, Gladstone himself was pleased to dine at the editorial dinner table in 1889), the very nature of Punch meant that it could express support for more conservative positions (or even out-and-out Conservatives), particularly as the nineteenth century waned.98 And what is more fascinating is that the kind of ‘cartoon-by-committee’ editorial approach to graphic satire (detailed at the beginning of this chapter) meant that often, multiple different positions might be discernible in a single cartoon. The master of the double meaning was John Tenniel, who served an outspokenly Liberal editor in Tom Taylor between 1874 and 1880, but managed to celebrate the Conservative Disraeli as a sympathetic and loveable rogue.99 In 1889, he asserted that: As for political opinions, I have none; at least, if I have my own little politics, I keep them to myself, and profess only those of my paper’.100

But precisely what Punch’s politics were at any given moment is a matter for continued debate; and indeed its often variegated attitude towards empire and imperialism is illuminated in many of the following chapters. As noted above, the self-professed Liberal Unionist (and therefore imperialist) Linley Sambourne seems to have been able to poke fun at Rhodes’s notion of ‘Cape to Cairo’ in 1892, but treated John Bull as the natural suitor for Samoa by the end of the century (see Chapter 2). John Leech (an early social radical, but who supported British rule in India in the most brutal terms) imagined American attempts at empire-building as patently ridiculous in the 1850s (see Chapter 3). But by the 1950s it was British imperialism that often seemed foolish to the likes of Leslie Illingworth, Norman Mansbridge, and Ronald Searle (see Chapters 9 and 10 in particular). In the mid-to-late [ 18 ]

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1870s, Disraeli’s new imperialism was something to be satirised by Tenniel at the height of his powers; but Britain’s imperial, civilising mission was an article of faith to Punch in the latter stages of the same cartoonist’s 50-year career (see Chapter 11).101 Yet this was not without qualification. To a great extent, it would appear that Punch’s readiness to comment on matters imperial did much to domesticate imperialism: to make it familiar and inoffensive to a broad spectrum of political opinion, and even perhaps to trivialise it. The example of Punch also illustrates well a factor often unnoticed by past scholarship, but becoming much more prominent in analyses of the cartoon (e.g. in the work of Nicholas Hiley and Richard Scully). This is the noticeable shift in the genre of publications carrying comic art in the period under discussion.102 If it was on the back of the Punch model of the satirical weekly magazine that the political cartoon colonised the globe, then it was the newspaper that did most of the decolonising and nationalising. So, Punch, Der Wahre Jacob, and Puck can be seen as publications where typically, the attitude towards empire and imperialism was bound up with nineteenth-century sensibilities; whereas The Australian, Eshi jingwen, Ruz al-Yusuf, and the Evening Standard arguably exhibited more of a twentieth-century attitude. But there were formats that transcended the great shift from the satire magazines to the newspapers that also feature in Comic Empires: notably, the persistence of the single-page broadsheet or poster as a medium for disseminating ideas and messages to a mass audience in public space (epitomised perhaps by Zhang’s exploration of Chinese posters during the struggle with Japan; and something that is exercising the broader scholarship).103 All of the chapters comprising Comic Empires underscore the particular importance of individuals as shapers of their times. This includes – first and foremost – artists and cartoonists. Certainly the great names of Tenniel and Nast, Low and Lindsay, appear prominently; but also the lesser-known and under-appreciated geniuses of East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Australasian cartooning are highlighted in the following pages. These artists were dependent on personal and professional relationships with editors, prose writers, and other adjuncts to their art. It seems that the ‘biographical model’ remains a key means of engaging in cartoons scholarship and comics studies, just as it was nearly a decade ago.104 Where the scholars who have contributed to this present volume have been unable to identify major cartoonists, editors, or other contributors, this points all the more insistently to the potential for new avenues of research to be opened up. Ultimately, of course (and as noted above), Comic Empires is not intended to be a [ 19 ]

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definitive ‘last word’ on the importance of cartoons and imperialism, but rather a starting point for ever-fuller, and more complex engagements with its main themes and content. At its fundamental level, this volume and the cases in it show how comic art featured across the story of imperialism and transcended periods of history, imperial traditions, and imperial/colonial spaces. At a more specific level the chapters show how comic art reflected the various ideas, developments, and moods of supporters and critics of empire, as well as more ambiguous perspectives, whether from the imperial metropole or the periphery. Comic art was not a static source that represented one idea or voice, but encompassed the entire fabric of imperialism. Whether studying the canon of one artist or one journal, or comparing across many, comic art offers a unique and largely untapped perspective, blending the humorous with the very serious commentary on imperialism in all its forms and manifestations and across its high and low points. This volume offers the most comprehensive exploration of comic art and imperialism to date, and yet this is just a first foray into what we hope is the start of a wider exploration into the subject.

Notes 1 Linley Sambourne, Diary entry, 30 November 1892 [p. 83]. 2 Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London, London: The British Library, 2010, esp. pp. 15 ff. 3 The Times, 30 November 1892, pp. 9 and 12. 4 For a detailed account of the creation of ‘The Rhodes Colossus’, see: Richard Scully, ‘Constructing the Colossus: The Origins of Linley Sambourne’s Greatest Punch Cartoon’, International Journal of Comic Art, 14 (2), 2012, pp. 120–142. 5 For example: Robin Brooke-Smith, The Scramble for Africa – Documents and Debates, London: Macmillan, 1987; R. I. Moore (ed.), Philip’s Atlas of World History, London: Philip’s, 1992, p. 125; Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912, London: Abacus, 1996, p. 257; Lawrence James (ed.), The British Empire, 1497–1997: 500 Years that Shaped the World, London: The Daily Telegraph, 1997, p. 114. 6 Nicholas Hiley, ‘Showing Politics to the People’, in Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson (eds), Using Visual Evidence, Maidenhead: Open University Press/ McGraw-Hill, 2009, p. 24; Richard Scully and Marian Quartly (eds), ‘Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence’, in Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence, Clayton, VIC: Monash University ePress, 2009, p. 01.1. 7 A. J. Balfour, Speech of 12 June 1901, quoted in ‘Banquet to Sir John Tenniel’, The Times, 13 June 1901, p. 6. 8 T. T. Heine, ‘Kolonialmächte’, Simplicissimus, 9 (6), May 1904, p. 55. The cartoon has been reproduced numerous times, e.g. Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus, 1890–1914, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984, p. 124; Roy Douglas, ‘Great Nations Still Enchained’: The Cartoonists’ Vision of Empire, 1848–1914, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 80–81; Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, p. 315; Stephen J. Eskilson, Graphic Design – A New History, second edition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 99; Richard Scully, Introduction to: ‘Comic Empires – Cartoons, Caricature, and Imperialism: A Symposium’, International Journal of Comic Art, 16 (2), 2014, p. 60.

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I N TRO D U C TI O N 9 Kent Worcester, Foreword to: Jane Chapman, Anna Hoyles, Andrew Kerr and Adam Sherif, Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. vii. 10 Douglas, ‘Great Nations Still Enchained’; Mark Bryant, Wars of Empire in Cartoons, London: Grub Street, 2008; Scully, Introduction to: ‘Comic Empires’, p. 58. 11 Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, esp. pp. 51–52; Neil Hultgren, Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014, pp. 1–2. 12 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London: Routledge, 1995; Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011; John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986; Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c.1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003; Stephen Clark, Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, London: Zed, 1999; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, second edition, London: Routledge, 2007; James Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895–1940, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 13 Brian Maidment, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 16. 14 L. Perry Curtis, Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, revised edition, Washington and London: Smithsonian, 1997, p. xi; Douglas, ‘Great Nations Still Enchained’, p. vii. 15 Haydon Manning and Robert Phiddian (eds), ‘Introduction: Controversial Images’, in Comic Commentators: Contemporary Political Cartooning in Australia, Perth, WA: Network, 2013, p. 6. 16 Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. x. 17 Hiley, ‘Showing Politics to the People’, p. 24. 18 Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. ix. 19 Scully and Quartly, ‘Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence’, p. 01.1. 20 Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. x. 21 Richard Scully, ‘The Cartoon Emperor: The Impact of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on European Comic Art, 1848–1870’, European Comic Art, 4 (2), 2011, pp. 152–154. 22 William M. Tweed (attrib.), in John Adler, Doomed by Cartoon – How Cartoonist Thomas Nast and the New York Times Brought Down Boss Tweed and his Ring of Thieves, Garden City, N: Morgan James, 2008, p. 3. 23 Donald Dewey, The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons, New York and London: New York University Press, 2007, p. 45; Thomas Nast, ‘The Tammany Tiger Loose’, Harper’s Weekly, 11 November 1871, pp. 1056–1057. 24 Fiona Halloran, Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012, pp. 119–143. 25 Halloran, Thomas Nast, pp. 145–175; Dewey, Art of Ill Will, pp. 17–19. 26 ‘Death of Mr John Leech’, The Times, 31 October 1864, p. 10. 27 John Ruskin, ‘Appendix I. Modern Grotesque’, in Modern Painters, Volume IV, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1856, pp. 398–399; John Ruskin, The Art of England – Lectures Given in Oxford, London: John Wiley & Sons, 1884. 28 R. W. Buss, English Graphic Satire and its Relation to Different Styles of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. A Contribution to the History of the English School of Art, London: R. W. Buss, 1874; Graham Everitt, English Caricaturists and Graphic Humorists of the Nineteenth Century, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893; Gleeson White, English Illustration: The Sixties, 1857–1870, London: Constable, 1897; J. A. Hammerton, Humorists of the Pencil, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905.

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I N TRO D U C TI O N 29 Linley Sambourne, ‘Political Cartoons [Parts I & II]’, The Magazine of Art, 1892, pp. 21–24 and 42–46; M. H. Spielmann, History of ‘Punch’, London: Cassell & Co., 1895. On Spielmann, see: Julie F. Codell, ‘Marion Harry Spielmann and the Role of the Press in the Professionalization of Artists’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 22 (1), Spring 1989, pp. 7–15; Julie F. Codell, ‘“The Artist’s Cause at Heart”: Marion Harry Spielmann and the Late Victorian Art World’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 71, 1989, pp. 139–163. 30 Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, Volume 1, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1893, p. 302; W. E. Gladstone, Diary entry, 14 November 1888, in H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, Volume XII, 1887–1891, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 163; W. E. Gladstone, Letter to Henry Lucy, 14 November 1888, in: H. W. Lucy, Sixty Years in the Wilderness: Some Passages By the Way, London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1911, p. 250; W. E. Gladstone, Diary entry, 7 May 1889, in Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries, Volume XII, p. 203. 31 Lucy, Sixty Years in the Wilderness, pp. 327–329. 32 David Low, British Cartoonists, Caricaturists and Comic Artists, London: William Collins, 1942; David Low, Low’s Autobiography, London: Michael Joseph, 1953. An earlier study – Ye Madde Designer, London: The Studio, 1935 – had also paved the way for this reflection on his craft. 33 Frederic George Stephens and M. Dorothy George (eds), Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 volumes [Volume III in 2 parts], London: The British Museum, 1870–1954. 34 Draper Hill, Mr Gillray: The Caricaturist. A Biography, London: Phaidon, 1965. 35 E. H. Gombrich, ‘Review of Draper Hill, Mr Gillray the Caricaturist and John Physick, The Duke of Wellington in Caricature’, Burlington Magazine, 108, 1966, pp. 206–207; E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Cartoonist’s Armory’, in Meditations on a Hobby-Horse, London: Phaidon, 1963, pp. 127–142. 36 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image-Music-Text, Stephen Heath (trans.), London: Fontana, 1977, p. 38. 37 Umberto Eco, ‘The Myth of Superman’ [1962], in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 107–124; Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati: comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa, Milan: Bompiani, 1964. 38 L. H. Streicher, ‘On a Theory of Political Caricature’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 9 (4), 1967, pp. 427–445; W. A. Coupe, ‘Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11 (1), 1969, pp. 79–95; W. A. Coupe, The German Illustrated Broadsheet in the Seventeenth Century: Historical and Iconographical Studies, 2 volumes, Baden-Baden: Librairie Heitz, 1966 and 1967. 39 Roland Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’, in Image-Music-Text, Stephen Heath (trans.), London: Fontana, 1977, p. 66, n. 1. 40 G. M. Thomas (ed.), 20th Century Studies, 13/14 – Politics in Cartoon and Caricature, December 1975; Michel Covin, Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, and Bernard Toussaint (eds), Communications, 24 – La bande dessinée et son discours, 1976; M. Thomas Inge (ed.), Journal of Popular Culture, 12 (4 – In Depth Section: the Comics as Culture), 1979. 41 David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 [The History of the Comic Strip, Volume 1], Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973; Thomas Milton Kemnitz, ‘The Cartoon as a Historical Source’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1 – The Historian and the Arts), Summer, 1973, pp. 81–93; Richard Scully, ‘A Serious Matter: Erwin D. Swann (1906–1973) and the Collection of Caricature and Cartoon’, Journal of the History of Collections, 27 (1), 2015, pp. 111–122. 42 Brian Glaser, ‘Enduring Spirit: Will Eisner’, Visual Arts Journal, 17 (1), 2009, at: http:// journal.sva.edu/issues/2009spring/02will_eisner.html, accessed 4 November 2016.

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I N TRO D U C TI O N 43 Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art, Tamarac, FLA: Poorhouse Press, 1985; Charles Press, The Political Cartoon, East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1981. 44 It has been argued – convincingly – that comics and comic art have been a foundational cultural determinant for delineating ‘Generation X’, even beyond the original, American context: Evi Sampanikou, ‘Generation X in Greek Comics’, in Christine Henseler (ed.), Generation X Goes Global: Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion, New York and London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 130–155. 45 While there is no ‘canon’ as such, the keynotes of the new literature undoubtedly include: Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, The Dark Knight Returns, Burbank, CA: DC Comics, February–June 1986; Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins, Watchmen, Burbank, CA: DC Comics, September 1986–October 1987; Art Spiegelmann, ‘Maus’, in Raw, July 1980–1991 (completed in one volume – Maus, New York City: Pantheon, 1991). 46 Jane Chapman, ‘Comics and the World Wars’, Arts and Humanities Research Council (2011–2015), at: https://ahrc.ukri.org/research/readwatchlisten/filmsandpodcasts/ comicsandworldwarsaculturalrecord/, accessed 3 April 2019; Richard Scully, ‘The Cartoon Empire: The Anglo-American Tradition of Political Satire and Comic Art, 1720–2020’, Australian Research Council (2013–2015), at: www.une.edu.au/ about-une/academic-schools/school-of-humanities/research/current-funded-research/ arc-project-the-cartoon-empire, accessed 21 November 2016. 47 Charles Press, ‘The Georgian Political Print and Democratic Institutions’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19 (2), April 1977, pp. 216–238; Werner Busch, ‘Die englische Karikatur in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Ansätze zu einer Entwicklungsgeschichte’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 40 (3/4), 1977, pp. 227–244. 48 Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Censorship of the Arts and Press in NineteenthCentury Europe, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989, esp. pp. 72–112; Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989; Robert Justin Goldstein (ed.), The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2000; Robert Justin Goldstein and Andrew M. Nedd (eds), Political Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Arresting Images, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 49 See the essays in: Ridiculosa, Hors série – La presse satirique dans le monde, 2013. 50 Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Africa’s Media: Democracy & the Politics of Belonging, London, New York, and Pretoria: Zed & UNISA Press, 2005, esp. pp. 204 ff.; Ganiyu Akinloye Jimoh, The Role of Editorial Cartoons in the Democratization Process in Nigeria: A Study of Selected Works of Three Nigerian Cartoonists, Boca Raton FL: Dissertation.com, 2010; Daniel Hammett, ‘Narrating the Contested Public Sphere: Zapiro, Zuma & Freedom of Expression in South Africa’, in Ebenezer Obadare and Wendy Willems (eds), Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century, Woodbridge: James Currey, 2014, p. 204. 51 Ethan Georges Rabidoux, ‘Street Gospels: Political Cartoons and their Role in Canadian Democracy’, Canadian Journal of Media Studies, 8 (1), 2010, pp. 1–13. 52 Press, The Political Cartoon, p. 50. 53 Chris Lamb, Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons in the United States, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. ix–xii. 54 Richard Scully, ‘Crossing the Line: Offensive and Controversial Cartoons in the 21st Century – “The View from Australia”’, International Journal of Comic Art, 17 (1), 2015, pp. 336–357. 55 Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity, 1754–2010, New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2013, pp. 186 and 17–18; Victor S. Navasky, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, p. xviii. 56 See, for instance, the good mix of essays in: Ridiculosa, 4 – Tyrannie, dictature et caricature, 1997.

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I N TRO D U C TI O N 57 Mark McKinney, Redrawing French Empire in Comics, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013, p. 10. 58 W. A. Coupe, German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second World War, Part I 1500–1848 – Commentary, White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1993, pp. xi–xiii. 59 Coupe, German Political Satires, p. xi. 60 Richard Scully, ‘The Foundations of the Anglo-American Tradition of Political Satire and Comic Art: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, International Journal of Comic Art, 17 (2), 2015, pp. 98–132. 61 John J. Richetti, The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 85. 62 Richard Scully, ‘Accounting for Transformative Moments in the History of the Political Cartoon’, International Journal of Comic Art, 16 (2), 2014, p. 342. 63 Gombrich, ‘The Cartoonist’s Armory’, p. 135. 64 Scully, ‘The Foundations of the Anglo-American’, pp. 101–102; Peter Desbarats and Terry Mosher, The Hecklers: A History of Canadian Political Cartooning and a Cartoonists’ History of Canada, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart/National Film Board of Canada, 1979, p. 23. 65 Linda Colley, Britons – Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992; Douglas Fordham, ‘Satirical Peace Prints and the Cartographic Unconscious’, in John McAleer and John M. MacKenzie (eds), Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 64–89. 66 Richard Johns and James Davey, Broadsides: Caricature and the Navy, 1756–1815, Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, in association with National Maritime Museum, 2012. 67 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000; Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 68 Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013; Richard Scully, ‘A Comic Empire: The Global Expansion of Punch as a Model Publication, 1841–1936’, International Journal of Comic Art, 15 (2), 2013, pp. 6–35. 69 Simon J. Potter, ‘Communication and Integration: The British and Dominions Press and the British World, c.1876–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31 (2), 2003, pp. 190–206; Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Simon J. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (3), 2007, pp. 621–646. 70 L. Perry Curtis, Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1971; Sheridan Gilley, ‘English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780–1900’, in Colin Holmes (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978, pp. 81–110; D. G. Paz, ‘Anti-Catholicism, Anti-Irish Stereotyping, and Anti-Celtic Racism in Mid-Victorian Working-Class Periodicals’, Albion, 18 (4), 1986, pp. 601–616; R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History, London: Allen Lane, 1993; Curtis, Jr, Apes and Angels, 1997; L. Perry Curtis, Jr, Images of Erin in the Age of Parnell: From the Collections of the National Library of Ireland, Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 2000; Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 71 Ian Fraser Grant, Between the Lines: A Cartoon History of New Zealand – Political and Social History, 1906–2005, Wellington: New Zealand Cartoon Archive, 2005; Edmund Bohan, ‘Auckland’s Carbuncle Jack and Mr Punch of Canterbury’, in Brad Patterson (ed.), Ulster–New Zealand Migration and Cultural Transfers, Dublin: Four

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I N TRO D U C TI O N

72 73

74

75 76 77 78 79 80

Courts Press, 2006, pp. 229–240; Marguerite Mahood, The Loaded Line: Australian Political Caricature, 1788–1901, Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1973; Vane Lindesay, The Inked-In Image: A Social and Historical Survey of Australian Comic Art, Richmond, VIC: Hutchinson Group, 1979; Richard Scully, ‘The History of the Australian Satirical Press’, Ridiculosa, Hors série, 2013, pp. 527–541; Jane Chapman, ‘The Aussie, 1918–1931: Cartoons, Digger Remembrance and First World War Identity’, Journalism Studies, 17 (4), 2016, pp. 415–431; Desbarats and Mosher, The Hecklers; Mary Lu MacDonald, ‘English and French-Language Periodicals and the Development of a Literary Culture in Early Victorian Canada’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 26 (4), 1993, pp. 221–227; Terry Mosher, ‘Canadian Political Cartooning’, International Journal of Comic Art, 16 (2), 2014, pp. 1–56; Christopher Arthur Holdridge, ‘Sam Sly’s African Journal and the Role of Satire in Colonial British Identity in the Cape of Good Hope, c.1840–1850’, unpublished MA thesis, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, 2010; Andy Mason, What’s So Funny? Under the Skin of South African Cartooning, Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2010; Peter Vale, Keeping a Sharp Eye: A Century of Cartoons on South Africa’s International Relations, 1910–2010, Crossways: Xlibris, 2012. On the transnational and imperial origins of these traditions, see: Scully, ‘A Comic Empire’, pp. 6–35. Josee Desforges, ‘Le débuts de la presse satirique a Montréal: Le Diable bleu (1843), Le Charivari canadien (1844), Le Scorpion (1854) et Le Perroquet (1865)’, in Ridiculosa, Hors série – La presse satirique dans le monde, 2013, pp. 345–377. Ana Pedrazzini and Maria Ximena Ávila, ‘Bref parcours à travers l’histoire de la presse satirique argentine de ses débuts au XIXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours’ and Isabel Lustosa, ‘La caricature Brésilienne: aspects notables de son histoire’, in Ridiculosa, Hors série – La presse satirique dans le monde, 2013, pp. 303 and 322. George Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, 1 (3), 1940, p. 174–200; Tony Watkins, ‘Piloting the Nation: Dan Dare and the 1950s’, in Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins, A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture, New York and London: Garland, 2000, pp. 153–176; Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, San Diego and Burbank, CA: Wildstorm/DC Comics, 1999–2007. Also see: James Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History, London: Reaktion, 2011. Jean-Claude Gardes, Jacky Houdré, and Alban Poirer, Introduction, Ridiculosa 18, November 2011, pp. 9–12; Press, The Political Cartoon, pp. 120–128; Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature, pp. 87ff. McKinney, Redrawing French Empire in Comics, p. 10. Matthew Screech, Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, esp. pp. 20–42. Russel B. Nye, ‘Death of a Gaulois: René Goscinny and Asterix’, Journal of Popular Culture, 14 (2), 1980, pp. 181–195. John A. Lent, Asian Comics, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015, p. 225. Peter Duus, ‘Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong – The Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon’, Journal of Asian Studies, 60 (4), 2001, pp. 965–998; Jozef Rogala, The Genius of Mr Punch – Life in Yokohama’s Foreign Settlement: Charles Wirgman and the Japan Punch, 1862–1887, Yokohama: Yurindo, 2004; Kinko Ito, ‘A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society’, Journal of Popular Culture, 38 (3), 2005, pp. 460–461; Adam Kern, Manga from the Floating World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007; Kinko Ito, ‘Manga in Japanese History’, in Mark W. MacWilliams (ed.), Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008, pp. 29–30; Todd S. Munson, ‘“A Sojourner Amongst Us”: Charles Wirgman and the Japan Punch’, International Journal of Comic Art, 13 (2), 2011, pp. 614–626; Peter Duus, ‘“Punch Pictures”: Localising Punch in Meiji Japan’, and Sonja Hotwanger, ‘“Punch’s Heirs” Between the (Battle) Lines: Satirical Journalism in the Age of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905’, both in Harder and Mittler (eds), Asian Punches, pp. 307–335 and 337–364.

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I N TRO D U C TI O N 81 Mason, What’s So Funny? See the essays in: Ridiculosa, Hors série – La presse satirique dans le monde, 2013. 82 I-Wei Wu, ‘Participating in Global Affairs: the Chinese Cartoon Monthly Shanghai Puck’, and Christopher Rea, ‘“He’ll Roast All Subjects That May Need the Roasting”: Puck and Mr Punch in Nineteenth-Century China’, both in Harder and Mittler (eds), Asian Punches, pp. 365–387 and 389–422; Lent, Asian Comics, esp. pp. 41–46. 83 See the essays in ‘Part III – Punch in the Middle East’, in Harder and Mittler (eds), Asian Punches, pp. 185–303; José Alanez, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010, esp. pp. 13–30. 84 Christopher A. Vaughan, ‘Cartoon Cuba: Race, Gender and Political Opinion Leadership in Judge, 1898’, Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, 24 (2), 2003, pp. 195–217; N. Han Jung-Sun, ‘Empire of Comic Visions: Japanese Cartoon Journalism and its Pictorial Statements on Korea, 1876–1910’, Japanese Studies, 26 (3), 2006, pp. 283–302; Andrekos Varnava, ‘Punch and the British Occupation of Cyprus in 1878’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 29 (2), 2005, pp. 167–186; Abe Ignacio, Enrique De La Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio, The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons, San Fancisco: T’boli Publishing, 2004. 85 Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Mushirul Hasan, Wit and Humour in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Niyogi, 2007; Ritu Khanduri, ‘Vernacular Punches: Cartoon and Politics in Colonial India’, History and Anthropology, 20 (4), 2009, pp. 459–486; Mushirul Hasan, Wit and Wisdom: Pickings from the Parsee Punch, New Delhi: Niyogi, 2012; Ritu Gairola Khanduri, ‘Punch in India: Another History of Colonial Politics?’, in Harder and Mittler (eds), Asian Punches, pp. 165–184. 86 Kanchanakesi Warnapala, ‘Caricaturing Colonial Rule in Sri Lanka: An Analysis of Muniandi, the Ceylon Punch’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 10 (3), 2012, pp. 227–244; Lent, Asian Comics, pp. 255–265, 305–318. 87 Timothy S. Benson and Anthony Gorst, Suezcide: A Cartoon History of the 1956 Suez Crisis, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2006. 88 Marilyn Booth, ‘Insistent Localism in a Satiric World: Shaykh Naggār’s “Reed-Pipe” in the 1890s Cairene Press’; Eliane Ursula Ettmueller, ‘Abū Nazzāra’s Journey from Victorious Egypt to Splendorous Paris: The Making of an Arabic Punch’; and Marilyn Booth, ‘What’s in a Name? Branding Punch in Cairo, 1908’; all in Harder and Mittler (eds), Asian Punches, pp. 187–244 and 271–303. 89 Elif Elmas, ‘Teodor Kassab’s Adaption of the Ottoman Shadow’, in Harder and Mittler (eds), Asian Punches, pp. 245–270. 90 Scully and Quartly, Drawing the Line; Manning and Phiddian (eds), Comic Commentators; Harder and Mittler, Asian Punches; Chapman, Hoyles, Kerr, and Sherif, Comics and the World Wars. 91 László Kürti, ‘“The Women-flogger, General Hyena”: Images of Julius Jacob von Haynau (1786–1853), Enforcer of Imperial Austria’; Annick Pellegrin, ‘Nothing New under the Western Sun: The (Necessity and Inevitability of the) Conquest of the Americas in U.K.R.O.N.I.A./Les Brigades du temps and Helldorado’; and John Moores, ‘John Leech’s “‘General Février’ Turned Traitor” in the Imperial Imagination’, International Journal of Comic Art, 16 (2), 2014, pp. 65–90, 91–110, and 111–131. 92 Scully, Introduction to: ‘Comic Empires: A Symposium’, p. 61. 93 Maren Jung-Diestelmeier, ‘Das verkehrte England’ – Visuelle Stereotype auf Postkarten und deutsche Selbstbilder 1899–1918, Gottingen: Wallstein, 2017. 94 Ambiguity and ambivalence is something inherent in Jung-Diestelmeier’s work (see above), but also more explicit and intrinsic to: Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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I N TRO D U C TI O N 95 Henry Miller, ‘The Problem with Punch’, Historical Research, 82 (216), May 2009, pp. 285–302; Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume I: The Founders, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, p. 17. 96 Leary, The Punch Brotherhood, pp. 39–44. 97 Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997; Henry J. Miller, ‘John Leech and the Shaping of the Victorian Cartoon: The Context of Respectability’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42 (3), Fall 2009, p. 267–291. 98 Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume I, pp. 156–157. 99 Frankie Morris, Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005, pp. 248–262. 100 John Tenniel, April 1889, quoted in Spielmann, History of ‘Punch’, p. 463. 101 John Tenniel, ‘Punchius Imperator A.D. MDCCCLXXVI’, Punch’s Almanac for 1877, 14 December 1876, pp. 8–9. 102 Hiley, ‘Showing Politics to the People’; Richard Scully, ‘Towards a Global History of the Political Cartoon: Challenges and Opportunities’, International Journal of Comic Art, 16 (1), 2014, pp. 29–47. 103 See the essays in: Ridiculosa, 24 – Satire visuelle et espace public, 2017. 104 Scully and Quartly, ‘Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence’, p. 01.5.

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PART I

High imperialism and colonialism

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CHA P T E R T W O

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Courting the colonies: Linley Sambourne, Punch, and imperial allegory Robert Dingley and Richard Scully

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Punch’s leading topical cartoonists, John Tenniel and Linley Sambourne, were able to select from a well-established lexicon of figurative conventions (to which they had themselves contributed) for picturing global politics.1 Nationstates, for example, might readily be represented by caricatures of their monarchs or principal statesmen; equally, however, they might be embodied in classicised female personifications like Britannia or Columbia, epitomised in stereotypical representatives of national character like German Fritz or John Bull, or emblematised in birds and animals drawn from heraldry and beast-fable and engaged in Aesopian encounters (the British Lion, the Indian Tiger, and the French Poodle).2 These various iconographic systems could, moreover, be deployed in dramatic scenarios which alluded – either textually or pictorially – to the kinds of reading with which their audiences might be assumed to be familiar: with allusions to Shakespeare, to Dickens, to (with increasing frequency as the century drew to a close) the ‘Alice’ books – even to the sporting novels of R. S. Surtees.3 However, although it is possible to disentangle and segregate these different codes and traditions, in practice they have seldom existed independently of one another and indeed, as Ernst Gombrich famously argued, it was the ‘fusion’ of caricature with other forms of graphic satire in mid-eighteenth-century England that created the ‘modern’ political cartoon.4 And it is certainly true that, in the pages of Victorian Punch, a mixed or hybrid mode (in which, say, Britannia might confront the Russian bear on either side of a pigtailed ‘Chinaman’ while Bismarck looks on) is more the rule than the exception. But images of this kind, drawing within a single plate on a range of diverse graphic conventions [ 31 ]

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H I G H I M PERI A LI SM A N D C O L O N IA L IS M

(allegory and caricature, for example) which require different procedures for decipherment, would seem inherently more liable to fission than to seamless ‘fusion’. For one thing, the ‘mixed mode’ of many cartoons is dictated as much by contingent historical circumstances as by a desire for decorous consistency. While, for example, Imperial Germany could satisfactorily be represented successively by Bismarck and by Wilhelm II, the political volatility of the Third Republic meant that none of the bewilderingly short-lived French presidents or premiers could claim instant recognition, which meant that the Liberty-capped Marianne generally stood in for any particular administration. Again, while the Bear and the Lion continued to do duty for Russia and Britain, the Gallic Cockerel – though dating back to antiquity – could only seem disproportionately puny in such heavyweight company and so featured hardly at all in the second half of the century (and especially after 1904, when the Entente Cordiale necessitated a more dignified representation).5 Outside the familiar European scene, moreover, established figurative vocabularies were no longer available and artists had to resort to an ad hoc imagery that was often only provisional and sometimes confusing. Indeed, the capacity of traditional iconographic systems to dramatise international politics in a way that remains transparently legible can rapidly become swamped by the proliferation of states and situations requiring representation, so that the unlimited invention of new allegorical figures threatens to tip the whole symbolic enterprise towards incoherence. The increasingly frenetic ‘scramble for colonies’, for example, necessitated the often arbitrary creation of a whole cast of new representative players whose graphic relationship with more established cast-members can work to disable the possibility of a neatly univocal reading. Lacking the instant recognisability of, for example, John Bull or Uncle Sam, the lightly allegorised (and often lightly clad) female figures recruited to represent exotic places like Abyssinia or Samoa are open to interpretation (or misinterpretation) as what they appear literally to be: desirable and desired women. And that possibility, in turn, can work to place in question the motivations of the colonising powers by implying material and sexual rapacity on their part rather than any decorous mission civilisatrice. This chapter therefore investigates aspects of imperially themed cartooning that have seldom hitherto been treated in depth. In particular, it will focus on the work of Linley Sambourne, an artist whose strategies for dealing with the kinds of problem outlined in the previous paragraphs have been largely overlooked. His successes as well as his failures in this regard are worth highlighting, not least because, until quite recently (and thanks largely to such researchers as Juliet McMaster, Leonee [ 32 ]

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Ormond, and Richard Scully), the more general significance of Sambourne’s work has also been under-appreciated in scholarship on late nineteenth-century graphic satire.6 Moreover, given what is now known or can be inferred of his erotic predilections and the ways in which these find expression in his art, Sambourne makes an ideal case study in the gendered and sexualised allegorical treatment of ‘courting the colonies’.7 Many of the issues which the chapter will explore in detail can be briefly exemplified in a single, and fairly typical ‘mixed mode’ Punch cartoon by Sambourne. ‘The Tryst’ (Figure 2.1), published in the number for 6 June 1891, addresses an attempt by Portugal to prevent the appropriation of Mashonaland by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company.8 Rhodes, in a dapper tropical kit (the same in which Sambourne would later dress his ‘Rhodes Colossus’ – see above: Chapter 1, Figure 1.1), gestures imperiously at a small, awkwardly posed, Portuguese soldier and declares punningly ‘You clear out! She’s my “Mash”!’ The ‘mash’ in question, both towering over and cowering behind the Portuguese trooper, is a sparsely clad African maiden whose lack of distinctive attributes is compensated for by a free-standing inscription to her left, identifying her as Mashonaland. Sambourne has thus combined three different conventions in his sketch: in Rhodes a recognisable portrait of an individual; in the Portuguese soldier a caricatured national stereotype; in the female object of contention a territorial personification. In graphic terms, the contest between the two European powers is an unequal one, since Rhodes, realistically depicted, heroically (indeed histrionically) posed and occupying the moral foreground, can only appear superior to the squat, ungainly caricature who tries maladroitly to oppose him. But the figure of Mashonaland complicates any simple triumphalist reading. She stares apprehensively towards Rhodes, her fists clenched to her mouth in a stereotypical gesture of anxious female defencelessness which seems to deprecate Rhodes’s confident assertion of proprietorship. At the very least, therefore, what had appeared at first glance to be an uneven struggle for supremacy between an epic adventurer (however pushy Punch may sometimes have found him) and a comical foreigner has been complicated by the appearance of a helpless female victim destined to become the unwilling ‘possession’ of the stronger of two male antagonists. The potential ambivalence of the ‘mixed mode’ cartoon, that is, can reveal beneath the surface of imperial allegory unintended erotic subtexts which, with a more seamless iconography, might have been camouflaged more efficiently. Linda Nochlin, commenting on the way in which images of women are used to signify vices like sin or lust, argues that there is ‘always something suspect’ about such representations because ‘there is inevitably [ 33 ]

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Figure 2.1  Linley Sambourne, ‘The Tryst’, Punch, 6 June 1891, p. 266.

a slippage between signifier and signified’, so that we are unable to read the image ‘in a purely allegorical way’.9 In what follows we shall explore the implications of Nochlin’s argument for a number of other ‘mixed mode’ cartoons in which, as in ‘The Tryst’, Sambourne sought to represent the European rush for colonies as a scene of sexual contest, [ 34 ]

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where single or rival male suitors solicit or demand the favours of female objects of desire. This recurrent motif, of course, undergoes local variations, corresponding to differing political circumstances, but its ostensible purpose remains constant: to legitimate and naturalise the British imperial project. So too, we shall suggest, does its incapacity – and perhaps unwillingness – completely to mask colonialism’s exploitative self-interest. In its number for 22 September 1888, Punch published Sambourne’s graphic commentary on the signing of the Royal Charter to set up the Imperial British East Africa Company.10 This was Britain’s latest, privately funded, move in the contest with Germany to extend the two nations’ respective ‘spheres of influence’ westward from Zanzibar into Uganda and Equatoria.11 The cartoon (Figure 2.2) illustrates a set of doggerel verses (probably composed by E. J. Milliken). These are very loosely modelled on George Chapman’s early seventeenth-century translation of the first Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite but reverse the scenario of the Greek original, where the goddess of love woos the Trojan hero Anchises, and instead cast the ‘African Venus’ as the object of courtship by Germany and Britain, not to mention subsidiary hopefuls like France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Accordingly, Sambourne drew a bustling group of male and fully dressed European national types – a Frenchman sporting an ‘imperial’ beard; an Italian wearing the plumed hat of the Bersaglieri and gesticulating excitedly; a dimly obscure figure who might represent almost anybody (perhaps Portugal); a German Fritz complete with bristling whiskers and longstemmed pipe; and a John Bull in full tropical kit – all crowding around the ‘African Venus’ herself.12 She is presented as an enticingly curvaceous figure, naked except for the tight cincture binding her waist and for the girdle precariously supported on her ample thighs. She appears coyly to be extending her hand to John Bull, who is protesting his passion with hand on heart – thus implying that (so far at least) Britain is winning the race for her favour (though the enigmatic coiled snake in the foreground may hint at troubles ahead). A bare description, however, cannot begin to do justice to the cartoon’s complex ambivalence. In the first place, both drawing and caption present Africa as able and willing to select from her various wooers, as possessing freedom of choice in deciding her own fate. Sambourne’s image thus simultaneously exposes and appears to endorse the cosmetic fiction with which imperial expansion preferred to legitimise itself, where emissaries of the European powers ‘negotiated’ formal treaties with tribal leaders, though often at gunpoint and generally with the intention of violating their terms if and when it became convenient to do so. The less pacific realities of colonial power might seem to be [ 35 ]

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Figure 2.2  Linley Sambourne, ‘Wooing the African Venus’, Punch, 22 September 1888, p. 134.

implied in the rifles carried by the Frenchman and slung discreetly over John Bull’s shoulder, but, as the attached verses make clear, these are more probably intended to gesture at the possibility of armed conflict between the contesting powers than at the suppression of native resistance. [ 36 ]

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Even if, however, the African Venus is construed as able to exercise agency in her choice of partners, there is never any question that a choice has to be made and a suitor selected. Not surrendering to one or other of the contending Europeans is simply not an option; and Sambourne inevitably weights his iconography to emphasise that, of all possible contestants, John Bull is not only the most likely to succeed, but also the most desirable. While the others look either threatening (France holds his gun ready for action) or truculent (Germany’s folded arms and spread legs imply a theatrically aggressive masculinity), Bull alone appears to be making a chivalrous effort to express loving devotion to the voluptuous African maiden and Sambourne takes care to enhance that impression by tactfully making no direct allusion to the wealth in gold and ivory which was, in reality, Britain’s (and everybody else’s) material objective. Indeed, the budding amorous relationship between Sambourne’s two principal players may have its source in a text whose implicit purpose is similarly to merge imperialism’s material ambitions with ‘romance’. Dining with Punch’s ‘suggester-in-chief’ E. J. Milliken on 12 September (two days before he finished his drawing), Sambourne discussed Henry Rider Haggard’s bestselling novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), in which the plump, dapper, stalwart, and mildly ridiculous Captain Good falls for the beautiful Kukuana maiden Foulata.13 Fortunately (in Allan Quatermain’s view) Foulata is killed before things get out of hand, but the abortive ‘entanglement’ forms – along with treasure maps, desert crossings, mountain ascents, and pitched battles – a part of the strategy with which Haggard effectively camouflaged imperial expansion and the pursuit of Africa’s wealth in the conventional romantic trappings of ‘adventure’ and the quest-narrative.14 But however much Sambourne sought, like Haggard, to palliate the greed and coercion endemic to Britain’s colonial project, his cartoon is unable altogether to erase the exploitative nature of what is going on, because the hybridised nature of his imagery insistently foregrounds it. After all, at the most immediate and literal level, what Sambourne represents is five fully clothed, middle-aged and unheroically proportioned males (and that description extends even to the obese and heavily jowelled John Bull) clamouring around the near-naked body of a young woman like so many elders lubriciously appraising Susannah. The female personification of Africa derives ultimately from the allegorical series of Four Continents which were a commonplace of baroque imagery, but juxtaposed with stereotypes from a different tradition (like John Bull and Fritz) she can only appear vulnerable to their male gaze (and worse); and her vulnerability and desirability are enhanced by her assimilation to western (and white) standards of beauty. Not only, after [ 37 ]

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all, is she named as ‘Venus’, but her body – both in its contours and its pose – reproduces the Hellenic ideal of feminine pulchritude, and her carefully defined profile only lightly replicates standard physiognomic assumptions about the cast of ‘negroid’ features.15 Like Rider Haggard’s Kukuana maidens in King Solomon’s Mines, her hair ‘is rather curly than woolly’, her features are ‘aquiline’, and her ‘lips are not unpleasantly thick, as is the case among most African races’.16 Her ‘blackness’, that is, can be dismissed as a superficial attribute, like a body-stocking, because it is overwritten by her easy conformity to western standards of the desirable.17 Sambourne’s black Venus is not alone among late nineteenth-century personifications of Africa in eliding racial difference with classicised beauty, an elision which serves to naturalise the white male desire she inspires (and which also, of course, minimises the potential ‘scandal’ of miscegenation).18 Edward Berenson, for example, describes the menu card for a dinner given at the Savage Club to honour Henry Morton Stanley after his return from the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition in 1890: The menu … featured an image of Stanley wearing a military uniform and carrying a rifle. Next to him is a white woman representing Africa. Her breasts are naked and Stanley reveals them by lifting up a large sheet or blanket covering her. She’s wearing a long loincloth open at the side all the way to her waist. Her waistband reads AFRICA. She looks apprehensive, but not uninterested, as Stanley gazes at her, seemingly contemplating an advance. The sexual imagery here requires no commentary, though it is significant that Africa takes the form of a white woman.19

This ‘racial transformation’, Berenson comments, ‘suggests, perhaps, the perceived desirability of the African continent’ and he adds that ‘so powerful was the longing to possess Africa that it could seem almost erotic’. Berenson’s tentative ‘perhaps’ and ‘almost’ indicate a reluctance to read what is clearly intended as allegory ‘against the grain’, but the hybrid nature of the design – a fully recognisable contemporary male advancing on a vulnerable female figure who appears to collude in her own violation – renders such a reading unavoidable. Besides, there is no lack of similar images from the period whose erotic impact is clearly both intended and unmistakable. For example, in Rider Haggard’s later novel Child of Storm (1912), Quatermain’s description of the Zulu femme fatale Mameena corresponds, in its lingeringly sensuous language, to Sambourne’s minutely detailed attention to the African Venus’ contours and attributes: She was a little above the medium height, not more, with a figure that, so far as I am a judge of such matters, was absolutely perfect – that of a Greek statue indeed. On this point I had an opportunity of forming an

[ 38 ]

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opinion, since, except for her little bead apron and a single string of blue beads about her throat, her costume was – well, that of a Greek statue. Her features showed no trace of the negro type; on the contrary, they were singularly well cut, the nose being straight and fine and the pouting mouth that just showed the ivory teeth between, very small. Then the eyes, large, dark and liquid, like those of a buck, set beneath a smooth broad forehead on which the curling, but not woolly, hair grew low.20

Once again, Mameena’s attractiveness for the white viewer (and reader) is naturalised and legitimated by minimising her ‘negritude’ and emphasising her Hellenic affinities; but that attractiveness is also paradoxically enhanced by hints of the excitingly primitive, even animal passion (the ‘ivory’ teeth and the eyes like ‘those of a buck’) that smoulders beneath the statuesque surface. Indeed, Quatermain goes on to note that ‘there was something not quite pleasing about that beautiful face’, something that ‘one does not associate with youth and innocence’. Sure enough, Mameena sets out to ensnare Quatermain for her own partly political, partly amorous, purposes; she is not, that is, merely an object of desire but also its active and willing stimulus. Sambourne’s Africa, similarly, poses provocatively (one hand toying with her hair while she gestures at her favoured suitor with the other), so that Bull’s courtship is reciprocated by an equivalent response, while the coiled snake in the foreground, hinting at the possibility of danger or betrayal, may even increase the black Venus’ appeal since, like Mameena, she might turn out to offer an excitingly transgressive sexual adventure and to be an African version of the cruel mistresses who infest the writing and art of the European fin-de-siècle. After all, the doggerel verses that accompany the cartoon refer not only to the ‘hot desire’ with which ‘all men woo’ the African Venus, but affirm that she ‘witches the world’ with her ‘ebon-moulded limb and sable hair’, and the writer likens her to history’s most celebrated seductress: Yet what strange Cleopatra charms are seen In thy most opulent blackness, that bewitch All modern men who would be loved – and rich.

The verses (unlike the accompanying drawing) continually harp on the desire for wealth as the true motive of the western suitors, and so seek to insist on an allegorical reading of the courtship scenario. But both their prolonged enumeration of the African Venus’ sensual attractions and Sambourne’s illustration might equally well be taken to suggest that material motives are, on the contrary, an alibi for a less sanctioned, but irresistibly powerful, form of desire. If Cleopatra came in handy as an analogy for the seductive African Venus, she appears in Punch in her own right as the personification of [ 39 ]

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Figure 2.3  Linley Sambourne, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Punch, 13 May 1893, p. 218.

Egypt in Sambourne’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (13 May 1893).21 This cartoon (Figure 2.3) reflects the long-running debate within the Liberal Party over the future of Egypt, which, since Gladstone’s initially reluctant decision of 1882 to crush a nationalist rebellion against the Khedive, had been effectively a British protectorate. This move had been essential in order to guarantee the security of the Suez Canal, but maintaining [ 40 ]

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a large military presence was not only a massive drain on British finances but a constant source of friction with France (which was supposed to be exercising joint oversight); the resultant tension was astutely exploited by Bismarck to widen the political gulf between his two principal antagonists. Moreover, during Gladstone’s short-lived final ministry of 1892–1894, the government was harassed by its own Radical wing, most vociferously represented by Henry Labouchere, who goaded the Prime Minister with accusations of bad faith and with demands that (once passage of the canal had been somehow safeguarded) Britain should withdraw troops from the area and leave Egypt to the Egyptians.22 In order to represent this situation, Punch adapted (and Sambourne illustrated) a quotation from Act 2, Scene 2, of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (Figure 2.3). Against a backdrop of ancient Egyptian architecture, Gladstone – costumed as a Roman general – argues with a similarly attired and bandy-legged Labouchere. The two are cast as Shakespeare’s secondary characters Maecenas (Labouchere) and Enobarbus (Gladstone) and the former remarks, ‘Now Antony must leave her utterly’; to which Enobarbus/Gladstone replies ‘Never; he will not’, but then un-Shakespeareanly adds, ‘At least, not yet.’ This dialogue between caricatured politicians, however, takes place in the drawing’s background; the foreground is occupied by Antony, played by John Bull, and Cleopatra-as-Egypt. Bull (equipped, like Gladstone and Labouchere, with Roman armour and thus implicitly equated with their own status as objects of satire) has a palm-leaf fan in his right hand while his left rests lightly but significantly on the pommel of his sword. He stands slightly to the rear of the Egyptian queen, his right foot planted on a stone step immediately behind her, so that he appears to be crowding her space. She, on the other hand, naked down to the waist and with her breasts only partially covered by her braided hair, twists her hands together in what looks like a gesture of maidenly coyness, and seems to be flinching from the attentions of her admirer. As well she might. Like the John Bull of ‘The African Venus’, Sambourne’s stereotyped Englishman follows the conventions inherited and refined by John Leech and Tenniel from their eighteenth-century antecedents: his beefy physique and bovine features (lit up by a grin of confident self-approval) are supposed to establish an air of stolid, no-nonsense integrity, but, encased in Roman armour and closely juxtaposed with a nubile and appealing Cleopatra, he can only appear an incongruously mismatched suitor, and the two seem reminiscent less of Shakespeare’s ‘mutual pair’ than of Sid James’s leering Antony and Amanda Barrie’s gormless Queen of the Nile in the 1964 film Carry on Cleo. Because, that is, of the disparate modes from which the cartoon has been assembled (topical caricature, parodic literary allusion, [ 41 ]

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classicised personification, national stereotype), its status as political commentary has been rendered ambivalent: what was presumably intended to suggest Britain’s protective (not to say proprietorial) relationship to Egypt can simultaneously be read as a comic travesty of smirking concupiscence. Moreover, the implications of the drawing’s erotic scenario are complicated and enhanced by Cleopatra’s various roles in the cultural life of late Victorian England. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, in her fascinating study of Cleopatra’s changing posthumous fortunes, argues that finde-siècle literary and pictorial incarnations of the Egyptian queen serve typically as the epicentre of Orientalist imaginings: she is infinitely desirable in her beauty and sexual appetite, excitingly dangerous in her decadent amorality. As, once again, Rider Haggard lip-smackingly puts it in his novel Cleopatra (1889): [I]n her met all the splendours that have been given to women for their glory, and all the genius which man has won from heaven. And with them dwelt every evil of that greater sort, which fearing nothing, and making a mock of laws, has taken empires for its place of play, and, smiling, watered the growth of its desires with the rich blood of men.23

Sambourne’s cartoon, it might be argued – while happy to emphasise ‘the splendours that have been given to women’ – seeks largely to pre-empt Cleopatra’s capacity for reducing her male admirers to quivering submission by making over the courtship scene as comedy and portraying her, for all her Venus-like curves, as winsomely girlish. But, as HughesHallett shrewdly observes of George Bernard Shaw’s contrarian portrait of Cleopatra as a fractious and not very bright child with a grown-up body (and Caesar and Cleopatra appeared little more than four years after Sambourne’s cartoon), her infantile qualities are themselves ‘by no means undesirable … pretty reminders that women and children must always defer to the adult male’, and they can themselves be deployed as a potent weapon in sexual combat.24 Similarly, the theatrically exaggerated (and therefore perhaps archly knowing) gestures of maidenly reluctance with which Sambourne has endowed his personified Egypt – when combined with her artfully displayed adult contours – appear calculated merely to increase her desirability for Antony/John Bull (and, it seems safe to assume, for readers of Punch). Once again, as with the ‘African Venus’, the possibility is left open that the female colonised willingly colludes in – indeed encourages – her own seduction by the male coloniser. Whichever of the two protagonists is doing the seducing and whichever is being seduced, however, the erotic drama proceeding in the cartoon’s foreground hardly serves to clarify its immediate topical purpose, and [ 42 ]

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Liberal debates about the morality and extent of the British presence in Egypt literally recede into the background of the ambiguous scenario being enacted at centre-stage between Antony and Cleopatra; a scenario which seems to conform to a dynamic of its own and to have only a tenuous relationship with the politics of Westminster. Hughes-Hallett’s conclusion about the Cleopatras of nineteenth-century ‘high’ art thus seems, mutatis mutandis, equally applicable to Sambourne’s ‘popular’ burlesque: But although the Orient of the imagination, in which Cleopatra plays such a glittering role, has served to validate and glamorize colonialism, it was not constructed for that purpose. It was invented to gratify its inventors’ desire.25

Towards the end of 1888, the German consul in Samoa (who, as representative of the leading European commercial power in the islands exercised effective political control) issued a series of autocratic proclamations aimed at discomforting the Anglo-American community. His ill-judged action – which was accompanied by threats of annexation – resulted in a flurry of anti-German sentiment in the American press, the dispatch of US warships to protect the islands’ ‘independence’, and (after Bismarck had been advised that a naval expedition would be impracticable) a humiliating German back-down. Although the possibility of war in the Pacific was almost certainly illusory, it seemed sufficiently real at the time, and in its number for 9 February 1889, Punch published ‘Hands Off!’ (Figure 2.4), Sambourne’s graphic representation of recent events.26 In the two cartoons examined so far, Sambourne was able to resort for his female personifications to well-established figurative conventions. When he was called on to represent Samoa, however, in the absence of a ready-made iconographic tradition, he was forced to improvise. And, in his first attempt to depict ‘her’ (which Sambourne sketched out on the evening of 31 January, before going off to dine with Rider Haggard himself), he created one of the most risqué of all Punch cartoons of the period. Samoa appears as a characteristic ‘Venus’ type in her usual statuesque pose, but is draped in a sort of clinging, miniature toga, which leaves her right breast (and part of her left) fetchingly exposed. Perched siren-like on a rock, she is being amorously approached with open arms by Bismarck in naval uniform; in the background a gangling and Colt-toting ‘Brother Jonathan’ gestures reprovingly and asserts his prior claim, announcing, in the caption and accompanying verses ‘’Scuse me, stranger,—my gal!’27 What emphatically differentiates this version of the courtship scenario from its deployment in the cases of Africa and Egypt is the quite explicit (as opposed to merely hinted) [ 43 ]

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Figure 2.4  Linley Sambourne, ‘Hands Off!’, Punch, 9 February 1889, p. 62.

sexual agency attributed to Samoa. The object of dispute between Jonathan and Bismarck makes no pretence of reticence, or of acknowledging (as the caption appears to do) the prior claims of the United States. Instead, she shamelessly eyes her Teutonic suitor with a knowing simper and an oblique, come-hither glance. She seems more than happy both to provoke dispute between competing males, and to propose herself as a willing object of pursuit, far more overtly than either the African Venus or Cleopatra. While, therefore, Sambourne was unable to draw on a distinctive allegorical convention for personifying Samoa, he was almost certainly [ 44 ]

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exploiting a generalised western tradition about the promiscuous and indiscriminate sexuality of women in the Pacific islands. This stereotype had been established firmly in the European mind at the end of the eighteenth century by accounts of Bougainville’s and then of Cook’s discoveries in Tahiti, and it rapidly became so entrenched in popular discourse that re-enactments of the Tahitian ‘rites of Venus’ were being staged in Mrs Hayes’s fashionable London brothel as early as 1779.28 Thus, as Irvin Schick puts it, ‘the bare-breasted, nubile, ever-loving vahine effectively came to function as a metonym for the South Sea Islands’.29 And that figure is incarnated in a wide variety of forms and media: in Pierre Loti’s semi-fictionalised Le Mariage de Loti (1880), which commemorates the author’s sexual idyll with the simultaneously voluptuous and childlike 15-year-old Tahitian girl Rarahu; in Gauguin’s paintings of languorously expectant islander girls who are, according to Griselda Pollock, ‘sexualised precisely by being contrasted to European codes of femininity’.30 This is also the case in one of the most influential anthropological studies of the early twentieth century, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), with its wide-eyed celebration of the Samoan maidens’ ‘free experimentation’ and ‘recognition of a need … to deal with sex as an art’ in a culture where ‘the capacity for intercourse only once a night is counted as senility’.31 But while Samoa’s openness to all comers could be viewed with amused equanimity in 1889, ten years later the changed political situation dictated a very different response. In the earlier standoff, Britain – despite a long-standing consular and commercial presence in Samoa – had played a marginal role (largely because Lord Salisbury saw the islands less as an asset of intrinsic importance than as a bargaining chip in the greater game of imperial diplomacy). But in mid-January 1899, news arrived in Europe of the outbreak of armed hostilities between the forces of two rival claimants to the Samoan throne; one faction was backed by the German consul and the other by the American and British representatives. The subsequent civil conflict resulted in attacks on the Anglo-American community and a retaliatory naval bombardment by warships of the Royal and US navies of the capital, Apia. Once again, the situation appeared to be escalating towards a major Pacific war, and this time Britain was centrally involved (not least because of the presence in the Cabinet of Salisbury’s new and influential colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain). On 26 April Punch published Sambourne’s latest take on this volatile situation, ‘The Tug of – Peace’ (Figure 2.5), in which Samoa, now much more decorously clad (but still with a fair expanse of her right breast on display), is being pulled three ways by a stereotypical German figure, Uncle Sam, and John Bull (in much the same tropical outfit as he had [ 45 ]

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Figure 2.5  Linley Sambourne, ‘The Tug of – Peace’, Punch, 26 April 1899, p. 194.

worn in ‘The African Venus’).32 Uncle Sam, chewing on a cigar, has one arm draped proprietorially around Samoa’s neck while the other grasps her firmly by the wrist. The German, meanwhile, has placed both hands aggressively on her left arm and is trying to drag her towards him. John Bull plays a more courteous role: he has placed a simultaneously restraining and fraternal hand on Uncle Sam’s arm (Salisbury had agreed to cooperate with President McKinley in negotiations with Germany) and, instead of attempting to grab parts of Samoa’s person, he leans forward decorously to take her hand. There is no question, in short, that, of the three suitors, his is the nearest approach to socially acceptable courtship, but equally there is no question of Samoa’s own distress. No longer, as in ‘Hands Off!’, an active participant in her own seduction, she re-casts in the caption Captain Macheath’s indecision between his two mistresses in The Beggar’s Opera (1728): ‘How happy could I be – alone! Were all these three charmers away’.33 That option, however, is no longer possible politically, so Sambourne’s cartoon can only suggest the alternatives of more and less acute forms of colonial [ 46 ]

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appropriation. While John Bull and Uncle Sam may be unwelcome, they at least appear relatively benign (Uncle Sam, despite the crudity of his approach, sports an affable grin), but Samoa’s anxious gaze is fixed on the gross figure of the German who, instead of trying to woo her, appears set on pulling off her arm. However, despite the cartoon’s efforts to differentiate the varieties of imperialism practised by the contending powers, the very terms in which it does so work simultaneously to imply their ultimate equivalence: a young and fearful woman is being groped by three middle-aged men, two of them grotesquely fat, and two puffing tobacco smoke in her face. Sambourne’s mauled and frightened Samoa transcends her role as mere personification and becomes all too easy to read as the sexually exploited victim of predatory males. But the least offensive of the three suitors was shortly to abandon the pursuit. On 14 November, after tense and protracted negotiations, the powers signed a ‘final’ settlement on the Samoan question. While Germany acquired a ‘free hand’ in the administration of the westernmost islands, the United States retained Tutuila and Manua in the east (including the only serviceable naval base at Pago Pago). 34 Britain, however, agreed to withdraw all but a minimal diplomatic presence in exchange for extremely advantageous territorial gains elsewhere in the Pacific, and for major concessions from Germany in Africa. Accordingly, in the number for 15 November, Punch produced Sambourne’s final update: ‘Good-bye, Samoa!’ (Figure 2.6), in which ‘she’ – now fully clothed and wearing a floral wreath – waves farewell to the departing British presence – this time represented by a diminutive but powerful Jack Tar rowing out to his waiting warship, which has already got up steam.35 Uncle Sam in sailor’s garb stands in the middle distance, also waving, his back significantly turned on Samoa. From the surrounding jungle, bandy-legged and puffing at his pipe, a myopic German emerges, rubbing his hands in excited anticipation of pleasures to come.36 Despite, then, the apparent promise of protection implied in Sambourne’s May cartoon, Samoa has been abandoned to German rapacity and her subsequent fate is not hard to imagine. The cartoon, however, seeks to banish any hint of betrayal by suffusing the scene in an elegiac glow. The foregrounded figure of Samoa waving goodbye to the departing tar, with her right hand blowing a valedictory kiss, takes up a sentimental motif common enough in Victorian and earlier popular culture in which women sadly but resignedly watch their departing menfolk taking ship for distant climes. And the caption (‘“Farewell,” she cried, and waved her nut-brown hand’) is adapted from John Gay’s poignant ballad ‘Sweet William’s Farewell to Black-ey’d Susan’, in which a young sailor takes sorrowful leave of his lover – though her ‘Adieu’ in the last line is [ 47 ]

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Figure 2.6  Linley Sambourne, ‘Good-bye Samoa!’, Punch, 15 November 1899, p. 230.

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intended to be much less final than Punch’s ‘Farewell’.37 But the other textual change in the caption – from Gay’s ‘lilly hand’ to ‘nut-brown hand’ – serves as a reminder that the drawing’s scenario can also be aligned with a rather different convention, in which the western male visitor to an exotic locale regretfully abandons his temporary native mistress to her fate. Thus, for example, in Le Mariage de Loti, the narrator describes in touching language his grief-stricken leave-taking from his Tahitian lover when his warship receives orders to sail, but in the remainder of the novel he records sadly her subsequent descent into drunkenness and prostitution. This is a fate which he sees as – unhappily – inevitable (she is, after all, representative of a race supposedly in terminal decline), but for which he appears to feel no culpability. Just as Loti wanted his readers to view his Polynesian sexual fling as a paradisiacal idyll while simultaneously bemoaning the corrupting impact of colonialism, so too Sambourne sought to present Britain’s largely pragmatic intervention in Samoa as a kind of benign interlude, whose conclusion is regretted by both sides, while he simultaneously segregates it firmly from the islands’ all too predictable colonial future at the hands of Germany (for which, of course, John Bull cannot be held responsible). Sambourne’s recurrent representation of the European race for colonies as the competitive courtship of a young, scantily clad woman by a bevy of middle-aged and fully clothed males need occasion little surprise: after all, that the imperial project frequently figures in the western imaginary as a form of sexual conquest has become a commonplace of postcolonial critical writing. But Sambourne’s female personifications, and the situations in which they find themselves, are distinctively imbued with a degree of erotic suggestiveness which exceeds their function as allegory and which threatens to expose the exploitative subtexts underlying imperialism’s ‘official’ programme. This proposition may seem less tendentious if one begins by comparing the female personifications of India in a pair of broadly similar cartoons from the 1890s: Sambourne’s ‘The Garden of Sleep’ (a comment on the drug trade) and Sir John Tenniel’s ‘An Appeal’ (Figures 2.7 and 2.8).38 The two characters are, superficially, very similar: both women wear saris and veiled headdresses, earrings and bracelets. But whereas Tenniel’s India is, as it were, wrapped in her costume (which serves to obscure the contours of her figure), and her bare midriff is largely concealed by her extended right arm, Sambourne exposes his India’s waist, and the tight fit of her tiny jacket and her sari seem purposely designed to emphasise the curves of thighs and breasts. The jewellery in Tenniel’s drawing, moreover, is rudimentary and ill-defined, whereas in Sambourne’s the sharply delineated outlines of earrings, choker, bracelets, [ 49 ]

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Figure 2.7  Linley Sambourne, ‘The Garden of Sleep’, Punch, 2 May 1891, p. 206.

and pendant are deployed to enhance the body’s allure. Tenniel’s figure, as far as possible, has been desexualised in order to preserve the moral and political purpose of his cartoon; Sambourne’s distractingly exploits India’s physical desirability. Partly, these contrasting effects may result from technical differences in the two artists’ working methods: almost to the end of his career, Tenniel doggedly eschewed photolithography – for which Sambourne’s [ 50 ]

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Figure 2.8  Sir John Tenniel, ‘An Appeal’, Punch, 13 June 1896, p. 283.

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more sharply defined graphic style was well-suited – and insisted on submitting his drawings to the mediation of the woodblock process, with its fussy cross-hatching and its tendency to reduce the particular nuance of an artist’s line.39 But it is also possible that Linley Sambourne’s special value to Punch lay – at least in part – precisely in his skill at presenting desirable female subjects. From internal evidence, it is possible to deduce that the magazine, in the closing decades of the century, was seeking ways to extend its appeal beyond the socially conservative and solidly middle-class audience which had become its preserve, and to attract the new and growing mass readership created by decades of educational reform. Papers like Judy (which, in its later phase, has recently been likened to an early ‘lad-mag’) and Ally Sloper’s HalfHoliday, among their other novel attractions, imitated French counterparts like Le Rire and Le Frou-Frou.40 These provided a steady diet of mildly risqué images of lightly clad chorus girls and bathing beauties; and it can plausibly be conjectured that Punch’s editorial team saw in Sambourne’s art a possible means of entering into competition with these downmarket rivals without compromising the magazine’s hard-won dignity.41 In 1889, for example, Sambourne was producing not only political and social cartoons but a series of full-page drawings in which each month’s characteristic social activity is typified by an attractive young woman, who is placed at the centre of a group of much smaller and less detailed sketches summarising the latest political developments. It is hard, looking at these plates (and especially, perhaps, at ‘August’ (Figure 2.9), languidly reposing in a skin-tight bathing costume) not to think of them as pin-ups.42 Furthermore, their principal status as, quite simply, representations of appealing women cannot readily be differentiated from that of the equally appealing female personifications produced by the same artist for the same journal, which therefore in turn become commensurately more difficult to view exclusively as allegorical encapsulations of nationhood rather than also as realistically drawn pictures of ‘pretty girl/s’ (a phrase which recurs in Sambourne’s private diaries almost as regularly as his approbatory remarks on food, drink, and celebrities). Marina Warner’s wry comment on the proliferation of female nudes in turn-of-the-century posters, that ‘their visual style was determined by the conventions of official art, including the affixing of meaning – any meaning – to a pretty girl – any pretty girl’,43 seems equally applicable to Sambourne’s procession of symbolic beauties, whose role as dignified embodiments of geographical expressions is liable to get obscured by their too-solid corporeality. And the possibility of this elision is, indeed, central to late Victorian attitudes towards the depiction of the nude, or semi-clad, female in [ 52 ]

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Figure 2.9  Linley Sambourne, ‘Mr. Punch’s Notes for August’, Punch, 7 September 1889, p. 110.

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art. As early as the 1850s, Alison Smith notes, ‘The vogue for realism … encouraged a literal interpretation of painting’, so that ‘Nudes were liable to be read as naked, divorced from metaphorical significance’; and the ambiguous status of the unclothed figure in art became still more problematic from the 1860s on, when artists like Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema – the ‘Victorian Olympians’ – began regularly to exhibit large, non-narrative, paintings of classical nude subjects.44 These canvases generated intense critical controversy precisely because they were felt to occupy an indefinite frontier between the elevatingly ‘ideal’ and the titillatingly ‘fleshly’. Many commentators, attempting to discriminate between the two categories, used as their criterion the extent to which the nude subject looked, or could be construed as looking, ‘contemporary’ rather than safely quarantined in some alternative realm of abstracted form. Thus, for example, in 1868, the Illustrated London News stigmatised P. H. Calderon’s Oenone for being ‘not merely naturalistic, but essentially modern in type’, and thus, by implication, for appealing to the baser instincts of male viewers in a way that compromised the possibility of detached aesthetic contemplation.45 Critics became accomplished at reading details of pictures in order to distinguish the offensively ‘naked’ from the decorously ‘nude’ (a distinction which itself, indeed, became entrenched in the 1870s), so that, for example, the naked woman being released from bondage by the heavily armoured knight in Millais’s The Knight Errant of 1870 (a juxtaposition of clothed male and unclothed female not structurally dissimilar to Sambourne’s colonial allegories) was widely condemned for her ‘dishevelled’ appearance, her blushing cheeks, and her cascading hair – so very different from the statuesquely immobilised nudes of, say, Albert Moore.46 Faces, too, were scanned anxiously for telltale signs of animation in which ‘Impersonal expressions gave way to glances of enticement, varying from the coy and simpering to the bewitching and voluptuous’, and which could unmask E. M. Hale’s divine Venus (Psyche before Venus, 1879) as nothing more than ‘a belle of the London streets, with canary coloured hair and blackened eyelashes’.47 Inevitably, late Victorian disquiet over the potentially transgressive ‘realism’ of female nudes found expression in widespread complaints that the women depicted by painters were all-too evidently taken from living models who had been only imperfectly refined into ideality. Women who posed naked in the late Victorian decades (despite what appears to have been their own growing sense of professional status) were generally assumed to be either already ‘fallen’ or liable to become so at the drop of a petticoat. Paintings, therefore, like Alma-Tadema’s A Sculptor’s Model (1877) disturbed critics because the female subject [ 54 ]

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was so obviously painted from life – her body too precisely individuated and lived in to be mistaken for a statue: ‘No Venus, but a common model’.48 Linley Sambourne’s female personifications, it has been widely recognised, share obvious affinities with the female nudes of the classicising Academicians – their perfectly proportioned bodies, their chiselled profiles, their statuesque poses.49 But they share, too, the dangerous borderland occupied by those painters, not merely in their distracting hints of contemporaneity (Sambourne’s cartoons, after all, addressed immediately topical concerns and his allegorical women are often accompanied by recognisable figures like Gladstone and Bismarck), but in that problematic expressiveness which implies derivation from a living model. For Sambourne, too, drew from life – or rather, from life captured in photographs, of which he possessed a ‘database’ containing thousands of exposures, many purchased from dealers or ransacked from publications, but many taken by himself and developed in his own darkroom.50 Week after week, he posed himself, his family, his domestic staff, his friends, and paid models in scenes and costumes which would form the basis for his Punch drawings, and a sizeable number of these photographs were of naked women or of women clothed only in some single, and suspiciously fetishistic, item of dress – a gladiator’s helmet, a black satin mask, black silk stockings. His nude models, most of whom it is possible to identify, were indeed professionals, not ‘fallen women’.51 Some of them, however, look towards

Figure 2.10  Linley Sambourne, ‘Miss Reid’, photographed 17 July 1901.

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Figure 2.11  ‘Zimbabwe kaffir girls’ – archival photograph from collection of Linley Sambourne. ‘Africa Women’ ST/PR/1-1051A/92.

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Figure 2.12  ‘Natives of Intuila’ – archival photograph from collection of Linley Sambourne. ‘Samoa’ ST/PR/1-1043/92.

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Figure 2.13  Linley Sambourne, photographic study for ‘The Tug of – Peace’, 21 April 1899. ST/PR/2-2070/99.

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Figure 2.14  Linley Sambourne, photographic study for ‘The Tug of – Peace’, 21 April 1899. Not numbered.

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the lens with what appear to be expressions of amused complicity (though such glances may equally have been demanded by the photographer) and it has been plausibly conjectured that Sambourne enjoyed a sexual relationship with at least one of them (a woman known only as ‘Miss Reid’ – see Figure 2.10).52 It is, moreover, clear that some of his more explicit photographs were never intended to provide guidelines for Punch drawings, but were taken for the artist’s gratification (and perhaps for that of a circle of friends).53 That there is a continuum, rather than a clear line of demarcation, between Sambourne’s public practice as a cartoonist and his private obsession is confirmed by his manipulation of the photographic sources for ‘The African Venus’ (Figure 2.11) and for the Samoan figures (Figure 2.12), which are still extant in the Sambourne archive.54 His adaptation of the physical proportions in his archival photograph of the young African woman, for example, to better suit conventional notions of classical beauty provides evidence for his deliberate shaping of an image to achieve the erotic, as well as the political and aesthetic, ends described earlier in this chapter. Likewise, his simultaneous desire for ethnographic realism and for the satisfaction of an altogether different kind of desire is apparent in his emphasis on the high cheekbones, full lips, and ‘immodest’ drapery found in photographs of actual Samoan women and described and illustrated in the printed sources he consulted.55 While he seems not to have recruited any nude life models for his feminised colonial allegories (time did not permit), in the case of ‘The Tug of – Peace’ he employed (unusually for him) a ‘lay’ figure (or artist’s mannequin) to stand in for Samoa (Figures 2.13 and 2.14). The feminised character in the cartoon was therefore quite literally a plaything of the artist (Sambourne posed himself as John Bull) and his male models (a rotund ex-policeman called Stace and Sambourne’s groom Otley, who also modelled for ‘Good-bye, Samoa!’). While the masculine protagonists, therefore, always possessed distinctive life and form, Samoa started out as anonymous, faceless, and (at least initially) sexless: her features and figure were sketched in afterwards to suit the artist’s predilections. It can be perilous to read ascertainable biographical detail back into works of art, but the contested cultural field in which Sambourne’s graphic female personifications circulate, the possibility that their erotic appeal was recognised and adopted as a deliberate strategy by Punch, and the often equivocal expressions with which they confront their male suitors, all combine to suggest that the artist’s ‘mixed mode’ images of semi-naked young women being ardently pursued by corpulent middle-aged men are also the expressions of private desire. If that conclusion is accepted, then Sambourne’s cartoons of colonial courtship [ 60 ]

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can be understood not only in their own allegorical terms, but also as public projections of a personal fantasy in which the sexually charged power relations between controlling male (middle-class) artist and compliant female (lower-class) model are realigned to figure – and sanction – the unequal relationship of male (white) coloniser and female (of colour) colonised. Indeed, the intensity of Sambourne’s graphic and photographic engagement with women’s bodies serves as a cautionary reminder that the recurrent allegory of empire as a form of sexual encounter should never be read simply as a symbolic trope: all too often, the fantasy of erotic conquest was acted out literally and tragically during western man’s penetration of the ‘dark places of the earth’.

Notes 1 On Tenniel, see: Frankie Morris, Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005, esp. pp. 117–118; Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume I: The Founders, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, pp. 116–161. On Sambourne, see: Leonee Ormond, Linley Sambourne: Illustrator and Punch Cartoonist, London: Paul Holberton, 2010; Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume III: Heirs and Successors, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, pp. 6–43. 2 For an account of the origins of these various conventions, see: H. M. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth: A Study of the Ideographic Representation of Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 84–105; see also Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 133–136 and passim. 3 On the knowledge expected of readers of cartoons, see: Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London, London: The British Library, 2010, pp. 39–44. 4 E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, second edition, London: Phaidon Press, 1971, p. 137. 5 For details of Tenniel’s political ‘bestiary’, see: Morris, Artist of Wonderland, pp. 240–244; David Low, British Cartoonists, Caricaturists and Comic Artists, London: William Collins, 1942, pp. 19–21; Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume I, p. 132. 6 Juliet McMaster, ‘That Mighty Art of Black-and-White’: Linley Sambourne, Punch, and the Royal Academy, Edmonton, AB: Ad Hoc Press, 2009; Ormond, Linley Sambourne; Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume III. 7 See, for instance, the essays in: Robin Simon (ed.), Public Artist, Private Passions: The World of Edward Linley Sambourne, London: Leighton House Museum, 2001. 8 Linley Sambourne, ‘The Tryst’, Punch, 6 June 1891, p. 266. For the political background to this dispute – which was finally resolved by Lisbon’s ratification of the AngloPortuguese Convention on 11 June 1891 – see Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, London: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 246–247. 9 Linda Nochlin, ‘Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an AntiSemite’, in N. L. Kleebatt (ed.), The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 109–110. 10 Linley Sambourne, ‘Wooing the African Venus’, Punch, 22 September 1888, p. 134. 11 For accounts of the setting up of the Company by Sir William Mackinnon, see: Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912, London: Weidenfeld and

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13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22

Nicolson, 1991, pp. 341–342; Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp. 200–202. Interestingly, Sambourne has not depicted the German figure with the features of Bismarck, as Milliken has it in his piece of doggerel, and as Sambourne himself had earlier done (albeit having the Iron Chancellor in blackface, in: ‘African Venus’, Punch, 20 December 1884, p. 291). This is an indicator that – although the pair were aware of the terms of their joint commission – they did not collaborate closely in this instance. On the Sambourne–Milliken collaborations, see: Ormond, Linley Sambourne, pp. 102, 177. Linley Sambourne, unpublished diary, 12 September 1888. Sambourne Family Archive, Leighton House. Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Library and Linley Sambourne House. Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, London: Collins, 1959, p. 240. For a similar usage of the goddess Venus, and its relevance to depictions of imperial desire, see: Andrekos Varnava, ‘Punch and the British Occupation of Cyprus in 1878’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 29 (2) 2005, pp. 167–186. Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, p. 111. The ‘Hellenic ideal’, it is important to note, is more than an innocently aesthetic category. Nineteenth-century ethnographers commonly ranked races in a hierarchy of female types based on physical proportions, with Venus (as represented in Greek sculpture) at the top and the ‘stereotypical’ African woman (who lacks classical contours) at the bottom. See (e.g.): Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 221–223. Sambourne’s decision to depict the African Venus as fulfilling Western standards of beauty is therefore a highly conscious one and it can be usefully contrasted with his depiction of Miss Niger in ‘Waking Up!’ (Punch, 23 October 1897, p. 182), where, because she is flirting with a Frenchman while John Bull has been asleep, the African woman is negatively characterised as knockkneed, with a shapeless torso and bony shoulders, and with a caricatural ‘negroid’ physiognomy. Although not of direct relevance to the present discussion, it is worth noting possible links to perhaps the most famous African ‘Venus’ of the nineteenth century: Sarah Baartman (c.1789–1815), the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’. Baartman’s physique (in particular her large buttocks) was of fascination to the European audiences, and she was exhibited for her distinct deviation from the classical ideal (something emphasised by the caricaturist William Heath, and contrasted also with the classicised anti-slavery images of earlier decades). On Baartman, see for example: Sander L. Gilman, ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature’, in Henry Gates (ed.), Race, Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 223–261; Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais, ‘Race and Erasure: Sara Baartman and Hendrik Cesars in Cape Town and London’, The Journal of British Studies, 47 (2), 2008, pp. 301–323; Sabine Ritter, Facetten der Sarah Baartman: Repräsentationen und Rekonstruktionen der ‘Hottentottenvenus’, Münster: Lit Verlag, 2010. Also see: William Heath, A Pair of Broad Bottoms, London: Walker Cornhill, 1810. On classical forms in anti-slavery visual culture, see: Douglas J. Hamilton and Robert J. Blyth (eds), Representing Slavery: Art, Artefacts and Archives in the Collections of the National Maritime Museum, London: Lund Humphries, 2007. E. Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, p. 148. Henry Rider Haggard, Child of Storm, third edition, London: Cassell, 1913, pp. 67–68. Linley Sambourne, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Punch, 13 May 1893, p. 218. For the domestic political background, see: Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp. 320–324; John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power 1874–1914, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999, pp. 182–191; A. L. Thorold, The Life of Henry Labouchere, London: Constable, 1913, pp. 173–204.

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C O U RTI N G TH E C O LO N IE S 23 Henry Rider Haggard, Cleopatra, London: Longmans, 1889, p. 91. 24 Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, London: Vintage, 1991, p. 315. 25 Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra, p. 279. 26 Linley Sambourne, ‘Hands Off!’, Punch, 9 February 1889, p. 62. For a detailed account of European political disputes over Samoa, see: Paul M. Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German-American Relations 1878–1900, Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974. See also: R. P. Gilson, Samoa 1830–1900: The Politics of a Multi-cultural Community, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1970. 27 The verses appear to be an adaptation of some popular, perhaps music-hall, song, but no clear source has been located. ‘Brother Jonathan’ was an earlier counterpart to the better-known ‘Uncle Sam’, who tended to alternate with his predecessor until the twentieth century. As well as Alfred Pionke and Fred Whiting’s chapter in this volume (see Chapter 3) – and Stephen Tuffnell’s following that – see: Winifred Morgan, An American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988; Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Insitution, 1841–1851, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997, pp. 367 ff.; Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity, 1754–2010, New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2011, pp. 28–31. 28 See: Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 101. 29 I. C. Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse, London: Verso, 1999, pp. 115–116. 30 Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1883–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992, p. 71. 31 Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1943, p. 91. Mead’s utopian view of Samoan sexuality was cogently and comprehensively challenged in: Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1983. This, too, has since been challenged – see: Paul Shankman, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. 32 Linley Sambourne, ‘The Tug of – Peace’, Punch, 26 April 1899, p. 194. 33 J. Gay, Poetical Works, G. C. Faber (ed.), London: Oxford University Press, 1926, p. 514. 34 For details of the settlement, see: Kennedy, Samoan Tangle, pp. 234, 252–4. 35 Linley Sambourne, ‘Good-bye, Samoa!’, Punch, 15 November 1899, p. 230. 36 The likely outcome of the Samoan tangle had been known in Europe for some time before it was finalised. Sambourne received his commission as early as 9 November and was gratified, according to his diary, that he had been given a ‘good cut’. He spent the following two days developing the subject and was able to send off the drawing on the evening of 11 November. ‘Good-bye, Samoa!’ was therefore able to be published on the following Wednesday, when the signed settlement was only a day old – a remarkable example of Punch’s immediate responsiveness to the international situation. 37 Gay, Poetical Works, pp. 181–183. 38 Sambourne, ‘The Garden of Sleep’, Punch, 2 May 1891, p. 206; Tenniel, ‘An Appeal’, Punch, 13 June 1896, p. 283. 39 See: Rodney Engen, Sir John Tenniel: Alice’s White Knight, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991, pp. 139–140; Morris, Artist of Wonderland, pp. 117–118. Punch first, belatedly, employed photolithography at the end of 1892 – for a drawing by Sambourne, who had experimented with ‘process’ as early as 1889. The success of the 1892 cartoon led to the unravelling of one of Punch’s foundational relationships: that between the magazine and the wood-engraving firm of Joseph Swain. Increasingly, ‘process’ work was given to the firm of Vaux and Crampton, while Swain was reduced to catering exclusively for those artists (like George Du Maurier and Tenniel) who refused to adapt.

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H I G H I M PERI A LI SM A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 40 See: Richard Scully, ‘Sex, Art, and the Victorian Cartoonist Matthew Somerville Morgan in Victorian Britain and America’, International Journal of Comic Art, 13 (1), Spring 2011, p. 291. The proliferation of such magazines in France followed the abolition of prepublication censorship in 1881, after which standards of decency had to be tested in the courts. See: Heather Dawkins, The Nude in French Art and Culture, 1870–1910, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 26 ff. 41 Evidence for Punch’s attempts to extend its appeal is largely circumstantial, but two indicative developments are the editorial decision taken by F. C. Burnand in 1900 to publish short stories by popular writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and George Manville Fenn; and the elevation to the Punch Round Table in 1895 of Phil May, whose spare drawings of costers and cockneys are in very stark contrast to the steady diet of heavily worked hunting scenes and servant jokes being served up by most of the magazine’s longer-established ‘social’ cartoonists. See: Simon Houfe, Phil May: His Life and Work 1864–1903, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, p. 64. 42 Linley Sambourne, ‘Mr Punch’s Notes for August’, Punch, 7 September 1889, p. 110. 43 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, London: Pan Books, 1987, p. 86. 44 Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 75. For a suggestive account of the vexed relations between eroticism and ‘higher truth’ in both Victorian ‘high art’ and ‘ethnographic’ photography, see: Elazar Barkan, ‘Victorian Promiscuity: Greek Ethics and Primitive Exemplars’, in Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (eds), Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 56–92. 45 Smith, The Victorian Nude, p. 120. 46 Smith, The Victorian Nude, pp. 147–154. 47 Smith, The Victorian Nude, p. 223. It is worth noting that Sambourne entered these debates directly. When, in 1885, the Royal Academician J. C. Horsley, writing under the nom-de-plume ‘British Matron’, wrote to The Times decrying the recent prevalence of female nudes, Punch responded to his prudish intervention with ridicule and on 24 October Sambourne depicted Horsley in drag as ‘The Model “British Matron”’ gesticulating with disgust at the Medici Venus. See: Smith, The Victorian Nude, pp. 227–231; Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume III, pp. 17–20. 48 Smith, The Victorian Nude, p. 204. 49 See especially: Alison Smith, ‘A “Valuable Adjunct”: The Role of Photography in the Art of Linley Sambourne’, in Simon (ed.), Public Artist, Private Passions, pp. 12–19. For Sambourne’s friendships with painters, see: Ormond, Linley Sambourne, pp. 74–77. 50 The fullest account of Sambourne’s photographic obsessions is the collection: Simon, Public Artist, Private Passions, which intersperses excellent reproductions with a number of valuable essays. It is worth noting that Sambourne’s use of photography was public knowledge at least as early as 1895, when M. H. Spielmann noted his cabinets containing ‘over ten thousand’ prints, including ‘figures by the score, nude and draped’ (The History of ‘Punch’, London: Cassell & Co., 1895, pp. 534–535). 51 See: Martin Postle, ‘Hidden Lives: Linley Sambourne and the Female Model’, in Simon (ed.), Public Artist: Private Passions, pp. 20–27. 52 See: Ormond, Linley Sambourne, p. 268; Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume III, pp. 34–35. Another model, Maud Easton, appears to have taken the lead in adopting risqué poses during her early association with Sambourne. See: Sambourne, diary entry for 20 August 1891, Sambourne Family Archives, Leighton House, Kensington; Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume III, pp. 7–8. 53 See Virginia Dodier’s catalogue entries on Sambourne in: Alison Smith (ed.), Exposed: The Victorian Nude, New York: Watson-Guptill, 2001, pp. 170–176. 54 On the importance of photography for the imperial imaginary, see: James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998.

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55 Sambourne lists, in the front endpapers of his 1889 diary, a number of books on the ‘South Seas’ borrowed from a friend. One of these, the Hon. Herbert Meade’s A Ride Through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand, Together with Some Account of the South Sea Islands … Edited by his Brother (London: John Murray, 1870) – which appears to have been his principal source of information – talks of the ‘pleasing features’ and ‘good figures’ of islander women, who ‘rarely wear anything but the mat or cloth round the waist’ (p. 186). Meade also describes an Upolu girl named Mary, who possessed ‘a sort of coquettish dignity that was rather attractive’ (pp. 197–198).

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‘Master Jonathan’ in Cuba: a case study in colonial Bildungskarikatur Albert D. Pionke and Frederick Whiting

As Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava note in their introduction to this volume, political cartoons, comics, and caricatures have yet to find an equal place alongside more traditional objects of historical study, and are often relegated to illustrating, both literally and figuratively, supposedly more substantial historical phenomena. One might make a similar observation about the role of graphic texts in a large proportion of literary scholarship, which similarly deploys them more for effect, or affect, rather than subjecting them to the same degree of analysis devoted, for instance, to novels. And this is true despite the fact that, emerging as they did hand and glove with the modern nation, and engaged fundamentally in both representing and producing national consciousness, the genres of the novel and the political cartoon, from their inception, formed an inter-animating dyad. Even before cheap mechanical reproduction made illustrations for novels increasingly feasible towards the end of the eighteenth century, the power and allure of visual caricature could motivate a novelist like Henry Fielding to describe his characters by reference to William Hogarth’s satiric prints and paintings. As he remarks in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742): ‘Now what Caricatura is in painting, Burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other’.1 In the nineteenth century, concomitant developments in printing technology and reductions in stamp duties not only enabled novelistic illustration, but also fomented a veritable explosion in serial forms of publication. Quarterly, and then monthly, fortnightly, weekly, and eventually daily periodicals appeared in vast numbers addressed to broad segments of an increasingly literate population. Frequently illustrated by cartoons and often featuring carefully calibrated segments [ 66 ]

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of in-process novels, periodicals of all sorts, including the paradigmatic Punch, helped to construct the modern state, interpellating readers into imperial and other forms of social fantasy.2 In fact, the concern of periodicals like Punch with national affairs, combined with their publication at regular intervals, provided a serialised forum for imagining the nation. That this process of imagining built on the novelistic forms that appeared in nineteenth-century periodicals’ pages seems almost unavoidable, and yet recognition of the reciprocal influence of these genres has been lopsided. While the impact of the cartoon on the novel has been recognised in analyses as early as Fielding’s, and as recently as the current extensive and growing critical literature on the graphic novel, critical attention to the influence of the novel on the art of the political cartoon has been somewhat less robust.3 It is with an eye to making preliminary redress of the imbalance that we offer a case study of political cartoons treating US foreign policy towards Cuba that appeared in Punch in the two decades between 1840 and 1859. During this period, one can discern the influence of generic permutations in the novel on contemporaneous cartoon representations of colonial ambitions, both old and new, in the New World. More specifically, these cartoons provide an illuminating instance of the influence of a sub-genre of the novel then at its zenith – the Bildungsroman – on British ruminations about a host of colonial topics (among them slavery, manifest destiny, the Monroe doctrine, waning British influence in the Americas, and the rise of the US as a world power). In the figure of Master Jonathan, British cartoonists personified the United States as a problematic youth whose upstart and mercenary national ambitions threatened both the welfare of the Cuban people and the national interest of his personified parent Great Britain in a variety of domains.4 In fine, our case has much to tell us about both an important episode in nineteenth-century colonial history and the power of literary form, broadly construed, in shaping the political and ideological operations of culture. Operating from the assumption that narrative form cannot be fully appreciated apart from the historical moment in which it appears, this chapter begins with a brief reconstruction of Anglo-American-Spanish relations as they intersect in Cuba in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It then moves to a brief history of the major developments in Bildungsroman theory, from its roots in nineteenth-century German aesthetics through its twentieth-century adoption by Mikhail Bakhtin and the English critical tradition, and culminating in Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World, which draws attention to the figurations of problematic youth that lie at the heart of the sub-genre.5 A similar anxiety about youth animates the included Punch cartoons and appears [ 67 ]

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throughout nineteenth-century British periodical debates about the nation’s upstart international relation: the United States. This evidence from the broader periodical record not only provides a generic bridge between the novel and the cartoon, it also establishes an empirical warrant for the more qualitative interpretations that follow. These readings use as heuristic points of entry into our instances of cartoon imperialism some of the inevitable complications that arise from applying Bildungsroman theory to a generically new set of objects. They build towards a reconsideration of the polyvalent notion of ‘mastery’ that underwrites Punch’s visual representation of a particular moment of mid-century international conflict. The chapter concludes by tracing the visual legacy of the figure of problematic youth in subsequent American political cartoons about Cuba, and by proposing a necessary theoretical link between a culture’s narrative forms and its strategies of visual representation. For over a century before the 1898 explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor precipitated a one-sided war that ended with Spain surrendering its last overseas possessions to the United States, Cuba was a site of contest among three colonial powers.6 Spain sought to hold onto its oldest, richest, and increasingly imperiled New World colony, whose wealth it relied on for collateral whenever national insolvency loomed.7 The United States, motivated by the complex narratives of ‘Manifest Destiny’ as well as a politically ascendant, pro-slavery, Southern expansionism, engaged in both legal and illegal attempts at annexation. Britain somewhat righteously served as Spain’s banker and self-appointed moral conscience on the subject of slavery, an institution which nevertheless lingered in Cuba until 1886. This three-way imperial tug-of-war took on special urgency after 1833, when Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act (3 and 4 Will. IV c. 73). The Act took effect in 1834, and by 1835 Britain had strong-armed Spain into signing a treaty to enforce the interdiction of the slave trade, thereupon placing the British hulk Romney in Havana Harbor and its largely West Indian crew in the city itself. Meanwhile, British cruisers dedicated to abolition, and based in the newly emancipated British colony of Jamaica, were constant presences on the Southern, slave-holding doorstep of the United States.8 In 1839, the Amistad case highlighted the continuance of the slave trade in Cuba, involved the United States in the final legal decision freeing the illegally enslaved hijackers, and attracted enough attention in Britain that Quaker businessman Joseph Sturge organised the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London the following year.9 In August 1840, David Turnbull, a prominent abolitionist, was appointed by Lord Melbourne as British consul to Cuba and Superintendent of Liberated Africans. By 1842 Turnbull’s [ 68 ]

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exceptional lack of diplomacy saw him transferred to Jamaica, from whence he was convicted in absentia by Spanish authorities of being the ‘prime mover’ behind the La Escalara conspiracy in Cuba (in 1843–1844).10 All the while, Cuba remained at the centre of a complex web of global trade that was cast in both economic and moral terms. Slavegrown, or at least slave-processed or slave-transported, sugar, tobacco, and coffee – the last overwhelmingly grown on British-owned plantations on the eastern side of the island – continued to be exported from Cuba.11 During the debates in Britain in the 1840s over the Corn Laws, the continued availability of Cuban exports (and of American products similarly tainted by their reliance on slave labour) was cited by both protectionists and free traders in support of their respective positions.12 The value of Cuba’s export market to Spain’s colonial economy, and of its import market for finished manufactured goods, was not lost on either Britain or the United States, with at least one British MP suggesting military annexation predicated on late Spanish bond payments, even as American statesmen tendered two different purchase offers to Spain for the island they referred to as ‘the garden of the world’.13 By 1850, according to Louis Pérez, 80 per cent of Cuba’s foreign trade was with three countries: the United States, Britain, and Spain; of this 80 per cent share, the US accounted for 39 per cent, Britain 34 per cent, and Spain 27 per cent.14 Thus, all three nations had powerful incentives to secure the island within their respective colonial empires. In the United States in particular, attitudes towards Cuba extended beyond instrumental financial interests to encompass both the configuration of domestic political power and national self-perception. As Pérez observes, the ‘destiny of the nation seemed inextricably bound to the fate of the island. It was impossible to imagine the former without attention to the latter’.15 Increasingly, over the first half of the nineteenth century, this imagining took the form of fantasies of annexation as the ‘destiny’ of Cuba found commodious accommodation within the broader narrative of Manifest Destiny. In this narrative, slavery occupied a central, if complexly contested position. There were northern proponents of annexation who unreservedly opposed both the spread and the existence of slavery.16 Even as staunch an opponent of the institution as Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who later successfully defended the slaves who revolted on the Amistad, could remark to the US Minister to Spain in 1823: ‘it is scarcely possible to resist the conviction that the annexation of Cuba to our Federal Republic will be indispensible to the integrity and continuance of the Republic itself’.17 Another group of proponents, variously motivated by political expediency, conviction, or both, maintained a spectrum of more cautious positions – ranging [ 69 ]

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from support of popular sovereignty to agendas for the containment and gradual elimination of the institution. Finally, there was a solid alliance of pro-slavery interests on the island and in the US that was intent on annexing Cuba, with a vision of maintaining and expanding the slave system. Beyond providing additional plantation land, pro-slavery proponents argued that the annexation of Cuba would prevent the abolition of slavery on the island (for which the British had been pressuring Spain) as well as increase Southern political power in the Union.18 Matters came to a head in 1850, when Venezuelan veteran of the First Carlist War (1833–1839), Narciso López, operating from a base in New Orleans, led his second filibustering expedition to Cuba.19 He planned to gain local popular support, overthrow the Spanish GovernorGeneral, and then engineer the island’s entry into the United States aligned with the slave-holding South. López was entirely unsuccessful, but his efforts nevertheless received widespread attention in Britain, where they were perceived as further evidence of American belligerence and dishonesty in the West Indies. The López expedition was even memorialised by John Leech in Punch, or the London Charivari (Figure 3.1). ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’ neatly features all three colonial powers jostling for position in Cuba: Spain appears as a middle-aged and somewhat paunchy tobacconist; he expels an armed López, identified as ‘American’, from his shop; Britain appears by implication as a spectator, one whose own imperial interest in the scene can be extrapolated from the size and smokable orientation of the cigar that is Cuba.20 A particularly productive point of entry into this moment of midcentury cartoon imperialism emerges out of the definitional debate and re-evaluation of Bildungsroman that has been ongoing in the past three decades.21 Although a full treatment of the history of these conversations remains beyond the limits of this analysis, a brief overview of the central concerns is necessary to establish the theoretical warrant for this critique. Presiding notions of Bildungsroman are informed by a view of genre that is diachronically both continuous and dynamic. As Michael McKeon describes them, genres are ‘integral structures’ whose temporal and spatial existence both defines their identities and establishes their relation to other historical formations.22 Importantly, as McKeon notes, neither their nature nor their transformations can be predicted in advance. So, on the one hand, genres must possess sufficient conceptual continuity to have temporal extension; on the other, they must be understood as evolving as a result of complicated interactions with other, also evolving, historical formations. Crucially, the evolution of a genre must be determined not only by surveying fluctuations in the canon of objects taken to instantiate it, but by [ 70 ]

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Figure 3.1  John Leech, ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’, Punch, 17, 1850, p. 247.

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taking stock of its evolving theorisations as well. Beyond this, the criteria constituting a genre can be usefully specified, and its definitions intelligibly identified as restrictive, promiscuous, or adequate, only in relation to particular critical projects and ends. Genre, then, is important as a functional model – one that does the work of ideological negotiation – rather than simply a taxonomic one. In the particular case of Bildungsroman, despite a long history of definitional debates, a core set of conceptual concerns has characterised theorisations of the genre from the introduction of the term. Although popularised by Wilhelm Dilthey, initially in his biography of Schleiermacher (1870) and later – more famously – in Poetry and Experience (1908), the term was coined in 1819 by Karl Morgenstern, a professor of aesthetics at the University of Dorpat, in a lecture entitled ‘Über das Wesen des Bildungsromans’ [‘On the Nature of the Bildungsroman’]. On Morgenstern’s account, his neologism was prompted both in order to identify an emergent sub-category of the novel, and to advance the claim that the conceptual elements of this new genre were paradigmatic of the novel as such. Thus, the transformations that distinguish the novel from the epic – the movement away from the marvelous and towards realism, and the shift from national to personal concerns – achieved their culmination, in Morgenstern’s view, in the quotidian events that constitute the development of the Bildungsroman’s protagonist. Indeed, according to Morgenstern, the protagonist’s development itself was a fundamental criterion distinguishing the novel from the epic: whereas the protagonist of the epic acts on and modifies the world around him, the protagonist of the novel is acted upon, and develops in response to, the surrounding world. As the species of the novel whose principal thematic concern is development itself (Bild = form, image; Bildung = formation, development, education), the Bildungsroman was for Morgenstern the purest form of novel. And like many nineteenthcentury commentators on the novel, Morgenstern stressed the Bildungsroman’s interpellative function: We may call a novel a Bildungsroman first and foremost on account of its contents, because it represents the development of the hero in its beginning and progress to a certain stage of completion, but also, second, because this depiction promotes the development of the reader to a greater extent than any other kind of novel.23

In brief remarks on the Bildungsroman – made in the course of his reading of Hölderlin in Poetry and Experience – Dilthey reprised key features of the genre identified by Morgenstern; in particular the fundamental focus on the personal development of the novel’s protagonist, realised through a sequence of unexceptional and ostensibly [ 72 ]

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apolitical experiences.24 But whereas, for Morgenstern, the subjective turn indexed the concerns of a universal humanity present across the transnational phenomenon of the novel, for Dilthey, it was a form of historical retreat, indicative in itself of the particular political circumstances in Germany at the time of the Bildungsroman’s emergence there.25 What is important here is not so much to adjudicate between these competing claims as to recognise that both trade on a conception of generational and historical accommodation. Whether the protagonist’s development culminates in a happy dissolution into society or represents a species of historical retreat, the path of development itself must ultimately be understood in relation to the larger national and historical framework that Franco Moretti calls ‘the way of the world’.26 Theoretical concern with the Bildungsroman in the English critical tradition began somewhat later, with Susanne Howe’s Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen (1930). Taking, as do virtually all previous and subsequent accounts of the Bildungsroman, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship] as the inaugural instance of the genre, Howe refined the definition to distinguish Bildungsroman, on the one hand, from the Erziehungsroman or pedagogic novel, which focuses specifically on formal schooling and, on the other, from the Entwicklungsroman, the novel of development, understood as a story of general growth rather than self-cultivation. In the course of making these distinctions, she brought to the fore what had largely remained implicit in previous treatments: namely, ‘[t]he idea that inspired the name and the story of Goethe’s hero, Wilhelm Meister – the idea that living is an art which may be learned and that the young person passes through the stages of an apprenticeship in learning it, until at last he becomes a “Master”’.27 Remarkable as it may seem from the present vantage point, Howe was also the first to insist on an element commonly accorded to be a mainstay of the genre: the fact that ‘[t]hey are preeminently the novels of youth’.28 Howe shared Dilthey’s sensitivity to the genre’s national and historical implications, observing that the Bildungsroman’s transplantation to England entailed protagonists’ adjustment to British national concerns, among them industrial confusion, political reform, religious doubt, and, of particular interest for the present study, imperial expansion. This concern with the national and historical implications of the genre achieved one of its most insistent and illuminating theoretical articulations shortly after Howe’s book was published, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal work on the Bildungsroman.29 As it had been for Morgenstern, the Bildungsroman was for Bakhtin paradigmatic of the modern novel, but for reasons that align somewhat more closely with Dilthey’s historical interests, namely in its tendency to provide an [ 73 ]

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‘image of man growing in national-historical time’.30 On Bakhtin’s account, the formally static and normative accounts of the novel then regnant failed to recognise a fundamental transformation in the genre that occurred during the period in which the Bildungsroman emerged: the joint representation of biographical time (the protagonist’s life) and historical time. According to Bakhtin, the former entails the latter: because biographical life necessarily unfolds within a larger epoch, extending beyond the limits of a single life and whose duration is represented by generations, the protagonist of the biographical novel emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He’s forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man. The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not, of course, the private biographical future, but the historical future.31

Thus, Bakhtin may be understood to extend Morgenstern’s original formulation from a dynamic protagonist to the interactions between that protagonist and a dynamic world. Indeed, the implication here (and more pronouncedly in Bakhtin’s reflections on the speaking subject in The Dialogic Imagination) is that the two are reciprocally self-constituting.32 Strange to say, for much of the critical history of the Bildungsroman, the concept of youth itself – virtually a sine qua non of the genre – remained largely unexamined as a kind of inert, ahistorical a priori. It is only with Franco Moretti’s magisterial The Way of the World that youth comes to occupy a central conceptual focus in the theorisation of the Bildungsroman. According to Moretti, the crystallisation of the genre (in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) was part and parcel – both a symptom of and a contributor to – a historical transformation in the concept of youth itself. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s work on generations, Moretti observes that in status societies youth is a simple biological differentiation without entelechy, a processual stage en route to adulthood. With the transformations ushered in by the Enlightenment, and brought to crisis with the French and Industrial Revolutions, youth becomes, in Moretti’s words, a problem, and youth itself becomes problematic. Already in Meister’s case, ‘apprenticeship’ is no longer the slow and predictable progress towards one’s father’s work, but rather an uncertain exploration of social space, which the nineteenth century – through travel and adventure, wandering and getting lost, ‘Bohême’ and ‘parvenir’ – will undertake countless times.33

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Thus the process of becoming a master that Howe astutely placed at the centre of the genre’s thematic preoccupations, moves from being merely a mechanism that harmonises self-determination and socialisation to being a way of rendering meaningful through narrative the social and political uncertainties of the period. At the level of discourse, Moretti insists, the Bildungsroman effects this binding through the pedestrian and ostensibly apolitical details of everyday life that critics have long associated with the genre. Bildungsromane participate in the larger tendency of the novel as a rule to pass over revolutionary fractures in silence. Because they are fractures, upheavals in the narrative continuum that are too abrupt and radical, of course. But also because they affect that particular sphere of action – the centralized power of the state – in relation to which the culture of the novel, in contrast to that of tragedy, is the victim of an unmistakable and very real taboo.34

Bracketing violations of the taboo that might be mentioned, Moretti nevertheless maintains that it is precisely the historical and political repression described above that constitutes the essence of Bildungsroman as a symbolic form: ‘[i]f youth, therefore achieves its symbolic centrality, and the “great narrative” of the Bildungsroman comes into being, this is because Europe has to attach a meaning, not so much to youth, as to modernity’.35 He might more accurately have said meanings, for as he elsewhere observes, within the supranational commonalities that constitute the genre, important national differences operate. Moreover, there is a signal difference in the protagonist’s development in Bildungsromane on the Continent and in England. Broadly, where the Continental Bildungsroman used youth, in the figure of the protagonist’s journey, as an exploratory device – an arena in which accommodations and exchanges could be effected and self-realisation unfold – the tendency among English novelists, at least until what Moretti maintains is the end of the genre with George Eliot, was to retrospectively valorise, and attempt to recuperate, the insights of childhood. ‘Contrary to Wilhelm Meister, in the English novel the most significant experiences are not those that alter but those which confirm the choices made by childhood “innocence”. Rather than novels of “initiation” one feels they should be called novels of “preservation”’.36 This mature return to the insights of childhood effectively produces, Moretti tells us, a ‘devaluation of youth’ (emphasis Moretti’s). Where the Continental Bildungsroman confronts the problem of youth, English Bildungsroman renounces, or perhaps rectifies problematic youth. Adapting the theoretical apparatus of Bildungsroman to the examples of cartoon imperialism cited in this chapter (and which is perhaps [ 75 ]

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especially extendable to those featured in the other chapters in this volume’s opening section) is grounded not merely in the fitness of these particular images for such analysis, but also in the powerful empirical warrant that emerges from the mid-nineteenth-century periodical record for conceiving of the United States as a problematic youth. In order to reconstruct this rhetorical context for our chosen examples of cartoon imperialism, we relied on two principal electronic archives: ProQuest’s British Periodicals database and the Google books online collection of Punch, or the London Charivari.37 With an eye towards historical immediacy and archival overlap, this chapter limits the search dates to 1840–1859, or the two decades surrounding the López expedition and its visual representation in Punch. Within British Periodicals, a search for ‘Cuba’ provides clear empirical evidence for the presence of Cuba in the British periodical record, in the form of 2,959 hits, 1,160 from the 1840s and 1,799 from the 1850s. Searching within these results for ‘Jonathan’ yields 134 articles of all types, from volume indices to obituaries to foreign affairs articles, 62 from the 1840s and 72 from the 1850s. Within the much smaller corpus of the first 37 volumes of Punch that comprise the full run of 1841–1859, 16 volumes contain at least one article featuring the word ‘Cuba’. Not every article from Punch featuring the word ‘Cuba’ also included explicit reference to ‘Jonathan’, but close reading enables one to find those that do as well as those that represent the United States using other terms that nevertheless reinforced the sense that Britain’s former colony had grown, without growing up, into its dangerously immature international rival.38 America’s status as the problematic youth among the world’s imperial powers manifests itself in a number of characterological traits, including materialism, unscrupulousness, and belligerence. Thus, in an article otherwise focused on Mexico, one writer for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine observes that ‘Jonathan, who thinks himself born to lay hold on every scrap of the globe by which he can turn one cent into two … frees himself from all scruples’.39 This unprincipled grasping after money may once have made ‘Jonathan … a monstrous funny fellow in his way’, but ‘this funny way of his has ceased to excite us, ever since we found it went direct to our pockets’.40 Not surprisingly, the writers at Punch never entirely lose their sense of humour at America’s materialist antics. Thus, in ‘Black and White’, one American fraud is positively celebrated when it comes at the cost of Cuba’s slave trade: The French papers give the following story – received neat as imported from the isle of Cuba. Six hundred negroes had been sold by an American slave-dealer, but in three weeks after the sale, they all disappeared in one night.

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It was afterwards discovered that the 600 pretended negroes had sailed for Jamaica, taking their places as – white passengers! The fact is, they had stained their skins with nitrate of silver or lunar caustic to pass for blacks – a fraud deposed to by a chemist who had sold the commodity. We have received a letter from Cuba (from ‘our Own Correspondent,’) on the matter. He states that the authorities are so indignant at the fraud, that they are about to pass a law to prevent its repetition. Henceforth, every person who buys a black man will be allowed to boil him before paying for him. If he stand colour, the bargain stands good; if not – NOT.41

The ‘short-sighted dollar-mania of brother Jonathan’ is less amusing, however, when it forces John Bull to ‘wink at insult … submit to unblushing rapacity … [and] knuckle under, in spirit, to braggart pugnacity, to a pig-sticking kind of martial ardour, never manifested in this generation with a spark of honour, or of heroism, or of patriotism, except as evinced in the anxiety to annex any territory or property representable in dollars’.42 The rhetoric surrounding America’s behaviour on the world stage frequently grows more specific in representing the nation as a youth among adults. Rarely, such age-specific references are positive, as in one Westminster Review writer’s approving characterisation of the United States as ‘the young giant state’ whose progress of westward expansion compares favourably with the labours of Hercules.43 More typical is the following observation in the abolitionist Eclectic Review: There is a youth in communities as well as in individuals, and both are characterized by strong passions, rashness, and impatience of control. All classes in the States are, more or less, morbidly tenacious of the national honour, and that tenacity has its root in the pride and an inflated idea of the present greatness and magnificent destinies of the States.44

The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist went one step further, seeing in ‘Brother Jonathan’ all the ‘petulance and arrogance of a younger brother’ in need of ‘an occasional moral flagellation’.45 Perhaps the crescendo of such youthful rhetoric emerges in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine, which moralises with full parental authority: Jonathan, bold upstart boy! you have despised paternal wisdom, you must reap the reward of your folly; your faults are those of froward youth; you must be whipped into propriety by that unsparing criticism which you so boldly challenge, by setting yourself so far above your elders and your betters. It is on these grounds, and also because the child is spoiled when the rod is spared, that we Englishmen take the liberty of belabouring you with your own stripes.46

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Figure 3.2  John Leech, ‘Master Jonathan tries to smoke a Cuba, but it doesn’t agree with him!!’, Punch, 18, 1850, p. 243.

British periodical writers of all political stripes from the 1840s and 1850s rehearse these and other flaws in America’s national character using the language of problematic youth so central to accounts of Bildungsroman. Collectively, they offer a rich rhetorical field within which to read not just ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’ but also its companion image, ‘Master Jonathan Tries to Smoke a Cuba, But It Doesn’t Agree with Him!!’ (Figure 3.2). Among the complexities of employing novel theory of any sort as a heuristic for interpreting political cartoons, are certain differences in narrative form and their impact on the process of reading. A striking case is the incongruous phenomenologies of consumption enjoined by each genre. Infamously labelled by Henry James as ‘large loose baggy monsters’, nineteenth-century novels are long, and reading them requires the gradual accretion of detail and incident over a significant period of time; powers of memory and sublimation were particularly tested by the process of serialisation, which deferred a novel’s conclusion for months or even years.47 By contrast, cartoons have no length to speak of and are designed to be legible immediately, perhaps in a single glance.48 To render this point in the language of particular cases, readers of Wilhelm Meister could be expected to linger with Goethe’s protagonist [ 78 ]

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through hundreds of pages and multiples of scenes of reading, developing themselves through the gradual unfolding of his narrative of maturation; whereas mid-century consumers of Punch were unlikely to spend even a meaningful fraction of that time with Master Jonathan or the American Rover-General. However fleeting that moment of cartoon consumption may have been, though, it would have been saturated with perspicuous hints, both visual and textual, of narrative duration. Appearing first, the half-page ‘Master Jonathan Tries to Smoke a Cuba, But It Doesn’t Agree with Him!!’ accomplishes this impression of time passing through the use of a diptych that presents the confident before and miserable after images of its callow subject. A clichéd rite of passage for young men of the period, the inevitably unpleasant experience of being overcome by one’s first cigar is rendered here in colonial terms via the shared name of the combustible commodity and the Spanish colony that produced it. The vertical line separating the panels performs the same function as the comma after the word ‘Cuba’ in the accompanying text, acting as a caesura that requires a blink, a beat, a pause before moving from the exposition to the climax of the cartoon’s familiar plot. With the quantity of smoke that has accumulated around the unfortunate Jonathan’s head in the right-hand panel, readers are left to imagine the coughing and spluttering that comprises the implied rising action. Printed on the last full page of the same final June 1850 issue of Punch, ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’ also invites its viewers to translate its static image into the passage of narrative time.49 Unlike its predecessor, this cartoon represents only the immediate aftermath of the past action identified in the accompanying text, ‘wot tried to steal’, although here, too, the story is a familiar one: designed especially for Napoleon’s somewhat more famous appropriation of Adam Smith’s ‘nation of shopkeepers’, this time it centres on shop-lifting, and it once again depends on the double meaning of the word ‘Cuba’.50 Visually, the image is constructed around a set of repeating diagonals that draw the eye into the cartoon and also imply movement: the shop awning, both of López’s legs, the oversized cigar, the shopkeeper’s leg. The crisis of this plot has already passed, and readers are now witness to the falling action of López’s flight and the imagined return to stability of Spain’s cigar shop. Juxtaposed within a single issue, these two discrete cartoons almost compel readers conditioned by the narrative conventions of the novel generally and of the Bildungsroman specifically, to read them as a single story of failed self-development. According to their combined plot, a fast young dandy, Master Jonathan, acquires and unsuccessfully [ 79 ]

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attempts to smoke a man’s cigar, a Cuba.51 His unpleasant experience hardens him into a petty criminal, a rather spindly American rovergeneral, whose later effort to steal an even larger cigar is thwarted by a robust tobacconist. The visual similarities between Jonathan and the general – their shared ectomorphic body types, tight-fitting jackets, upturned collars, nearly identical hairstyles, and equally sour downturned mouths – abet this combined reading. Moreover, the text that intervenes between these two cartoons returns to Cuba no less than three times. ‘Bulletin of General Lopez’ purports to reproduce a self-aggrandising broadside posted by López after his unsuccessful filibuster and features frequent ‘Americanisms’ intended to be read as signs of insufficient linguistic cultivation: ‘bin’ for ‘been’; ‘castin’ for ‘casting’; ‘ginnerus’ for ‘generous’; ‘slockdologer’ for ‘sockdolager’, itself nineteenth-century American slang for ‘decisive blow’.52 Only three articles later, the much briefer ‘Pirate’s Doom’ waxes metonymically: ‘When we recollect the association that exists in the minds of Englishmen, between a Cigar and Cuba, we are not surprised that the late affair should have ended in smoke.’53 Finally, and perhaps most tellingly for those interested in links between political cartoons and narrative theory, ‘Lopez and Cuba’ invokes the long-running Anglo-American debate over authorial copyright – ‘In connexion with the subject of tobacco, we may make the observation, that from literary to common piracy there seems to be but one step in America, and advise Jonathan to put that in his pipe and smoke it’ – thus overtly linking the López expedition to novel publication.54 However quickly they may have glanced at the original cartoons, then, readers of Punch in June 1850 would have consumed a recognisable and novelistic serial in miniature, centred on the misadventures of a problematic American youth in colonial Cuba. Another complexity connected with the differences in the narrative form of novels and cartoons concerns an issue at the etymological and conceptual centre of Bildungsroman: development. However rich and varied the story particulars of individual Bildungsromane, generically speaking they share a single plot form: the development of the protagonist. In the Bildungsroman, in the most literal sense, the development of the plot is the development of the protagonist. Indeed, as Bakhtin observed, a signal formal and representational innovation of the Bildungsroman is to link this development in the protagonist’s biographical time to the encompassing framework of historical time. But as subsequent critics have recognised, the representational presence of history in the genre is complicated. On Moretti’s account, Bildungsroman eschews direct representation of world historical figures and events (or at least rusticates them to the margin of the novel’s plot) in favour of the pedestrian details of the protagonist’s private life. At the level [ 80 ]

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of direct representation, we might say, the Bildungsroman is history writ small. All this, then, would seem to stand in blunt contrast to political cartoons, whose occasions are the movements of history and whose raison d’être is the illumination of the events and actors therein. Here again, however, what seems a difference in function is better conceived as a difference in mechanics. Like the Bildungsroman, cartoons reprise both the separation of the world historical from the private and their ideological suturing. However, they accomplish this paradoxical operation by somewhat different means. For example, both ‘Master Jonathan Tries to Smoke a Cuba But It Doesn’t Agree With Him!!’ and ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’ trade on the polysemy of the word Cuba to effect a metonymic displacement of the national referent. Thus the cigar in each image constitutes the literal object that the viewer must initially interpret in order to render the cartoon meaningful. Once so identified, the term ‘Cuba’ can also invoke the geopolitical entity – absent from the frame yet its ultimate referent – where these cigars are produced. The former cartoon (‘Master Jonathan’) uses the generic lineaments of the callow young master to invoke the US without any explicit reference to specific historical incidents. In the latter cartoon (‘Rover-General’), although the thief’s face is rendered in generic terms rather than as the concrete caricature of a specific historical figure, his attire and the designation ‘Rover-General’ clearly invoke the immediate historical referent, filibuster leader Narciso López – himself a stand-in for the United States itself. In both cases, these cartoons function very much as Bildungsromane do, rendering the movements of history and ideology by a species of displacement into stories about the private development of problematic youth. Somewhat more precisely, both cartoons can also be classified according to the dynamic that Moretti identifies as specific to the British tradition of Bildungsroman. On the European continent, the Bildungsroman’s fundamental ideological tension between self-realisation and socialisation was resolved either through youth’s exchange of freedom for happiness (marriage) or vice versa (adultery, exile).55 In either case, youth serves as the developmental staging ground for the novel’s resolution. In England, in contrast, Bildungsromane were far more likely to render youth as a kind of developmental misstep leading to a retrospective renunciation of youth in favour of the prescient wisdom of childhood. In these cartoons, England’s youth bends beside him, as it were, in the figure of an upstart, overreaching, and callow figure whose apprenticeship has led not to mastery but to its ironic inversion. Although it is beyond the scope of this analysis to argue that it would necessarily be the case for every instance of nineteenth-century [ 81 ]

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cartoon imperialism, our particular examples from Punch share with the foundational instance of the Bildungsroman an overt and etymologically multivalent fascination with the notion of mastery. As we have already noted, Howe was the first critic to make this point explicit with respect to Goethe’s foundational Wilhelm Meister, whose eponymous protagonist must learn to balance at least three of the definitional permutations of being a ‘master’: ‘to be one’s own master: to be independent or free to do as one pleases’; a ‘person of approved learning, a respected scholar’; and an ‘artist, musician, writer, etc., possessing great skill, or regarded as a model of excellence’. 56 Both of our cartoons are predicated on the very Victorian idea that there should be limitations to the first sense of mastery, with ‘Master Jonathan’ implying that these limits are especially desirable in the case of an individual who remains ‘a boy or a young man’, lest ‘master’ be ‘[p]refixed, with disparaging implication, to a man’s first name or surname’; whereas ‘The American Rover-General’ finds that his ability to do as he pleases is barred by another sort of ‘master’ – a ‘manager, overseer, etc., of a shop, factory, or other business’ – who also happens to be a ‘person who is stronger than or who overcomes another’, in this case with a swift kick to the backside. In these comedic images, the senses of mastery as both the capacity for self-possession and the regulating hierarchy of labour and production paradigmatically mobilise the image of another, far more serious form of master, the slave-master, who retained his power in both Cuba and the American South, despite the interdiction of the slave trade through global treaties enforced by the British navy. Like the many Bildungsromane with which they share numerous narrative and cultural conventions, these two political cartoons invite their readers to think about the complexities of mastery in what Scully and Varnava note is termed the period of High Imperialism. One such complexity concerns the larger, and up to now only implicit, issue of the extension and historical duration of the narrative of problematic youth embodied in the figure of Master Jonathan. As discussed, the phenomenology of processing individual cartoons entails acts of narrative extension: the imaginative temporal projection of the story they tell both fore and aft beyond the boundaries of the frame. In similar fashion, taking stock of the impact that Bildungskarikatur had on the imperial ménage à trois examined here requires the historian to consider these cartoons and, by extension, the larger corpus of which they form a part, as episodes in the broader, rapidly changing colonial history of Cuba. The abolition of institutionalised slavery in both the US (1863) and Cuba (1886), as well as the shift from clandestine filibustering forays to more overt and muscular efforts at American annexation, are [ 82 ]

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indices of a somewhat different fin de siècle ideological context for understanding the representational legacy of Master Jonathan. Within the reconfigured colonial circumstances at the end of the century, and thus during the height of the New Imperialism, the earlier conventions of Punch’s cartoon imperialism robustly re-emerge, in modified form, in American political cartoons. Although a range of metaphors for national vulnerability and underdevelopment – including helpless women and an astonishing array of racist caricatures – appeared in American newspapers and periodicals of the period, by far the most common was the figure of problematic youth. Or, we might more accurately say, the problematic child. Where British cartoonists, in their attempts to preserve long-standing imperial interests, had embodied in Master Jonathan the moral, economic, and political callowness of a young man on the threshold of adulthood – legally ready, but in all other ways unprepared, to assume his place among nations – American cartoonists, representing an emerging imperial agenda towards the end of the century, required a modified generational metaphor. Under their pens, Cuba became in the first instance (up until 1898) a vulnerable and abused child in need of the protection which Uncle Sam, in his avuncular benignity, stood ready to extend. The sense of mastery that comes to the fore is that of the head of household and parental protector, as in ‘Now, Little Man, I’ll See What I Can Do for You’, which responds to the joint congressional resolution for war in April of 1898 (Figure 3.3). After the war, however, uncle–child relations almost immediately began to show signs of stress. Udo Keppler’s cover of Puck for 27 February 1901 – entitled ‘Encouraging the Child’ – sets the stern solicitousness of Uncle Sam against the sullen lowering of young Cuba (Figure 3.4).57 The caption is a cautionary admonishment to Cuba as it approaches independence (and beyond): ‘That’s right, my boy! Go ahead! But remember, I’ll always keep a father’s eye on you!’ With the possibility of Cuba negotiating trade agreements with European nations scarcely two years later, the suggestion of a proto-rebellious resentment has given way to outright obstreperousness as little Cuba is depicted, in ‘More Trouble for Uncle’, as creating a disturbance in the North American neighbourhood (Figure 3.5). If space permitted, it would be relatively easy to extend these observations still further: the malleable conventions of Bildungskarikatur proved remarkably durable throughout the twentieth century, particularly at moments when Cuban economic and political interests fell out of direct alignment with those of the US. The paramount instance, of course, was the Cuban Revolution, when US cartoonists resuscitated the personified image of Cuba as a willful and disobedient child. A cartoon that appeared in The Charleston News and Courier on New [ 83 ]

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Figure 3.3  ‘Now, Little Man, I’ll See What I Can Do for You’, New York Journal, 20 April 1898.

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Figure 3.4  Joseph Keppler, ‘Encouraging the Child’, Puck, 27 February 1901, cover.

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Figure 3.5  ‘More Trouble for Uncle’, Minneapolis Journal, 18 November 1902.

Year’s day, 1960 serves as a final example. In it, the US response to the Castro regime’s nationalisation of US property in Cuba is depicted as a failure of proper parenting (Figure 3.6). In the frame, the maxim ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ is illustrated by the synecdochal hand of US parental authority, which forgoes the paddle of an economic crackdown for the feather of severing diplomatic relations in response to Castro’s infantile tantrum – an outburst of violent histrionics that threatens to upset the cart of international trade. Although these later examples of American cartoon imperialism remain troubled by questions of mastery and motivated by layers of [ 86 ]

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Figure 3.6  ‘Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child’, The Charleston News and Courier, 1 January 1960.

interest, it would be an interpretive mistake to read them purely through the lens of Bildungsroman theory. Not only do they as individual images reconfigure earlier familial metaphors by simplistically replacing youth with childhood, but also the novel, and fictional narrative more broadly, had by the end of the nineteenth century moved beyond their earlier privileging of the narrative conventions arising out of Wilhelm Meister. This is neither to say that every element of the Bildungsroman had disappeared by 1898 or even 1960; nor to endorse Moretti’s rather too precisely dated account of the collapse of the subgenre in The Way of the World. Rather it is to acknowledge that even American cartoonists, who were self-evidently aware of the visual precedent for their own work established by Leech in mid-nineteenth-century issues of Punch [ 87 ]

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– as are those cited above – would need to engage their readers using the forms and methods of fictionality appropriate to their shared historical moment if they hoped to replicate Leech’s interpellative effect. Just as novels ‘seek to suspend the reader’s disbelief, as an element is suspended in a solution that it thoroughly permeates … prompting judgments, not about the story’s reality, but about its believability, its plausibility’, so too do political cartoons appeal to prevailing discourses of credulity and credibility.58 In fine, critics seeking to explain the palimpsestic appeal of subsequent instances of cartoon imperialism should begin among the illustrative pages of the contemporary novel.

Notes 1 Henry Fielding, Introduction to: Henry Fielding and Judith Hawley, Joseph Andrews; and, Shamela, London and New York: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 51. Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava provide a pithy summary of scholarship concerning eighteenthcentury caricature in their introduction to this volume. 2 On interpellation, see: Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: Verso, 1970, p. 11. As Benedict Anderson has observed, one of the discursive forms whose emergence was ideologically imbricated with the emergence of the modern nation-state was the newspaper. Through what Anderson (after Hegel) describes as the secular ‘ritual’ of reading these regular publications, national subjects effectively imagined themselves as part of a vast, invisible collective; eagerly and regularly consuming narratives about the ongoing adventures of the nation both at home and abroad. With respect to this practice of constructing national consciousness, Anderson might well have extended his analysis to serialised news publications of all sorts. See: Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and extended edition, London and New York: Verso, 2006, pp. 34–35. 3 For two exceptions, see: W. A. Coupe, ‘Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11 (1), 1969, pp. 79–95; and Lawrence H. Streicher, ‘On a Theory of Political Caricature’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 9 (4), 1967, pp. 427–445. 4 In the nineteenth century, Jonathan was known by a number of epithets, among them ‘Master’, ‘Brother’, and ‘Cousin’. For a fuller treatment of Jonathan, see Stephen Tuffnell’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 4), as well as: Winifred Morgan, An American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. Such deployments of an American Jonathan by British cartoonists surely deserve to be counted among those ‘images of imperial competitors or opponents’ enumerated by Scully and Varnava in their introduction to this book. 5 M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (eds), University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 8, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986; Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, Selected Works, Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (eds), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985 [originally published 1907]; Susanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, New York: Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, 1930; Karl Morgenstern and Tobias Boes, ‘On the Nature of the Bildungsroman’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 124 (2), 2009, pp. 647–659. 6 On the three-way imperial contest over Cuba, see: Robert L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalara and the Conflict between Empires over

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Slavery in Cuba, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988, pp. 139–140; and Jaime Suchlicki, Cuba: From Columbus to Castro, second edition, Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1986, pp. 65–66. For one of many documented examples of Spain offering the future trade of Cuba as collateral for a loan from the Bank of England, see: The Annual Register; or, A View of the History, Politics, and Literature of the Year 1836, 78, London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1837, p. 384. See: Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970, p. 137; and Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, pp. 139–140. The Amistad case was a significant enough news event in Britain to appear in The Annual Register, or, A View of the History and Politics of the Year 1839, 81, London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1840, pp. 186–189. In 1843–1844, rumours of a planned slave revolt that has subsequently come to be known as the Conspiración de La Escalera circulated on the island. Cuban authorities conducted a harsh pre-emptive crackdown in which thousands of slaves and free blacks were tortured, imprisoned, executed, and/or banished from the island. Historians have long disputed the existence of the La Escalara conspiracy. See: Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, p. 95; and Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, pp. 248–249. According to Paquette (Sugar is Made with Blood, p. 155), in the 1840s the region between Gibara and Holguín was known as ‘English Cuba’. In 1845, free-trade Conservative Edward Cardwell made the following especially pernicious proposal: ‘Re-enact slavery, license the importation of slaves, and give to the West India proprietors the economy of their own advantages to compete with the Brazils and Cuba. You would thus put them in the same situation in which they were before you deprived them of their advantages; and then they would gladly repay you the millions which you gave them as a compensation for their slaves.’ See: The Annual Register, or, A View of the History and Politics of the Year 1845, 87, London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1846, p. 53. Leslie Bethell (ed.), Cuba: A Short History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 12. Louis A. Pérez (ed.), Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: The Travel Diary of Joseph J. Dimock, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998, pp. xi–xii. By 1859, the balance would shift decisively and permanently in favour of the United States, which controlled 41.9 per cent of Cuba’s foreign trade, compared with Britain’s 25 per cent and Spain’s 12 per cent shares. See: Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, p. 44. Louis A. Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008, p. 1. Philip Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations With the United States, Volume 2, New York: International Publishers, 1962, pp. 30–40. John Quincy Adams, Cited in Albert Bushnell Hart, ‘A Century of Cuban Diplomacy – 1795 to 1895’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 97 (577), June 1898, p. 131. As James McPherson notes, many in the mid-century American South sought to establish an ‘Empire for Slavery’, that would extend into Latin America, most prominently Cuba and Nicaragua. See: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, esp. pp. 103–116. Between September 1849 and August 1851, López organised – with financial and recruit support from pro-slavery interests in the South – three filibustering expeditions to Cuba. The first was aborted by President Zachary Taylor, and the last resulted in the execution of López and all of his men. See: Foner, A History of Cuba, pp. 30–40; and McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 103–116. John Leech, ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’, Punch, Volume 18, 1850 [January–June], p. 247. See also: Morgan, An American Icon, p. 90. Punch did not date its weekly issues until the second number (Saturday, 14 July) of Volume 29 (July–December, 1855).

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H I G H I M PERI A LI SM A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 21 See, for example: Frederick Amrine, ‘Rethinking the Bildungsroman’, Michigan Germanic Studies, 13 (2), 1987, pp. 119–139; Tobias Boes, ‘Apprenticeship of the Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Invention of History, ca. 1770–1820’, Comparative Literature Studies, 45 (3), 2008, pp. 269–288; Tobias Boes, Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012; Jerome H. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974; Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003; Joshua Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; Rita Felski, ‘The Novel of Self-Discovery: A Necessary Fiction?’, Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays, 19 (2), 1986, pp. 131–148; Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions’, Genre, 12 (3), 1979, pp. 293–311; and Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, new edition, London: Verso, 2000. 22 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 1. 23 Morgenstern and Boes, ‘On the Nature of the Bildungsroman’, p. 654. 24 Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, p. 42. 25 On Dilthey’s account, the Bildungsroman’s resolute eschewal of political reference and its emphasis on the particulars of private life are themselves political, constituting a response to both repressive state power and the absence of an established public sphere in Germany during the Romantic period. 26 Moretti, Way of the World, p. 85. 27 Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, p. 4. 28 Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, p. 4. 29 In possession of only the book’s prospectus when the publishing company to which he had submitted the book manuscript was destroyed in the German invasion during the Second World War, Bakhtin subsequently used portions of the prospectus to roll cigarettes when end papers became unavailable. ‘The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Notes Toward a Typology of the Novel)’ is the surviving introductory material from this prospectus. 30 M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman and its Significance’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 25 (emphasis Bakhtin’s). 31 Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman and its Significance’, p. 23. 32 M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse and the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, passim. 33 Moretti, Way of the World, p. 4 (emphasis Moretti’s). 34 Moretti, Way of the World, p. 52. 35 Moretti, Way of the World, p. 5 (emphasis Moretti’s). 36 Moretti, Way of the World, p. 182. 37 Available by library subscription, ProQuest’s British Periodicals, Collections I and II, contains roughly 6.75 million facsimile page images for slightly more than 460 weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, and quarterlies published between 1692 and 1937. The Google books digitisation of Punch volumes online is free for anyone with access to the internet, and can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/. Both resources are fully searchable through their respective hosts’ optical character recognition (OCR) software, which, while never perfect, renders down the unmanageable amount of pages available to a results list of digestible size. For more on the practical, methodological, and theoretical concerns that surround using the British Periodicals database, see: Albert D. Pionke, ‘Excavating Victorian Cuba in the British Periodicals Database’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 47 (3), 2014, pp. 369–397. 38 In the interests of space, we have been highly selective in our choice of representative periodical examples. 39 ‘Mexico, its Territory and People’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 60 (371), September 1846, pp. 261–276, esp. p. 264.

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‘ M A STER J O N A TH A N ’ I N C U B A 40 ‘Jonathan Sharp’, New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, 74 (293), May 1845, pp. 140–141, esp. p. 141. 41 ‘Black and White’, Punch, or The London Charivari, 1, 1841, p. 2. 42 ‘Speculations on the Future.—Our Alliances’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 79 (488), June 1856, pp. 726–743, esp. p. 741; ‘Our Yankee Relations’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 21 (250), October 1854, pp. 619–622, esp. p. 620. 43 ‘The Affairs of New Zealand’, Westminster Review, 45 (1), March 1846, pp. 132–222, esp. p. 146. 44 ‘India and Our Supply of Cotton’, Eclectic Review, 3, April 1852, pp. 391–409, esp. p. 397. 45 ‘Latest Notes on America’, New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, 96 (382), October 1852, pp. 229–237, esp. p. 230. 46 ‘A Flying Shot at the United States’, Dublin University Magazine, 41 (244), April 1853, pp. 507–520, esp. p. 518. 47 Henry James, The Tragic Muse, New York: Scribner, 1922, p. x. 48 This legibility of course requires the expected reader to possess the intellectual and class-based knowledge to enable immediate interpretation. For more on the ideal readership of Punch – and the assumed knowledge of the reader – see: Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London, London: The British Library, 2010. 49 John Leech, ‘The American Rover-General Wot Tried to Steal a Cuba’, Punch, 18, p. 247. 50 Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Volume 2, Dublin: printed for Messrs. Whitestone, Chamberlaine, W. Watson, Potts, S. Watson [and 15 others in Dublin], 1776, p. 483. The cigars, which were one of the island’s principal exports, were referred to as ‘Cubas’ (most notably by Charles Dickens in the Pickwick Papers of 1837; see: ‘Cuba’, Oxford English Dictionary, Volume II – C, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933, p. 1233. 51 John Leech, ‘Master Jonathan Tries to Smoke a Cuba, But It Doesn’t Agree with Him!!’, Punch, 18, p. 243. 52 ‘Bulletin of General Lopez’, Punch, 18, 1850, p. 244. 53 ‘The Pirate’s Doom’, Punch, 18, 1850, p. 244. 54 ‘Lopez and Cuba’, Punch, 18, 1850, p. 246. 55 Moretti identifies two competing principles, co-present but in variable proportions, at the heart of the European Bildungsroman. The principle of classification is characterised by teleological and normative structure in which closure is definitive, youth is subordinated to maturity, and happiness is the highest value. The principle of transformation, in contrast, subverts teleology, locates the story’s meaning in the impossibility of closure, and elevates freedom to the highest value. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869) are, for Moretti, paradigmatic instances of these respective principles. 56 ‘Master’, Oxford English Dictionary, Volume VI – L/M, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933, pp. 211–215. 57 Udo Keppler, ‘Encouraging the Child’, Puck, 27 February 1901, cover. 58 Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Volume 1, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 346 (emphasis is Gallagher’s).

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C HAP T E R FO U R

‘The international Siamese twins’: the iconography of Anglo-American inter-imperialism Stephen Tuffnell

As the United States began to assert itself more forcefully on the international stage in the 1890s, American statesmen, commentators, and cartoonists sought to understand world power through the lens of its closest rival and chief model: the British Empire. Although diplomatic crises still troubled transatlantic relations, by the final quarter of the nineteenth century Americans celebrated the long-standing transnational cultural, social, and political connections between the two nations. For so long interpreted as debilitating neo-imperial binds, these transnational ties were increasingly viewed as evidence of the United States’ transition to great power status. This transition depended on a great deal of inter-imperial collaboration, which soon found powerful expression in the visual vocabulary of American illustrators. American graphic artists both reacted to, and shaped, the narrative of Anglo-American convergence, drawing on a range of symbols, caricatures, and cultural allusions to depict support for, or scepticism of, the reunion of the former colonies with the imperial parent. As both an opinion-forming and opinion-reflecting medium, these caricatures shine a powerful spotlight on the evolution of popular attitudes towards imperialism and foreign relations in late nineteenth-century US political culture. A ‘magazine revolution’ of affordable popular journals reached large new audiences in the burgeoning urban metropolises of the United States’ Gilded Age (c.1870–1900).1 Developments in chromolithography gave cartoonists dramatic, full-colour canvases to reach mass audiences, which – as the historian of visual culture Bonnie Miller has noted – gave them a ‘critical voice in the unfolding dialogue about American foreign policy’.2 As the chapters in this volume make clear, cartooning [ 92 ]

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was an imperial medium. Just as British comic art came of age in the context of a rapidly expanding British Empire, in the United States, graphic artists were key protagonists in the ‘Great Debate’ over empire that convulsed turn-of-the-century American politics. What follows focuses on the leading illustrated journals of Puck (1871–1918), Judge (1881–1947), and Life (1883–1936), all of which exerted great power in the formation of political and social debate in the United States. Under the long editorship of Henry Cuyler Bunner, Puck enjoyed a circulation of more than 90,000 by the 1890s, and was famed for its boldly coloured centre spread satirical cartoons.3 At Puck, Udo Keppler (son of the magazine’s founder, the Austrian-born Joseph Keppler), Louis Dalrymple, and John S. Pughe shaped the popular imagery of John Bull and Uncle Sam. By contrast, its long-time rivals, Judge and Life, enjoyed circulations closer to 50,000 readers, but were equally well known for their political caricatures. While Life adopted stylish line drawings to attack the pervasive cultural and social ‘Anglomania’ of New York’s high society, Judge’s Victor Gillam followed Puck’s style but transformed familiar Anglo-American images into hybrid symbols of imperial reciprocity. 4 This chapter argues that American graphic artists refigured the visual language of Anglo-American relations into a versatile and adaptable imagery for understanding the United States’ place in world affairs and its newfound status as an empire among empires. The visual imagery of Anglo-American imperial reciprocity competed with the versatile visual culture of American Anglophobia in the late nineteenth century. American Anglophobia provided a flexible framework into which American politicians and commentators could position complex political problems, ignite electoral passions, and rally support for foreign policy objectives. Most powerfully, as the growth of the US economy accelerated in the Gilded Age, John Bull and Uncle Sam appeared frequently as industrial and commercial competitors. In the imagery of economic nationalism – explored below in the second part – John Bull is crowded out of world markets and defeated by a wealthy and assertive Uncle Sam in the industries at which he traditionally excelled. However, united by imperial warfare, colonial insurgencies, and nervousness over the future of world politics, John Bull and Uncle Sam were also reformulated as collaborative partners in the quest for global leadership. The iconography of inter-imperialism celebrated shared cultural and social interconnections and featured new hybrid symbols of AngloAmerican global leadership (the subject of this chapter’s closing section). The visual culture of collaborative global leadership may have cemented Anglo-American imperial interconnections, but it could destabilise them as well. The iconography of inter-imperialism also enabled [ 93 ]

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American anti-imperialists to pursue a sustained attack on US expansion in the western hemisphere by employing the same visual techniques as its celebrants. To shape the American public’s understanding of world affairs in the Gilded Age, American illustrators pressed into service a shared stock of visual metaphors, symbols, and stereotypes. The popularity of sports, blackface minstrelsy, and music-hall comic operas provided a reservoir of cultural referents to add to classical, Shakespearean, and Biblical allusions in the work of American cartoon artists. Traditions of political satire inherited from British caricaturists such as James Gillray and Punch also informed American illustrators and shaped the evolution of their craft.5 From this grew a cast of familiar caricatures of Great Britain that included the portly John Bull (replete in tailcoat, breeches, Union Jack waistcoat, and shallow-crowned top hat); the British lion; and, less frequently, Britannia. Britain was also referenced by a number of other established allusions, such as repeated references to the American Revolution, in the bags of British gold lurking in the background of election cartoons, and, increasingly, in attacks on American ‘Anglomaniacs’.6 Above all, the visual representation of Anglo-American relations was interwoven with the flexible framework of late nineteenth-century Anglophobia. Versatile and conspiratorial, American Anglophobia rendered complex political problems understandable to American voters, providing a recognisable political enemy as a focal point. As such, Anglophobia was grafted easily onto a range of regional and national political problems, served a number of uses, and mobilised a variety of political constituencies.7 Anglophobia was used most frequently as a language for expressing the highly selective anti-imperial concerns of American statesmen.8 Typically, this revolved around the persistent fear of British neoimperialism. In the antebellum period (c.1815–1861), John Bull appeared in US political woodcuts and engravings at times of internal discord, as leading gullible Anglophiles astray and threatening the hard-won independence of the young republic.9 A number of strategies were deployed to suggest John Bull’s greed that continued in the final third of the nineteenth century. Judge’s Victor Gillam chose the common image of an octopus-power grasping all corners of the globe as the metaphorical representation of Great Britain’s economic and military might.10 Before the acquisition of the United States’ own Pacific empire, Puck’s John S. Pughe sketched ‘Greedy Johnnie’ (Figure 4.1), a glutton whose arms were so full of colonies that Egypt, Honduras, Africa, Guiana, and the West Indies had fallen from his arms to the floor.11 Hungry imperial powers watch on jealously in the background, including Uncle Sam. [ 94 ]

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Figure 4.1  John S. Pughe, ‘Greedie Johnie’, Puck, 19 February 1896, cover.

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Most Americans did not fear the literal re-colonisation of the United States by the British Empire, but being stuck in the orbit of its ‘unofficial’, economic empire. As a crippling agrarian depression hit the United States throughout the nineteenth century’s closing decades, John Bull was an easy target for domestic political movements. Populist Anglophobia blended fears of British economic dominance with the symbols of the American Revolution, deploying economic and romantic nationalism in defence of Uncle Sam, as in Wilbur Steele’s ‘The Tory is Still Here’ (Figure 4.2).12 ‘Is this nation a British Dependency?’ asked the Republican County Freeman in July 1892, as Uncle Sam genuflected before John Bull and Queen Victoria while Columbia turned away in shame.13 John Bull appeared frequently in the works of cartoonists of the Populist movement as a pliable surrogate for attacking the movement’s opponents over issues as varied as the gold standard (seen below

Figure 4.2  Wilbur Steele, ‘The Tory is Still Here’, Rocky Mountain News [Denver, CO], 16 June 1895, p. 1.

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in the figure of the ‘Goldbug Tory’) and the corrupting effects of foreign capital on US politics.14 Britain’s worst excesses were often highlighted by American cartoonists in the rampaging figure of the British lion. ‘Twisting the lion’s tail’ was an image that gained widespread currency in the American press, as it was indulged in by members of both the Republican and Democratic parties as they sought to rouse the Irish vote.15 The image was also used at times of Anglo-American diplomatic crisis – such as at the height of the Venezuela boundary dispute (c.1895–1899), when the usually rampant lion was reduced to a howling and humiliated figure, in contrast to the superior statesmanship of his American adversaries.16 While Anglophobes fantasised about humiliating or ‘bearding’ the British lion in this way, metaphorical representations of Britain appeared most frequently at times of imperial expansion or warfare. While a visible manifestation of strength, that power was often displayed by American artists as disproportionate. Overbearing British power was signified by an oversized lion in comparison to those being attacked, as in Joseph Keppler’s Puck cover of 19 July 1882 (Figure 4.3), which showed a giant British lion, wearing John Bull’s trousers and shirt, beating a caricatured Egyptian (in reference to the recent bombardment of Alexandria in the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882), as Ashantee, Afghan, and Boer victims lie dazed in the background. His Zulu opponent is more defiant and smiles up at the lion, possibly in reference to the British Empire’s humbling at the Battle of Isandhlwana just three years earlier in 1879. Similarly, as the Second Boer War broke out in the final months of 1899, Britain’s lion appeared in the red coat of British infantry (Figure 4.4). Despite his apparent force, Britain is shown as a power easily distracted by its imperial ventures in Boer War-era prints. Udo Keppler warns of the challenge facing British forces in ‘A Pretty Tough Mouthful to Swallow’ as the lion is unable to approach Paul Kruger in the guise of a bayonet-covered South African porcupine.17 Likewise, as he extinguishes (rather painfully) the flames of a South African camp fire, Britain’s ‘friendly foes’ (Russia and France; armed with coal-pincers) wait to pick through the ashes of the over-stretched British Empire (Figure 4.5).18 The bluster and aggressiveness of British expansion was also referenced in the more unlikely figure of an anthropomorphised bull. Like the rampaging lion, John Bull as a bull was used to express the disproportionate and unwieldy power of Britain. As European imperial competition surged over access to Chinese markets and territorial concessions in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, William Dalrymple’s centrefold [ 97 ]

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Figure 4.3  Joseph Keppler, ‘British Benevolence’, Puck, 19 July 1882, cover.

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Figure 4.4  Udo Keppler, ‘A Pretty Tough Mouthful to Swallow’, Puck, 11 October 1899, cover.

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Figure 4.5  Udo Keppler, ‘A Tempting Opportunity’, Puck, 15 November 1899, cover.

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of March 1898 parodied John Bull as the Bull in a China Shop (Figure 4.6): a warning to the ‘European trouble-makers’ if ‘England doesn’t get free ports in China’. The visual pun is watched from the background by Uncle Sam – as Britain, then completing negotiation of the Lease of Waihaiwei, sets its sights on the lucrative territories of Port Arthur, Kiao Chau, Ta-Lien-Wan, and Tonquin (leased by European powers) – and by a rather coquettish Japan. Ostensibly a warning to other powers, Uncle Sam grins at the irony of Britain unknowingly eliminating the United States’ rivals in the Pacific, and particularly the China trade.19 ‘The Bull in a China Shop’ emphasises that American caricatures of Britain were highly reactive and context-dependent. The visual imagery of Anglo-American relations could rely on an array of stock figures to simplify and essentialise complex problems, but their meaning was far from fixed. The figure of John Bull was easily manipulated by American cartoonists to suit the needs of a range of contemporary debates, into which his rotund form could be inserted to generate public discussion or simply to raise its temperature. This visual language was easily refigured to suit the demands of American nationalism. This was especially true of Gilded-Age American economic nationalism, which refigured John Bull as the counter-image to a wealthy, young, and confident Uncle Sam.20 ‘Business is business’, declared a towering Uncle Sam, in a John Pughe-penned centrefold spread for Puck (Figure 4.7).21 Pockets and fists stuffed with dollars, he stands confidently on the sidewalk and is hailed by representatives from Britain, Italy, Austria, France, Russia, and Germany, all of whom have sold all their stock to Uncle Sam. ‘After careful consideration, Europe seems inclined to admit that Uncle Sam is right – and a good customer’, bragged Pughe. Rather than support a bankrupt Spain in its war against the United States, Pughe’s European shopkeepers are more inclined to support a flush-with-gain United States. Between 1865 and 1900, the United States underwent a period of rapid economic transformation, and began the protracted transition from debtor nation to a competitive industrial power.22 As the national economy boomed, foreign trade followed suit. In 1868, the US share of world trade was 6 per cent; a figure that rose to 11 per cent by 1913.23 This was driven by the dramatic overhaul of the United States’ trading deficit. In 1860, US imports amounted to $354 million, and exports to $316 million. By 1897, that deficit had been translated into a surplus, with imports doubling to $765 million and exports tripling to $1.03 billion.24 Europe remained the United States’ main customer, however, and was the recipient of 75 to 80 per cent of American foreign exports in this period (15 per cent went to markets in the western hemisphere, [ 101 ]

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[ 102 ] Figure 4.6  Louis Dalrymple, ‘The Bull in the China Shop’, Puck, 9 March 1898, centrefold.

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[ 103 ] Figure 4.7  John S. Pughe, ‘Business is Business’, Puck, 22 June 1898, centrefold.

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and Asia took only 1.5 per cent).25 ‘America has invaded Europe not with armed men, but with manufactured products’, wrote one European observer.26 Increased US global trade raised the spectre of Americanisation to British observers. ‘While we are pluming ourselves on our own commercial astuteness’, wrote the Canadian journalist Frederick Arthur McKenzie in his popular pamphlet The American Invaders, ‘the Americans are stepping in to the centre of our industrial capital, and taking from under our eyes the most profitable and easiest speculations’.27 The invasion was propelled by a barrage of American-manufactured products and progressed – to the eyes of British observers – ‘unceasingly and with little noise or fuss in five hundred industries at once. From shaving soap to electric motors, and from tools to telephones.’28 American cartoons present the graphic narrative of this ‘invasion’ as it unfolded. The signs and symbols pressed into service by Anglophobes were easily catalysed by diplomatic crises, but found an alternative expression in the imagery of American economic nationalism. This imagery featured a mature Uncle Sam travelling the globe as the world’s shopkeeper, salesman, and manufacturer; the counterpoint to the ageing, confused, and harassed John Bull. In Keppler’s ‘The Two Drummers’ (Figure 4.8), John Bull is outperformed in world markets by a selfconfident Uncle Sam and is heard to complain, ‘you’re takin’ away all me old customers’. ‘Well, John’, Uncle Sam replies, ‘what you need is American hustle’.29 This visual narrative was also aspirational. The salesman Uncle Sam from ‘The Two Drummers’ may have cases, pocketbooks, and coat pockets filled with orders from the markets of the world, but such an image bore little relation to the reality. By 1899, and despite large growth, the United States’ share of the global trade in manufactures stood at just 9.8 per cent, fourth behind Britain, Germany, and France.30 Indeed, such imagery was moulded by a groundswell of opinion among the American business classes that, having caught a glimpse of the United States’ burgeoning economic power, predicted the nation’s future world importance.31 As American industry boomed, some American commentators boasted of the United States as the ‘world’s greatest workshop’, declaring that ‘it is our manifest destiny to rise to the first rank among the manufacturing nations’, while ‘our commerce is threatening to eclipse that of Continental Europe’.32 If that vision were to be realised, foreign markets must be acquired or created, and the substance, as well as the signs, of dependency on British financial capital, transport infrastructure, and international communications overturned. [ 104 ]

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Figure 4.8  Udo Keppler, ‘The Two Drummers’, Puck, 12 July 1899, cover.

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In Puck’s ‘A Rival Who Has Come to Stay’, Louis Dalrymple reversed the traditional role of Britain as the premier shipbuilder and carrier of American commerce (Figure 4.9). John Bull, whose sign advertises his ‘speciality’ as the construction of ships for US commerce, looks on aghast as an American freight steamer glides by. While Uncle Sam celebrates the launch of a new member of the merchant fleet, John Bull exclaims, ‘Good ’evins! – wotever ’ll become of my ship-building monopoly, if that there Yankee is going to turn out boats like that right along?’33 In fact, John Bull’s supremacy was perfectly safe: before 1914, 58 per cent of American trade was carried on board British ships, while US ships carried just 8 per cent of America’s foreign trade tonnage.34 Nonetheless, as the weight of evidence confirmed the rising industrial eminence of the United States, Uncle Sam was transformed from doorto-door ‘drummer’ to shopkeeper – the customary antebellum role of John Bull. In 1899, Uncle Sam stood behind the counter of ‘the greatest department store on earth’ (Figure 4.10). ‘Every day a bargain day’ proclaimed the illustrator John S. Pughe, as Uncle Sam handed out trains, battleships, chemicals, clothing, grain, and steel rails to his European customers, in exchange for bulging sacks of money.35 Similar examples proliferated in the American press, all of which depicted an aged John Bull defeated by a lively Uncle Sam in all manner of industrial, cultural, and sporting contests.36 Life magazine even featured John Bull as Rip Van Winkle, the title character of Washington Irving’s allegorical tale of a society haunted by its colonial past. In William H. Walker’s centrefold spread, John Bull as Rip Van Winkle awakes from his slumber to find an onrushing tide of Uncle Sam miniatures carrying bridges, tin plate, ships, streetcars, pig iron, steel, and cotton towards him.37 By the turn of the century, American journals were more explicit in proclaiming the United States’ invasion of the Old World. In September 1901, Life magazine ran a series of cartoons depicting views of London in which key landmarks such as the Royal Exchange, Houses of Parliament, and statues of British military and naval heroes were Americanised. The Houses of Parliament were re-christened the ‘residence of John B. Grab of Chicago’ and accompanied by the caption that ‘this structure has a historical interest, having been used at one time by the British Parliament’. The Bank of England, meanwhile, is portrayed with the United States’ crest hung over the door.38 The most striking of Life’s images, however, was a view of Trafalgar Square surrounded by buildings adorned in American flags with Nelson’s column now featuring Uncle Sam at its pinnacle.39 As ever, the flexible framework of Anglophobia dictated the visual culture of Anglo-American relations. In this case, it worked in tandem with a surging economic nationalism in the United States that demanded access to foreign markets and government aid [ 106 ]

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[ 107 ] Figure 4.9  Louis Dalrymple, ‘A Rival Who Has Come to Stay’, Puck, 24 July 1895, centrefold.

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[ 108 ] Figure 4.10  John S. Pughe, ‘The Greatest Department Store on Earth’, Puck, 29 November 1899, centrefold.

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(although it was only ever sporadic at best) to erect the commercial apparatus required to compete with British economic power. Ironically, the industrial growth accelerating the demands of American economic nationalism was dependent on the technologies of trade and communication instrumental to the organisation of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century.40 As noted above, US commerce not only travelled in British ships, but by 1900, 53 per cent of American trade was with the British Empire.41 British-controlled submarine telegraph cables, steamship routes, and colonial outposts conditioned the form and extent of the United States’ overseas expansion. In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the United States and Britain had settled into a mutually beneficial interdependence. By the eve of the American Civil War, Atlantic economic interdependence had reached, in the description of Jim Potter, ‘a closer approximation to a North Atlantic free-trade area than has occurred at any other time’.42 This quickened in the late nineteenth century, lubricated by increasing social and intellectual exchange between Anglo-American elites.43 This inter-imperial reciprocity was viewed through the lens of a shared ideology of racial AngloSaxonism that was frequently celebrated in US political cartoons. Anglophobia, economic nationalism, and diplomatic incident ensured that traditional animosities continued to be replicated in the iconography of Anglo-American relations. Nonetheless, Britain continued to be regarded as a model for US statesmen and commentators as transatlantic rapprochement crystallised in the late nineteenth century – and a useful referent for creating an auto-image of the United States.44 To a cabal of imperialist leaders in the Republican Party, the British Empire was viewed as the yardstick of American success, as – in spite of the potency of Anglophobia – it was transformed into an imperial model in addition to chief rival. The ability to hold these contradictory impulses simultaneously was neatly surmised in one editorial from the New York Herald when it suggested that in future England ‘need not bother with this side of the sea. We are a good enough England for this hemisphere’.45 Transnational economic and social ties provided the groundwork for transatlantic ‘rapprochement’ but this long-standing reciprocity found new forms of expression in the late nineteenth century. In the age of empire, the symbols, caricatures, and familiar visual metaphors of Anglo-American relations were redeployed and transformed to depict the new Anglo-American imperial reciprocity. John Bull and Uncle Sam appeared together as collaborators rather than rivals; the American eagle and British lion were likewise depicted in mild-mannered interactions; and Britannia and Columbia were now pressed into service to reaffirm the cultural and social bonds of Anglo-American reunion. In a new departure, many of these symbols were merged together into [ 109 ]

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single beings, creating a visual culture of hybrid, transnational symbolism. Commercial rivalries were transformed into collaborative competitions and points of interconnection – but as rapprochement came to the fore, so too did more emotional bonds including shared language, literature, and blood. More importantly, empire was depicted as a collaborative project aimed at multilateral leadership of the global ‘civilising’ mission. Mixed metaphors of blood, kinship, and race bisected the discussion of empire on both sides of the Atlantic. This was especially evident in the wake of the short Spanish-American war of 1898. As Paul Kramer has emphasised, those beating the drum of Anglo-Saxonism gave racial endorsement to the extension of American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific.46 ‘Race patriots’ viewed the world map as a stage on which Anglo-American settler imperialism unfolded inevitably.47 In a widely read article in the monthly journal Nineteenth Century, the English journalist Edward Dicey was representative of many Britons in his jubilation that the United States shared British ‘imperial instincts’ and were now ‘prepared to carry out that manifold destiny which is the birth right of the Anglo-Saxon race’.48 ‘With us of the Anglo-Saxon race’, wrote Dicey, ‘it is our mission, our manifest destiny, to rule the world’.49 Americans welcomed the Anglo-Saxon tributes flooding across the Atlantic and invoked the British Empire as a model for the emerging American sibling. For their part, British Imperial Federationists hoped to inaugurate ‘Greater Britain’: a geopolitical union of the United Kingdom with its settler colonies, buttressed by an Anglo-American alliance built of a shared cultural and racial heritage.50 The density of Anglo-American connections increased dramatically in the late nineteenth century. Business, professional, and social contacts multiplied as travel and communication across the Atlantic accelerated. Citizens on both sides of the Atlantic joined new transatlantic institutions founded to celebrate Anglo-Saxon solidarities. More than 500 Britons and Americans joined the Anglo-American League after its founding in July 1898, for instance.51 The League quickly founded an office in New York and launched the Anglo-American Magazine to promote cooperation between the two nations.52 Britons and Americans likewise joined William T. Stead’s Informal Association of Friendly Fellowship, the Atlantic Union, and the Pilgrims Society of Great Britain.53 Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism was both driven by these connections and cited as the chief reason for their proliferation. Such a cognitive shift was also driven by the increasing overlap of the American and British empires. Britons and Americans encountered one another in a number of imperial contexts from the 1880s onwards. Frequently, American sub-imperial agents hitchhiked the imperial [ 110 ]

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pathways blazed by Britons before them. The expansion of American merchants, entrepreneurs, missionaries, and professionals overseas took form within the British Empire. Under the protection of the Pax Britannica they could take advantage of British transportation and communication networks; join the social institutions established by British settler colonists; and acquire first-hand knowledge of investment opportunities.54 In part, this was a form of imperial competition; as US businesses competed for British contracts and American missionaries often hoped to extend American standards to other Anglo-Saxons in addition to other non-Christian peoples. Yet, this inter-imperialism depended on a great deal of collaboration, a fact registered in the visual imagery of Anglo-American convergence. As Anglo-American relations entered new, more tranquil waters, the competitive masculine figures of John Bull and Uncle Sam were joined by the benign female images of Columbia and Britannia. Feminine icons were rarely subjected to the same satirical scrutiny as male personifications of the nation and, when deployed, were intended to raise the gravity of discussion or lend intellectual weight to an illustrator’s argument.55 Female iconography was used most commonly to embody national virtues such as liberty and democracy rather than perceived national characteristics, as was the case with John Bull and Uncle Sam. Just as Columbia featured regularly to heal national wounds at times of American political crisis, Columbia and Britannia appeared together when diplomatic tensions rose. British satirical journals Punch and Fun invoked the pair in a number of roles during the American Civil War. In October 1864, for example, a matriarchal Britannia looks on as Columbia attempts to sew back together the torn map of the United States, offering the advice that Columbia would ‘find it difficult to join that neatly’.56 Throughout the war, Fun’s Matt Morgan juxtaposed Columbia with a devilish Abraham Lincoln, most strikingly in a homage to Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), with Lincoln as the succubus perched on the bosom of a tormented Columbia.57 In May 1865, Punch’s illustrator John Tenniel performed a dramatic U-turn and depicted the pair as grieving sisters, Britannia placing a wreath on the body of the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln (whom Punch had taken delight in attacking throughout his presidency).58 With the renewal of Anglo-American hostilities over the Alabama Claims, female iconography receded while John Bull was viciously satirised by American artists.59 But after the passing of the Venezuela Crisis in 1896, Britannia and Columbia began appearing together regularly in the American press. However, rather than appearing at times of Anglo-American crisis, the pair begin to take on the mantle of peaceful partners as conflict raged around them. In the popular Puck magazine, [ 111 ]

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Britannia and Columbia met as mother and daughter aboard battleships. In the background, the dark clouds of the Spanish-American War gather behind Columbia, and those of the Eastern Question gather for Britannia – emphasising once more the importance of crisis in determining the deployment of Anglo-American icons (see Figure 4.11). Following their appearance together in June 1898, Britannia and Columbia cemented Anglo-American affinities by laying laurel wreaths at a monument to the recently deceased Thomas Bayard, former Ambassador to Great Britain, exhorting one another not to ‘forget the man who did more than any other to bring us together’.60 Female icons were embedded into the narrative of Anglo-American rapprochement. Anglo-American marriages were used as a compass through which commentators on both sides of the Atlantic navigated this inter-imperial world. Transatlantic marriages were an important point of inter-elite contact that enabled Britons and Americans to view one another as partners in the quest for global ‘civilisation’.61 The historian Dana Cooper has documented 588 marriages between American heiresses and members of the British peerage, barons, and the landed gentry between the American Civil War and the eve of the First World War.62 The day after it was announced that Joseph Chamberlain was to marry Mary Endicott, Life magazine pilloried such marriages as little more than an economic transaction, but to many others, including the English journalist William T. Stead, they represented ‘the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin’.63 More broadly, female icons were central to the depiction of the United States’ imperial mission in Cuba and the Philippines, where Uncle Sam protected feminised symbols of Cuba and the Philippines from the implied sexual violence of Spanish colonial leaders.64 More unusually, the four national symbols (of Columbia, Britannia, Uncle Sam, and John Bull) appear re-united together in a poster from 1898 celebrating the United States’ entry into the fraternity of world leadership (Figure 4.12). Qualities including invincibility, integrity, and colonial success were celebrated as shared racial traits ‘in the interest of humanity, civilization, and peace for all time’. Balancing such celebration, as ever, was the Anglophobic and anti-imperialist Life magazine. In this instance, Columbia has tamed a fawning British lion above the caption ‘Dear me, it was not always thus!’ (Figure 4.13).65 At their most celebratory, images of inter-imperialism depicted John Bull and Uncle Sam as the guarantors of peace and civilisation worldwide. In this sense, as the historian Frank Ninkovich has observed, ‘imperialism was a form of internationalism’ for its American supporters; and through it the United States’ place in global affairs would be clarified by ‘confirming the nation’s new standing at the forefront of civilization’.66 Placing [ 112 ]

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[ 113 ] Figure 4.11  Louis Dalrymple, ‘After Many Years’, Puck, 15 June 1898, centrefold.

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Figure 4.12  Donaldson Lithograph Co., ‘A Union in the Interest of Humanity’, 1898.

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Figure 4.13  F. G. Attwood, ‘Dear Me, it was Not Always Thus!’, Life, 19 May 1898, cover.

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Uncle Sam alongside John Bull gave a seductive packaging to imperial internationalism, and the powerful doctrine of Anglo-Saxonism through which it was often expressed. In Puck’s ‘And Peace Shall Rule’, John Bull and Uncle Sam lift the globe in unison as the goddess of peace looks down approvingly.67 Anglo-American reciprocity could also take on overtly militaristic tones, as the two national symbols appeared in their respective armies’ uniforms, rather than the traditional uniforms of Union Jack waistcoat, and suit made from the Stars and Stripes (Figure 4.14). The transformation of Anglo-American identity and its symbolism was also driven by the simultaneity of colonial rebellion in the Philippines and protracted imperial warfare in South Africa. A month after the second Anglo-Boer war broke out on the Rand in October 1899, Uncle Sam was depicted on the cover of Puck sending ‘good will’ to John Bull as British troops were being rushed to relieve Boer sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley (Figure 4.15). Anglo-American reunion, shared imperial ventures, and co-leadership of global civilisation were portrayed in the visual imagery of numerous middle-class journals. Judge’s Victor Gillam celebrated Anglo-American reunion more enthusiastically than most. Repeatedly, Gillam’s work portrayed Anglo-American leadership of world politics as a reunion of estranged Anglo-Saxon brothers. The Anglophile’s ‘Hands across the sea’ portrayed Anglo-American rapprochement as a division of labour between the maritime empire of John Bull and the land-based military conquest of Cuba and the Philippines by Uncle Sam. As they reach across the Atlantic Ocean to shake hands, they are watched enviously by supposedly lesser imperial powers as John Bull invites Uncle Sam to ‘shake, and we will boss the whole world’.68 More striking still was Gillam’s cartoon of 7 January 1899 after the successful conclusion of the Spanish-American War for the United States (Figure 4.16). In this instance, John Bull and Uncle Sam have ingested the globe and control the eastern and western hemispheres via the Suez and Mangua canals (a projected isthmian route through Nicaragua) respectively.69 Gillam continued to merge Anglo-American iconography as an expression of the shared cultural and economic entanglements of the two nations. In ‘The International Siamese Twins’ of 1902, the American eagle and British lion stand together harmoniously, exactly mirroring one another in posture and expression. Binding them together are the economic and emotional bonds of ‘business interests’ and ‘friendship’.70 Tellingly, a dose of realpolitik lay behind Gillam’s assessment of AngloAmerican reunion, as the Kaiser lurks in the background (jealous of US trade relations with Britain, he draws a sword labelled ‘envy’). A year later, Gillam merged the American and British flags to illustrate the interwoven interests of the transatlantic partners. Sharing the [ 116 ]

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Figure 4.14  Louis Dalrymple, ‘United We Stand For Civilization and Peace’, Puck, 8 June 1898, cover.

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Figure 4.15  Louis Dalrymple, ‘Wireless Telegraphy’, Puck, 29 November 1899, cover.

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Figure 4.16  Victor F. Gillam, ‘It Ought to be a Happy New Year’, Judge, 7 January 1899, cover.

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unifying connections of ‘friendship, business, commerce, language, steamships, Anglo-Saxonism, and wireless telegraphy’, Uncle Sam and John Bull unfurl the merged flag over the Atlantic as rival Germany, Russia, and France keep a watching brief.71 British cartoonists reciprocated Judge’s enthusiasm with a wry take on Anglo-American rapprochement, illustrated by the composite figure of Punch’s Jonathan J. Bull, robed in a Star-Spangled Union Jack waistcoat and flanked by a lion-headed eagle.72 The deployment of hybrid imagery had a sharp political edge. Gillam’s work for the pro-Republican Judge magazine intervened in the ongoing ‘Great Debate’ over the direction of US foreign affairs that had dominated the presidential election campaign of 1900.73 Gillam shot across the bows of American anti-imperialists and their allies in the Democratic Party who charged that expansion in the Pacific presented ‘the danger that we are to be transformed from a republic, founded on the Declaration of Independence, guided by the counsels of Washington, into a vulgar, commonplace empire, founded upon physical force’.74 As debate raged between William Jennings Bryan’s alliance of anti-imperial Democrats and ‘Mugwump’ Republican defectors, and the incumbent William McKinley’s Republican Party, Gillam penned ‘A Lesson for Antiexpansionists’. The lesson was spread across the centre page of Judge, showing, the caption noted, ‘how Uncle Sam has been an expansionist first, last, and all the time’. The cartoon traces Uncle Sam’s development from an innocent child to a bloated, cigar-smoking adult, whose prodigious growth is accelerated by the addition of more territories and states to the national domain. Here, the image of bloating is reappropriated from anti-imperialist critiques to represent prosperity, as the arms of European powers reach in from the cartoon’s edge ‘anxious to be on friendly terms with Uncle Sam’.75 Metaphors of maturity and manhood featured regularly in Gillam’s work on Anglo-American relations. In June 1898, Gillam depicted a youthful ‘Sammy’ (a diminutive Uncle Sam) in the school playground. In an image that recalled Pughe’s ‘Greedy Johnnie’, his arms and pockets are stuffed with apples representing Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. ‘I’m a-goin’ to eat them apples all by myself’, he tells his European playmates, ‘an’ there ain’t a-goin to be any cores’.76 Weeks later, a fawning ‘cousin’ John Bull introduces Uncle Sam to fellow empires as ‘the new giant among nations’.77 While historians focus on the Civil War as a foundational moment of US nationhood, proponents of American empire in the 1890s instead focused on the invigorating effect of colonial warfare on what Theodore Roosevelt famously chastised as ‘the over-civilized man’ who ‘fear[s] the strenuous life’.78 For Roosevelt and a cabal of Republican Party [ 120 ]

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leaders including Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator Albert Beveridge, martial virtues were viewed ‘as an essential ingredient of national self-renewal’ which would be the adhesive bond of American nationalism.79 Gillam and his counterparts therefore moulded and reflected the ongoing dominance of masculine vocabularies in the motivations of American statesmen and commentators as they shaped public attitudes towards war.80 Familial reunion, shared leadership, and hybridity characterised the visual narrative of rapprochement, but American graphic artists continued to depict John Bull in a tutelary role. Although Gillam celebrated the United States’ rise to global pre-eminence, even he was clear that Uncle Sam faced unique challenges as a result of his late entry into the methods of imperial governance. In arguably his most famous cartoon, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (Figure 4.17), Gillam took up the message of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, published just a month earlier in McClure’s Magazine.81 In this instance Britain is a model for the United States to follow if the heights of ‘civilisation’ are to be reached. Uncle Sam must follow the path forged by John Bull over boulders of ‘superstition’, ‘oppression’, ‘ignorance’, and ‘slavery’. John Bull struggles up the hill with the weight of caricatured Indian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Chinese, and Zulu subjects on his back, while Uncle Sam – sweat dripping from his brow – follows behind with his own colonial subjects from Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa, and the Philippines impeding his progress. Gillam’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ emphasises the flexibility and reactive nature of the cartoon medium. In reference to the eruption of conflict between the US Army and Filipino insurgents after the Battle of Manila of February 1899, the United States’ colonial subjects are depicted by Gillam as unruly and rebellious while Britain’s comparatively older subjects, schooled in the necessity of racial uplift, either gaze forward to the summit of ‘civilisation’ (with its offer of ‘education’ and ‘liberty’), or look back and laugh at Uncle Sam’s less civilised wards.82 Graphic artists responded rapidly to the unfolding events of the imperial moment, but they also responded to one another, further emphasising that cartoons were not passively received, as the introduction to this volume makes clear. Ever the megaphone of Anglophobia, Life magazine’s William H. Walker, inverted Gillam and Kipling’s burdened national icons and depicted Uncle Sam, John Bull, the Kaiser, and a stereotypical Frenchman, carried on the backs of their colonial subjects.83 The circulation of the graphic narrative of the United States’ mission was depicted more alarmingly by the actions of US troops in the empire itself. In clear reference to Gillam’s image of April 1899, one soldier posed for the camera carrying three colonial subjects wrapped in the US flag on his back (Figure 4.18). [ 121 ]

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[ 122 ] Figure 4.17  Victor F. Gillam, ‘The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)’, Judge, 1 April 1899, pp. 200–201.

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Figure 4.18  ‘Uncle Sam’s Burden (with apologies to Mr. Kipling)’, c.29 June 1903.

As the narrative of US imperialism unfolded, the iconography of Anglo-American inter-imperialism could be deeply ambivalent. As ever, the reflexive Anglophobia of American observers and perhaps even its demand from the readership of American journals provided a flexible framework for American cartoonists to express their concern over the course of US imperialism. While the simultaneity of colonial ventures in South Africa and the Philippines renewed the sense of Anglo-Saxon imperial vigour, they also fuelled suspicion among American anti-imperialists that the United States had been tempted off-course by Britain. In an equivocal cover from March 1901, Puck’s Louis [ 123 ]

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Dalrymple imagined Uncle Sam and John Bull, attired as marines and redcoats respectively, mired in quagmires of debt accumulated while fighting their respective colonial wars (Figure 4.19). In a period in which the United States was convulsed by fierce debates over its recent imperial acquisitions, such ambivalence functioned as a form of inter-imperial lesson-learning – a favoured theme of Puck’s illustrators. Udo Keppler’s ‘Cape to Cairo’ depicts a white-robed Britannia leading British soldiers and settler colonists against the forces of ‘barbarism’. ‘Though the process be costly’, Keppler’s caption cautioned American readers, ‘the road of progress must be cut’.84 As the storm clouds of ‘Philippine complications’ gather in Keppler’s similarly themed ‘The Duty of Great Nations’ (Figure 4.20), Uncle Sam turns his back as John Bull gestures towards the monument of ‘civilisation’, carved with the figures representing Guiana, Australia, Ireland, Scotland, India, Canada, Egypt, and South Africa, bearing the weight of Britannia on top. ‘Don’t get discouraged, Sam!’ exhorts John Bull in the accompanying caption, ‘I’ve had just that sort of trouble for three hundred years’. ‘It has cost many lives and much money’, John Bull remarks to Uncle Sam, ‘but the whole world, as well as England, has benefited by it.’ Anglophobic anti-imperialists were able to subvert such images of the convergence of the Anglo-Saxon imperial powers. Colonial rebellion in the Philippines and imperial warfare in Britain’s South African possessions provided anti-imperialists with the ammunition to critique the United States’ imperial policy. Satirising the iconography of AngloAmerican inter-imperialism, Life magazine depicted the reunion of Uncle Sam and John Bull as two elderly gentlemen in bed. Woken by ringing alarms representing the Philippines and Transvaal, the pair complain about their ‘bloomin insomnia’.85 A month later, Life wished its readers ‘war on earth, good will to nobody’, as Uncle Sam and John Bull sat resolutely within a Christmas wreath behind Maxim machine guns.86 Anti-imperialists also lamented the loss of the United States’ moral superiority over other empires. Competing with images of AngloAmerican superiority in leading the arts of civilisation and peace, was a narrative of cartoons depicting John Bull and Uncle Sam among other nations. As the United States’ intervention in Cuba began, a number of illustrators depicted other nations looking on with envy, or in approval, as Uncle Sam gave the corrupt Spanish empire a lesson in humane colonial rule.87 Yet, at the same time, European (and other) powers are often depicted gloating over the United States’ reversal of its traditional ideological opposition towards formal colonial rule. In ‘No Chance to Criticize’, Uncle Sam is about to carve a small cake on a platter labelled [ 124 ]

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Figure 4.19  Louis Dalrymple, ‘Misery Loves Company’, Puck, 20 March 1901, cover.

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Figure 4.20  Udo Keppler, ‘The Duty of Great Nations’, Puck, 15 February 1899, centrefold.

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‘Cuba’ with his sword; drinks wine from a decanter labelled ‘Philippine Islands’; while on the left of the table is an ice bucket with a bottle labelled ‘Porto Rico’. In the background, John Bull, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicolas II, and French President Félix Faure, carve a large cake on a platter labelled China. John Bull looks on as he remarks to his European counterparts, ‘What are you mad about? We can’t grudge him a light lunch while we are feasting!’88 Examining the iconography of imperial reciprocity charts the United States’ transition to imperial and global power at the turn of the twentieth century. The potent domestic brew of American Anglophobia ensured that British caricatures provided a visual shorthand for the American public to understand domestic political problems. Yet the pliable visual culture of Anglophobia competed with an equally flexible framework for understanding the transformation of American foreign policy in the 1890s. These frameworks could be easily interwoven, and as transnational cultural interconnections continued to thicken a new visual culture of Anglo-American relations emerged. In the new iconography, Uncle Sam and John Bull appeared as equals – rather than squabbling brothers – in joint leadership of global civilisation. These images were part of a broader, transnational imperial culture in the American press that contrasted other empires through their visual representation. Driven by the Spanish-American War, and the accompanying demonisation of Spanish imperial rule, American cartoonists reimagined the iconography of Anglo-American relations as one of imperial reciprocity.89 At the turn of the twentieth century, imagery of harmony, interconnection, and shared ideological aims was deployed frequently in American depictions of the Anglo-American relationship, best evoked through the new hybridity of Anglo-American icons. In part, the iconography of imperial reciprocity reflected the geopolitical reality of new global connections between the US and British empires. In another respect, hybrid visual imagery enabled the American public to chart a course through the shifting imperial waters entered into by the United States in the late nineteenth century. In this light, Anglophobes and Anglo-Saxonists alike understood empire and world power through Britain and its visual representatives. The visual imagery of Britain in American political culture was flexible and ambivalent. British power was at all times the primary referent for American graphic artists as they attempted to shape and reflect the ongoing transformation of the United States to world power status, meaning that John Bull was both the imperial adversary of American foreign policy and the yardstick by which global power could be measured. Perhaps it was best expressed in Frederick Opper’s 1896 cartoon, ‘They Can’t Fight’ (Figure 4.21). Uncle Sam and John Bull glare each other down with clenched fists, [ 127 ]

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Figure 4.21  Frederick Opper, ‘They Can’t Fight’, Puck, 15 January 1896, cover.

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but various ties of financial and cultural interconnection ensure that they have settled into a mutually beneficial competition.

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Notes 1 Frank Luther Mott, ‘The Magazine Revolution and Popular Ideas in the Nineties’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 64 (1), 1954, pp. 195–214. 2 Bonnie M. Miller, ‘The Image Makers’ Arsenal in the Age of War and Empire: A Cartoon Essay, Featuring the Work of Charles Bartholomew (of the Minneapolis Journal) and Albert Wilbur (of the Denver Post)’, Journal of American Studies, 45 (1), 2011, p. 58. 3 John Appel, ‘From Shanties to Lace Curtains: The Irish Image in Puck, 1876–1910’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (4), 1971, pp. 365–366. 4 Patricia Marks, ‘“Americanus Sum”: “Life” Attacks Anglomania’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 28 (3), 1995, pp. 217–231. 5 Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity, 1754–2010, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2011, p. 35. 6 Stephen Tuffnell, ‘“Uncle Sam is to be Sacrificed”: Anglophobia in Late NineteenthCentury Politics and Culture’, American Nineteenth Century History, 12 (1), 2011, pp. 77–99. 7 Tuffnell, ‘“Uncle Sam is to be Sacrificed”’, pp. 77–99. 8 US Statesmen from all major parties used the euphemism ‘expansion’ to disguise their own military conquest of the North American continent. For a discussion of the ambivalence, and selective racial, geographic, and constitutional anti-imperialism of American statesmen, see: Jay Sexton and Ian Tyrrell (eds), Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. 9 On early American caricatures see: Winifred Morgan, An American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. 10 Victor F. Gillam, ‘Free Trade England Wants the Earth’, Judge, 27 October 1888, cover. See also: ‘The English Octopus – It Feeds on Nothing but Gold’, in Worth Robert Miller, Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the third-party movement in the 1890s, Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2011, p. 99. 11 John S. Pugh, ‘Greedy Johnnie’, Puck, 19 February 1896, cover. 12 See also: Anon., ‘If John Bull came to Fight’, Rocky Mountain News, 25 September 1896, p. 1. 13 Miller, Populist Cartoons, p. 21. See also: ‘We are Still His Subjects’, in Miller, Populist Cartoons, p. 19. 14 ‘Who said Flying Squadron’, Rocky Mountain News, 19 January 1896, p. 1; L. O’Brean, ‘John Bull Leaves his Valentine’, Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, 14 February 1896, p. 1; Anon., ‘Holy Smoke! I Wonder if I can’t Inch up that Boundary Line a Little’, Rocky Mountain News, 26 June 1897, p. 1. 15 See, for instance: Friedrich Graetz, ‘Out of a Job Once More!’, Puck, 5 November 1884, cover; Friedrich Graetz, ‘The Lion’s Share of the Campaign Procession’, Puck, 23 July 1884, p. 331; and Thomas Nast, ‘When It Comes to the Lion, Business Between Ben and Jim, It’s Nip and Tuck’, Harper’s Weekly, 6 September 1884, p. 575. 16 John S. Pughe, ‘Give it Another Twist, Grover’, Puck, 8 January 1896, centrefold. 17 Keppler’s image recalls John Leech’s satire of Napoleon III’s militarism in: ‘The French Porcupine’, Punch, 19 February 1859, p. 75. Puck’s John S. Pughe makes a wry assessment of British losses after Boer kommandos repeatedly outmanoeuvred British forces, depicting John Bull as Gulliver tied down by Boer Lilliputians. See: John S. Pughe, ‘The Boer Liliputia[n] – the British Gulliver’, Puck, 21 February 1900, centrefold.

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H I G H I M PERI A LI SM A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 18 See also: Udo Keppler, ‘Not Dead Yet’, Puck, 17 January 1900, centrefold; John S. Pughe, ‘The Hunters didn’t Expect a Live Lion’, Puck, 28 March 1900, cover; Samuel Erhart, ‘A Misunderstanding’, Puck, 20 February 1901, cover. Keppler’s choice of coals here is prescient, perhaps pointing to the British Empire’s struggle to secure coal concessions in China against its European rivals. See: Ian Phimister, ‘Foreign Devils, Finance and Informal Empire: Britain and China c.1900–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, 40 (3), 2006, pp. 737–759. 19 Michael Hunt, The Making of A Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. On the great power rivalries at stake in the China Question, see: Thomas G. Otte, The China Question: Great Power Rivalry and British Isolation, 1894–1905, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 20 For more on American economic nationalism in the Gilded Age see: Marc-Willian Palen, ‘Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age: A British Free-Trade Conspiracy?’, Diplomatic History, 37 (2), 2013, pp. 217–247. 21 John S. Pughe, ‘Business is Business’, Puck, 22 June 1898, centrefold. 22 Alfred E. Eckes, Jr, and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 10–26. 23 Walter LaFeber, The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: The Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 25. 24 LaFeber, New Cambridge History, p. 25. 25 David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998, p. 10. 26 Frederick A. McKenzie, The American Invaders, London: Grant Richards, 1902, p. 1. 27 McKenzie, American Invaders, p. 20. See also: Christopher Furness, ‘The Old World and the American “Invasion”: A Review of the Industrial Situation’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, March 1902, pp. 362–363; William T. Stead, The Americanisation of the World, or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century, London: Horace Markley, 1902; Benjamin H. Thwaite, The American Invasion; or, England’s commercial danger and the triumphal progress of the United States with remedies proposed to enable England to preserve her industrial position, London: S. Sonneshein & Co., 1902. 28 McKenzie, American Invaders, p. 2. 29 See also: John S. Pughe, ‘The British Despot Beaten Again’, Puck, 24 March 1897, centrefold. 30 Pletcher, Diplomacy of Trade and Investment, p. 12. 31 The classic analyses of this opinion and its impact on US imperialism are William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1959; and Walter LaFeber’s The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860–1898, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963. For a more circumspect analysis of this rhetoric see: Pletcher, Diplomacy of Trade and Investment. 32 Quoted in: David M. Pletcher, ‘Rhetoric and Results: A Pragmatic View of American Economic Expansionism, 1865–98’, Diplomatic History, 5 (2), 1981, p. 95. 33 Louis Dalrymple, ‘A Rival Who Has Come to Stay’, Puck, 24 July 1895, centrefold. 34 Eckes and Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century, pp. 22–23. 35 John S. Pughe, ‘The Greatest Department Store on Earth’, Puck, 29 November 1899, centrefold. 36 John S. Pughe, ‘Another Revelation of Strength’, Puck, 17 August 1898, centrefold; Eugene Zimmerman, ‘New Year’s 1901: Century Race of Nations’, Judge, 5 January 1901, centrefold. 37 William H. Walker, ‘John Bull Van Winkle’, Life, 17 October 1901, p. 310–311. By contrast, a decade later Puck’s Gordon Ross cast Uncle Sam as Rip Van Winkle returning from his tariff sleep to discover that European nations dominate South

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American trade (Gordon Ross, ‘It was About Time he Woke Up’, Puck, 8 February 1911, centrefold). Anon., ‘Life’s Views in London’, Life, 19 September 1901, p. 227. ‘Life’s Views in London’, p. 228. Stephen Tuffnell, ‘Anglo-American Inter-Imperialism: US Expansion and the British World, 1865–1914’, Britain and the World, 7 (2), 2014, pp. 174–195. Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective Since 1789, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 154. Jim Potter, ‘Atlantic Economy, 1815–1860: The USA and the Industrial Revolution in Britain’, in L. S. Pressnell (ed.), Studies in the Industrial Revolution, London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1960, p. 279. Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914, New York: Atheneum, 1968. ‘England and the Panama Canal’, New York Herald, 16 January 1882. Paul Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History, 88 (4), 2002, pp. 1315–1353. For instance: E. G. Ravenstein (ed.), Handy Volume Atlas of the World, London: George Philip & Son, 1895, Plate 1; Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 33, n. 44. Edward Dicey, ‘The New American Imperialism’, The Nineteenth Century, September 1898, pp. 499, 501. Dicey, ‘New American Imperialism’, p. 489. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 254–255. W. B. Bancroft (ed.), Directory of Americans Resident in London and Great Britain, American Firms and Agencies, London: American Directory Publishing, 1902, p. 293. ‘Anglo-American Relations’, The Cyclopedic Review of Current History, 1 July 1898, p. 569. Charles Campbell, Jr, Anglo-American Understanding, 1898–1903, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957, p. 44; Richard Heindel, The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914: A Study of the United States in World History, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940, p. 39; William T. Stead, ‘Why not a British Celebration of the Fourth of July?’, Review of Reviews, June 1898, p. 600. Tuffnell, ‘Anglo-American Inter-Imperialism’, pp. 180–191; Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons’, pp. 1327–1331. Morgan, American Icon, pp. 27–30; Christopher Kent, ‘War Cartoon/Cartoon War: Matt Morgan and the American Civil War in Fun and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 36 (2), 2003, pp. 153–181. John Tenniel, ‘Columbia’s Sewing Machine’, Punch, 1 October 1864, p. 136. Kent, ‘War Cartoon/Cartoon War’, p. 164; Matt Morgan, ‘Columbia’s Nightmare’, Fun, 10 September 1864, p. 257. John Tenniel, ‘Britannia Sympathises with Columbia’, Punch, 6 May 1865, p. 182. See: Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume I: The Founders, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, p. 131; Frankie Morris, Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005, pp. 327–336; William S. Walsh, Abraham Lincoln and the London Punch: Cartoons, Comments and Poems, Published in the London Charivari, during the American Civil War (1861–1865), New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1909; Matt Morgan, The American War: Cartoons by Matt Morgan and Other English Artists, London: Chatto and Windus, 1874. Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865–1872, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.

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H I G H I M PERI A LI SM A N D C O L O N IA L IS M 60 Udo Keppler, ‘Tempora mutantur’, Puck, 12 October 1898, cover. 61 A. G. Baker, ‘International Marriages’, The Independent, October 1908, p. 757. 62 Dana Cooper, Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-American Relations, 1865–1945, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014, p. 4. 63 Anon., ‘Another Nobleman Among Us’, Life, 8 November 1888, p. 260; Stead, Americanisation of the World, p. 124. 64 Louis Dalrymple, ‘The Duty of the Hour’, Puck, 11 May 1898, centrefold; Louis Dalrymple, ‘Save Me from My Friends’, Puck, 7 September 1898, centrefold; Louis Dalrymple, ‘He Can’t Let Go’, Puck, 23 November 1898, centrefold; John S. Pughe, ‘Looking Forward’, Puck, 1 November 1899, centrefold. In Judge, by contrast, Victor F. Gillam invoked a sleeping Columbia to raise the United States’ moral duty to intervene in Cuba as the ghosts of the Marquis de Lafayette and Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben try to wake her (Victor F. Gillam, ‘A Plea for Cuba’, Judge, 19 October 1895, pp. 248–249). 65 It is possible that Francis Carruthers Gould had seen this cartoon, and used it to compose his comment on the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Britain and the positive response from the press (Francis Carruthers Gould, ‘A Very Little England View’, Picture Politics, 12 January 1899, p. 14). 66 Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, p. 37. 67 Udo Keppler, ‘And Peace Shall Rule’, Puck, 3 May 1899, centrefold. 68 Victor F. Gillam, ‘Hands Across the Sea’, Judge, 11 June 1898, centrefold. See also: Victor F. Gillam, ‘The See-Saw Nations – The Anglo-Saxons Balance of Power’, Judge, 9 April 1898, pp. 234–235. 69 Victor Gillam, ‘It Ought to be a Happy New Year’, Judge, 7 January 1899, cover. Significantly, A. G. Hopkins has used this cartoon as the cover image for his American Empire: A Global History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 70 Victor Gillam, ‘The International Siamese Twins’, Judge, 21 June 1902, cover. 71 Victor Gillam, ‘How can they Quarrel when their Interests are so Interwoven?’, Judge, 21 February 1903, centrefold. 72 Bernard Partridge, ‘Colonel Jonathan J. Bull; or, What John B. May Come To’, Punch, 27 November 1901, p. 381. 73 Miller, ‘Image Makers’ Arsenal’, pp. 53–75. 74 Quoted in Ninkovich, United States and Imperialism, p. 45. Life depicted President William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt in the process of revising the Declaration of Independence as Jefferson’s concerned spirit looks on; see: William Bengough, ‘Fun for the Boys’, Life, 23 August 1900, p. 147. For more on the American anti-imperialist movement see: Michael Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, 1898–1909, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 75 Victor Gillam, ‘A Lesson for Anti-expansionists’, Judge, 1899, pp. 72–73; John S. Pughe, ‘Declined with Thanks’, Puck, 5 September 1900, centrefold. 76 Victor Gillam, ‘He’s Getting a Big Boy Now’, Judge, 25 June 1898, centrefold. 77 Victor Gillam, ‘The New Giant Among Nations’, Judge, 9 July 1898, centrefold. 78 Theodore Roosevelt, ‘The Strenuous Life’, April 1899, in Theodore Roosevelt, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume XIII, New York: C. Scribner’s & Sons, 1926, pp. 319–331. 79 Ninkovich, United States and Imperialism, pp. 20–21. 80 Kristen Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 81 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, McClure’s Magazine, 12, 1899, pp. 290–291. 82 Victor Gillam, ‘The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)’, Judge, 1 April 1899, pp. 200–201. 83 William H. Walker, ‘The white (!) Man’s burden’, Life, 16 March 1899, cover; Walker used a similar theme for ‘A Promising Pupil’, Life, 2 March 1899, cover.

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Udo Keppler, ‘From the Cape to Cairo’, Puck, 10 December 1902, centrefold. Louis Dalrymple, ‘Misery Loves Company’, Life, 7 December 1899, p. 497. Anon., ‘War on Earth, Good Will to Nobody’, Life, 4 January 1900, cover. John S. Pughe, ‘Satisfying their Curiosity’, Puck, 18 May 1898, centrefold; Udo Keppler, ‘The Survival of the Fittest’, Puck, 1 June 1898, centrefold. 88 Louis Dalrymple, ‘No Chance to Criticize’, Puck, 25 May 1898, centrefold; William H. Walker, ‘Those Pious Yankees Can’t Throw Stones at us Anymore’, Life, 22 May 1902, cover. 89 For a wider discussion of cartoons from the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, see: John Johnson, Latin America in Caricature, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980; Abe Ignacio (ed.), The Forbidden Book: The Philippine American War in Political Cartoons, San Francisco, CA: T’boli Publishing, 2004.

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C HAP T E R FIVE

‘“Every dog” (no distinction of color) “has his day”’: Thomas Nast and the colonisation of the American West Fiona Halloran

Before the period usually identified as ‘imperial’ in the history of the United States, the nation engaged in a colonial exercise in the Plains and Mountain West. There, the US imposed its cultural, economic, and religious standards on disparate peoples. Scholars have, in their exploration of the ways that the West represents an imperial project, and in their efforts to link American western expansion to the lives and histories of native people, addressed a variety of elements of imperial thought to connect settlement, property, culture, and political action.1 Writing about imperialism as a concept, Lorenzo Veracini discussed an idea useful to the study of the American West. ‘Settler colonialism’, as he explains it, expands imperialism to include ‘different modes of empire’. It distinguishes between traditionally understood empires – ‘the localised ascendancy of an external element’, usually a government – and a more specific phenomenon in which people move into a space in order to be ‘founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them’. As Americans moved west, then, they carried with them the government of the United States, embarked on a project that presumed their dominance in the new land, and established governments – local and state – that both expanded American political power and idealised a culture better than, though reflective of, the original American identity.2 Eric Cheyfitz points to similar ways of seeing empire. For example, he argues that culture – in the form of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series of novels (1827–1841) – intersected and interacted with the law, in the form of Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v M’Intosh: an 1823 Supreme Court case regarding the property rights of native people. ‘Law and letters’, Cheyfitz asserts, ‘plot to construct the figure of the “other”’ in order to ‘do the work of dispossession’.3 [ 134 ]

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Where settlers require land, and existing populations control land, law and culture come together for the colonial project. Addressing colonialism in the early nineteenth century from another angle, Jeffrey Ostler argues that because political independence required land ownership, property occupied the heart of the Jeffersonian republic.4 Acquisition and settlement of land, therefore, represented the basis for believing that the United States could act as a colonising nation without the despotism of European empires. Just as property can be the basis of a national commitment to ideologically pure expansion and property rights can be a legal concept requiring an ‘other’, cartoons, too, participate in the process of creating and policing identity. In their drawings cartoonists assert a reality intended both to comment on and shape national discourse. Their perspectives can illuminate dominant ideas about colonisation and ancillary, oppositional voices. Indeed, the cartoonists’ tendency to subvert the conventional wisdom makes them ideal commentators on national efforts like colonisation. Portraying native people as hunters, carefully delineating their clothing and bearing from those of whites, placing native people into contexts that emphasise difference from white culture, eastern culture, or Christian culture, all serve to convey imperialist messages to the reader. An examination of the work of cartoonists reveals their ability both to reinforce and to challenge the narratives embodied in law, policy, and practice. Indeed, cartooning might even reveal connections between commentary on the West as imperial space and commentary on race and conquest in broader terms. When periodising, some historians identify the very last decade of the nineteenth century as a period of American imperial expansion. Whether they assert that it was an aberration, quickly abandoned, or an integral part of the American rise to global influence, scholars of American studies and American history tend to focus on events like the Spanish-American War (1898) as examples of an American imperial era. They recognise, though, the centrality of the colonising impulse to all of American history.5 Reading the introduction to a document collection devoted to ‘Manifest Destiny’, for example, a student would encounter this statement: ‘[By] 1870, northerners and southerners showed an unwillingness to recognize the political rights of non-white people’; and slightly later, ‘While the United States proved more than willing to use military force to protect US business interests … few politicians showed much interest in annexing new territories’.6 Both statements are entirely correct in general terms. But for a student of history familiar with the work of cartoonists who insisted on the political potential of non-white people, [ 135 ]

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the first would be puzzling. Moreover, the latter statement draws a distinction between external imperialism and internal conquest that ignores much of what they share. In the West, the United States engaged in a slow, violent struggle to annex – in fact if not in international legal terms – territory intended for settlement. A student of imperialism in the American context must, thus, accept a dichotomy. There is, in the history she or he studies, ‘imperialism’, by which most scholars will mean the 1890s, distinct from the ‘colonial’ era or from ‘western expansion’. There is also, though, ‘imperialism’, a term applicable across a broad swathe of the nineteenth century in a wide range of western geographies. Engagement with the history of the American West requires the student to unify these competing versions of ‘empire’ and consider race, ethnicity, national origin, and gender as lenses through which the power of empire emerges. Ultimately, of course, American history cannot exist without some recognition of the power of colonising and of resistance to colonisation. That discourse forms the basis for all studies of American national identity. When it comes to the West, though, the picture becomes more complex. When colonising the West, Americans imposed the governmental authority of the United States on unwilling existing populations, laying their legal system atop – and often in conflict with – existing norms of land ownership, exchange, and decision-making. They ejected native populations and asserted the supremacy of white Americans.7 Imperialism as an American behaviour in the American West also demands attention because it contradicted itself so frequently. ‘Indians’ were feared and hated but also idealised. The West differed from the other regions of the nation and yet it emerged as a site of racial disharmony strikingly similar to that in the East. The work of cartoonists can help to illuminate these contradictions not because artists simplify but because they embrace the complexity of their time. Americans loved cartooning in the late nineteenth century and consumed it in a variety of forms. Humour magazines routinely printed cartoons, some politically inflected and some just plain funny (‘gag’ cartoons). Cartoonists also published their work in more ‘serious’ newspapers and news magazines. They worked with humorists writing novels, essays, and speeches, to produce collaborative works intended to skewer the excesses of American politics in the Gilded Age (c.1870–1900).8 First among the cartoonists of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s was Thomas Nast (1840–1902). His work appeared primarily in Harper’s Weekly, a news magazine published in New York City. With a wide readership, a circle of influential friends, and unchallenged authority as the most highly regarded (often the most feared) of American [ 136 ]

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cartoonists, Nast was a phenomenon. He was, therefore, in a position to comment thoughtfully about events in the West. He brought to this commentary two decades of experience in American politics, including views shaped by the Civil War.9 Nast worked from a combination of emotion and reason. He was a homebody who spent his evenings listening as his wife read to him from Shakespeare, newspapers, classic novels, and letters from his many friends and fans. He never knew when inspiration might strike, but when it did he could produce several large, detailed cartoons a week. He thought about the points he tried to make but he also allowed his emotions to direct his pencil. To be insightful and to arouse the reader – to pity or shame as much as laughter – inspired Nast. He had made his reputation in the rough and tumble world of postCivil War presidential politics. His 1864 cartoon ‘Compromise with the South’ proved so useful in support of President Lincoln’s re-election campaign that the Republican Party reprinted it as a poster.10 In 1868 Nast painted the backdrop for the stage at the Republican convention that nominated U. S. Grant for the presidency. In 1872, Nast’s pencil supported Grant’s pursuit of a second term and defended the President against charges of corruption (including those levelled by a rival, Britishborn cartoonist, Matthew Morgan).11 The early 1870s also witnessed Nast’s support of the New York Times’s anti-corruption crusade against ‘Boss’ Tweed and Tammany Hall.12 Wealth and fame followed, including an enormously lucrative lecturing campaign with James Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau. The later years of the decade, though, offered Nast far fewer triumphs. By the end of Grant’s second term, a rift among Republicans posed serious challenges to the electoral prospects for 1876. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, built on the successes of the Redemption movement in the South to field a strong candidate (Samuel J. Tilden). As the Republicans fought with one another and the generation nurtured in the abolition movement died away, commitment to the racial goals of Reconstruction faltered.13 Nast observed all of these developments with alarm. His particular interest in racial questions is of significance when seeking to understand his cartoons related to the West. The years during which Nast built his career, established his reputation, and became a national figure coincided with a massive national conflict sparked by slavery and the questions it generated. Nast involved himself deeply in that conflict and its consequences.14 Thomas Nast supported the freedoms of black Americans during and after the Civil War. When Reconstruction ended and the Redemption movements of the South pushed blacks back into a subservient social [ 137 ]

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and political role, Nast experienced the most crushing disappointments of his professional life. He fought to convince readers of Harper’s Weekly that violence against freedmen violated not only the Constitutional protections of the Reconstruction amendments, but also fundamental values inherent in American identity. He lost. Reconstruction ended; and violent attacks against black Americans stripped them of civil rights dearly won. So when the US began to impose its will on the West in the 1870s and 1880s – behaving in ways reminiscent of the racial oppressions of Redemption – Nast picked up his pencil. Likening the Plains Wars to the treatment of the Chinese and African-Americans, Nast created a pan-racial argument that posed the US as an enforcer of white supremacy both in the East and the West. Nast thus observed the expansion and conquest of the late nineteenth century with a distracted eye. Concerned primarily with the political struggles of the East, Nast brought his most focused energies to bear on questions of electoral – especially presidential – politics. The West only sometimes captured his attention. But despite his obsessive commitment to Republican Party politics, the racial and sectional questions raised by Reconstruction, and the increasingly complicated economic world of eastern industrialism, Nast paused to note events in the West. In his cartoons related to emancipation and Reconstruction, Nast routinely commented on the civil rights implications of events. When he linked emancipation to black citizenship, Nast joined nearly everyone he knew. But he also brought to that link a lifetime of experience with a malleable, diverse version of citizenship. A child immigrant to New York, Nast grew to maturity in a neighbourhood filled with Americans born elsewhere. These neighbours not only joined the economic and cultural life of the nation but also participated enthusiastically in its politics. Thus, Nast easily envisioned a citizenship comprised of many faces and many voices. The West, therefore, presented to Nast a geography filled with potential members of a national polity. Immigrant settlers, Native Americans, Exodusters, and Chinese railroad workers alike might appear in Nast’s cartoons as members of an American ‘family’. One example of Nast’s embrace of national diversity appeared in 1869.15 At ‘Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner’ table, Nast invited all residents of the United States – ‘Come One, Come All’ – to join in a table where everyone was ‘Free and Equal’ (Figure 5.1). Ranged around a centrepiece of ‘self government’ and ‘universal suffrage’, the celebrants of Thanksgiving included Native Americans, a Chinese family (complete with a baby in a highchair), European immigrants of Irish and Spanish descent, and the black family he had portrayed in his 1863 illustration [ 138 ]

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Figure 5.1  Thomas Nast, ‘Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,’ Harper’s Weekly, 10 November 1869.

‘Emancipation’.16 For Nast, American identity expanded as necessary, in response to circumstance. Given the intense focus of colonial and imperial activity on the question of insiders and outsiders – who is ‘us’ and thus entitled to participation in decisions; versus who is ‘them’ and thus subject to the results of those decisions – Nast’s inclusive view must have affected his perception of the West as a site of imperial expansion.17 Indeed, his view of it as such may have rested particularly on his sense that the actions of the US in the West belied the promise of its founding documents and of Reconstruction. At the heart of American citizenship lay voting rights. Yet those rights were, in the years when Nast considered events in the Plains and Mountain West, hotly contested. Suffrage for black men, protected by the US Army in the former Confederacy and guaranteed by constitutional amendment, gradually slid backwards thanks to a wave of violence by white vigilante groups like the Klu Klux Klan.18 At the same time, Chinese immigrants to the West, recruited to work in mining and on the Trans-Continental Railroad, faced riots by coworkers and restrictive legislation intended to constrain their economic choices, exclude them from politics, and make them leave the United States.19 [ 139 ]

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Nast decried violence against freedmen and the Chinese. In a series of cartoons in the late 1860s and 1870s he portrayed the lives of freedmen as symbols of American national identity. Only when black men could protect their families, vote, own property, and expect to live reasonably safe, productive lives, could the United States say it had achieved a ‘republican’ form of government, he argued.20 On behalf of the Chinese he was similarly vehement. He blamed Irish immigrants for much of the violence against the Chinese. They were hypocrites, he asserted; happy to take advantage of a warm welcome but unwilling to let anyone else enjoy the same privilege. By the 1870s, Nast’s established record of sympathy for those Americans excluded from the political and economic systems that benefited white people suggested to any faithful reader what he might think of events in the West. There, driven by the influx of American settlers – native-born and immigrant alike – conflict between indigenous people and representatives of the United States took on a significant racial dimension. Settlers perceived native people as barbarous, religiously and culturally inferior barriers to both white settlement and American national destiny. Nast noticed, of course. His response both emphasised voting – as he had done for black Americans during Reconstruction – and linked racial categories in ways his readers may not have been prepared to accept. In the indigenous/exogenous dichotomy so central to colonialism and settler societies, Nast attempted not only to erase some distinctions but also to suggest commonalities reflecting the ‘protracted contestation’ of identity in settler societies.21 Probably Nast’s most famous image related to Native Americans appeared in 1879.22 In it, a Chinese immigrant ponders the rash of anti-Chinese violence and legislation that emerged in the late 1870s. Standing with him is a Native American man who comments, ‘Pale face ’fraid you crowd him out, as he did me’. Behind them Nast placed a black man, sitting at his ease and smiling as he anticipates the future. ‘My day’, the wall next to him promises, ‘is coming’. Nast clearly intended to address the plight of Chinese immigrants in the West. But his cartoon achieved other purposes, too. It asserted a kinship between Native Americans, Chinese, and African Americans. It suggested the potential for full citizenship for them. On the wall appear posters protesting Chinese immigration. Each points to the political power of German and Irish settlers. If they can assimilate, Nast seems to ask, perhaps in time so will Native Americans, Chinese, and black Americans. After all, as the title of the cartoon asserts, ‘“Every Dog” (No Distinction of Color) “Has His Day”’ (Figure 5.2). [ 140 ]

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Figure 5.2  Thomas Nast, ‘“Every Dog” (No Distinction of Color) “Has His Day”’, Harper’s Weekly, 8 February 1879.

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In one of the images the two men consider, Nast satirised the building of the railroad. As it moved west, it pushed the ‘Indians’ ahead of it, forcing them off their lands. As railroads moved eastward from California, they required the labour and expertise of Chinese immigrants. When finished working, though, those immigrants found themselves pushed along the tracks, excluded from an unwelcoming West. Nast connects the two as part of his point about the kinship of non-white groups. But he also, implicitly, critiques the economic impulses responsible for the settlement of the West. When expansion required help, Chinese immigrants provided it. When expansion required that the Native Americans disappear, they were made to go. For Nast, the economics of western settlement bear as much blame for conflict as the politics. Two years later, in the autumn of 1881, Nast pushed readers to ask whether Native Americans might be more successfully engaged through the political process.23 ‘Give the Red Man a Chance’ (Figure 5.3), he urged in the caption to an image that showed a Native American man already in a noose, about to be lynched by a mob standing in the very shadow of the Capital. In his hand he held ‘a vote’. Nast sub-captioned the cartoon by urging the nation to ‘Make him a citizen, with all the privileges which that implies’. Here, Nast echoed theories that posit the importance of the future in settler societies. They are, always, in the process of becoming.24 Settlers fear the cost settlement will exact, in terms of violence as well as cultural loss. They also expect, though, that indigenous and exogenous peoples can interact through language emphasising ‘uplift’. That is, if only the Indians would become more like white men, they could integrate into the United States. Some settlers believed that if only the Indians would assimilate, conflict would disappear and harmony reign. Nast’s cartoon encouraged such thought. One element of the significance of this portrayal appears clearly when Nast’s work is placed in contrast to conceptual disappearance of ‘Indians’ in fictional narratives. Cheyfitz argues that in Cooper’s The Pioneers ‘Indians appear to disappear’.25 He means that they appear in order to disappear. That is, their purpose in the narrative is, partly, to reify the western emphasis on property rights by asserting a right to land and then losing the ensuing argument. Thus, Cheyfitz argues, the white right to land is fictionally established legally, culturally, and inevitably, thanks to the appearance of Chingachgook and his status as the last of his people. Likewise, the conceptual basis for Jeffersonian agrarianism requires the disappearance of the Indian.26 Expansion in the era of the Homestead Act reinvigorated the Jeffersonian model of land ownership as civic [ 142 ]

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Figure 5.3  Thomas Nast, ‘Give the Red Man a Chance’, Harper’s Weekly, 24 September 1881.

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virtue. Indians barred the way. They must, therefore, disappear either by melting into the national population or by dying out. Nast’s portrayal of native people as men whose experience parallels that of black Americans and Chinese immigrants challenged the view that the Indian should, or would, inevitably disappear. Instead, it linked the lives and rights of Native Americans to the acts of white men. It was the behaviour – the hypocrisy – of white men that connected the former slave, the railroad labourer, and the dispossessed man of the Plains. White attempts to exploit and exclude may, indeed, have been inevitable, Nast suggested, but the continued presence of all three – and the implied reality that their presence and future represented a serious political question – contradicted any sense that the Native Americans would fade away to make way for white settlers. Readers of Harper’s Weekly learned to expect surprises from Thomas Nast. Angered by racist attacks on freedmen, for example, in 1876 he drew an angry, armed black man staring directly at the reader.27 ‘He wants change, too’, Nast asserted. For audiences used to supplicant black figures like those in images accompanying abolition’s most famous question – ‘Am I Not A Man and a Brother?’ – this man proposed a terrifying reality. Black men might tire of waiting for justice, Nast pointed out. They might choose to take it for themselves. As he had done in 1876, Nast commented on white violence again in 1879.28 This time, the violence originated in conflict over land: Utes in Colorado and Utah attempted to defend their lands against encroachment both by settlement and by the power of the US government and its army. The result was the White River War, in which the Utes were defeated and driven from most of their lands. In Nast’s cartoon, a Native American man, armed with a rifle, tells Uncle Sam that he, ‘Little Hatchet’, knows what white men really do. They ‘steal, kill, get drunk, and lie’. Embedded in the image – on Uncle Sam’s desk – Nast included part of a statement familiar in the annals of Western settlement. ‘A Good Indian …’ Nast wrote onto the desk. But instead of completing the sentence – ‘is a dead Indian’ – Nast drew the prone body of a warrior. ‘Little Hatchet’ replies to this sentiment, telling Sam that he will ‘make pale face “good” too’ (Figure 5.4). As with ‘He Wants Change, Too’, Nast embedded a clear threat. White Americans should expect limits on their freedom of action. If mistreated by the United States, Nast asserted, black Americans and native people alike would defend themselves. Of the three groups Nast connected in ‘Every Dog’, two had a clear link to the West. Black Americans appeared for reasons related to Nast’s national view of race. But other cartoonists, also willing to connect disparate populations, sometimes made different comparisons. In 1881, [ 144 ]

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Figure 5.4  Thomas Nast, ‘Making White Men “Good”’, Harper’s Weekly, 6 December 1879.

for example, George Frederick Keller portrayed Columbia – symbolic of the United States – as a mother pulled in three directions by her fractious children: Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Mormons (Figure 5.5).29 Keller’s image differed from Nast’s in two important ways. First, he portrayed all three groups as babies. This choice blunted the comparative meaning of the image by making the mother (Columbia) and father [ 145 ]

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Figure 5.5  George Frederick Keller, ‘The Three Troublesome Children’, The Wasp, 16 December 1881.

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(Uncle Sam) the most important figures in the image. Second, the image reflected the location of the paper Keller worked for. Drawing for The Wasp, a graphic newspaper published in San Francisco, Keller’s focus encompassed a western view of the challenges of American expansion. For Nast, living in New Jersey and working from a perspective shaped by New York City, the question of race must always include African Americans. Despite these differences, the Keller image clearly shows that the same questions of race connected to the national project to settle and govern the West resonated with commentators other than Nast. Whether as a policy challenge – Keller’s perspective – or a problem of national character – the implication of Nast’s assertions about the hypocrisy of white Americans’ racist actions – the colonising effort in the West forced the nation to confront difficult questions. Contemporary cartoonists acknowledged those questions. But historians have been slow to do the same. Although studies of western expansion acknowledge the central role played by members of what is now known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, they rarely explore the ways that the story of the Mormons in the West reflects larger themes both of race and of American identity. Thanks to conflict with the nation, though, the Mormons occupied an odd, even a unique, place in the American consciousness in the 1870s.30 Nast linked the church that dominated Utah Territory both to the idea of colonisation and to the dangers posed by ‘Indians’. Mormons were outsiders, Nast asserted in drawings like ‘Religious Liberty Guaranteed’ (Figure 5.6) and ‘“When the Spring-time Comes, Gentle” – Indian!’31 Like Roman Catholics, they represented a threat to American national identity and to the civic virtue required for a stable republic. However, just as he linked native people and their experiences at the hands of the United States to the experiences of other minority groups, Nast suggested a fundamental kinship between Mormons and Native Americans. This kinship rested on the shared experience of being outside the American national identity. Mormons moved west to escape violent persecution from Americans in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa. They sought refuge in the Mountain West because of its remoteness and the fact that, in 1847, it was not a part of the United States, but still technically Mexican. Almost immediately, though, Utah Territory changed ownership by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War (1848). When it did, Mormons again found themselves in tension with their American neighbours. Westward expansion – both of the power of the national government and of citizens settling western lands – pressed hard on the borders of the new Mormon world. They [ 147 ]

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fought back but also negotiated – much like the native people of the West.32 In asserting a link between Native Americans and Mormons, Nast was not alone. Most Mormons in the nineteenth century came from families with English or Scandinavian ethnic heritage. As a result, Mormons tend to seem obviously ‘white’ to modern eyes. But in the nineteenth century that racial identity appeared far less clear. As Paul Reeve has shown, American popular culture routinely portrayed Mormons as non-white. Nast joined this tradition when he linked Mormons to Native Americans and to the Catholic Church.33 The link to Native Americans stemmed in part from theology and in part from events unfolding between the US Army and native groups in Mormon settlement zones across the Mountain West. The Book of Mormon asserted a religious history of North and South America that linked Christianity directly to the peopling of those lands.34 Native Americans were, therefore, of special interest to Mormons. Mass conversions of several groups of Native Americans in the 1870s reinforced a sense that the Mormon relationship to native people differed from the norm. In addition, national attention to the practice of polygamy made the Mormons seem distinct from American Christianity. Thus, Mormons could be moved into a category of theological practice so alien that it might be analogous to the religious practices of Native Americans. A second connection between Mormons and Native Americans related to the way the Army used force to rob native people of their lands and the presumed role of Mormon leaders in Native Americans’ attempts to strike back. As Reeve explains, representatives of the government tasked with overseeing treaty obligations reported that Mormon leaders paid or convinced Indians to attack settlements and soldiers. Nast echoed those charges in 1882 when he drew a ‘Polygamous Barbarian’ urging a warrior to look forward to a future filled with plunder and destruction.35 The bodies of federal soldiers surrounding the men attest to the deaths already achieved by this unholy alliance. As a specific set of events, and at first glance, Nast’s connection of Mormonism to native people seems unrelated to the question of the West as a site of colonial or imperial domination. An unpublished Nast cartoon in the archives of the Library of Congress, though, establishes a more explicit link between the idea of colonisation and the presence – and growth – of the Mormon church. In that image, drawn in the 1880s, Nast portrays the Mormon church as a turtle (Figure 5.6). Shaped like the Tabernacle building in Salt Lake City, the turtle climbs up the domed roof of the Capitol in Washington, DC. Facing it, also climbing, is a crocodile: the ‘Roman church’. The two, Nast asserts, threaten the integrity of the nation. ‘Religious liberty [ 148 ]

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Figure 5.6  Thomas Nast, ‘Religious Liberty Is Guaranteed’, unpublished pen and ink drawing.

is guaranteed’, he writes on the dome, ‘but can we allow foreign reptiles to crawl all over US?’36 Like nativist concerns about immigration, this image suggested a concern for American identity – a desire to define who belonged in the United States and to exclude those who did not. Given the power of nativism in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, and Nast’s significant contribution to anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment, this link constituted a serious attack on the Mormons. In the same decade, Nast published an image with a different anti-Mormon message. He acknowledged, in its title, that Mormon immigration (of converts) was ‘Pure White’ but attacked it as a way for Mormon leaders to obtain sexual partners and cheap labour. A line of immigrant women file off a boat, waiting to be collected by ‘Mr. Polygamist’. Each woman wears a plate identifying her as a cook, nurse, laundress, etc. This was not the kind of white immigration that helped the nation, Nast suggested. It served only to expand a population already problematic.37 Whether connecting Mormons to Roman Catholics, linking them to Native American attacks in the West, or complaining about their practice of plural marriage, Nast clearly intended to convey their place as ‘other’. That placement links them directly to the tension inherent in colonial ventures and to the questions raised by territorial expansion of any kind. [ 149 ]

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It would be a mistake, though, to imagine Nast – or any other cartoonist – as inoffensive. Steeped in the racial assumptions of his time, Nast often resorted to stereotypes. In 1878, for example, Nast decried the violence of the West in a cartoon called ‘The Noble Red Man’ (Figure 5.7). Crawling through tall grass, this far from noble Indian clearly intends to deliver violent death to the settlers in a distant cabin.38 In some cases, he insisted on the humanity of a particular group but then used the same group’s stereotypical characteristics to attack another group.39 So while Nast critiqued western expansion in his portrayals of Native Americans, he also drew members of Tammany Hall as vicious, bloodthirsty warriors ‘After Mother Country’s Scalp’ (Figure 5.8).40 Dressed in fringed buckskin, hair wild and eyes rolling, these sharp-toothed men represented everything white Americans feared most about the indigenous people of the West. Nast used the image to suggest savagery in political corruption but he knew that his readers’ intense reaction originated in their fear and hatred of Indians. Cartoons defy easy categorisation. Undoubtedly, Nast employed stereotypical images of native people to make political points of interest to his readers. And yet, as had been true of his cartoons in defence of freedmen, to place Nast’s cartoons side by side is to see how nuanced he could be. When drawing Native Americans, for example, he chose to emphasise violence and destruction in images like ‘The Noble Red Man’. But the Native Americans in that drawing appear fully human – drawn without exaggeration in face, body, or pose. ‘After Mother Country’s Scalp’, on the other hand, pushes the image of the terrifying Indian warrior much further. Every detail of these ‘Indians’ is exaggerated for effect. Thus, when Nast intended to portray Native Americans sympathetically, he did so. When he wanted to criticise them but to reflect them as entirely human, he did that, too. It was when he constructed an attack on his oldest, most dedicated enemies – political corruption led by Tammany Hall – that he resorted to the most extreme representations of native people. The problem for Nast – and for others committed to the idea of diversity in American citizenship – was that the nation as a whole tired of change in the 1870s. Nast continued to defend the political and social rights of black Americans as Reconstruction slowly ebbed. But his neighbours and colleagues stepped back. One result was that his attempts to link western events to American ideals, especially ideals related to fairness and equality, met a public no longer as interested in attempting major social change as before. Indeed, many people redirected attention away from questions of equality in the South and West and towards the newer divide: urban vs rural. [ 150 ]

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Figure 5.7  Thomas Nast, ‘The Noble Red Man’, Harper’s Weekly, 10 August 1878.

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Figure 5.8  Thomas Nast, ‘After Mother Country’s Scalp’, Harper’s Weekly, 17 July 1886.

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As cities like New York and Chicago grew, immigrant populations and concentrations of workers employed by the new mass-industrial production of the latter nineteenth century seemed a more pressing concern to some people. For others, the difficult challenges of Reconstruction proved that equality was an impossible goal. Perhaps, they thought, it was even a waste of effort.41 In such a climate, Nast’s examination of the West could hope to evoke only a little sympathy. The plight of native people and the treatment of the Chinese paled in comparison to the problems posed by waves of immigrants flooding New York’s processing depots. If the West offered a safety valve, as Frederick Jackson Turner would argue in 1893, its importance to national stability outweighed any regrettable but inevitable damage done to cultures like the Utes.42 Nast’s ideas existed in a period when mass readership of illustrated newspapers meant that ideas advanced by cartoonists could touch Americans who never bought the newspaper, met the artist, or even visited the city where he lived. In Nast’s case, that diffuse and often hard-to-trace influence appears repeatedly; perhaps even, in this case, in the ways that later debates reflected the multi-racial view of expansion he so dramatically presented. In the 1890s, for instance, black Americans pointed directly to the record of the United States in its conquest of the West when offering a critique of American imperialism in the Philippines. As Kevin Gaines has shown, they identified with the Philippine independence movement in part because they drew a connecting line to Reconstruction and the conquest of the West.43 ‘Maybe’, wrote one black anti-imperialist, ‘the Filipinos have caught wind of the way Indians and Negroes have been Christianized and civilized’.44 Black women echoed that critique, noting in particular the use of black women’s bodies as sites for the exercise of patriarchal – and therefore colonising or imperial – power. Writing about this insight, Hazel Carby points to the connections between ‘internal and external colonization’, and ‘domestic and racial oppression and imperialism’.45 Black feminists of the late nineteenth century here linked not only the project of western expansion, race, and imperialism, but also the gendered implications inherent in a colonising project that honoured the pioneer as an exploring, settling, conquering man.46 Patriarchy, they argued, accompanied race in shaping a domestic form of colonisation. Nast’s work reflected this point when he drew, over and over, Chinese, native, and black Americans as men. Their conflicts, and thus the expansion project itself, he visualised as a male domain. Even the lynching crisis of the 1890s, and the anti-lynching campaign, reflect in part a transition from a racialised, western internal colonisation [ 153 ]

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to an outward-looking imperialism. As Paul Reeve points out, Mormons in the West again faced rumours of their links to ‘Indians’ in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance movement in 1890.47 Racial violence across the nation – but especially prevalent in the South – peaked with more than a thousand lynchings in the decade preceding 1900. As the grip of white America on the West solidified, and black Americans suffered under a wave of racist violence, the challenges and opportunities imperialism represented shifted to an international stage. Americans could, as a result, identify colonisation as something that happened ‘over there’ while Native Americans and black Americans continued to insist that it was, in fact, happening right here at home. There exists no direct link between Nast’s work and these later ideas. But they suggest both that Nast’s images reflected a wide conversation about the broader implications of domestic imperialism and that views on the significance of the West as a site of colonisation triggered comparative racial histories in many more Americans than just cartoonists. In both cases, Nast demonstrates the constant reality of cartoons: they reflect societies and shape them simultaneously.

Notes 1 See, for instance: William Appleton Williams, Empire As a Way of Life, New York: Ig Publishing, 2007, pp. 89–95; and Walter LaFeber, The New Empire, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1963, pp. 62–72. LaFeber argues for a view of the transition at the end of the frontier period, as described by Frederick Jackson Turner, that acknowledges the empire-building, economic vitality of the expansion west, and the recognition by scholars and citizens that its end meant a need for overseas expansion of one kind or another. 2 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: An Overview, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 2–3. 3 Eric Cheyfitz, ‘Savage Law: the Plot Against American Indians in Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh and The Pioneers’, in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 119. 4 Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 13–14. 5 See, for example, the organisation of LaFeber’s The New Empire, in which the period between 1860 and 1889 is described as ‘Years of Preparation’. William Appleton Williams (Empire as a Way of Life) broadens the view of imperial and colonial activity to embrace a wider range of activities across time in support of his argument that the American project is built on imperial actions. In both cases, though, and in others, scholars have offered the last decade of the nineteenth century as the clearest example of territorial acquisition and subordination to the metropole built on or related to links to the events of other places and times. The tendency to see the 1890s as the heart of imperial expansion appears most clearly in works for wider audiences, such as Brinkley’s survey. There, the chapter ‘The Imperial Republic’ begins with Hawaii and spends much of its energy on the Spanish-American War and the Philippines. Nell Irvin Painter’s study of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the United States, 1877–1919,

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7

8

9 10 11

12

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14 15 16 17 18

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New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) similarly begins its chapter on imperialism with the crisis in Cuba in 1898. Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012, p. 32. See: Elliott West, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998; Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008; Anne F. Hyde, Empire, Nation, and Family: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860, New York: Ecco, 2012; Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, New York: Norton, 1987; Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. On the work of American political cartoonists, see: Chris Lamb, Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons in the United States, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004; and Victor S. Navasky, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. I explore Nast’s career at greater length in: Fiona Halloran, Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. ‘Compromise with the South’, Harper’s Weekly, 3 September 1864. Halloran, Thomas Nast, pp. 145–175. Examples of these cartoons include ‘Mephistopheles at Work for Destruction’, Harper’s Weekly, 9 March 1872; ‘The Last Shot of the Honorable Senator from Massachusetts’, Harper’s Weekly, 22 June 1872. On Morgan, see: Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume II: The Rivals of ‘Mr Punch’, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, pp. 8–50, esp. pp. 39–49. Halloran, Thomas Nast, pp. 119–144; Roger A. Fischer, Them Damned Pictures: Explorations in American Political Cartoon Art, North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1996, pp. 1–24; Kenneth Ackerman, Boss Tweed, New York: Da Capo Press, 2005, passim. See: James McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976; Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997; David Blight, Race and Reunion, New York: Belknap Press, 2002. Halloran, Thomas Nast, pp. 59–118. ‘Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner’, Harper’s Weekly, 10 November 1869. ‘Emancipation’, Harper’s Weekly, 24 January 1863. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, p. 4. On Reconstruction and the Redemption movement, see: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, New York: Perennial, 1988; Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents, Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1998; Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007. See: Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882, New York: Hill & Wang, 2004; Liping Zhu, The Road to Chinese Exclusion: The Denver Riot, 1880 Election, and Rise of the West, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013. ‘Is This a Republican Form of Government?’, Harper’s Weekly, 2 September 1876. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, pp. 18–19. ‘Every Dog (No Distinction of Color) Has His Day’, Harper’s Weekly, 8 February 1879. ‘Give the Red Man a Chance’, Harper’s Weekly, 24 September 1881.

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33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41

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Veracini, Settler Colonialism, pp. 23–25. Cheyfitz, ‘Savage Law’, p. 121. Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, p. 14. ‘He Wants Change, Too’, Harper’s Weekly, 28 October 1876. ‘Making White Men “Good”’, Harper’s Weekly, 6 December 1879. George Frederick Keller, ‘The Three Troublesome Children’, The Wasp, 16 December 1881. Reeve examines this cartoon relative to Mormons. See: W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 105. This point is the origin of Reeve’s work in Religion of a Different Color, in which he links Mormonism to the wider study of whiteness in the nineteenth century. ‘Religious Liberty Is Guaranteed’, pen and ink drawing, unpublished, Library of Congress, at: www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010717281/, accessed April 2019; ‘“When the Spring-Time Comes, Gentle” – Indian!’, Harper’s Weekly, 18 February 1882. On the history of the Mormons, see (in addition to Reeve): Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992; Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, New York: Vintage, 2007; D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, New York: Signature Books, 1994; and D. Michael Quinn (ed.), The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, New York: Signature Books, 1992. Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, pp. 102–105. See: the Book of Mormon, first and second Nephi. ‘“When the Spring-Time Comes, Gentle” – Indian!’, Harper’s Weekly, 18 February 1882. ‘Religious Liberty Is Guaranteed’, pen and ink drawing, unpublished, Library of Congress, at: www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010717281/, accessed April 2019. One of Nast’s most famous cartoons, ‘The American River Ganges’ (Harper’s Weekly, 30 September 1871), also portrayed the Catholic Church using crocodiles, this time in a commentary on education. ‘Pure White “Mormon Immigration” on the Atlantic Coast. More Cheap “Help-mates” for Mr. Polygamist’, Harper’s Weekly, 25 March 1882. ‘The Noble Red Man’, Harper’s Weekly, 10 August 1878. The contrast, for example, between Nast’s Reconstruction cartoons defending the freedmen and his cartoon ‘The Ignorant Vote’ suggests this practice. In the former, he portrayed black Americans as vulnerable citizens deserving protection and a political voice. In the latter he satirised the legacy of slavery – poverty and ignorance – to demonstrate the unfitness of Irish immigrants to vote. ‘After Mother Country’s Scalp’, Harper’s Weekly, 17 July 1886. See also: John M. Coward, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90, Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 1999. The original examination of this change, and still the definitive work, is Foner: Reconstruction, especially chapter 10. See also: McPherson, Abolitionist Legacy. Joan Waugh’s work on the social worker Josephine Shaw Lowell points to the ways that northern activism and political commitments shifted after the Civil War (Joan Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On Nast’s confrontation with this change in public interest, see: Halloran, Thomas Nast, pp. 221–264. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1921, passim. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 28. Quoted in: Gaines, Uplifting the Race, p. 28. Hazel Carby, ‘“On the Threshold of Woman’s Era”: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1 – ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference), 1985, p. 265.

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46 On the relationship between masculinity and colonialism in American history, see: Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Amy Kaplan’s examination of Mark Twain’s writing about Hawaii addresses similar themes. See: Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005 (especially chapter 2). 47 Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, pp. 103–105.

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P AR T II

The critique of empire and the context of decolonisation

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CHA P T E R S IX

The making of harmony and war, from New Year Prints to propaganda cartoons during China’s Second Sino-Japanese War Shaoqian Zhang

This chapter examines the media war unleashed on the Chinese population by the forces of Japan and China during the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945; comprising one of the essential steps in Japan’s military expansion and imperialist strategy. It opens with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, which precipitated the official outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and ends with the surrender of Japan at the end of the Pacific War (1941–1945). Precisely, this chapter compares and contrasts mass-produced wartime cartoon posters – commissioned by governments and military agencies – which were aimed at the Chinese audience. Visual methods of persuasion and indoctrination appealed to both sides in the conflict, because of the low level of literacy in the country and the strong folk-oriented visual tradition of the Chinese people. To mobilise popular support for the respective military governments, political cartoonists relied not only on existing, centuries-old pictorial vocabularies, but created new ones as well. These political images were usually produced in large quantities and distributed among the general population, during a period which featured the emergence of a modern and media-conscious state system. Large posters were often pasted on walls for public consumption.1 As far as preexisting popular pictorial traditions are concerned, China’s nianhua 年畫 (New Year Prints) had been the most prevalent form of shared art, distinguished by regional variations, among the Chinese people from the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). They were made for popular consumption, as a means of expressing hopes for prosperity on the occasion of the Chinese New Year. Produced by woodblock printing techniques, they were themselves representations of older Chinese superstitions surrounding the acquirement of good fortune in [ 161 ]

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the coming year. Almost every household in China possessed nianhua depicting stove, wealth, and door gods. And despite their suffusion with obsolescent tradition and superstition, these nianhua ultimately provided a foundation for the popular acceptance of modern propaganda posters, as political cartoonists succeeded in transforming nianhua-inspired imagery into effective wartime propaganda. Although the Japanese were the first to recognise the value of this nianhua template, the Chinese soon caught on, and applied it to their own propaganda efforts. These were far from being the only styles employed by the two belligerents. By focusing on these important aspects of wartime propaganda art, this chapter will examine and compare the pictorial strategies used in propaganda posters produced by the Japanese and Chinese governments during their eight years of military conflict. It should be noted that the history of prints in China follows a completely different pattern from that of Europe. Traditional Chinese uses of print included copying of religious text and imagery, illustrating books for elite audiences, and producing pictures for popular consumption, especially New Year Prints (nianhua) invoking prosperity.2 Such images would adorn the walls of common households for an entire year and would be replaced during festivals. Before the advent of the political poster in the 1920s, nianhua were the primary form of massproduced art in China.3 Nianhua actually remained popular throughout the twentieth century, even with the advent of other forms of massproduced art. For ordinary people in China, who could not afford expensive handscrolls or hanging scrolls, nianhua became one of very few venues for their access to art in any form. The major pictorial themes of nianhua are quite predictable: folkreligious deities such as the ghost hunter, Zhong Kui; the stove god; gods of wealth; local customs; historical episodes; dramatic stories; and images of happy, round-faced babies.4 With such imagery, nianhua were able to draw a much larger audience than books or any other printed media. As historian James Flath argues: ‘Nianhua offered simple solutions to simple problems … the production of the art form appears highly prescriptive’.5 They represented abstractions of Chinese superstitions in a form that could encourage people’s hopes for good fortune in the coming year, and were favoured more by the common Chinese person than by the elite. From the early nineteenth century onwards, the printing of nianhua was commercialised in the workshops of urban centres such as Tianjin and Suzhou. They were produced into millions of copies every year by famous nianhua studios in Yangliuqing and Taohuawu, using woodblocks.6 In addition to promoting auspiciousness, they occasionally [ 162 ]

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illustrated conservative ethical values such as filial piety and orderly social class structures. In the words of Flath: The Chinese state has a long record of promoting social order through regulation of customs, and since the early Qing dynasty it promoted this policy through a variety of official and semi-official publications dealing with the subject of moral and customary standards … Orthodox moral guidelines did ultimately have an effect on rural society by encouraging ritual praxis, but the real content of the moral world was provided not by the original text but by the narrative reinvention of the moral message through popular texts, or popular images, including nianhua.7

As this text indicates, nianhua played a functional role in fostering moral ideals under the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). The nianhua in Figure 6.1, for example, first published under the Kangxi Regime (1661–1722), features two officials carrying a board with one row and two columns of large inscriptions. The horizontal inscription reads: ‘shengzhi 聖旨(Sacred Edict)’; the two columns correspond to the six important moral qualities advocated by the Kangxi emperor.8 Respectively, they are ‘xiaoshun fumu 孝順父母 (Filial piety)’, ‘zunjing zhangshang 尊敬長輩 (Respect the elderly)’, ‘hemu linli 和睦鄰里 (Befriend your neighbours)’, ‘jiaoxun zisun 教訓子孫 (Discipline children and grandchildren)’, ‘ge’an shengli 各安生理 (Be content with your profession and class)’, and ‘wuzuo feiwei 無作非為 (Do not misbehave)’. This nianhua aimed at instigating a moral revival among people under the imperium. The Kangxi emperor ordered his officials to distribute such templates among a number of local nianhua studios as a way of educating people through a vernacular art form.9 As such, the state borrowed a popular art form to direct its own form of communication from the centre to its subjects. To summarise, nianhua were cheaply mass-produced and generally included only the simplest, easily understood motifs in order to appeal to an overwhelmingly uneducated mass populace. By the end of the nineteenth century, due to China’s increasing contact with the westand the emergence of a sense of nationalism, some nianhua also took up satire and began to address political issues. Those qualities would eventually prove useful to propaganda artists producing posters under both the Chinese and Japanese military agencies in the early twentieth century. Focusing on nianhua may therefore also aid in understanding Chinese propaganda art during both the Republican (1912–1949) and early Communist (1949–1964) periods.10 After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan began to distinguish itself from the rest of Asia and express simultaneously its emerging sense [ 163 ]

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Figure 6.1  Nianhua ‘Jiaominbang 教民榜 [Education Board]’, woodblock print, c.1661–1772, in: Wang Shucun 王樹村, Zhongguo nianhua shi 中國年畫史 [History of Chinese New Year Pictures], Beijing: Beijing gongyi meishu chubanshe, 2002, p. 114.

of superiority. As the twentieth century got underway, Sino-centrism – which had dominated the China–Japan relationship in centuries past – began to give way. Japan had now emerged as the leading modern nation in Asia. The post-Meiji Japanese used the term ‘Shina’ to imply that ‘China was a nation mired in the past, in great contrast with bright [ 164 ]

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Figure 6.2  Map with illustrations of various nations, text in Japanese, Chinese, and English. Tokyo: Hakugakan, 1914–1918. Lithography, 21 × 15 inches.

and modern Japan’.11 In this Japanese cartoon map of the world produced after the First World War (Figure 6.2), China is presented as a pig-headed person, dressed in old-fashioned garments and shoes, holding and looking at a barometer.12 China is sitting, completely oblivious to the huge Russian bear to its north, uninterested in independence or self-reliance, and unable, therefore, to control its own fate. Actually one of the excuses by which Japan justified its invasion into China during the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 was that China was completely ignorant of its own compromised position and unaware of the Russian threat.13 Thus, Japan’s invasion could be regarded as protection, rather than interference. Yet it is of course unfair to consider China as having been completely oblivious to its plight as the victim of western colonisation, as a cartoon produced by Chinese artists during this period plainly demonstrates (Figure 6.3). Shijutu 時局圖 (Picture of the Current Situation), published in the Shanghai newspaper Eshi jingwen 俄事警報 (Alarming news of Russian affairs) in 1903, appeared in the midst of an anti-Russia movement and is considered to be the earliest political Chinese newspaper [ 165 ]

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Figure 6.3  James See 謝纘泰 (attrib.), ‘Shijutu 時局圖 [Picture of the Current Situation]’, first published in furen wenshe shekan 輔仁文社社刊, July 1898.

[ 166 ]

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cartoon.14 Created by Hong Kong activist James See (1872–1939), this illustration shows China’s foreign invaders as various animals, occupying different regions of China: a bear standing in the northeast stands for Russia; a bulldog bending over the east is Britain; France is represented by a frog in the south; while the USA is depicted in the east coast region in the form of an eagle. By scrutinising these two cartoons, one can understand that political cartoons had already begun to play an important role in responding to East Asia’s fast-changing political position by the turn of the twentieth century.15 Needless to say, the modern print industry and news media supported the production and distribution of such cartoons effectively. Although there were numerous artists focusing on more lyrical and non-satirical content, and emphasising the aesthetic value of their cartoons, the intensification of war and revolution in China increasingly transformed the art of cartooning into a potent political weapon against imperialism and warlordism.16 Especially during the May Thirtieth Movement (1925), a number of political cartoons were produced in large quantities and distributed to the masses, taking on the dimensions of propaganda posters. Numerous pictorials were published, such as Gongren huabao 工人畫報 (Workers’ pictorial), Bagong huabao 罷工畫報 (Strike pictorial), and Gongren zhilu 工人之路 (The path of workers).17 The cartoon was adaptable to different forms for distribution: many were produced as flyers to be handed out, while others were produced as posters. Eventually, the cartoonist’s techniques were increasingly evident in propaganda posters produced by military governments. In 1931, after the Mukden Incident, Japan seized Manchuria and installed a pro-Japanese government with Puyi (1906–1967), the last Qing emperor, as the nominal regent and emperor. After Beijing was captured by the Japanese in December 1937, Former Beiyang official Wang Kemin (1879–1945) was appointed by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) as head of the new regime, and the old Five-Coloured Flag was restored as its official banner.18 The restoration of Puyi and Beijing – the previous emperor; and the capital city of several dynasties – served as an effective symbol for Japanese troops to advertise themselves as protectors of the ‘orthodox’ Asian culture, grounded in the Confucian value system. Meanwhile, the ideologies of the Kingly Way (wangdao) and New Order (xinzheng) became the major slogan for the new government, which drew not only from Chinese tradition, but also expressed a modern national identity for the new state.19 On 3 November 1938, Japan officially brought up the concept of Tōa Shin Chitsujo (New Order in East Asia).20 Coordination of the occupation was placed in the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army, through both the Tokyo headquarters and the co-option of local elites. [ 167 ]

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The major propaganda agency tasked with appealing to the Chinese population on behalf of the IJA was Senbuhan 宣撫班 (the Pacification Unit), later named Shinminkai 新民會 (the New People Association), in Beijing, with a number of regional agencies based on the same model as the headquarters. The majority of their staff members were Chinese, serving under Japanese advisors. After the establishment of the China Expeditionary Army (Shina haken gun 支那派遣軍) in September 1939, Hōdōbu 報道部 (the Report Department) was established, modelled after Senbuhan. Under the Hōdōbu there were several Hōdōhan 報道班 (Report units). They were responsible for propaganda work in North China, and communicated directly with Tokyo.21 Visual communication was one of many tools utilised by these agencies, with the goal ‘to convey the idea of war not as destruction but as a positive adjunct of East Asian culture, and to illustrate the Japanese occupation of China as peaceful’.22 In this climate, political cartoons and propaganda posters achieved a peak of artistic expression, both in form and content. These numerous agencies sent out propaganda material along with everyday necessities as a way of pacifying the occupied Chinese population.23 The major policies in Shinminkai were: 1. keep the new order and persuade the people to accept; 2. develop industry to improve people’s livelihood; 3. propagate the East Asian culture; 4. resist against communism.24 It also emphasises the unity between China, Japan, and Manchuria.25 In terms of visual strategy, the most direct approach was for these agencies to re-appropriate the visual conventions found in traditional Chinese nianhua.26 As early as 1926, speaking at the Second Congressional Meeting of the Guomindang, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) had already pointed out that more than 90 per cent of the Chinese population were illiterate; pictorial propaganda and cartoons were therefore likely to be the most effective tools for spreading political messages.27 In the view of the IJA, the Chinese people were not only predominately illiterate, but also highly superstitious and stubborn in clinging to old customs.28 According to the document of the China Expeditionary Army entitled ‘Tai Shi senden jisshi sankō 对支宣伝実施参考 [Advice on Propaganda work in China]’, prior to the Chinese New Year of 1938, the Japanese puppet government in Beijing dispatched policemen to give every household a New Year Print-like poster to paste on the wall to replace the New Year Prints from the previous year.29 These posters generally adopted the visual motifs with which Chinese people were familiar, often borrowing directly from old nianhua narratives. Depictions of Zhong Kui or happy, round-faced children were among the most frequently adopted themes in these Japanese posters. [ 168 ]

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Zhong Kui is traditionally regarded in Chinese folklore as a vanquisher of ghosts and evil beings, and reputedly able to command 80,000 demons. His image is often painted on household gates as a guardian spirit, as well as in places of business where high-value goods are stocked.30 When portrayed as a ghost hunter (as in Figure 6.4), Zhong Kui is usually displayed with a bursting beard, a frown and wide eyes, his body leaning forward with a hand contorted out front. One hand brandishes a sword pointed at the captured demon, with the other hand powerfully thrust into the air, and his right foot treading on the demon’s body.31 These dramatic, even mannerist, renderings of physical gestures evoke many classical depictions of protective icons in traditional Chinese folk art such as taotie or the gate guardians. Zhong Kui is also a popular icon in Japanese religious painting and Ukiyo-e tradition.32 Therefore, it is not surprising to see how frequently he appears in visual propaganda materials produced by the IJA for Chinese consumption. The poster shown in Figure 6.5, published in 1939–1940, is an example of the IJA’s appropriation of traditional iconography of Zhong Kui.33 The large inscription reads ‘There will be persistent big chaos if the red demon does not die 赤魔不死大亂不止.’ The inscription on the right reads: Absorbing communism and fight against Japan is killing China. Hope [you] be awakened quickly and powerfully, to construct a happy land [together] 容共抗日是滅亡中國，望速猛醒 建設樂土.

This colourful poster features a forceful figure holding a sword in his right hand, dressed in a traditional Chinese outfit, complete with bureaucratic boots and cap, confidently standing on the body of a demon. His eyes widen and stare fiercely at the demon. His other hand is thrust into the air, before an auspicious rising sun. His bursting beard, flying sashes, and powerful gestures all serve to indicate his triumph over the demon. Even without any overt explication, the viewer will be able to easily identify him as the ghost hunter, Zhong Kui, since he features similar hand gestures and body language when conquering a ghost. But the most obvious distinction between this poster and conventional Zhong Kui imagery is the background presence of a rising sun with rays, to recall the Japanese military flag, which can also be seen as the source of strength for this particular ‘Zhong Kui’. According to the inscription, his vanquished ‘red demon’, featuring long finger and toe nails, horns and fangs, represents communism.34 This demon is stout, muscular, and powerful-looking, with a barbaric yet fearful expression on his face. For people familiar with popular Chinese folk tales, he would likely be recognised as an anthropomorphised beast or ghost. Since communism was a foreign ideology that had been coloured by Soviet politics, the goal of this political poster [ 169 ]

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Figure 6.4  Nianhua ‘Zhong Kui’, woodblock print, 13 × 17 in.

[ 170 ]

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Figure 6.5  ‘There will be persistent big chaos if the red demon does not die’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 40 × 30 in. c.1937–1940.

[ 171 ]

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was to convince people that communism was an exotic yet troublesome beast. The difference in age between the two figures is also emphasised: the Japanicised Zhong Kui appears significantly older and more mature compared with the demon. The plausible conclusion for this difference is that Tōa Shin Chitsujo is traditional, protective, and native, whereas communism is unproven, foreign, and disturbing. Speaking in January 1940, the Chinese Communist Party general Zhu De (1886–1976) pointed out that the Japanese were exceptionally skilful at using visual resources such as large propaganda posters and small brochures, adopting visual elements with traditional Chinese motifs.35 Among all the old folk tales, the IJA seems to have harboured a special preference for the story of Sima Guang (1019–1086). As even Zhu De noted, the Japanese had on many occasions utilised the story of Sima Guang as a metaphor for their relationship with China.36 When Sima Guang was a child, one of his playmates fell into a large ceramic vat and began to drown. The other children scattered in panic, but Sima Guang cracked the vat with a rock, saving the child. His calm decisiveness won him considerable praise. Though the story is probably apocryphal, it has remained popular in China up to the present day. Almost every Chinese person knows the story of Sima Guang. This popularity of the Song-Dynasty story did not fade with time. In October 1905, it was recorded in The Newest Edition of Chinese Literature Textbook for Elementary School 最新初等小學國文教科書, published by the Commercial Press. In the second volume, a story titled ‘Sima Wengong 司马温公’ was included with an illustration.37 In the illustration (Figure 6.6), the story is set in a Chinese garden and it shows the moment when the drowning child flows out of the broken vat in a torrent. The calm Sima Guang offers a stark contrast with the startled children running away from the scene. With the line-drawing technique and minimal attention to strict perspective, it resembles many book illustrations published during the Qing Dynasty by various commercial presses, like those in The Story of the West Wing and The Peach Blossom Fan. In the large Japanese poster in Figure 6.7, the IJA has altered the story slightly, to cater to its imperialist strategy.38 A giant vat, set in a traditional Chinese garden landscape, has been broken by a little Japanese boy, dressed in the IJA uniform. A Chinese boy is depicted flowing out of the broken vessel along with a stream of water; and a rock, used by the Japanese boy to break the vat, lies nearby. Unlike the earlier illustration, other children are absent in the Japanese poster, and the Chinese garden scenery is minimised, so that the viewer’s attention is easily directed towards the two figures of the Japanese soldier-child [ 172 ]

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and the beleaguered Chinese boy, along with the Japanese national flag and Chinese Five-Coloured Flag, flying together atop the vat. The clear message of this poster is that brave, intelligent Japanese soldiers are saving the Chinese people from their own ignorance and mistakes. Further symbolism is added by four characters inscribed on the vat, reading ‘ronggong zhi weng 容共之甕 [the vessel containing communism]’. Ergo, the Chinese people are drowning themselves in communism, and its ‘vessel’ must be broken by the Japanese to save China. The major colours in this poster are red, green, blue, yellow, and brown. According to the IJA document, the second volume of 思想戦講習会講義速記 Shisōsen kōshūkai kōgi sokki [The Fast Notes on the Ideological Combat Lectures], the most popular colours for the Chinese nianhua include red, blue, yellow, green, and gold.39 Obviously, colours were adopted which would appear most appealing to a Chinese audience. Another important dimension of this illustration is the emphasis on round faces in the two children. In northern China, wawaxi 娃娃戲 [Child Play] was a very popular nianhua motif.40 Wawaxi refers to children performing in the theatre, dressed in adult clothing and behaving like adults. Fat and round-faced happy children, their iconic features including large heads, wide foreheads, chubby cheeks, peaceful eyes, pillow lips, and protruding chins, were considered very auspicious in China as symbolising the abundance of life.41 They were very popular with families who wish to produce a son, have an opulent life, or gain promotion in official ranks. In this example, the IJA takes full advantage of Chinese popular folk stories and well-established visual motifs from traditional nianhua. In China’s largest cities, yuefenpai – literally meaning ‘advertisement calendar posters’ – became extremely popular with young people during the 1930s. Yuefenpai adopted elements from both traditional Chinese nianhua and western commercial culture. The most common format for yuefenpai is a vertical, rectangular shape with a large image in the centre, usually a portrait of a beautiful woman, or a small group of them. These yuefenpai were typically sold to customers for very low prices or given away free with purchases or as a New Year gift to valued customers. The object was to promote business using images of modern and beautiful women.42 The adoption of yuefenpai in common households in large cities like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing was quite prevalent and was even observed by the famous Shanghai writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995) in her most famous piece of short fiction, Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier (wherein the heroine remembers the bedroom she shared with her sister, in which there is a yuefenpai featuring a beautiful, fashionable woman).43 [ 173 ]

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Figure 6.6  ‘Sima Guang Breaking the Vet’, in Jiang Weijie 蔣維介 et. al. (eds), Zuixin chudeng xiaoxue jiaokeshu 新初等小學國文教科書 [The Newest Edition of Chinese Literature Textbook for Elementary School], Vol. 2, Shanghai: The Commercial Press, October 1910, p. 11.

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Figure 6.6 (cont.)

[ 175 ]

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Figure 6.7  ‘China and Japan Are Like Brothers that Build East Asian Peace Together’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 31 × 21 in., c.1938–1939.

[ 176 ]

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Figure 6.8  ‘People Make Efforts to Build a New Paradise’, text in Chinese, poster– lithography, 31 × 21 in., c.1938–1939.

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The poster in Figure 6.8 serves as an example of the IJA’s appropriation of this popular, urban, printed art form, with its connotations of urban sophistication and dreams of an idealised lifestyle.44 Three women are depicted in the centre of the picture: two are dressed in yellow and green, one holding the Five-Coloured Flag; the one in red is holding a Japanese flag; and a small boy is also holding the Five-Coloured Flag. The women, with their round, heart-shaped faces, neatly painted pencilthin eyebrows, pink eye shadow, and matching-colour blush, all follow the standards for beautiful Chinese women of the 1930s, and are arrayed in the latest fashions (wearing one-piece close-fitting garments with mandarin collars, a type of reformed qipao, popular in urban China at the time).45 Their sleeves are one-quarter length and they wear matching pairs of high-heeled shoes. Fashion is certainly not the only theme here, however. Rather, the emphasis is on the relationship of the happy young mothers with their chubby baby. The three women stand close together, arm-in-arm, and the young boy stands next to them, dressed in a traditional Chinese male long gown. The quartet being slender and pale-visaged, we can infer that the focus here is not the eugenic ideal that healthy mothers give birth to healthy children (as advertised in Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement of 1934).46 Instead, this poster celebrates an idealised Confucian society in which harmony and gender hierarchy persists. The pagoda in the background further promotes the notion of traditionalism. And inasmuch as Japan had maintained its own dynastic lineage reaching deep into the past, it could therefore be perceived as an ideal model of Confucianism.47 Yet the women’s modern fashion serves to reproduce, for the viewer, the pleasant, fondly remembered visual experience of looking at yuefenpai. Japanese imperialism and military aggression in China worked effectively and smoothly until the fall of Wuhan in October 1938; after this, the Guomindang (GMD) – the then-dominant political party of China – launched several large-scale counter-offensives against the IJA.48 During this process, both the IJA and the GMD gave full attention to a variety of propaganda efforts. The War of Resistance superseded the ongoing conflict between the GMD and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and gave birth to the Second United Front (1937–1946). The CCP’s Red Army was officially reorganised as part of the National Revolutionary Army. While the GMD engaged the Japanese in conventional battles, the CCP preserved its military strength, yet proved to be quite efficient in reorganising the Political Department of the Central Military Command: an agency in charge of political education, media relations, and propaganda.49 The effectiveness of the CCP propaganda effort was even noticed by the Japanese. According to Barak Kushner, [ 178 ]

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the Japanese military examined the CCP propaganda and considered their activities to be ‘highly skilled’.50 From its establishment in the 1920s, the CCP was quick to benefit by becoming adept in an art at which the Soviet communists excelled: that of transmuting the hopes and fears of a mass audience into positive action through printed imagery.51 The core mission of the Central Military Command was to coordinate military strategies for the Second Sino-Japanese War.52 The Political Department of the Central Military Command was re-established in February 1938, with Chen Cheng (1898–1965) as the chief director and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) as deputy director. In April, Guo Moruo (1892–1978) – a key figure in the production of propaganda for the GMD’s Northern Expedition of 1926–1928 – was appointed chairman in charge of anti-Japanese propaganda.53 Yet the GMD-CCP Central Military Command was not the only source of its anti-Japanese propaganda; the task was frequently left to voluntary associations or local troops as well. In addition to the Political Department of the Central Military Command, there were also numerous ‘political departments’ under different institutions of the GMD military organisation, and a number of civilian ‘anti-Japanese propaganda’ agencies. Meanwhile, the maturing Chinese press and media also promoted a rise in political cartooning during the 1930s and 1940s. As observed by Hung Chang-tai, Chinese resistance intellectuals praised the efficiency of the press in communicating with the masses, and therefore regarded newspapers and journals as ‘a weapon of immense value in spreading patriotic messages and politicizing public opinion’.54 In January 1934, cartoonists Zhang Guangyu 張光宇 (1900–1965) and Lu Shaofei 魯少飛 (1903–1995) founded Shidai manhua (Modern Sketch) in Shanghai. From its first publication, it had featured a large number of political cartoons, serving as pictorial ammunition against the Japanese.55 In September 1937, a number of Chinese intellectuals established National Salvation Cartoons (jiuwang manhua), a supplementary publication to the daily Jiuwang ribao (Salvation Daily). The cartoonist Wang Dunqing wrote in an essay, published in its inaugural issue, about ‘cartoon warfare’ (manhua zhan), stipulating the role of cartoons as an important political weapon in the combat against the Japanese. 56 Countering the Japanese ideal of Tōa Shin Chitsujo after its proclamation on 3 November 1938, the Chinese strove to utilise a variety of signs, symbols, and artistic techniques to create their own propaganda art language. At first, to differentiate themselves from the Japanese, the GMD-CCP alliance created cartoon posters with a quite different focus and visual language: less sensitive to traditional symbols and more concerned [ 179 ]

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Figure 6.9  ‘Excellent Youth, Join the Air Force’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 31 × 21 in., c.1938–1942.

with basic survival. The poster in Figure 6.9, for example, published by the Political Department, Military Command, offers an aesthetic impression that is strikingly distinctive from the Japanese types.57 A prominent, larger-than-life figure is shown standing upright in the [ 180 ]

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foreground, in the right of the picture. He is dressed in a typical pilot’s uniform, with goggles, aviator’s cap, and gloves. Waving to the three helicopters in the air, he appears determined, forceful, and calm. At the bottom of the picture, behind the soldier, is a large plane bearing the GMD icon on one of its wings. At left, in two columns, is a slogan, exhorting: ‘Excellent Youth, Join the Air Force.’ The background features a deep red colour, which contrasts with the figure’s yellow uniform and the white-coloured plane. The message in this poster is quite straightforward: young people should join the air force to fight against the Japanese. It also aims to demonstrate the advanced state of the Chinese air force facility, including airplanes, helicopters, and well-trained soldiers. The Chinese people had long been intimidated by Japan’s rapid military aggression after the Meiji Restoration, its success in ‘civilisation and enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika), and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Compared to Chinese military facilities, the Japanese army was far wealthier and better equipped. A number of politicians – including Wang Jingwei (1883–1944) and Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001) – believed that it would be impossible for China to defeat the Japanese. This poster, nevertheless, encourages people to overcome their fear of ‘modern and powerful Japan’ in the GMD’s large-scale counter-offensives against the IJA. The firm posture and robust body of the figural type represents an ideal of the stalwart soldier that was also typical in Soviet propaganda art. As pointed out by Victoria E. Bonnell, the Bolshevik male heroes of the Red Army became more or less the premier icons of Soviet Russia.58 The colour red provides an eye-catching background tone, but unlike the auspicious red of traditional Chinese nianhua, here it symbolises something entirely different, namely the bloody nature of warfare. Red, moreover, is the colour of communism. The revolutions of 1848 began with red flags being hoisted in France and, later, in Germany. The contrast between red and yellow also reminds the viewer of the colours of the communist international flag, which uses red for background and yellow for the hammer and sickle. The flags of the Soviet Union and the later People’s Republic of China also incorporated the contrasting red and yellow colours. After the outbreak of the Pacific War (1941–1945), the Second SinoJapanese War became a sub-theatre of the Second World War, and China officially became a member of the allied powers, together with the US, UK, and USSR. With China’s integration into the international effort to defeat fascism, many Chinese posters began to show less nationalist iconography in favour of more generic military themes. The poster in Figure 6.10, for example, titled ‘The More I Fight, the Stronger I Become; the More the Enemies Fight, the Weaker they Become’, is imbued with [ 181 ]

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Figure 6.10  ‘The More I Fight, the Stronger I Become’, text in Chinese, poster – lithography, 17 × 22 in., c.1938–1942.

a spirit of confidence and determination, featuring a fierce-looking soldier’s facial portrait.59 Underneath the solider are two ghastly-looking Japanese soldiers, burning in red flames. Artistically, this poster displays the aesthetic qualities of critical woodblock prints promoted by the [ 182 ]

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left-wing writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), which became popular during the 1930s; and it is very likely that the artists who produced many early propaganda posters were influenced by the emerging woodblock arts movement. Lu Xun – inspired by the German anti-war artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) – believed that woodblocks allowed for masscooperation and mass-production, while having the concomitant potential for political agitation.60 Julia Andrews has suggested that after Lu Xun’s death and the outbreak of the Japanese War, woodblock-print artists were enlisted to create nationalistic and propagandistic (anti-Japanese) images.61 With their dramatic compositions, chisel marks, arrangements of black and white, and representations of various objects in light and shade, these prints easily expressed the energy and desire to resist oppression. This particular poster avoids any complication in its visual language, relying instead on the dramatic contrast between red and white colour blocks, which not only suggests an aura of agitation, but also blends the pictorial information seamlessly with the textual information, bringing the viewer’s attention to the inscription. Both the Soviet and the Lu Xun woodblock movement-inspired posters had their artistic roots in the west, so the question nevertheless remained as to whether the unsophisticated Chinese populace could actually accept those foreign visual languages. In fact, as Chang-tai Hung points out, the Chinese rural population found the woodblock movementinspired propaganda posters – with their dull, black-and-white colours and dazzling compositions – extremely unappealing.62 After Zhu De pointed out how skilful the Japanese were in adopting visual elements from traditional nianhua in 1940, some Chinese cartoon and propaganda artists, rather than adopting the techniques of their western allies, took their inspiration from the Japanese enemy. Artists such as Gu Yuan (1919–1996) and Li Keran (1907–1989) eventually were able to seamlessly translate nianhua motifs into their propaganda cartoons, creating eyecatching images to appeal to the rural public.63 The poster in Figure 6.11, produced by the GMD-CCP alliance, serves as an example of how their artists appropriated nianhua motifs into new propaganda imagery.64 Titled ‘Congratulations on the New Year’, it features a soldier, dressed in the GMD military uniform, brandishing a sword in his right hand and confidently stepping over a blue-skinned ‘demon’. His other hand arrogantly points at the ‘demon’, who is wearing a khaki military uniform and a backpack emblazoned with the Japanese military flag icon. The major colours in this poster – red, yellow, and blue – are also the common colours used innianhua. Because they were produced at low cost, most traditional nianhua used very few colours. Here the colours also serve as visual aids by which the audience can [ 183 ]

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Figure 6.11  Wenyuan Zhang, ‘Congratulations on the New Year’, text in Chinese, poster – woodblock print, 17 × 22 in., c.1940.

[ 184 ]

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quickly identify the good and the evil, as in Chinese theatre tradition, wherein characters with dark-coloured skin tones are generally evil. The evil character portrayed here appears quite frightened, with one hand covering his screaming mouth. The picture adopts a traditional hierarchical scale as well, with the Chinese solider depicted much larger than the Japanese ‘demon’. After searching for the most effective visual motifs, and adjusting them to the tastes of a mass audience, the GMD-CCP alliance ultimately returned to nianhua for their artistic inspiration.65 Speaking at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art in May 1942, Mao Zedong stressed that the requirement of those forging the new culture was to learn from the masses.66 So, for example, specialists in the fine arts must pay attention to the arts of the masses. This is as close as Mao’s Yan’an Talks come to explicating the role of New Year Prints in China’s ‘new culture’. Nianhua was considered to be art from the people and for the people. By observing how their enemies, the Japanese, had created propaganda art, the GMD-CCP learned the value of the nianhua, which eventually would help them to gain popular support from the rural population that had not been effectively marshalled by their earlier propaganda efforts. From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1940s, the cultural exchange and conflict between China and Japan increased dramatically, culminating with the surrender of Japan in 1945. Before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, both sides had already gained extensive experience in using printed political cartoons as tools for spreading and evoking desired political ethics, and Chinese propagandists benefited greatly from Japanese print facilities, techniques, and aesthetics in creating political cartoons.67 After the Mukden Incident in 1931, the collaborative efforts directed towards art and culture reform quickly faded from historical memory, displaced by the casualities of the war and the lasting animosities it generated. Japan gradually became the symbol of imperialism, and later fascism, in East Asia. As for China, the war coincided with the emergence of a modern state out of a condition of anarchy and colonial subjugation. The Chinese and Japanese both appreciated the effectiveness of imagery in reaching ordinary people with their messages. Yet the differences between the political imagery favoured by each side are quite unmistakable. From a technical point of view, the Japanese political posters were of higher quality, due to the employment of highly professional artists by the Imperial Japanese Army, which was also better equipped financially.68 What is striking about the Japanese posters, however, is the extent to which they relied on existing Chinese visual traditions, namely those of nianhua and yuefenpai. As Chiharu Kawase [ 185 ]

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observed, the Japanese propagandists took advantage of New Year’s events, such as sacrificial activities and religious customs, to distribute large numbers of posters. The popular New Year icons – such as the stove god, Zhong Kui, happy round-faced children playing, or linqi (the unicorn) bringing sons – are the most frequently employed themes in the Japanese political cartoons.69 Occasionally, they relied as well on the visual motifs of more recent yuefenpai, incorporating Asian females in modern qipao in their posters. The familiar icons and stories were intended to be easily digested by the Chinese population. Despite their position as foreign invaders, the Japanese frequently vilified their Chinese opponents as foreign-influenced or communist, and ultimately a grave threat to the peaceful and harmonious Asian society being fostered under the New Order in East Asia. They deliberately conflated the GMD and CCP together, and portrayed the culture of their alliance as utterly foreign and anti-Asia. Occasionally, they depicted China as a vulnerable child, incapable of protecting itself and requiring the guidance of a wiser brother or benevolent mother. Essentially, most Japanese posters and political cartoons underscored the Imperial Japanese Army’s position as the defender of the traditional Asian order and the appropriate protector of China, along with the rest of Asia. By this process, the IJA sought to encourage collaboration from the inhabitants of its new possessions, by persuading local populations that occupation would ensure that ordinary life could carry on in peace and harmony. The political posters produced by the GMD-CCP alliance, by contrast, focused on a completely different set of ethics and aesthetics. The human cost, which was generally absent from the Japanese political cartoons, was a frequent topic of the Chinese posters, which consequently register as agitating and unsettling, rather than romantic. They approached their audiences in more emotional terms, with anger, suffering, and hatred as their primary themes. Their audiences were not treated to any abstract ideas about East Asian cultural values. Initially, perhaps due to their fear of being perceived as backward and superstitious, the CCP chose not to adopt traditional Chinese motifs from nianhua.70 Employing simple, yet dramatically contrasting colours and stirring slogans in oversized characters, they served up visual provocations, intended to activate the populace by summoning emotions like hatred, fear, and love. As one branch of the International Anti-Invasion Alliance and Communist International, China’s own cultural and artistic traditions and aesthetic preferences had been absent from the earlier posters. Instead, much of their art influence had come from Soviet propaganda art and Lu Xun’s woodblock movement. Later, however, [ 186 ]

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due to the lack of enthusiastic response from the rural audience, and especially after Chairman Mao’s Yan’an Talk, the GMD-CCP alliance followed the Japanese example and looked to the nianhua for inspiration for their political cartoons. Meanwhile, the rural areas became the primary base of CCP operations, and they implemented land reforms while fighting against both Japanese and Chinese local landlords. Ultimately, both the opposing sides utilised nianhua as the visual source for their propaganda cartoons. Since the Japanese persistently advertised themselves as the protectors of traditional East Asian culture, it is not surprising that nianhua was their primary inspiration from the beginning. The CCP, on the other hand, was a long time in coming to an effective political strategy before the end of the Second SinoJapanese War. At first, they borrowed from the Soviet model and depended on the advice of Russian advisors. Later, as the CCP began to domesticate, both politically and aesthetically, their attitude towards nianhua evolved, from seeing them as relics of a superstitious and obsolete society, to appreciating an art form ‘by the people and for the people’. The CCP’s utilisation of nianhua reached its highest point with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. In the words of Tanya McIntyre, ‘the acknowledgement of the New Year Picture Aesthetic in modern art falls largely within the framework of the historical narrative of the communist revolution that culminated in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China’.71 What McIntyre fails to point out, however, is that the Japanese were first in recognising the value of nianhua as modern propaganda art, well before the CCP did. This traditional folk art had come to stand for the revolutionary promises of their propaganda; yet it also served as the focus for collective delusions and a meeting point for all manner of anxieties.

Notes 1 Many images from this chapter come from the archives of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. I therefore wish to express my gratitude to Jidong Yang, Hsiao-ting Lin, and Carol Leadenham for their invaluable help at Stanford. I am also indebted to Xiaodong He for help with the Japanese translations, and to Whitney Chandler for advice on writing this chapter. 2 Ellen Johnson Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Shanghai, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004, pp. 25–26. 3 James Flath points out: ‘Nianhua meant many things to many people, but in their raw form they were also commodities.’ See: James Flath, The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004, p. 14. As far as this chapter is concerned, nianhua is considered as the single-sheet pictorial prints wishing auspiciousness for big events. Sometimes, nianhua produced for the New Year Festival include a calendar on them, which

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4 5 6 7 8

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20

makes them one form of the printed traditional calendar. For the definition of traditional printed calendars, see: Laing, Selling Happiness, pp. 20–21. Tanya McIntyre, ‘Chinese New Year Pictures: The Process of Modernisation, 1842–1942’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1997, p. 11. Flath, The Cult of Happiness, pp. 14–15. Wang Shucun, 王樹村, Zhongguo nianhua shi 中國年畫史 [History of Chinese New Year Pictures], Beijing: Beijing gongyi meishu chubanshe, 2002, p. 262. Flath, The Cult of Happiness, p. 59. Nianhua ‘Jiaominbang 教民榜 (Education Board)’, woodblock print, c.1661–1772. See: Wang, Zhongguo nianhua shi, p. 114. Wang, Zhongguo nianhua shi, p. 114. On the cartoons of the late Republican period, see: Hung Chang-tai, ‘The Fuming Image: Cartoons and Public Opinion in Late Republican China, 1945 to 1949’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36 (1), 1994, pp. 122–145. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 4. A Map with Illustrations of Various Nations, Text in Japanese, Chinese, and English. Published by Hakugakan, 1914–1918, Tokyo. Lithography, 21 × 15 inches. Stanford, Hoover Institution Library and Archives. More information can be found in: Bruno Lasker and Agnes Roman, Propaganda from China and Japan, a Case Study in Propaganda Analysis, New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1938. Accredited to James See 謝纘泰 (1872 – 1939), ‘Shijutu 時局圖 (Picture of the Current Situation)’, first published in furen wenshe shekan 輔仁文社社刊 (July 1898). Hong Kong Education City Archive. It should be pointed out that Japan actually played an essential role in introducing the art of cartoons to the Chinese. Literally translated as ‘cartoons’ or ‘impromptu paintings’, the term manhua was first adapted by the famous Chinese cartoon artist Feng Zikai (1898–1975) from the Japanese term manga in May 1925. The term ‘Zikai Manhua’ was applied to his painting published in Wenxue zhoubao 文學週報(Literature Weekly). Trained in Japan as an artist, Feng Zikai’s cartoons inspired many later satirical paintings and illustrations in China. For more information, see: Geremie Barme, ‘An Artist and His Epithet: Notes on Feng Zikai and the Manhua’, Papers on Far Eastern Economic History, 39 [Dept. of Far Eastern History, Australian National University, Canberra] (March 1989), p. 17. Japan’s own adoption of Western-style cartooning has also been the focus of recent scholarly attention. See: Peter Duus, ‘Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong – The Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 60 (4), 2001, pp. 965–998; Jozef Rogala, The Genius of Mr Punch – Life in Yokohama’s Foreign Settlement: Charles Wirgman and the Japan Punch, 1862–1887, Yokohama: Yurindo, 2004; Todd S. Munson, ‘A Sojourner Amongst Us: Charles Wirgman and the Japan Punch’, International Journal of Comic Art, 13 (2), 2011, pp. 614–626; Peter Duus, ‘“Punch Pictures”: Localising Punch in Meiji Japan’, in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013, pp. 307–336. Bi Keguan and Huang Yuanlin, Zhongguo manhua shi [History of Chinese Cartoons], Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006, p. 45. Bi and Huang, Zhongguo manhua shi, pp. 45 and 21–23. Di wo zai xuanchuan zhanxian shang [We and enemies on the frontier of propaganda warfare], Wenhua jiaoyu yanjiuhui 文化教育研究會, 1941, p. 277. More detailed information can also be found in: Rena Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 75. Mitter, The Manchurian Myth, p. 95. Wang Jianmin, Kangri zhanzheng 抗日戰爭 1937–1945 [The Anti-Japanese War: 1937–1945]. Zhongguo jindai tongshi 中國近代通史 [The History of Modern China], Volume 9, Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2006, p. 194.

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NEW Y EA R PRI N TS TO PRO PA G A N D A C A R T O O N S 21 Chiharu Kawase 川瀬千春, Sensō to nenga: ‘Jūgonen sensō’ ki no Nitchū ryōkoku no shikakuteki puropaganda 戦争と年画「十五年戦争」期の日中両国の視覚的プロパガンダ [War and New Year Pictures: The Visual Propaganda between Japan and China in the Fifteen Years of Battles], Matsudo-shi: Azusa Shuppansha, 2000, p. 113. 22 Kendall H. Brown, ‘Out of the Dark Valley: Japanese Woodblock Prints and War, 1937–1945, Impressions, 23, 2001, p. 67. 23 Kawase, Sensō to nenga, p. 133. 24 Shinminkai chūō shidōbu 新民會中央指導部 [The Central Administration of the New People Association], Shinminkai sōsaku taiko 新民会工作大纲 [The Mission Outline of the New People Association], 1938, p. 1. 25 Shinminkai chūō shidōbu, Shinminkai sōsaku taiko, p. 80. 26 For more information on the Japanese policy on ethnicities in China, see: Feixiao Tong, ‘Ethnic Identification in China’, in Dudley L. Poston, Jr and David Yaukey (eds), In The Population of Modern China, Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis, New York: Springer US, 1992, pp. 601–623; Liu Heng-hsing 劉恒興, ‘When the Great Way Prevails: Thought and Cultural Discourse on the Kingly Way in Datong Period Manchukuo (1932–1934)’, Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究, 30 (3), 2014, pp. 297–329. 27 Mao Zedong, ‘Zhengzhi baogao 宣傳報告[Propaganda Report]’ Zhengzhi zhoubao 政治週報 [Political Weekly], 6, 1926. 28 Kawase, Sensō to nenga, pp. 114–115. 29 Kawase, Sensō to nenga, p. 115. 30 Richard von Glahn, The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, pp. 122–128. 31 Nianhua ‘Zhong Kui’. 2014, China. Woodblock print, 13 × 17 in. Yangliuqing. The Author’s Collection. 32 See: Lai Yu-chih, ‘Ren Bonian (1840–1850) and Japanese Culture in Shanghai, 1842–1895’, unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 2005. 33 Poster: ‘There will be persistent big chaos if the red demon does not die.’ Text in Chinese, c.1937–1940, China. Lithography, 40 × 30 in. Stanford, Hoover Institution Library and Archives. 34 Between 1937 and 1946, to resist the Japanese invasion during the Second SinoJapanese War, the Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party, GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) formed the Second United Front. In the Japanese propaganda materials, they frequently relate the GMD, the leading party of China, to the CCP. For more information on the Second United Front, see: Tetsuya Kataoka, Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists and the Second United Front, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974; John W. Garver, ‘The Origins of the Second United Front: The Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party’, The China Quarterly, 192, March 1992, pp. 171–179. 35 Zhu De 朱德, Zhu De xuanji 朱德選集 [A Selection of Zhu De’s Works], Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1983, p. 217. 36 Zhu De, Zhu De xuanji, p. 218. 37 Illustration: ‘Sima Guang Breaking the Vet’, in Jiang Weijie 蔣維介(ed.), Zuixin chudeng xiaoxue jiaokeshu 新初等小學國文教科書 [The Newest Edition of Chinese Literature Textbook for Elementary School], Volume 2, Shanghai: The Commercial Press, October 1910, p. 11. 38 Poster: ‘China and Japan Are Like Brothers that Build East Asian Peace Together’, text in Chinese, c.1938–1939, Japan. Lithography, 31 × 21 in. Stanford, Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives. 39 Kawase, Sensō to nenga, p. 111. 40 Laing, Selling Happiness, p. 28. 41 Kawase, Sensō to nenga, p. 116. 42 Laing, Selling Happiness, pp. 29–39. 43 Zhang Ailing, Love in a Fallen City, Karen S. Kingsbury (trans.), New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, pp. 5–76.

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C RI TI Q U E O F EM P IR E 44 Poster: ‘People Make Efforts to Build a New Paradise’, text in Chinese, c.1938–1939, Japan. Lithography, 31 × 21 in. Stanford, Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives. 45 For more information on the evolution of women’s dresses in China, see: Ellen Johnston Laing, ‘Visual Evidence for the Evolution of Politically Correct Dress for Women in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai’, Nannü, 5 (1), 2003, pp. 69–114. 46 Chiang, Kai-shek, Xinshenghuo yundong gangyao 新生活運動綱要 [The Outline of the New Life Movement], 15 May 1934, at: http://zh.wikisource.org/zh/新生活運動綱要, accessed 20 August 2010. 47 Lynn A. Struve, Time, Temporality and Imperial Transition: East Asia from Ming to Qing, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005, p. 257. 48 Rena Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013, pp. 14–15. 49 Mitter, Forgotten Ally, pp. 14–15. 50 Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007, p. 128. 51 Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 194. 52 Prior to China’s Northern Expedition (1926–1928), at the suggestion of Soviet military strategist Henk Sneevliet (1883–1942), Sun Yat-sen set up the Political Department of Central Military Command in 1924 at the Huangpu Military Academy, a modern military school in Guangzhou dedicated to training a revolutionary army. Most members of the Political Department, including the chairs, vice-chairs, and political department secretaries, were Chinese Communist Party members. See: Wang Qisheng, Guo gong hezuo yu guomin geming 國共合作與國民革命 [The Cooperation Between the GMD and CCP]. Zhongguo jindai tongshi 中國近代通史 [The History of Modern China], Volume 7, Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2006, p. 79. 53 Wang, Kangri zhanzheng, p. 161. 54 Hung Chang-tai, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 9. 55 Chen Guangbiao 陳廣彪 and Wen Jingen 溫晉根, Zhongguo xuanchuan shihua 中國宣傳畫史話 [History of Chinese Propaganda], Guiyang: Guizhou Jiaoyu chubanshe, 2010, pp. 49–50. 56 Information can be found in: Hung, War and Popular Culture, p. 93; Ellen Johnston Laing, ‘Shanghai Manhua, the Neo-Sensationist School of Literature, and Scenes of Urban Life’, MCLC Resource Center Publication, October 2010. 57 Poster: ‘Excellent Youth, Join the Air Force’, text in Chinese, c.1938–1942, China. Lithography, 31 × 21 in. Stanford, Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives. 58 Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 64. 59 Poster: ‘The More I Fight, the Stronger I Become’, text in Chinese, c.1938–1942, China. Lithography, 17 × 22 in. Stanford, Hoover Institution Libraries and Archives. 60 Liu, ‘When the Great Way Prevails’, p. 303. 61 Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, ‘The Modern Woodcut Movement’, in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen (eds), A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China, New York: Guggenheim, 1998, p. 213. 62 Wang Shucun 王樹村, Zhongguo minjian nianhua 中國民間年畫 [Chinese Folk New Year Pictures], Jinan: Shandong meishu chubanshe, 1997, pp. 242–243. Hung Chang-tai also has extensive discussion on the Chinese people’s resistance against foreign influenced woodblock prints. See: Hung Chang-tai, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011, pp. 182–212. 63 Wang, Zhongguo nianhua shi, pp. 244–251. 64 Wenyuan Zhang, Poster: ‘Congratulations on the New Year’, text in Chinese, c.1940, China. Woodblock print, 17 × 22 in. Public domain. 65 It should be noted here that although the artists under GMD-CCP adopted some motifs from nianhua, they did not completely give up other options. They continued

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66

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67

68 69 70 71

to produce Käthe Kollwitz-inspired woodblock prints, hoping to use art to reform the population. Mao Zedong, ‘Talks at the Yan’An Conference on Literature and Art’, in Bonnie McDougall (ed.), Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’An Conference on Literature and Art”. A Translation with Commentary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1980, pp. 57–86. For Japanese influence on Chinese graphic art, see: Florence Chien, ‘The Commercial Press and Modern Chinese Publishing: 1897–1949’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1970; Chunfeng Shi, ‘Shangwu yinshuguan jindai jiaokeshu chuban lütan- cong guowen(yu) he lishi jiaokeshu tanqi [A Brief Investigation on the Modern Textbook Published by the Commercial Press – from the Textbooks on History and Chinese literature]’, Beijing Normal University Xubao (Social Science Edition), 6, 2003, pp. 84–85; Carrie Waara, ‘Arts and Life: Public and Private Culture in Chinese Art Periodicals, 1912–1937’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1994; Lai, ‘Ren Bonian’. Diwo zai xuanchuan zhanxianshang 敵我在宣傳戰線上 [We and Enemies on the Frontier of Propaganda Warfare]. Wenhua jiaoyu yanjiuhui 文化教育研究會, 1941, p. 241. Kawase, Sensō to nenga, p. 121. For the CCP artists, nianhua was related to the old habits and superstitions, demonstrating a lack of revolutionary spirits. For more information, see: Wang, Zhongguo minjian nianhua, p. 242. McIntyre, ‘Chinese New Year Pictures’, p. 71.

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David Lockwood

When he was growing to years of discretion, the best way of getting a laugh was to gibe at the established order of things, and especially at the British Empire … To jeer at its fatted soul was the delight of the green-eyed young Antipodean radical.1

Thus Winston Churchill described David Low in 1931. Low was in fact a New Zealander. When he moved from there to Australia in 1911 at the age of 20, he was indeed a radical. He wrote later, ‘I had been born into a “progressive” society, which I consequently accepted as normal. Further development on equally bold lines seemed only right and proper.’2 He had worked as a journalist and a cartoonist in New Zealand, but it was in Australia that he took to cartooning seriously. In Sydney, he worked for The Bulletin where, with the onset of the War and the conscription debates, the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes became his particular target. He portrayed Hughes as an explosive, almost elemental force, full of ‘Vanity, irascibility, impatience and hysteria’.3 This culminated in The Billy Book, ‘a fantastic account in caricature of Hughes’ adventures during his travels to and in Britain’.4 Despite his radicalism, Low supported the ‘Yes’ case in the conscription plebiscites because, he said, the volunteering system ‘had already changed by easy stages from persuasion to pressure, from pressure to persecution’. In anticipation of a ‘Yes’ victory in the second referendum, he was himself nearly conscripted – but exempted ‘on the grounds of national importance’ on the recommendation of his employer.5 Low left Australia in October 1919 for a job on The Star newspaper in London (for which he was recommended by the novelist and propagandist Arnold Bennett). Smith’s Weekly declared that this was a Good Thing since ‘Mr Low is out of place in White and Anglo-Saxon Australia’. [ 192 ]

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The Star, it went on, ‘hates Mr Hughes and loves the coloured races. It stands for pacifism, brotherhood of man, no army, if possible no navy, in fact for defeatism generally. It is welcome to Mr Low and his works.’6 He arrived in London when newspapers were being transformed from weighty journals of record to popular publications, featuring ‘human interest’ stories that would attract mass readerships – and the advertisers that they brought in their wake.7 At the time, this was not really what interested Low at all – and The Star, as a radical paper, tended to resist the trend. Low began making a name for himself as a radical cartoonist at The Star, where he worked until 1927. It was therefore something of a surprise for Low to be approached in 1924 by the Tory Lord Beaverbrook (the ‘Prince of Darkness’ according to Low) to come over to his newspaper, The Evening Standard – ‘at double my salary, whatever that was’.8 Three years later he agreed – he recalled later that ‘in the general view I had sold out to the highest bidder’. It was expected that he would fall in with the paper’s Conservative outlook (as ‘editorial cartoonists’ by definition fell in with their publications’ editorials). After all, said Low, ‘Free and regular expression by the staff cartoonist was unheard of and incredible’. Churchill, however, would be rather more perceptive: This jester has been engaged by Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, supposed to be a Conservative paper. But Low’s pencil is not only not servile, it is essentially mutinous. You cannot bridle the wild ass of the desert.9

Low had in fact taken steps to ensure that he would not be bridled. His contract with Beaverbrook promised ‘complete freedom in the selection and treatment for your cartoons and in the expression therein of the policies in which you believe’.10 Beaverbrook kept his side of the bargain for most of Low’s time at the Evening Standard. Nevertheless, some 40 of Low’s cartoons were ‘held back’ [not published] for political reasons, mostly during the appeasement period.11 Low said his aim was ‘to ridicule opponents and to injure their policies’.12 The cartoonist – he asserted – should influence and interfere with public opinion. S/he should be ‘a Nuisance dedicated to sanity’. The intent was to cause trouble: ‘The more shouting, waving of arms and argument there are about political affairs, the better for Democracy, I say … Anything is better than dismal lack of public interest.’13 To this end, he put across his provocative views in a format that ‘used individuals to symbolize policies and attitudes’.14 What were those views? Firstly, Low was a socialist. After the Great War, he had decided that ‘change and readjustment was more likely to come from the Left than the Right, so I inclined leftwards. [ 193 ]

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Temperamentally, I was for the quick against the dead.’ He was to the left of the British Labour Party, remarking after lunching with Ramsay MacDonald: ‘This wasn’t socialism, this was Liberal reform.’ On the other hand, he was careful to draw a distinction between communism and ‘the Russian practice of communism’.15 In any case, his cartoons against repression in the Soviet Union and later against the Nazi–Soviet Pact excluded him from the ranks of the communists.16 It is said that Churchill (who seems to have been fascinated by the man) once described him as ‘a Communist of the Trotsky variety’, but this was clearly inaccurate.17 Low was part of the interwar left in Britain that revolved around hatred for the National Government, support for the Spanish Republic in the Civil War, a call for a people’s front against fascism; and such organisations as the Left Book Club and Mass Observation.18 He was a strong supporter of centralised economic planning.19 He believed in ‘a planned world in which at last man is relieved of the eternal preoccupation with scrabbling for the elementary necessities of life, and is released to begin civilising himself’.20 With the onset of the Second World War, he felt that this kind of socialism was inevitable at its conclusion.21 Low was also a passionate opponent of the policy of appeasement towards the interwar dictators. In this – like many on the British left – he was forced to move from a more or less pacifist position to one which endorsed military resistance to fascism (or at least aid to those engaged in military resistance).22 He supported the Republican regime in Spain and joined the Friends of the Spanish Republic to campaign against the non-intervention of the western democracies in Spain.23 Finally, Low was an anti-imperialist. He had no sympathy with: the type of British imperialist who assumed the possession of primitive emotions about one’s native land to be patriotism among the British, but treason among the lesser folk. Perhaps if those chaps could be stuck at the receiving end of the imperial connection for a while, I thought, instead of the sending end …24

‘Low’, said Churchill, ‘was always for a retreat in India’.25 In each of these areas, Low – the socialist, the anti-appeaser, and the anti-imperialist – came into conflict with his employer. Beaverbrook was a Tory, a passionate proponent of appeasement and a rabid imperialist: ‘For King and Empire’ proclaimed the header on his newspaper. During the civil disobedience campaign in the early 1930s, he wrote: ‘There is only one way to govern India … “Divide and Rule”.’ And a year later: ‘It is obvious the Government must either shoot up or shut up Gandhi.’26 Thus, far from the normal condition of the ‘editorial cartoon’ in which ‘Editors harnessed the potential of political cartooning to represent [ 194 ]

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and construct layers of opinion’, Low blasted happily away with his cartoons, directly opposite the editorial in both content and location.27 Low published his first cartoon on the subject of India in The Star in December 1919 (Figure 7.1). Early in that year, as part of an Indian National Congress campaign against British repression, there were widespread political disturbances across Punjab. In Amritsar, following

Figure 7.1  David Low, ‘Progress to Liberty – Amritsar style’, The Star, 16 December 1919.

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the arrest of two local leaders on 10 April, the town hall and the post office were attacked and telegraph wires cut.28 Some Europeans were attacked, including a Miss Sherwood, the manager of the City Mission School. On 15 April, martial law was declared and control of the city was handed over to General Reginald Dyer. Dyer set about crushing the disturbances with floggings, collective punishment, and what were known as ‘fancy punishments’ (humiliation, whitewashing, forced labour as sweepers, and so on). The most notorious of these was the ‘Crawling Lane’ – the place where Sherwood was attacked – through which Indians could only pass on all fours, helped along by soldiers’ boots and bayonets. When the protests did not stop, on 13 April Dyer subjected a 20,000-strong confined crowd of demonstrators to a ten-minute burst of rifle fire from 50 soldiers, which only ended when their ammunition ran out. The government of India estimated that 379 men, women, and children died. Indian estimates were much higher.29 Low published ‘Progress to Liberty – Amritsar Style’ on 16 December 1919. The cartoon draws on the image of the ‘Crawling Lane’ and directly compares the struggle for freedom in India with that reaching its violent peak in Ireland. Both squirm before a monstrous sergeant major figure representing the British Empire. Low wrote later: There was a row. This was a cartoon so far removed from the customary pleasantries that it shocked. For some days sizzling letters poured in … ‘You’ll get yours, you swine,’ said a postcard, signed, rather surprisingly, ‘Yours sincerely.’30

The comparison with Ireland was a calculated one. Low believed that in both colonies ‘The blood-and-iron school were out to “stamp out the agitators”.’31 Low was not alone here. On Amritsar, The Guardian editorialised: General Dyer’s more thorough supporters by no means intend to stop at India … After India, Ireland. After Ireland, British workmen on strike.32

Low did not publish another cartoon specifically on India for nearly ten years.33 But by then events on the subcontinent ensured that ‘The affairs of India came into [his] cartoons a lot in the late nineteen-twenties and early ’thirties.’34 In November 1927, the British government announced the appointment of a Commission to investigate India’s constitutional progress (following the reforms of 1919). The members of the Commission (named after its chairman, Sir John Simon) were – to a man – British and white: there was not a single Indian representative. The Indian National Congress, supported by a majority of the Muslim League, immediately announced a total boycott, accompanied by mass demonstrations as [ 196 ]

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the Commission travelled around India. Low was similarly critical. He portrayed Simon as a big game hunter on the trail of tigers labelled ‘Indian Problems’.35 ‘The Game’, read the caption, ‘not having been properly invited, decide to ignore the proceedings.’ Later, Simon was a magician, requesting help from ‘the audience’ – the Indian population.36 The audience turns its back. At its session in December 1928, the Congress demanded Dominion status for India within a year, and threatened a campaign of civil disobedience if it was not granted.37 The British meanwhile set about organising a ‘Round Table Conference’ to sort out India’s constitutional future. Congress, sticking to its demand, declared its intention to boycott this conference. In March 1930, Gandhi led the ‘Salt March’ – a moving mass-mobilisation of Indians from Ahmedabad to the coast – to protest against the tax on salt and against British rule which stood behind it.38 During this campaign, Gandhi, Nehru, and a host of other Congress leaders and supporters were arrested. Low was slightly more critical of this campaign. In March 1930, his cartoon ‘Goosey Gandhi’ (according to Low) ‘shows Mr Gandhi as a goose turning from the conciliatory Viceroy, and preferring to wander “non-violently” into the jungle of anarchy, with a reckless disregard for the consequences’.39 Once the real Gandhi and thousands of his supporters reached India’s shore, they proceeded to make illegal salt. In ‘Exchange of Condiments’ Gandhi offers the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, some salt. Irwin wonders, ‘Now should I pass him the pepper?’ (i.e. have Gandhi arrested). Low regarded the Congress as intransigent in the face of British offers of conferences and reforms.40 But (as is illustrated in Figure 7.2) he could also see that Congress’ mass civil disobedience campaigns were a tremendous success, obstructing and confusing the government of India. Low recognised that in many ways the government of India was powerless in the face of these campaigns. He portrayed India as a ‘Non-Helpful Elephant’ in May 1930.41 In the cartoon, Secretary of State for India, William Wedgwood Benn, declares, ‘Now boys, all we have to do is to place the patient [i.e. the elephant] on the operating table’ – a clearly impossible task. Similarly powerless, in ‘Waiting’, the Viceroy is seen waiting in vain for Gandhi’s consent to the Round Table Conference.42 Low saw Gandhi as a wily politician who used arrest – regarded as a deterrent in British circles – as a potent weapon. When Gandhi was arrested during the Salt Campaign, he drew ‘The Determined Martyr’ (Figure 7.3). ‘This cartoon’, he said, ‘shows the determined martyr getting himself arrested at last by main force, thus illustrating the victory of non-violence over a cruel and oppressive Government.’43 [ 197 ]

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Figure 7.2  David Low, ‘Housing Problem in India’, Evening Standard, 27 May 1930.

Figure 7.3  David Low, ‘The Determined Martyr’, Evening Standard, 6 May 1930.

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With huge numbers in India’s gaols, and the government of India brought to a standstill, the British sued for peace. A compromise was reached (the ‘Gandhi–Irwin Pact’) and Congress agreed to attend the second Round Table Conference; though, as it turned out, with little success.44 The British proceeded on their road to reform, eventually producing the 1935 Government of India Act which was aimed at giving India’s leaders some say in provincial government, but was a long way from Dominion status and even further from independence. The Act, however, appeared to be the road down which India would travel (until the roadway was destroyed by the Second World War). Low’s critical support for Indian freedom was – as already noted – in marked contrast to the views of his employer. Shortly after the Salt March, while civil disobedience continued, Beaverbrook wrote to Arthur Brisbane (a well-known US newspaper editor): The day that a policy of repression is decided on will mark the end of the crisis … In Ireland we were never free to bomb towns, wipe out villages, or turn machine guns on the people. In India we can, and the rebellion can be crushed the moment a decision is taken to do so.45

But Beaverbrook was out of step with much of his political class. By the second half of the 1930s, India appeared to be heading for reform along the lines of the 1935 Act.46 Churchill, at the head of a ‘die-hard’ outfit of dissident Tories, stood against this trend and from this point onwards crusaded against Indian freedom. Thus he entered Low’s sights (whereas – perhaps surprisingly – he had featured little in the cartoonist’s work before this).47 ‘Churchill’, wrote Low, ‘supplied enough vehement opposition to the idea of Indian self-government to invite pertinent comment.’48 Until the outbreak of war, Low ‘mercilessly mocked Churchill’s opposition to Indian self-rule’ (e.g. Figure 7.4).49 In these cartoons, Churchill was often renamed ‘Windhi’ – the nemesis of the Mahatma. In ‘Between Gandhi and Windhi’ in 1931, Gandhi is shown making salt, while Churchill – a monstrous over-grown baby – is making bombs. Churchill is trying to turn the clock back to the glory days of empire in ‘Historical Tableau’ and ‘Mr Churchill’s Film Debut’; and consequently being left behind by India policy in ‘Feeding the Elephant’.50 Low also identified and attacked Churchill’s attempts (and he was not alone) to disunite India by emphasising differences within the country – in this case, on behalf of the Indian princes. The effect of Low’s cartoons was not confined to Britain. His artistic campaign against appeasement, for which he is probably most famous, antagonised the higher circles of the Nazi regime to such an extent [ 199 ]

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Figure 7.4  David Low, ‘By-Election Support for the Churchill Party’, Evening Standard, 1 March 1935.

that from 1934 Beaverbrook’s papers (and all others containing Low’s cartoons, including the Manchester Guardian) were banned in Germany, and then (from 1935) in Italy.51 Lord Halifax, a member of the government, visited Germany in late 1937. He reported: You cannot imagine the frenzy these cartoons cause [in official Nazi circles]. As soon as a copy of the Evening Standard arrives, it is pounced on for Low’s cartoon, and if it is of Hitler, as it generally is, telephones buzz, tempers rise, fevers mount, and the whole governmental system of Germany is in uproar. It has hardly subsided before the next one arrives.52

Unsurprisingly, Low’s name later ‘stood high on the Gestapo list of those who would not enjoy a happy old age’.53 At the other end of the scale (in every respect), it is also clear that Gandhi was an avid reader. When he visited London for the second Round Table Conference in 1931, Low met Gandhi at a meeting on Indian freedom in the House of Commons. He received me with loud laughter as though I were a very funny friend of the family. He was waving the evening paper about with a cartoon of mine on the meeting of Gandhi and Windhi54

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But the famous and the powerful were not Low’s intended audience. It was the ordinary readers of the Evening Standard to whom his work was primarily directed. Who were they? According to Low, ‘The Evening Standard … was a West End sale among the middle-classes. The Tory clubman’s evening paper.’55 A. J. P. Taylor, in his biography of Low’s employer, described Evening Standard readers as ‘the well-to-do of London and the suburbs’.56 He added: ‘newsvendors, it is said, have always known that the man in the bowler hat will ask for the Evening Standard’. The National Readership Survey developed a social grading system (from A to E) at about this time to classify readers for advertising purposes. The Evening Standard was designed for grades A (upper middle class) and B (middle class).57 What was the effect of Low’s anti-imperialist and pro-Indian cartoons on his middle-class audience? To ask that question is to enter a much wider debate on the attitude of the British public to the empire in general.58 This has been the subject of major academic controversy, and although on balance it appears that the British middle class was indeed concerned with the empire and with India, it is worth examining what would appear to be a contrary view. Bernard Porter argues that the empire – while having an obviously significant material impact on British society from the eighteenth century onwards – did not have a similar effect on its everyday consciousness.59 He argues that ‘imperial policy invariably arises from material circumstances, which then, if it needs popular support at home … gets that by appealing to other values and discourses’.60 When Britain’s ruling classes needed popular support for the defence of the empire in the twentieth century (which they had not needed before) they had to elicit it from the British people on the basis of popular causes (the spread of liberalism, for example), rather than an already existing, general enthusiasm for the glory of imperial conquest and domination per se.61 Porter’s argument fell foul of those who believed that the empire was much more of a consciously criminal enterprise than he did. His main opponent (and great friend), John MacKenzie, contended that ‘the notion that the British were indifferent to their Empire and accepted decolonisation with total equanimity [which he attributed to Porter] constitutes an interesting piece of right-wing propaganda’.62 Porter conceded: The problem was … that the book appeared to exonerate a large slice of the British people from complicity in these deeds, by pleading either ignorance or ‘rosiness’ [a rose-tinted view] on their behalf; which was clearly thought to let them off too lightly for some people’s liking.63

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However, whether the British people were enthusiastic about, or simply approved of, or were plainly apathetic towards the empire, is an entirely different issue from that of their responsibility for its crimes and triumphs.64 But both sides in the debate fail to emphasise the fact that enthusiasm, approval, or apathy for the empire ebbed and flowed over time; and that attitudes towards the empire were significantly conditioned by social class. For this reason, when they reach the interwar period, their judgement is seriously awry. At this point, both Porter and MacKenzie agree that apathy ruled. ‘Popular ignorance of and apathy towards the empire can be pretty well established for these interwar years’, writes Porter.65 Further: ‘lack of imperial commitment … characterized the majority of the British people from the 1940s onwards’. MacKenzie agrees: ‘It is true that in the 1940s there was a good deal of evidence that the British were exceptionally ignorant about their Empire.’66 This view would seem to be backed up by a survey carried out by the Colonial Office in May–June 1948, to ascertain what people knew about the colonies. The survey exposed ‘the true state – not so much of public knowledge – as of public ignorance’ and concluded that ‘people’s knowledge of the Colonies and our relations with them, is sketchy and inadequate in the extreme’.67 Had this been the general condition of British opinion, it would indicate a less-than-rapt audience for Low’s cartoons on the subject of imperialism. But such a judgement would be blind to the question of social class. Despite this being by no means central to the debate over the popularity or otherwise of empire, one class is regularly mentioned in passing. Porter says that the middle class – ‘those beneath the public-school-educated elite, from professional people and medium-sized capitalists down to small shopkeepers, schoolteachers and clerks’ – were afflicted with ‘widespread imperial enthusiasm’.68 Andrew Thompson argues that the middle class had a practical interest as well: Professional people were the dominant group in terms of recruitment to the colonial bureaucracy and armed forces. As missionaries, doctors, engineers, journalists and teachers they were highly mobile within the British imperial world.69

Even if they did not go themselves, they mixed in the circles of people that did go. The middle class was interested in issues surrounding the empire. According to Madge and Harrisson, in their Britain by MassObservation (published in 1939), ‘Through all our research results the interest in oneself and one’s own home predominated far and away over international and general political concerns, except in the upper middle class.’70 In the Colonial Office survey mentioned above the [ 202 ]

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exception is noted again: ‘only the top group on our list (Professional and Managerial) can be regarded as possessing sufficient basic knowledge of the Colonies’.71 Thus, regardless of whether British society in general in the interwar period cared about the empire, the middle class cared. And the middle class bought the Evening Standard. Is it possible to ascertain what the attitude of the average Evening Standard reader was to India and the empire, and thus to Low’s cartoons? Back in 1919, according to Sayer, support for General Dyer after the Amritsar massacre ‘appears to have come from upper- and middle-class groups, or those with direct connections with India or the army’.72 But there seems to have been a change in middle-class attitudes during the interwar years. Their interest in the empire did not decline, but their powers of critical observation increased. Tom Jeffery argues that ‘the employed middle classes – school teachers, civil servants, laboratory technicians [and] clerks’ – were those who felt most involved (and most threatened) by the international crises of these years. They were therefore more interested in international questions (and more likely to be critical of those forces they regarded as threatening: fascism, imperialism, and war). In most historical circumstances, it is difficult to gauge the opinions and feelings of a social group or class during a certain period. In the case of the British middle class, however, and as alluded to above, we are helped at this time by the data collected by the Mass Observation project from 1937 onwards. Mass Observation was initiated by a poet, an anthropologist, and a documentary film maker (Charles Madge, Tom Harrisson, and Humphrey Jennings) in 1937. In the midst of the interwar crisis, the project sought to discover what ‘the people’ – bombarded by propaganda and lied to by a less-than-honest government – really thought. As Jeffery puts it: In this sense, Mass-Observation was a political challenge of the man in the street, of us against them; it was a populist demand that democracy should mean what it says, rule by the people, appraised of the facts.73

Early in the year, the founders placed advertisements in newspapers and magazines asking for volunteers to write one-day diaries once a month dealing with their everyday activities and concerns and to reply to occasional questionnaires (‘Directives’) which they would send out. They recruited some four hundred volunteers. This rose to a height of nearly three thousand volunteers who participated in the project in some way over the next decade or so.74 Just before the war, volunteers were offered the choice of either continuing with the monthly Directives alone or combining them with day-to-day diaries ‘covering every aspect of their war-time lives’. Some two thousand of them answered at least [ 203 ]

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one Directive, while about five hundred continued to toil away at their Diaries.75 Given the political culture of the movement and the tasks required of them, it was perhaps inevitable that Mass Observation turned out to be a solidly middle-class project. ‘The diaries’, records Jeffery, ‘contain accounts of the work of clerks, shop-assistants, draughtsmen, many school-teachers, commercial travellers, and laboratory technicians … accounts of lower middle class work’.76 There was some response from working-class volunteers before the war, but by 1940 (according to Savage) ‘those writing were nearly entirely comprised of professionals, senior clerks, and middle class housewives’.77 Such judgements are confirmed by Mass Observation’s own statistics. In June 1939, the organisation sent out a Directive on ‘the class complex’. This asked volunteers to ‘define exactly the “class” to which you feel you belong’. Sixty-three per cent of the respondents felt themselves to be lower middle class, middle class, or professionals.78 In September 1948, a Directive asked again to which class volunteers felt they belonged. Judging by a sample of the responses, Savage calculates that 70 per cent of them regarded themselves as middle class; 22 per cent felt themselves to be upper middle class. ‘Clearly’, he concludes, ‘MassObservation seems to have become the haven for the middle class, and especially the educated middle class.’79 For a project aimed at advancing mass democracy, this was obviously a disappointing result. But for the purposes of this chapter, it provides a useful insight into British middle-class opinion on India and the empire, and therefore an indication of the impact of Low’s cartoons. Middle-class opinion on matters imperial had shifted dramatically since the outpouring of support for General Dyer. The sentiment expressed through Mass Observation was overwhelmingly sympathetic to Indian freedom. In fact, this was representative of British society as a whole. In a November 1939 Gallup Poll, 77 per cent of those asked declared that India should be granted independence ‘soon’ – 26 per cent said this should happen even while the war continued.80 Support for independence continued despite the threat posed to British India once Japan had entered the war. A young Mass Observation diarist wrote, ‘Certainly there can be no possibility of a refusal of Dominion status now, and the more we can rally Indian support the better.’81 Once the Japanese advance had begun, another responded: Although it’s maddening that the Japs are pinching bits off the Empire right and left my rage is somewhat diluted by the thought that we ought not to have had those places anyway82

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In March 1942, a Mass Observation Directive was sent out to 1,300 volunteers on their current feelings towards the British Empire. The report on the replies to this Directive tells us, with characteristic understatement:

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Unqualified enthusiasm about the Empire is rare … There seems to have been a fairly widespread belief that this war would mean the end of the Empire through secession or disintegration.83

Many of the respondents were more forthright. Said a 26-year-old accountant: ‘complete independence with Dominion status must be achieved’. A shop assistant said: ‘we should train the natives in selfgovernment as quickly as possible’. A retiree: ‘India should definitely be given her complete independence … and I am positive that the present policy of “no concessions to India” is totally wrong and producing disastrous results’.84 By the middle of 1942, Japan had taken Malaya and Burma from the British. Calcutta, Madras, and other Indian port cities had come under Japanese attack. It was widely believed that Japan would move against British India. The threat from Japan, however, was not uppermost in the minds of the Congress leadership at this time. They were far more preoccupied with Britain’s refusal to guarantee the independence of a united India after the war. Having previously been disinclined to damage the British war effort, British obduracy provoked the Congress into an all-out push for immediate independence. With the British gone, India would then deal with the Japanese alone. This was the ‘Quit India’ campaign that the All-India Congress Committee approved in August 1942. The next day the entire Congress leadership was arrested and British India went into meltdown. Insurrectionary strikes, mass demonstrations, attacks on symbols of British authority, and sabotage were the order of the day. It has to be said that a revolutionary movement to bring about immediate Indian independence, possibly followed by a Japanese invasion, shook the resolve of the British middle class in its support for Indian freedom. Even before the arrests, one diarist declared: ‘Quite seriously I suggest we put the whole bunch of Congress leaders under lock and key’. According to others: Gandhi is doing a great deal of harm to India and the Allied cause. Gandhi and other leaders arrested … Sorry about this, but hardly see what else could have been done. Impossible not to take up challenge. With the Japs just waiting to fall upon the quarrelling Indians, not a moment was to be lost if this Congress canker which was eating into the Indian empire was to be stopped.85

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According to a Morale Report (another Mass Observation activity) in August 1942, ‘Gandhi aroused a storm of criticism and his arrest was very popular.’86 But Mass Observation opinion was not unanimous. An articled clerk in the army, on hearing of Gandhi’s arrest, asked ‘How can we expect them [the Indians] to believe our promises when we start this old arresting business again … the old gang still holds sway in the government’. A chemist warned that ‘we are trying … to fight an invader with a population which rapidly becomes more and more hostile’.87 In the August 1942 Morale Report, while one middle-class man thought ‘Gandhi is a double-crossing little bastard’, another ‘has heard that Churchill has gone to India and hopes he gets assassinated’.88 Low was frankly hostile to the Quit India campaign. He pointed to the Japanese threat to India in ‘The Hopeful Enemy’ and presented India with a stark choice in ‘Alternative’ (Figure 7.5).89 In ‘Substance and Shadow’, he portrayed Gandhi and Nehru as a couple of rather stupid-looking dogs, so captivated by a bone labelled ‘Certainty from Britain of Indian freedom’ that they are blind to the dangers of Japan.90 His cartoon after Gandhi’s arrest is perhaps a little more ambiguous. This is sometimes interpreted as a message of support and sympathy for Gandhi in prison (Figure 7.6).91 It is certainly drawn in that way, but it should be noted that Low has Gandhi spinning a shroud for liberty – that is, preparing for its demise – perhaps as a result of Quit India insurrection and Japanese invasion. After the Quit India campaign subsided and the end of the war approached, both Low and the British middle class rallied once again to the cause of Indian independence. As a civil servant and housewife noted in her diary in February 1945: ‘Then we began talking about what should be done about India, and decided that India should be left to manage herself, but we didn’t know how she was going to do it.’92 Low pointed out the continuing irony of India’s enforced participation in a war for democracy by the ‘free self-governing peoples of the British Commonwealth’ in ‘Passing Shadow’ (Figure 7.7).93 That support was now qualified in two ways. Firstly, it was combined with a general weariness with the whole question of empire and the trouble that it seemed to bring with it. Edie Rutherford, the wife of a timber merchant, wrote in her diary after anti-British riots erupted in Calcutta in November 1945: Oh dear, all this trouble in Calcutta now. Let us GET OUT and if the Indians are bent on killing, let them kill each other.94

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Figure 7.5  David Low, ‘Alternative’, Evening Standard, 16 March 1942.

When some Indians apparently took Edie’s advice, and communal violence began to assume alarming proportions (from August 1946 onwards), she wrote: The BBC and the press continue to stress India’s affairs. I swear most folk couldn’t care less … most folk are simply glad to be shot of them.95

Low expressed this desire to be gone in ‘Unrest in India’ (Figure 7.8).96 A second qualification, exacerbated by the first, was an impatience with the apparent inability of Indian politicians to come to an agreement about the shape and nature of a free India. This impatience increased in intensity with the onset of communal violence. In his cartoon of 5 March 1947, Low represented the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee as Cupid, trying to bring the lovers (Nehru and Jinnah) together, [ 207 ]

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Figure 7.6  David Low, ‘A Shroud for Liberty’, Evening Standard, 11 August 1942.

but finally exclaiming, ‘Get a move on! I can’t stay here forever.’97 Despite this, Low did appear to support the Congress in the debate on India’s future. He portrayed Mohammed Ali Jinnah – the Muslim League leader – as an obstacle to Indian freedom, refusing Congress concessions and generally not playing by the rules.98 When the partitioned independence finally came, Low seems to have been optimistic about India’s future. From the British point of view, he drew Britannia as a departing nanny and Nehru as a harassed parent left to deal with Pakistan and the Indian princes. ‘Your babies now’, she says.99 On Indian Independence Day (15 August 1947), he drew ‘The Open Road’ (Figure 7.9).100 This is an optimistic cartoon, but again, one with a certain ambiguity. The British District Officer hands over maps for the future to figures representing India and Pakistan and the caption indicates a sense of unlimited possibilities. But is that the black cloud of communal violence that threatens them [ 208 ]

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Figure 7.7  David Low, ‘Passing Shadow’, Evening Standard, 8 May 1944.

from behind? Or are they leaving it behind and progressing into the future? As the violence worsened, Low was at least able to point towards Gandhi’s lonely struggle against it.101 But that came to an end when he was assassinated by a Hindu communalist on 30 January 1948. Low’s comment was published on 3 February (Figure 7.10).102 His readership echoed his sentiment: Who can benefit from that good man’s death? He was the conscience of mankind. We all know in our better selves that what Gandhi stood for and lived was the highest ideal.103

Low drew a few more cartoons on India after 1947 (a couple of dozen at most). They were mainly concerned with Nehru’s foreign policy and India’s war with China (1962). He was never again as intensely engaged with Indian politics as he had been in the 1930s and 1940s. He maintained his position drawing ‘anti-editorial’ cartoons at the Evening Standard [ 209 ]

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Figure 7.8  David Low, ‘Unrest in India’, Evening Standard, 26 September 1945.

until 1950, when he moved on to the Daily Herald and then to the Manchester Guardian in 1954. This chapter has drawn attention to the probable sympathy held by the Evening Standard’s middle-class readers towards Low’s approach. Low himself believed that he had shaped this middle-class opinion into a broad conformity with his own. In an interview with some Mass Observation report-writers, he said: Always I have made a point of working for a paper with a small circulation because there is more chance of people thinking alike … in the Evening Standard I have educated the public, they know what I am driving at and I can get over much more complicated ideas … I don’t say there is enough influence in cartoon to start a revolution but it could sow the seeds of revolt.104

Perhaps this was sometimes the case. But overall it seems more likely that the message of his cartoons against imperialism in India struck a [ 210 ]

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Figure 7.9  David Low, ‘The Open Road’, Evening Standard, 15 August 1947.

Figure 7.10  David Low, ‘Touch of a Vanished Hand’, Evening Standard, 3 February 1948.

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chord with already existing middle-class opinions in the interwar period (despite the politics of the Standard’s proprietor). Low’s was, to be sure, a gentle anti-imperialism. It could perhaps have been assuaged by the full implementation of the 1935 Government of India Act. His portrayal of British officials in India (after Amritsar) was generally one of decent chaps doing a job in difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, it went against the empire, as did the opinion of his audience. When the British Empire in India came to an end, there was not among these people – as Porter caricatures it – bitter disappointment, traumatic disorientation, and cruel adjustment.105 But this was not, as Porter would have it, because they were uninterested in the empire. It was because they were against it.

Notes 1 Winston Churchill, ‘Cartoons and Cartoonists’, Strand Magazine, LXXXI, June 1931, p. 588. 2 David Low, Low’s Autobiography, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, p. 39. 3 Low, Autobiography, p. 66. See, for example, ‘The Imperial Conference’, The Bulletin, 16 March 1916. 4 Low, Autobiography, p. 70; David Low, The Billy Book: Hughes Abroad, Sydney: NSW Bookstall Company, 1918. 5 Low, Autobiography, pp. 69 and 72. 6 Cited in: Low, Autobiography, p. 77. 7 See: Mark Hampton, ‘Inventing David Low: Self-presentation, Caricature and the Culture of Journalism in Mid-twentieth Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 20 (4), 2009, p. 484. 8 Low, Autobiography, pp. 181–182. 9 Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932, pp. 31–32. 10 Low, Autobiography, p. 182. 11 Hampton, ‘Inventing David Low’, p. 500. 12 David Low, Ye Madde Designer, London: The Studio, 1935, p. 11. 13 Remarks made in 1935–1936 and 1955; cited in: Hampton, ‘Inventing David Low’, p. 488. 14 Low, Autobiography, p. 185. 15 Low, Autobiography, pp. 91, 168, and 226. 16 ‘The Russian Terror Again’, Evening Standard, 22 April 1930; ‘Rendezvous’, Evening Standard, 20 September 1939. 17 A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972, p. 434. 18 For an account of this ‘left’ see: Tom Jeffery, Mass Observation – A Short History, Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1978. 19 ‘Possibilities of a Planned World Economy’, Evening Standard, 2 July 1937; ‘The Good Old Days’, Evening Standard, 7 October 1943. This latter cartoon was attacked by the Sunday Times as a ‘wicked incitement to class hatred’ (Low, Autobiography, p. 351). 20 David Low, Low’s Political Parade with Colonel Blimp, London: The Cresset Press, 1936, pp. viii–ix. 21 ‘Things to Come’, Evening Standard, 29 February 1940. 22 For Low’s pacifist stance see: ‘The Saner Sex’, Evening Standard, 9 May 1929.

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D A V I D LO W A N D I N D IA 23 ‘The Patriots’, Evening Standard, 23 July 1936; ‘“Correct Attitudes” in Spain’, Evening Standard, 5 August 1936. 24 Low, Autobiography, pp. 96–97. 25 Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, p. 32. 26 Arthur Herman, Gandhi & Churchill, London: Arrow Books, 2009, p. 378. 27 Samuel S. Hyde, ‘“Please, Sir, He Called Me ‘Jimmy!’” Political Cartooning before the Law: “Black Friday”, J. H. Thomas, and the Communist Libel Trial of 1921’, Contemporary British History, 25 (4), 2011, p. 526. 28 Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, K. N. Panikkar, and Sucheta Mahajan, India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 181–183. 29 See: Chandra et al., India’s Struggle, pp. 182–184; Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’, Past and Present, 131, May 1991, pp. 130–164. 30 Low, Autobiography, p. 98. 31 Low, Autobiography, p. 96. 32 Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, p. 152. Sayer argues that ‘In one way, crystal clear at the time, the whole Dyer controversy was a thinly coded discussion of Ireland, then in open revolt’ (p. 153). 33 In January 1928, Low started drawing on the Simon Commission (see below). In the intervening period, there was one Indian event for Low. Commenting on the God-like status given the cricketer Jack Hobbs when he equalled W. G. Grace’s batting record in August 1925, Low drew him as a huge figure, towering above lesser luminaries such as Caesar, Columbus, Chaplin – and ‘Mahomet’ (‘It’, The Star, 18 August 1925). Reaction in India to the portrayal of the Prophet was explosive. The Calcutta correspondent of the Morning Post wrote that ‘The cartoon has committed a serious offence, which had it taken place in [India], would almost certainly have led to bloodshed.’ A widely distributed poster asked the government ‘to submit the editor of the newspaper in question to such an ear-twisting that it may be an object lesson to other newspapers.’ Low commented later: ‘The whole incident showed how easily a thoughtless cartoonist can get into trouble.’ See: Low, Autobiography, 123–124. Also see: Nicholas Hiley, ‘Showing Politics to the People: Cartoons, Comics and Satirical Prints’, in Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson (eds), Using Visual Evidence, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2009, p. 34. 34 Low, Autobiography, p. 220. 35 ‘Indian Big Game Hunt’, Evening Standard, 19 January 1928. 36 ‘Indian Rope Magic’, Evening Standard, 11 February 1928. 37 Chandra et al., India’s Struggle, p. 264. 38 Chandra et al., India’s Struggle, pp. 270–274. 39 Low’s comment on ‘Goosey Gandhi’ (Evening Standard, 8 March 1930) in: David Low, The Best of Low, London: Jonathan Cape Limited, 1930, p. 191. 40 See: ‘Indian Cup Final’, Evening Standard, 26 April 1930; ‘Civil Uncivility’, Evening Standard, 5 March 1931. 41 ‘The Non-Helpful Elephant’, Evening Standard, 13 May 1930. 42 ‘Waiting’, Evening Standard, 14 July 1930. 43 ‘The Determined Martyr’, Evening Standard, 6 May 1930. Low’s comment in: Low, Best of Low, p. 205. 44 Chandra et al., India’s Struggle, pp. 280–283 and 316–318. 45 Cited in: Taylor, Beaverbrook, p. 270. 46 Low supported the thrust of the 1935 Act (Low, Autobiography, p. 220). 47 Tim Benson, ‘Low on Churchill’, in Churchill in Caricature, London: The Political Cartoon Society and Sotheran’s, 2005, p. 15. The post-war canonisation of Churchill has led to much of the negatively themed phase of cartooning being left out of edited collections – e.g. only one such cartoon appears in: Fred Urquhart (ed.), W. S. C. – A Cartoon Biography, London: Cassell & Company, 1955, p. 85. 48 Low, Autobiography, p. 220. 49 Timothy Benson, ‘Low and Churchill’, History Today, 50 (2), 2000, p. 11.

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C RI TI Q U E O F EM P IR E 50 ‘Between Gandhi and Windhi’, Evening Standard, 31 January 1931; ‘Historical Tableau’, Evening Standard, 7 July 1933; ‘Mr Churchill’s Film Debut’, Evening Standard, 3 October 1934; ‘Feeding the Elephant’, Evening Standard, 2 November 1933. 51 The cartoon that brought the ban compared the Nazi government’s behaviour at the League of Nations with the burning down of the Reichstag: ‘It Worked at the Reichstag’, Evening Standard, 18 November 1932. See: Leonard Freeman, The Offensive Art: Political satire and its censorship around the world from Beerbohm to Borat, London and Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009, p. 101; Timothy S. Benson, Low and the Dictators, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2008, pp. 5 and 7. 52 Timothy Benson, ‘Low and the Dictators’, History Today, 51 (3), 2001, p. 39. For Low on Halifax’s attempt to get him to tone it down, see: Low, Autobiography, pp. 277–279. 53 According to ‘documents found in the Berlin headquarters of the Reich Security Police after the war’ (Low, Autobiography, pp. 328–329), and confirmed via the rediscovery of the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. [‘Special Search List, Great Britain’]: Walter Schellenberg, Invasion, 1940: The Nazi Invasion Plan for Britain, London: Little, Brown, 2001, p. 217. 54 Low, Autobiography, p. 221. The cartoon was probably: ‘Day of Silence’, Evening Standard, 12 September 1931. 55 Low, Autobiography, p. 184. 56 Taylor, Beaverbrook, p. 215. 57 Taylor, Beaverbrook, p. 216. 58 For the major protagonists see: Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Bernard Porter, ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36 (1), 2008, pp. 101–117; John M. MacKenzie, ‘Review: Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists’, The Round Table, 94 (379), 2005, pp. 280–283; John M. MacKenzie, ‘“Comfort” and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36 (4), 2008, pp. 659–668; John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, in Stephen Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 273–283. See also: Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005. 59 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, chapter one; Porter, ‘Further Thoughts’, p. 102. 60 Porter, ‘Further Thoughts’, p. 106. 61 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 18. 62 MacKenzie, ‘Persistence of Empire’, p. 275. 63 Porter, ‘Further Thoughts’, p. 104. 64 As Porter put it: ‘there is of course no logical reason why one should want to implicate the whole of Britain in imperialism in order to deplore the latter’s effects … You can be anti-imperialist without believing that every Briton was soaked in imperial gore’ (‘Further Thoughts’, p. 105). 65 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, pp. 273 and 282. 66 MacKenzie, ‘Persistence of Empire’, p. 278. 67 G. K. Evens, Public Opinion on Colonial Affairs: A Survey made in May and June, 1948 for the Colonial Office, London: Colonial Office, 1948, pp. iv and 16. 68 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 233. 69 Thompson, Empire Strikes Back, p. 17. 70 Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain by Mass-Observation, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939, p. 217 (emphasis added). 71 Evens, Public Opinion on Colonial Affairs, p. 8. 72 Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre’, p. 159. 73 Jeffery, Mass Observation, p. 3. 74 Jeffery, Mass Observation, pp. 28–29.

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D A V I D LO W A N D I N D IA 75 Jeffery, Mass Observation, p. 41. See also: James Hinton, ‘The “Class” Complex: Mass-Observation and Cultural Distinction in Pre-War Britain’, Past and Present, 199, May 2008, p. 207; Penny Summerfield, ‘Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (3), 1985, pp. 441–443. 76 Jeffery, Mass Observation, p. 29. 77 Mike Savage, ‘Changing Social Class Identities in Post-War Britain: Perspectives from Mass-Observation’, Sociological Research Online, 12 (3), 2007, p. 6, at: www.socresonline.org.uk/12/3/6.html, accessed April 2019. 78 Hinton points out that in 1939 the manual working class constituted three-quarters of the British population; the middle class were therefore ‘clearly over-represented’ in Mass Observation. See: Hinton, ‘“Class” Complex’, pp. 207–211. 79 Savage, ‘Changing Social Class Identities’. 80 Cited in Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 267. 81 www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/SearchDetails/Diarist-5127 (henceforward Diarist 5127 etc.) 11 March 1942, accessed April 2019. 82 Report on Feelings about the British Empire 16–17 March 1942, at: www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Images/FileReport-1158, 4, accessed April 2019. 83 Feelings about the British Empire, 7. 84 Feelings about the British Empire, 2929, 3001, 2964. 85 Diarists 5004 (5 August 1942); 5177 (6 August 1942); 5275 (9 August 1942); 5004 (9 August 1942). 86 Morale in August 1942, at: www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/ Images/FileReport-1401, 1 September 1942, accessed April 2019. 87 Diarists 5177 (10 August 1942); 5016 (10 September 1942). 88 Morale in August 1942, 3 and 5. 89 ‘Hopeful Enemy’, Evening Standard, 6 January 1942; ‘Alternative’, Evening Standard, 16 March 1942. 90 ‘Substance and Shadow’, Evening Standard, 4 August 1942. 91 ‘A Shroud for Liberty’, Evening Standard, 11 August 1942. For the sympathy view see for example: Colin Seymour-Ure and Jim Schoff, David Low, London: Secker & Warburg, 1985, p. 87. 92 Diarist 5239, 20 February 1945. 93 ‘Passing Shadow’, Evening Standard, 8 May 1944. 94 Edie Rutherford, diary entry, 23 November 1945; quoted in Simon Garfield, Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain, London: Ebury Press, 2005, p. 132. 95 Edie Rutherford, diary entry, 16 August 1947; quoted in Garfield, Our Hidden Lives, p. 438. 96 ‘Unrest in India’, Evening Standard, 26 September 1945. 97 ‘Get a Move On!’, Evening Standard, 5 March 1947. See also: ‘Have Either of the Patients Regained Consciousness?’, Evening Standard, 28 August 1942. 98 ‘Indian Outlook’, Evening Standard, 21 September 1945; ‘Missed the Bus’, Evening Standard, 17 May 1946; ‘Suppression, Oppression and Persecution, Eh?’, Evening Standard, 4 September 1946; ‘Indian Test’, Evening Standard, 3 November 1946. 99 ‘Your Babies Now’, Evening Standard, 18 July 1947. 100 ‘The Open Road’, Evening Standard, 15 August 1947. 101 ‘Journey to Indian Freedom (continued)’, Evening Standard, 1 October 1947; ‘The Saint and the Tiger’, Evening Standard, 20 January 1948. 102 ‘Touch of a Vanished Hand’, Evening Standard, 3 February 1948. 103 Edie Rutherford, diary entry, 30 January 1948; quoted in: Garfield, Our Hidden Lives, p. 486. 104 Mass Observation File Report: Jokes , 27 June 1940, at: www. massobservation.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Images/FileReport-229, accessed April 2019. 105 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 2.

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Between imagined and ‘real’: Sarukhan’s al-Masri Effendi cartoons in the first half of the 1930s Keren Zdafee

In December 1936, Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara (‘Last Hour, Illustrated’; founded July 1934) published a black-and-white cartoon commemorating the ratification of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (Figure 8.1).1 Although the general feeling among educated Egyptians, students, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and politicians, was one of limited satisfaction with the treaty, the cartoon featured rows of identical men in Turkish fezzes (the tarbush) and western suits (the badla) marching in procession, praising and extolling the treaty achieved ‘with our blood, and through our arms’ (min dhammana wa min dhira’ina).2 A short-statured, middleaged man, wearing a western suit, a fez, and a pair of glasses is leading the procession. In his left hand he is holding prayer beads (sibha), and in his right a flag adorned with a crescent and three stars (the flag of the Kingdom of Egypt between 1923 and 1953).3 The image is accompanied by the following text: Rise, oh Egyptian and welcome with joy and greetings the new era Forget your misery, and prepare free, from first of January to live happily Beware of overlooking and peace you are living among wolves He that will want to sleep will among monsters in the middle of sleep   the forest Beware of relying on the glory of it will be disgraceful and it will the Pharaohs   be a curse Let us praise the glory we have with our blood and through our achieved  arms This flag will not be lowered again after it has risen to greatness We will raise it to the sun and say we want it to be yet higher it is still low

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Figure 8.1  Iskandar Sarukhan (?), ‘With our Blood, and through our Arms’, Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 129, 27 December 1936, p. 9.

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Every drop of our blood for our homeland, with no  hesitation Our blood preserved safely we will devote it to the day of  struggle.4

Although not referred to by his name in this cartoon, the short-statured, middle-aged man leading the procession came to be known throughout the first half of the 1930s as al-Masri Effendi – a caricatured type, who first appeared in 1930 in the pages of the Egyptian satirical journal Ruz al-Yusuf (founded October 1925). His creation was attributed to the Armenian artist Alexander Sarukhan (1898–1977).5 According to Fatima al-Yusuf, the founder of Ruz al-Yusuf, she and Muhammad al-Taba’i (the leading editor) sought an icon for their journal, which would symbolise the leading ideas of their journalistic venture.6 This icon needed to be recognised as visually and thematically different from the caricatured type used by their main competitor – the satirical journal al-Kashkul al-Musawwar (‘Illustrated Notebook’; founded May 1921), which used the image of Goha.7 In al-Kashkul al-Musawwar, Goha represented the typical Egyptian as caught in the gaze of the artist who drew him – Juan Santes (d. 1941), a Spanish Jew who emigrated to Egypt in 1908.8 Goha was a character who appeared in numerous stories in Persian and Middle Eastern folklore. He was witty, sometimes wise, even philosophical, sometimes the instigator of practical jokes on others and often a fool or the butt of a joke.9 He was characterised as simple and naive, harmless and non-violent. The stories in which he appeared are generally humorous, but there is always a lesson to be learned from them.10 Returning to Ruz al-Yusuf, browsing through western satirical journals, al-Yusuf and al-Taba’i came across an image of a man, who looked like al-Masri Effendi, who wore a bowler hat, and carried an umbrella. And we quoted this character; thereafter we dressed him in the tarbush and placed the prayer beads in his hands. And Sarukhan started to draw al-Masri Effendi.11

According to al-Yusuf, this character was meant to be used as ‘a timeless allegory for the average [‘ada], loyal, kind Egyptian man’.12 Setting aside the controversy regarding who came up with the idea of ‘al-Masri Effendi’, in a couple of years the popularity of this character reached unprecedented heights.13 Browsing through Ruz al-Yusuf from the first half of the 1930s, one can detect that the use of this character mushroomed in the journal: from elaborate coloured caricatures to rough, fuzzy, black-and-white sketches, to advertisements for cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, and various consumer goods, and as part of the visual design of headers for different columns. In addition, several other artists working for different journals adopted the image of al-Masri [ 218 ]

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Effendi in their caricatures as well: a practice common in this artistic genre in interwar Egypt, which indicated that artists and newspapers did not yet possess legal copyrights for their visual materials.14 The visibility of this character was so extensive that some readers thought they were seeing a caricatured image of an actual person. Some approached the paper asking for the address of al-Masri Effendi, what was his origin, and did he have any children? Others complained that in view of al-Masri Effendi’s national efforts he should have received the honorific of Pasha.15 Adopting a semiological approach, the cartoons, headers, and advertisements of al-Masri Effendi in the first half of the 1930s will be analysed here as visual signs: an expression of a set of ideas relating both to the journals in which he first appeared, and to the sociocultural group of the Effendiyya, to which he ‘belonged’. As a representative of the Effendiyya, the character was meant to symbolise what it meant to be a modern Egyptian subject in the context of the anti-colonial struggle. In other words, the visual image will be addressed here as a sign indicating the existence of meaning, as well as a testimony to the prevailing differences between the ‘reality’ or the ‘world’ per se, and the one which exists in the mind.16 However, al-Masri Effendi was also an image in itself, a caricatured type that had its own characteristics, ways of thought and codes of behaviour, which differed from the ideas it was meant to convey. It also created meaning, and therefore can be addressed as an artistic creation in and of itself, and as a part of a sign-system, which was semi-autonomous with regard to reality. As this chapter will show, in the caricatured world, al-Masri Effendi was also the embodiment of Sarukhan’s cosmopolitan perspective, which manifested itself in a partial set of Orientalistic values regarding the Egyptians and their character. The character is therefore best seen as a far more complex one than commonly believed, as both a critique of internal Egyptian politics and society (with inflections dependent on understandings of class and gender), and an affectionate (but contested) embodiment of the nation. In what follows, I chart the origins of the character in its home context of the satirical review Ruz al-Yusuf; explore the broader cultural context from which al-Masri Effendi emerged and drew his relevance; and examine his contested status as either everyman, or national symbol in the colonial context of the early 1930s. Al-Masri Effendi was first seen in May 1930 in a short comic strip, signed by Sarukhan, which followed the responses of ‘one of [Ruz alYusuf’s] readers’ to the progress of the negotiations between Egypt and Britain (Figure 8.2). In the next couple of years, this short-statured middle-aged man came to occupy every niche of the journal, always with the prayer beads in his hands. He read and answered readers’ [ 219 ]

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Figure 8.2  Iskandar Sarukhan, ‘Contradicting News Regarding the Negotiations Last Week, and Their Effects on One of the Readers’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 5, 13 May 1930, p. 9.

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letters received by the editorial board. He signed different columns, which addressed topical events, and criticised the behaviour and actions of prominent politicians (in text and images). He advertised the coming publication of new volumes of the journal and pleaded for readers to purchase Egyptian goods in various advertisements and articles. And he was the leading actor in numerous caricatures and cartoons – mainly addressing the British occupation. In most of these images, he was seen as ‘himself’, but occasionally he ‘played’ different roles in accordance with the scene of the caricature. Thus, he could be adapted to be drawn as (e.g.) Napoleon, a doctor, a lawyer, a boxer, and so forth.17 Sometimes, when he appeared not in his usual dress, his partners in the scene questioned him regarding his unusual appearance.18 The linkage between al-Masri Effendi and Ruz al-Yusuf was so close that the border between the imagined and the real was blurred: one column, titled ‘al-Masri Effendi: political, weekly illustrated newspaper’, which appeared in Ruz al-Yusuf every week, presented al-Masri Effendi as the president and editor-in-chief of this alleged newspaper, and al-Yusuf as its owner. The subtitle of this column-newspaper declared its mission thus: ‘The people, for the people and through the people’. The text was ‘written’ every week by al-Masri Effendi.19 A significant portion of the different kinds of images that included al-Masri Effendi showed him reading a volume of Ruz al-Yusuf, or acting in the name of Ruz al-Yusuf. These kinds of images identified al-Masri Effendi – in accordance with al-Yusuf’s remarks regarding her and al-Taba’i’s intentions for this caricatured type of the ‘average Egyptian’ – as an expression of the journal’s intent to create, imagine, and attempt to capture the public by designing its symbols. In other words, al-Masri Effendi as an ‘average Egyptian’, or as ‘one of the readers’, was an attempt to create an image of the public by assuming and addressing it. One can also say that this visual embodiment of the imagined reader can serve as proof of the existence of that public. In this context, the engagement of this imagined type in interaction with the journal itself, with other cartoon characters in this imagined space, and with the public at large (the journal’s audience) repeatedly reaffirmed the journal’s two self-assigned missions: the first, to ‘speak’ in the name of that public; and the other, to reaffirm its self-perception as the leading producer of the preferred, symbolic, caricatured repertoire of Egyptian society.20 As Even-Zohar has noted, the cultural repertoire of any society is the product of the labour of cultural entrepreneurs, whom he also calls ‘active idea-makers’, who wish to make images, metaphors and alternative, different or new models of life.21 This ‘small group of thoughtful people’ becomes engaged in the business of thinking, generating or [ 221 ]

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providing alternative or unprecedented new options for society.22 Such semiotic products, or ‘life images’, serve the purpose of reinforcing sociocultural control by promoting preferred interpretations of life circumstances. Even-Zohar – following Russian semioticians such as Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspenskij, and Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov – stressed the ability of these ‘life images’ to provide not only explanations, justifications, and motives, but also plans of action.23 Anyone who read or saw these semiotic products got from them not only conceptions and coherent images of what was supposed to be ‘reality’, but could also extract practical instructions for daily behaviour from them.24 Satirical journals appeared in Egypt from the late nineteenth century, but it was in the interwar years that this medium, a product of new processes and practices in Egypt, emerged fully and gained momentum.25 According to al-Yusuf’s memoirs, she decided to publish Ruz al-Yusuf first as an art journal, in light of the absence of this kind of discourse in the Egyptian press.26 Two years later, and in view of ‘raging letters from readers who complained about the complexity of the art papers’, al-Taba’i demanded that the journal should transform itself into a more commercial version, a change which proved successful, since the paper now managed to sell 9,000 copies per volume.27 In June 1926, the format of the paper changed again, now addressing the political issues of the day: a change that made Ruz al-Yusuf a bestselling periodical with a reported circulation of 20,000 by the late 1920s.28 Al-Yusuf noted that this last change was due to the limitations of the art-journal market, and in accordance with her rising interest in local politics.29 Browsing through texts and images in Ruz al-Yusuf of those years, one can detect that the owner, editors, writers, and artists working in it, and through it, were all eager to establish the journal’s and their own place in the political and cultural arena of the time. That is to say that the satirical content (images and text) was not meant to be read as isolated cries, but rather that the journal’s struggle was being conducted in the public space and it strove to be politically effective and impact significantly the cultural field. One way to publicise its significance and success in the public space was to show images (photographs, sketches, paintings, and caricatures) of various prominent figures of the time reading a copy of the journal. Thus over the years it can be seen in images of leading politicians, intellectuals, theatre and movie actors and actresses, and male and female singers reading a copy of Ruz al-Yusuf in their home, at coffee houses, on park benches, and at the beach.30 Alongside these images, photos advertising the paper also showed ‘regular’ Egyptians reading copies of it. In this context of the visual repertoire of the journal’s audience or the ‘public’, al-Masri Effendi performed as the only caricatured type representing that public. [ 222 ]

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Although in many of these images women were seen as representing the alleged ‘reading public’, no wife of al-Masri Effendi or caricatured type of an ‘average female reader’ was designed in Ruz al-Yusuf, or in other satirical publications which included caricatures.31 Regarding interwar Egypt, this imagined entity known as ‘the public’ was used to being addressed by historical literature as ‘middle class’, ‘the bureaucratic class’, or ‘the reading public’. These different labels were all partially accurate attempts made by historians to define the emergence of the sociocultural stratum of the effendiyya (singular, effendi) in the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, an emergence that was crucial to the emergence of media. Originally an Ottoman honorific, which distinguished the religiousscribal class from military officialdom, in the course of the nineteenth century in Egypt the term effendi had become more associated with western education.32 Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the effendis were the product of a top-down modernisation effort: i.e., the product of Muhammad ‘Ali’s (r. 1805–1848) new educational institutions and missions to Europe. These schools were modelled on the army, and their graduates were integrated into state-sponsored modernity projects throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century.33 Whereas in the mid-nineteenth century effendi meant a bureaucrat associated with implementing the state’s modernisation agenda, from Khedive Isma’il’s rule (1863–1879), changes in Egyptian society led to a wider embrace of western education, and modernity.34 The first generation of effendis as national, gendered subjects, up to the 1920s, were the graduates of the new schools. These graduates were not associated solely with the state bureaucracy, and their occupations diversified from the civil service to free professions and private employment. As products of modern education, they embraced modern habits, expertise, and lifestyles, which included the university, the coffee house, or the clubs. They read, played sports, and went to the cinema. While the conventional understanding of the effendi in historical literature was simply as the modern, educated Egyptian – a product of the state’s modern education system – researchers in the last decade have analysed the effendi of the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century as an Egyptian who actively claimed to be modern, regardless of the degree he obtained and the kind of education he received; in Jacob’s words, as ‘anyone who was able to affect the proper look’.35 That is to say, there was no ‘effendi class’ that could be pinned down to one location in a socioeconomic structure: if the occupations of the effendiyya were largely bureaucratic and professional in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, by the interwar period the effendi category also included sons of small merchants, [ 223 ]

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students, and unemployed graduates.36 Their economic and social profile shifted from mainly rural, landowning families throughout most of the nineteenth century, to a more complex mix of rural and urban backgrounds. To quote Ryzova, ‘there were rich effendis, there were poor effendis, and there were “middle class” effendis’.37 First and foremost, the effendi was a cultural concept signifying a stance towards modernity in a particular historical context. A number of socially recognised signs, which included western-style education and subsequent employment as a professional worker, marked him out. Outwardly, he was differentiated in the social sphere by a western-style suit and the fez. Finally, the effendi was a subjectivity enacted through a particular worldview, which was articulated against ‘tradition’ and western modernity. This worldview, which Ryzova also termed ‘effendi subjectivity’ or ‘effendi culture’, reflected the ideological relationship of the effendis with the modernity project.38 The effendi subjectivity (i.e., the building of a modern national state in a colonial context) was articulated around two main missions, which the effendis took upon themselves: internal reform, or modernisation; and independence from the British occupier.39 In the effendi discourse, Egyptian society was deficient and sick. The reasons for this varied from poverty and ignorance, to the al-Azhar education, a degenerate form of religion, bad social habits (ranging from personal hygiene and gender exclusion to the architecture of the city space), bad government, and an unjust political system that denied people their rights. Also under attack was the Egyptian ‘character’, which was perceived as submissive and fatalistic.40 Fixing these problems required reforms in all aspects of life. The method of reform was perceived as ‘education’ and the introduction of new forms of knowledge, order and discipline. The effendis believed themselves to be the only force in Egyptian society in a position to ‘save, liberate, and modernize […] the rest of the Egyptians’.41 In conceptual terms, the effendi became the ideal citizen of the state, one that could fulfil the role of a ‘modern’ public in whose hands lay the future of the country, and with whom Egypt could reemerge as a nation among nations. Following Lockman and Gasper, Ryzova analysed this constructing of Egyptian society as sick and in need in reform, and the effendis placing themselves at the centre of those reforms, as a strategy of the effendiyya to redistribute power in society.42 Despite their relatively small number, prior to 1952 the effendis played a crucial role in Egypt’s political life. As Ryzova has noted, they were both the makers and the primary consumers of modern Egyptian political life, social institutions, and cultural production: they were central to the nationalist movement that emerged in the last decade [ 224 ]

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of the nineteenth century in the context of the British occupation, and led to the creation of the independent Egyptian state as a constitutional monarchy in 1923; which earned them the titles of ‘the liberal generation’ or ‘the 1919 generation’. They ran the modern bureaucracy, formulated its policies, and supervised its implementation; in the modern schools they taught the future generations of effendis; they were the journalists and writers who shaped the emerging national public sphere, through the press and publishing; and the intellectuals and cultural producers who formulated the modern national culture society.43 From late 1929 – as an outcome of the New York Stock Exchange collapse and the global economic crisis – the Egyptian market experienced a more or less continuous decline. The most significant social outcome of this economic depression (alongside the anti-parliamentary political upheaval, which manifested itself in the governmental coercion of the Ismail Sidqi regime) was the appearance of a new generation of effendis. This ‘new effendiyya’ rose as a new social force with clear intentions of assuming political and cultural hegemony over Egypt; intentions that manifested themselves in the appearance of radical social movements and political groups in late 1930 and even more so in the 1940s (such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Young Egyptians, and the Communists).44 If ‘effendification’ (as Ryzova termed the process of becoming an effendi) in the first quarter of the twentieth century was about upward status mobility, in the second quarter, instead of leading to power and influence, becoming an effendi frequently ended in being a poor urban male.45 Their number rose significantly from hundreds or several thousands to tens of thousands, and included ‘lower’ social elements such as small merchants, unemployed graduates, and anyone who could adopt the socially recognised signs used to distinguish the effendi in the Egyptian social field, who wished to climb the social ladder through ‘belonging’ to this sociocultural stratum. Thus, the effendi category included semi-educated or differently educated people who actively claimed to be modern, either by dressing as effendis or by adopting specific effendi social practices. Compared to the first generation, they were younger (some were in their teens, and most in their twenties), and their professional characteristics were more prominent. Although like their predecessors they were exposed to European culture and its intellectual and technological achievements, the Egyptian education system from which they graduated stressed their local Egyptian heritage to the extent that they grew up to be self-aware modern subjects, open to western culture, but at the same time they sought to construct their national identity as embedded with local Egyptian, Islamic, and Arabic values. They viewed the British [ 225 ]

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presence as the source of all of Egypt’s problems and distress, and the local politicians as its collaborators. Furthermore, they demanded that independence be achieved by action, not negotiations with the British (the method employed by the first generation of effendis who ruled the country). Al-Masri Effendi was immediately recognised as belonging to the effendiyya on the grounds of his title and appearance: the western suit and the fez. At the same time, these garments served as differential signs of the effendi from his external and internal others. On the one hand, the colonial powers that had come to dominate the country, and his social superiors – the Ottoman elite; and on the other, his subordinate social others, who represented ‘tradition’, and were identified by the galabiyya. Satirical periodicals such as Ruz al-Yusuf, as well as other newspapers and publications centring on consumerism, health, sports, family, civilisation, or science, provided the cultural space for the making (or unmaking) of the visual embodiments of the national subjects. These cultural products were all spreading the effendi subjectivity and caused it to dominate the national public space. In other words, the effendi subjectivity was inseparable from the appearance of the new cultural forms, and especially the press and publishing.46 The caricatured image of al-Masri Effendi could be read – and has been read by historians – as being the ideal embodiment of this worldview. To return to the cartoon with which the chapter began (Figure 8.1), the appearance of al-Masri Effendi in this image, and his duplication in the ranks of alMasri Effendis marching behind him, visually embodies the effendis’ worldview that constructed themselves as the only positive and productive force in society. In this cartoon, there is no other Egyptianness which can claim to participate in the national struggle and to which can be attributed the national triumph. Only the Egyptianness manifested in the images of al-Masri Effendi could navigate the country to the shores of independence. This cartoon visually articulates what Ryzova termed ‘a national community of similar-minded men with a shared perspective on society and history’.47 This effendi subjectivity manifested itself in numerous cartoons and caricatures from the interwar period, as can also be seen in a comic strip published in Ruz al-Yusuf and titled ‘Egypt in Fifty Years’ (Figure 8.3). While setting out Egyptian history over the last fifty years, the comic imagined Egypt as a woman in local attire, titled ‘al-umm’ (the mother), and her son, ‘the ibn’, as al-Masri Effendi. Also performing in this imagined ‘cinema’ (as the subtitle of the comic declared) was the villain, Britain, played by the image of John Bull (the well-known personification of Britain, used by satirical artists in Britain and elsewhere since the eighteenth century). The family rhetoric reflected in this [ 226 ]

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Figure 8.3  (Unknown cartoonist), ‘Egypt in Fifty Years’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 289, 29 October 1934, p. 7.

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Figure 8.4  Ihab Khouloussy, ‘The Leaders of the Nation – Great Win for the Egyptian Cause’, al-Lataʾif al-Musawwara, 257, 12 January 1920, p. 1.

comic was apparent in other caricatured images as well, most of them from the 1920s, which were all trying to enhance the sense of Egyptian community as an ‘extended family’ (to use Baron’s terminology).48 The difference lay in the social versatility of the members of that ‘extended family’: many of these caricatures presented Egyptians of every social stratum as ‘the Egyptian people’, and in so doing defined a range of possibilities regarding the available national Egyptian identity. One example of this is a caricature from al-Lataʾif al-Musawwara (‘Illustrated Anecdotes’; founded February 1915), titled ‘The Leaders of the Nation – a Great Win for the Egyptian Cause’ (Figure 8.4).49 Standing on the side of the road leading to ‘full independence’ (al-istiklal al-tam), a group of men, women, and children who are titled ‘members of the Egyptian nation’ (‘anasir al-umma al-Misriyya) are waving to their political leaders walking on that road. Each of these individuals is distinguished by his dress as belonging to a specific social group, which existed in Egypt in the interwar years. There is a Muslim cleric, a Coptic cleric, an effendi, a woman belonging to the local Ottoman-Egyptian elite, and a woman that can be identified as belonging to the awlad al-balad (sons of the country, i.e. the lower urban Muslim society) or a [ 228 ]

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fallaha (peasant).50 In contrast to images like this, in al-Masri Effendi’s caricatures, he was usually presented as the only ‘true’ Egyptian. The self-identification of al-Masri Effendi (and of the effendiyya) as the only ‘true’ Egyptian was most apparent in caricatured images dealing with the British occupier. In this context, on several occasions the boxing ring served as the setting for al-Masri Effendi’s confrontations with all kinds of British representatives. One example, from Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, showed the progress he made with regard to his might, his physical power, and determination, in dealing with the different high commissioners to Egypt and the Sudan from 1920 to 1935 (Figure 8.5).51 The four imagined confrontations are accompanied by the following dialogue: Sir Miles Lampson Oh, my God! Where did you learn to punch like that? Al-Masri Effendi I learned it from the High Commissioners that preceded you … !

The caricatured images of the ‘boxing ring’ reflected what Jacob termed the constructing of ‘effendi masculinity’.52 Jacob’s research explored the attempts made by modern Egyptian subjects to free themselves from the ‘colonial gaze’ during the British colonial period. These attempts were explicitly manifested in discourses of gender and sexuality, which, as Jacob demonstrated, resulted in a complex set of pedagogic and performative acts. With the British occupation of Egypt, the modern effendi under the colonial gaze was perceived as generically deficient, weak, less disciplined, and insufficiently masculine: unfit for national service. At the same time, he was positioned as the target of reform, reform that would have produced a subject that could become an obedient – but not servile – individual. According to the British colonial discourse, after being properly disciplined, such men could eventually be entrusted with real responsibilities.53 The likelihood of reforming the pre-colonial Egyptian body was what provided the justification for the continued British colonial presence in Egypt, as well as in other colonies.54 As Jacob demonstrated, effendi discourse from the late nineteenth century revealed awareness, even anxiety, towards the colonial representations of Egypt and Egyptians. Not all denied the colonial claims, but rather they incorporated them into proposals for the regeneration of Egyptian men.55 This primary aspect of the effendi discourse was focused on the production of the new national bodies: a discourse based on a profound sense of physical inferiority. Nevertheless, this discourse and numerous practices related to it came to play a critical role in the Egyptian nationalist project and the constitution of ‘effendi masculinity’. [ 229 ]

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Figure 8.5  Iskandar Sarukhan, ‘The Policy of Distress is what Taught Us’, Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 78, 5 January 1936, p. 7.

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In this context as well, education was perceived as the key to ‘fixing’ the problem, as the nationalist effendi pedagogy incorporated growing interest in physical culture, as a means to character development (which in turn was related to masculinity).56 Returning to Sarukhan’s cartoons in Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, one can detect how these four images sought to redesign reality, as the giants in the first act are defeated at the hands of the new, masculine, fit al-Masri Effendi in the last act. The arrogance of the first was replaced by confusion and helplessness as an expression of the colonial encounter according to the effendi perspective. Scholars have thus tended to read the image of al-Masri Effendi as symbolising an ‘average Egyptian’, an ideal embodiment for the rise of the ‘new effendi’ of the 1930s as the central force of political culture. However, as compelling as such a reading is, it tells only part of the story. Al-Masri Effendi was not just an expression of the effendiyya, or of the platform on which he appeared (the journalistic venture initiative by effendis and for effendis). He was not just a sign; he was a caricatured type, which had its own interpretive dimensions, who differed from the concepts it allegedly was meant to represent. This aspect of the imagined type was the product of the worldview and cultural capital of the person who created him, the Armenian artist Sarukhan – he and Juan Santes are perceived in cultural Egyptian discourse as the foreign fathers of modern Egyptian caricature.57 Bibliographic information regarding Sarukhan’s early career is scanty. He was born to an Armenian Catholic family living in Ardanush, a small town in Transcaucasia, which was part of the Russian Empire. In 1900, his father Hagop Saroukhanian moved with his family to Batumi, capital of the region. In 1909 they moved again, this time to Istanbul. He enrolled Sarukhan and his brother Levon at the Armenian Catholic Clerics’ school. After the Ottoman armistice of the First World War (30 October 1918), both brothers graduated, and despite the civil strife and Turkish persecution of Armenians, they stayed in Istanbul and started publishing a four-page weekly called Ardanush, in which Sarukhan drew caricatures. In 1922, Sarukhan emigrated to Vienna, where he studied arts. In Vienna, he met the Egyptian intellectual ‘Abd al-Qader al-Shennawi, son of a wealthy family from Mansura, who was studying the art of printing, hoping to establish later a printing house and a journal in Egypt. This encounter led Sarukhan to the decision to emigrate to Egypt. He arrived in Alexandria in July 1924, and together with al-Shennawi embarked on the publication of a journal titled alJarida al-Musawwara (‘The Illustrated Journal’; founded September 1924).58 In 1926, he showed his works – mainly caricatures of prominent Armenian figures in Egypt – in an exhibition. This exhibition led to a [ 231 ]

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meeting with al-Taba’i, who brought Sarukhan to work at Ruz al-Yusuf. Some researchers claim that with this new position at Ruz al-Yusuf he became the leading caricature artist in Egypt, displacing Santes from that position.59 In her memoirs, al-Yusuf mentions that when Sarukhan started working for her he did not know Arabic, and was unfamiliar with the prominent politicians of Egypt, so models from Santes’ works were brought to him to copy.60 Moreover, al-Taba’i ‘lost his patience ten times before he could figure out the idea that was laid in one painting’, claimed Abu al-ʻAynayn.61 Work between the two was based on Sarukhan drawing the caricatures and al-Taba’i writing the text. In 1934, when al-Taba’i left Ruz al-Yusuf to start publishing Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, Sarukhan left with him.62 Browsing through Sarukhan’s caricatures of al-Masri Effendi one can notice that in many of them this character was portrayed as standing at the side of events, submissive and fatalistic; only rarely was he seen ‘in action’. A caricature published in April 1932 can serve here as a typical example. The image showed a hungry, sick, and worn-out alMasri Effendi, chained to Prime Minister Sidqi. His back is bent, but nevertheless he is smiling (Figure 8.6). He makes no attempt to resist his condition. A dialogue between Sidqi and the High Commissioner to Egypt and the Sudan at the time, Sir Percy Loraine (in office 1929–1933), stressed his fatalistic stance towards his life circumstances: The High Commissioner It seems al-Masri Effendi is humiliated and hungry. What’s the story? Why did you do that to him? The Prime Minister In the name of God, I was told once that al-Masri Effendi, whenever he became hungry, blessed whatever he received! You can see the results with your own eyes.

In addition, al-Masri Effendi’s small dimensions, which were always in sharp contrast to the dimensions of his other partners to the imagined world of the caricature, stated his weakness and inferiority against the vigour and authority of the colonial powers and local rulers alike. In this context, al-Masri Effendi demonstrated close linkage to western images of everyman – a kind of representation of the ‘common people’. One of them (with the bowler hat and umbrella) served as the inspiration for al-Yusuf and al-Taba’i’s decision to create al-Masri Effendi.63 Since the fifteenth-century morality plays, everyman has been a title for representations of the ‘common people’, and in its modern sense, a representation of the ‘little man lost in the big organization world, the Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times’.64 From the beginning of the twentieth [ 232 ]

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Figure 8.6  Iskandar Sarukhan (?), Untitled cartoon, Ruz al-Yusuf, 217, 11 April 1932, p. 1.

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century, these standard caricatured stereotypes were usually drawn as short-statured men who were exploited and manipulated by their political leaders. Examples are ‘Mr. Common Man’ by Frederick Opper (1857–1937) – a short bald man, wearing a hat too small for his head; ‘John Q. Taxpayer’ by T. E. Powers (1870–1939) – designed as a naked man wearing a barrel; ‘John Citizen’ by Percy Fearon, known as ‘Poy’ (1874–1948); ‘John Q. Public’ by Vaughn Richard Shoemaker (1902–1991), who was short, wore glasses, a moustache, a felt hat, a suit and a tie (and sometimes smoked a cigar); and ‘The Little Man’ by Sidney Strube (1890–1956) – to whom apparently al-Yusuf related in her memoirs, since he was recognised by his bowler hat and umbrella.65 Common to all these caricatured types of everyman was their defined identity as national subjects. Additionally, they were conservatives, married men, loyal, and patriots; committed to the principles of the country in which they performed. All these characters represented the lower middle class, bullied by their governments and economic monopolies, and their appearance was linked to the consequences of national and imperial economy on ‘the man in the street’ in the first half of the twentieth century. The popularity of these characters reached its height in the interwar years, when they were put in the satirical images at the front of the economic, social, and political struggles of their nations, whereas the politicians were tucked away on the margins of those images as spectators. Their crucial role as constructing national identity was based on their alleged accessibility to all classes as representing the middle class, which was supposed to be a social position for the lower strata of society to strive to achieve. This middle-class identity defined the new national lifestyle, new social practices, and new interests, while the popular press distributed its notion to an audience that could afford to maintain such a lifestyle. Al-Masri Effendi shared all these characteristics with the caricatured representations of everyman. However, one can ask if the state of colonial modernity to which he was subjected should not have driven him ‘into action’ in the caricatured world, in accordance with the political and social context in which he appeared. Governmental coercion and popular opposition characterised the first half of the 1930s, which resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands wounded.66 In this context of political violence, young men, particularly students (i.e. effendis), were seen as increasingly important actors. British discourse presented them as the ‘effendi problem’.67 The Egyptian intellectuals of the 1930s defined the changes in Egyptian society as nahadat al-shabab (the youth revival) or thawrat al-shabab (the youth revolution).68 If al-Masri Effendi was the embodiment of this rising young social force, an [ 234 ]

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embodiment of ‘the age of the effendiyya’, why didn’t Sarukhan portray him as a young student? Why did he use the image of a balding middleaged man? This choice seems obscure when compared with caricatured images of everyman which appeared in forming national spaces, that were subjected to colonialism, such as the Israeli image of ‘Srulik’ by Dosh (Kariel Gardosh, 1921–2000): the ideal new Israeli subject, young, with curly hair, a ‘tembel’ hat on his head, wearing khaki shorts and Biblical-style sandals. Srulik was the embodiment of Israeliness and of Israel. He represented the innocence, determination, and courage of the small young state in contrast to the ‘big hostile world’, which managed to succeed despite all the difficulties it faced. His image was in sharp contrast to the ‘eternal Jew’: the product of Christian myths from the Crucifixion of Christ, to its ultimate development into the Nazi version. Srulik was sharp, sarcastic, and aggressive; the ultimate ‘Sabra’ (a term referring to Jews born in Israel from the 1930s onward). If al-Masri Effendi had been shaped in the same cultural field, one could have said he looked like Srulik’s father. In other words, it seems that Sarukhan did not make a conscious decision to create an artistic antithesis to the colonial perspective – a visual symbol that would have represented a coherent resistance to the images of the effendis under the colonial British gaze. In the absence of primary sources regarding Sarukhan’s intentions, one can ask whether the foreign artist was not actually creating an image of a type, which reflected in his behaviour and characteristics if not the colonial gaze, then a partial set of Orientalistic values regarding the Egyptians and their character. In this context, al-Masri Effendi’s facial features should be noted as well: the accentuated nose, the big eyes, and the thick lips – all features that can be seen as an exaggeration of Orientalistic descriptions of Egyptians.69 This should come as no surprise, since most of the caricature artists working in Egypt during the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s were foreigners (or Egyptians who studied in Europe) and had a distinct Europeanised identity. The intellectual Memmi, writing in the 1960s, titled these foreigners as ‘those who weren’t colonizers nor colonized’, and who shared the European culture, customs, practices, and lifestyle, and sometimes even religion with the colonisers.70 Consequently, they also shared with them their set of values and perspectives on the colonised. Browsing through the caricatures of Santes, one can detect that the same insights can be concluded regarding his caricatured images of Goha – who, although he performed in Santes’ caricatures as a representation of ‘an average Egyptian’, actually reflected the artist’s cosmopolitan gaze.71 Thus, although the platform on which these caricatured images of [ 235 ]

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‘average Egyptians’ appeared broadcast anti-colonial discourse and sought to construct Egyptian national modern identity, its caricatures did not always ‘speak’ the same language. The two missions that the effendis took upon themselves – modernisation and independence – presented them with an endless dilemma: to modernise first or to liberate first? As Ryzova put it, for the effendis ‘the West, or modernity, potentially represented both the disease as well as the cure’.72 European countries were the actual occupier, and western values could pose a threat to the local culture and social order. However, western modernity was also the source of the methods and tools needed to ‘fix’ the country. This dilemma, Jacob argued, resolved itself in the construction of subjects who were ‘questionably Egyptian[s] and less certainly modern and debatably masculine’.73 Jacob’s definition of the modern national subject of interwar Egypt can be used here to articulate the image of al-Masri Effendi. On the one hand, the imagined representative and spokesman of the effendiyya, sharing with them their socially recognised signs and their self-perception as the only modern national subject in the 1930s; and on the other, a type that also occasionally ‘spoke’ visually and thematically in a somewhat different language. If as a national symbol he was ‘meant to reaffirm the unity of the collective and give the concept of nationhood greater immediacy’, not all could share his (and the effendiyyas’) self-identification as embodying national identity.74 And indeed, other journals, such as al-Ithnayn, did not portray al-Masri Effendi, but effendis: drunk, unemployed, wandering the streets of Cairo, objects of ridicule. In an illustrated article published in al-Ithnayn, the writer addressed the issue of the ‘foreign Egyptians’ (al-misryun al-aganeb), which he classified as the ‘English Egyptian’, the ‘French Egyptian’, and the ‘German Egyptian’.75 They were Egypt’s young ones who went to European capitals, spent a certain amount of time studying there, and came back to Egypt as foreigners in their own country: they walk the streets and quarters as tourists, asking about the behavior and costumes in wonder, as the Americans do; they speak in broken Arabic, and address their Egyptian brothers arrogantly; as if they were from different ‘dough’, different from the Egyptian ‘dough’.76

Afterwards, the article criticised in text and image the appearance, characteristics, and behaviour of these ‘English Egyptians’, ‘French Egyptians’, and ‘German Egyptians’. This article, as well as many caricatures in al-Ithnayn, reflected the different approach adopted by this journal, as well as others, towards the effendis, whereby they were constantly the object of mockery and ridicule.77 Mockery and ridicule [ 236 ]

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that one could say also labels the visual performance and visibility of al-Masri Effendi.

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Notes 1 Egypt was occupied by the British military in 1882, and by 1892 most of its administrative affairs were in British hands. Egypt was never declared a colony of the British Empire. Legally it remained an Ottoman province until the outbreak of the First World War, when it was made a protectorate (19 December 1914), until the declaration of independence on 28 February 1922. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty allowed Britain to retain most of its influence. This treaty was amended in 1936 to reduce the British presence to military outposts along the Suez Canal. It was only in 1954 that Egypt managed to achieve the final withdrawal of British troops from its territories. The 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was signed on 26 August and ratified on 22 December. The terms of the treaty are published in: Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment, 1922–1936, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1977, pp. 253–267. For histories of this period see: Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966; Al-Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment; and Joel Beinin and Zackary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1982–1954, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. 2 The ratification was on 12 December 1936 – five days before the volume was published. 3 The field of the flag was green, and the crescent and three stars white. The interpretations of Egypt’s flag between 1923 and 1953 vary: some argue that the three stars symbolise the three monotheistic religions; others claim that the three stars stand for Egypt, Sudan, and Nubia. The green of the flag’s field was the colour of the nationalist movement and the traditional colour of Islam. See: Elie Podeh, ‘The Symbolism of the Arab Flag in Modern Arab States: Between Commonality and Uniqueness’, Nations and Nationalism, 17 (2), 2011, pp. 419–442, esp. pp. 435–436. 4 I have attempted to translate the captions here and elsewhere throughout this chapter as literally as possible. The translation does not attempt to duplicate rhyme or metre, and hence it may appear less ‘flowing’. 5 Some researchers associated the image of al-Masri Effendi with the artist Muhammad Rakha (1911–1989), who worked for al-Ithnayn (‘The Two’; founded June 1934) among other periodicals. Lucie Ryzova, for example, mentions that al-Masri Effendi first appeared regularly on the pages of this journal (see: ‘Egyptianizing Modernity through the “New Effendiya”: Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Class in Egypt under the Monarchy’, in Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni (eds), Re-Envisioning Egypt, 1919–1952, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007, p. 155). Roberta L. Dougherty suggests that the character was invented in the mid- to late 1920s (‘Badi’a Maabni, Artiste and Modernist: The Egyptian Print Media’s Carnival of National Identity’, in Walter Armbrust (ed.), Mass Meditations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 267, n. 21). Researching the caricature in Egypt in the interwar years for my doctoral studies, I have discovered that the image first appeared in Ruz al-Yusuf during 1930. See: Keren Zdafee, ‘Visual Printed Culture: The Caricature in the Interwar Egyptian Press (1919–1936)’, unpublished PhD thesis, Tel-Aviv University, 2016. 6 Fatima al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, al-Qahira: Mu’assasat Ruz al-Yusuf, 1955, p. 135. 7 For the image of Goha in al-Kashkul al-Musawwar, see: Irène Fenoglio, ‘Caricature et Representation du Mythe: Goha’, in Jean-Claude Vatin (ed.), Images d’Egypte, De la Fresque à la Bande Dessiné, Cairo: CEDEJ, 1992, pp. 133–143. 8 Juan Santes emigrated to Egypt following an invitation from the amir Yusuf Kamal (1882–1969) to teach at the Madrasat al-fanun al-Gamila (the school of fine arts),

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founded in Cairo in 1908 by the amir. See: Iskandar Rushdi and Kamal Mallakh, Khamsun sanah min al-fann, Misr: Dar al-Ma ‘arif, 1962, p. 161. The character is known by different names in different countries: Koja Nasr al-Din by the Kazakhs and Uzbeks; Nasr al-Din Effendi by the Uighurs; Nasarat by the Chechens; Hoja Nasr al-Din by the Greeks; Joha al-Rumi among the Arabs, and so forth. For a brief summary of the folklore character, see: Hasan Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988. Having said that, my dissertation revealed that Santes’ use of the character did not reflect his folklore characteristics. It seemed that Santes used Goha as embodying Egyptianness that reflected the Orientalist’s gaze – non-violent, harmless, passive, submissive, and fatalistic. See: Zdafee, ‘Visual Printed Culture’. al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, p. 135. al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, p. 136. While discussing the originality of al-Masri Effendi, al-Yusuf emphasises that Sarukhan denied on at least one occasion – while being interrogated by the state prosecutor regarding a caricature which featured al-Masri Effendi – that he was responsible for creating the image. See: al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, p. 135. For the history of press laws in Egypt, see: Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. One letter, signed by ‘Eyewitness’, addressed the editor of Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara regarding a previous article published under the title ‘Naivety of some readers, or why al-Masri Effendi is unworthy of the title “Pashawiyya”’. The letter mentioned that many readers ask the paper for al-Masri Effendi’s address and the paper needed to clarify that the character is only a fictional character like Goha. The writer urges the editorial board to publish that there is an al-Masri Effendi living in Alexandria, and he further specifies his address there (‘Al-Masri Effendi’, Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 66, 13 October 1935, p. 52). For a brief explanation regarding the different administration titles in Egypt, see: Swasan al-Messiri, Ibn al-Balad: A Concept of Egyptian Identity, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978, pp. 11–18. For an extensive discussion on the linkage between caricature and semiotics, see: Eitan Machter and Avital Maya Machter, Caricature, Interpretation and Critic, Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014. For a doctor, see: Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 113, 6 September 1936, p. 8. For Napoleon, see: Ruz al-Yusuf, 354, 3 December 1934, p. 1. For a boxer, see: Ruz al-Yusuf, 358, 31 December 1934, p. 1; and Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 62, 22 September 1935, p. 1. For an example in which he is wearing a brimmed hat, and questioned about his appearance as a khawaga – a foreigner – see: Akher Sa’a al-Musawwara, 74, 8 December 1935, p. 7. My searches for the actual writer of this column proved unfruitful. An actual periodical entitled al-Masri Effendi was published in Alexandria between the early 1940s and the early 1950s. Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 51–53. Brummett’s approach to interpreting representations of caricatured types of the ‘average reader’ provided me with the model for reading the image of al-Masri Effendi as a metaphor for the relationship between the press and the public. Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘Idea-Makers, Culture Entrepreneurs, Makers of Life Images, and the Prospects of Success’, in Papers in Culture Research, Tel-Aviv: Unit of Culture and Research, Tel Aviv University, 2010, p. 192. Even-Zohar argues that for human societies to achieve a level of existence beyond survival and heading for success, it is necessary to have dedicated individuals (or groups of individuals) who are able to produce ideas or images that can be converted into alternative or new options for the repertoire of culture whereby the life of societies is shaped and organised. Even-Zohar, ‘Idea-Makers’, p. 192. Even-Zohar, ‘Idea-Makers’, p. 199. Even-Zohar, ‘Idea-Makers’, p. 199.

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S ARU KH A N ’ S A L- M A SRI EFFEN D I C A R T O O N S 25 This is not to say that no other satirical journal existed in Egypt before 1919. For satirical journals as part of colloquial mass culture in Egypt, see: Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011; Eliane Ursula Ettmueller, ‘Abu Nazzara’s Journey from Victorious Egypt to Splendrous Paris: The Making of an Arabic Punch’, in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013, pp. 219–244; and Marilyn Booth, ‘What’s in a Name? Branding Punch in Cairo, 1908’, in Harder and Mittler (eds), Asian Punches, pp. 271–303. The first satirical periodical to be published in Egypt, which included cartoons, was Ya’qub Sanu’a’s Abu Naddara Zarka (‘The man with the blue glasses’). The periodical appeared between March and May 1877, and after the enforced exile of its initiator to Paris, it continued to be published there until 1910. For a brief history of the political cartoon in Egypt, see: Afaf Lufti al-Sayyid-Marsot, ‘The Cartoon in Egypt’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13 (1), 1971, pp. 2–15. For a detailed study of Ya’qub Sanu’a, see: Irene Gendzier, The Practical Visions of Ya’qub Sanu’a, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966; and Eliane Ursula Ettmüller, The Construct of Egypt’s National-Self in James Sanu’a’s Early Satire & Caricature, Berlin: Klaus Scharz Verlag, 2012. 26 al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, pp. 94–95. 27 al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, p. 101. 28 Ayalon, The Press, pp. 78–79. The first caricature in it was published only in September 1927. 29 al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, p. 103. 30 One of these first images presented Victoria Cohen, a Jewish-Egyptian theatre actress, holding a volume of Ruz al-Yusuf in her hand on the front cover page of one of Ruz al-Yusuf’s volumes. The subtitle of the picture clarified that the image is of Victoria Cohen and that she is holding a volume of the journal (Ruz al-Yusuf, 58, 8 December 1926, p. 1). 31 Only after the Second World War did images of caricatured types of women start to appear in the Egyptian satirical press. This can be explained by the fact that the effendis were constructed mostly by the categories of education and employment, ‘both being problematic for women’. See: Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity’, p. 151, n. 8. 32 In its original meaning the term effendi meant ‘master’ or ‘seigneur’. For the origin and Ottoman use of the concept, see: B. Lewis, ‘Effendi’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Volume II, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965, p. 687. 33 For Muhammad ‘Ali’s modernisation project, see: Khaled M. Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed ‘Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Ehud R. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990; F. Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureuacracy, Cairo: American University in Cairo, 1999. 34 As Ryzova has shown, the reasons for seeking modern education varied from the perspective of the state, the school, the family, and the young-student-subjects themselves. For some, and in material terms, it meant the option of a future prestigious job, the most prestigious of which was the miri, the ‘all-powerful government official’. See: Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity’, pp. 137–138 and 141–143. For a discussion on the educational and career choices among Egyptian students in this period, see: Donald Malcolm Reid, ‘Educational and Career Choices among Egyptian Students, 1882–1922’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 8, 1977, pp. 349–378. 35 Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 4. 36 For an analysis of the Effendiyya as a class in the Weberian or Marxist sense, see: Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, Jean Stewart (trans.), London: Faber & Faber, 1972; Marius Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt: The Wafd and its Rivals, 1919–1939, London: Ithaca Press, 1979; Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Egypt,

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54

Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; and Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile. Lucie Ryzova, The Age of the Effendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 9. Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, p. 8. See also: Jacob, Working Out Egypt, p. 4. Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, p. 23. Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, pp. 19–20. Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, p. 23. Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, p. 23. Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, p. 4. For an extensive discussion of the ‘new effendiyya’ see: Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, pp. 7–22. On the economic developments and the economic depression in Egypt see: Robert Tignor, State, Private Enterprise and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918–1952, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 109–146; E. Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920–1941, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 134–168; Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment, pp. 211–215. Consequently, Ryzova notes that in the course of the interwar period the term effendi lost most of its glamour: Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity’, p. 125. In the context of the press, advertisements for various consumer goods and services were one means of spreading the cultural capital that anyone claiming to be an effendi needed to possess. For discussion of press advertisements in interwar Egypt see: Mona Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education and National Identity, 1863–1922, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Mona Russell, ‘Marketing the Modern Egyptian Girl: Whitewashing Soap and Clothes from the Late Nineteenth Century to 1936’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6 (3 – Special Issue: Marketing Muslim Women), 2010, pp. 19–57; Relli Shechter, ‘Press Advertising in Egypt: Business Realities and Local Meaning, 1882–1956’, Arab Studies Journal, 10 (2)/11 (1), 2002/2003, pp. 44–66; Relli Shechter, ‘Reading Advertisements in a Colonial/Development Context: Cigarettes Advertising and Identity Politics in Egypt, c.1919–1939’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2), 2005, pp. 485–503. For how the cinema functioned as a field for spreading the ‘bourgeois culture’ of the effendis, see: Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernity in Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Walter Armbrust, ‘Golden Age before the Golden Age: Commercial Egyptian Cinema before the 1960s’, in Walter Armbrust (ed.), Mass Meditations: Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 292–327. Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, p. 21. For the role photography played in ‘imagining’ the Egyptian political community, see: Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 82–104. Also see: James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. The context of the publication of this caricature was the work done by the Milner Committee in Egypt between December 1919 and April 1920, which examined ending the British protectorate over Egypt and recognising Egypt’s rights to independence. For a discussion of the concept of Ibn al-balad (Ar. Pl. awlad al-balad), see al-Messiri, Ibn al-Balad. This comic strip was published in light of the United Front’s presentation to the High Commissioner to state the British government’s willingness to conclude a treaty with the Egyptian government. Jacob, Working Out Egypt, p. 4. Jacob discusses the effendi under the colonial gaze in depth in his book: Jacob, Working Out Egypt, pp. 46–54. Jacob, Working Out Egypt, pp. 65–67.

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S ARU KH A N ’ S A L- M A SRI EFFEN D I C A R T O O N S 55 Jacob, Working Out Egypt, p. 63. 56 Chapters 3 through 7 in Jacob’s book detail the different ways in which the care of the male body was addressed as a means to produce a modern national subject. 57 For brief bibliographical information on Santes see: Abu al-ʻAynayn, Rakha – Faris al-Karikatur, Cairo: Akhbar al-Yawm, 1990, p. 35; Rushdi and Mallakh, Khamsun sanah, p. 161; and Khalid Muhammad ʻAzab, Ahmad Mansur, and Muhammad Sayyid, Rus al-Yusuf: 80 Sanah Sihafah, al-Iskandariyah: Maktabat al-Iskandariyah, 2006, p. 311. 58 Rushdi and Mallakh, Khamsun sanah, p. 163. 59 Abu al-ʻAynayn, Rakha, p. 114. 60 al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, p. 112. 61 Abu al-ʻAynayn, Rakha, p. 114. 62 Rushdi and Mallakh, Khamsun sanah, p. 162. 63 al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, p. 135. 64 Charles Press, The Political Cartoon, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981, p. 222. 65 For an interpretation of Strube’s Little Man as a symbol of national identity, see: Rod Brookes, ‘The Little Man and the Slump: Sidney Strube’s Cartoons and the Politics of Unemployment, 1929–1931’, The Oxford Art Journal, 8 (1), 1985, pp. 49–61; and Rod Brookes, ‘“Everything in the Garden is Lovely”: The Representation of National Identity in Sidney Strube’s Daily Express Cartoons in the 1930s’, The Oxford Art Journal, 13 (2), 1990, pp. 31–43. 66 Israel Gershoni, Egypt and Fascism, 1922–1937, Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1999, pp. 103–104. 67 Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity’, p. 133. 68 See, for example: Ahmad Hassan al-Ziat, ‘Nahadat al-Shabab’, al-Risala, 15 November 1933, pp. 3–4, quoted in Gershoni, Egypt and Fascism, p. 92. 69 One example, among many, is the description in: Edward Lane, The Manners & Customs of the Modern Egyptians, London and Toronto: East-West Publications, 1908, pp. 27–28. 70 Albert Memmi, ‘Portrait du colonisateur’, Avner Lahav (trans.), in Yehuda Shenhav (ed.), Coloniality and the Postcolonial Condition: Implications for Israeli Society, Tel Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2004, p. 52. 71 For a discussion on Santes’ caricatures of Goha, which reflected the artist’s Orientalistic perspective, see: Fenoglio, ‘Caricature et Representation’, pp. 133–143. 72 Ryzova, Age of the Effendiyya, p. 25. 73 Jacob, Working Out Egypt, p. 5. 74 Baron, Egypt as a Woman, p. 57. Although Baron addresses national iconography (images in human form that imagine the nation itself), her definition can also be applied to the female members of that nation. 75 Abu Shabat, ‘al-Misryun al-aganeb’, al-Ithnayn, 60, 5 August 1935, pp. 14–15. 76 Abu Shabat, ‘al-Misryun al-aganeb’, pp. 14–15. 77 According to al-Messiri, this approach could explain why in 1941 the image of al-Masri Effendi was dropped from the pages of al-Ithnayn because ‘it didn’t and shouldn’t symbolize the Egyptian, because it represented the lowest class of government officials – the effendi class or petty bureaucrats’ (see: al-Messiri, Ibn al-balad, p. 48). Messiri quotes the artist Rakha, who referred to the periodical al-Ithnayn as having published caricatures of al-Masri Effendi. Regarding the interwar years, I should mention that I have not found any incorporation of this character into this periodical.

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The iconography of decolonisation in the cartoons of the Suez Crisis, 1956 Stefanie Wichhart

In the midst of the Suez Crisis, cartoonist Pol Ferjac created a series of cartoons for the French humour weekly Le Canard enchaîné with the caption ‘Nil novi’, or ‘Nothing new under the sun’. The message was clear: to western observers, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal was another instance of aggressive expansionism that conjured up memories of Hitler in the 1930s. This slogan would have resonated with Egyptian observers as well, for a very different reason: they saw the western response to the nationalisation of the canal as imperialism in another guise. As Egyptian, British, and French cartoonists commented on the events surrounding the Suez Crisis, they also looked to the past for precedent by digging deep into the rich reservoir of icons from the high age of imperialism – such as Britannia and Marianne, the British lion, historical analogies, literary references, and classic imperial cartoons themselves. European imperialism provided rich fodder for political cartoonists, both those celebrating empire and those critical of its costs, and as colonies gained independence in the post-Second World War period cartoonists reappropriated and recrafted imperialist imagery to convey new meanings.1 The political cartoons drawn during the 1956 Suez Crisis provide a rich snapshot of this emerging iconography of decolonisation. While historians continue to debate the long-term implications of the crisis, at the time it was viewed as the final gasp of the British and French empires in the Middle East.2 For Britain, the humiliation of Suez came less than ten years after the withdrawal from both India (1947) and Palestine (1948). France was struggling with the ongoing war in Algeria, with the memory of defeat in Vietnam still fresh (1954). For Egypt, the [ 242 ]

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Suez Crisis represented a triumph over imperial foes and solidified its place as leader of the Arab world. The Suez Crisis inspired a prodigious outpouring of political cartoons, out of all proportion to the length of the conflict. 3 Many of these cartoons commented on the dramatic events themselves or the byzantine negotiations in the months leading up to the military confrontation. Others, however, used these events as a platform for broader commentary on the changing dynamics of international power, such as the decline of the traditional European colonial powers, the rise of the new Cold War superpowers, and the ‘third way’ emerging in the non-aligned movement. These cartoons were not merely pro- or anti-colonial, but simultaneously engaged in multiple debates about imperialism and the Cold War dynamic. This chapter will explore a small selection of cartoons that showcase different strands of this new iconography of decolonisation using events surrounding the Suez Crisis as their focal point. Drawn from three publications, the images chosen all refashion classic images and historical references and give them new meaning to help readers come to terms with a changing world. The British humour weekly Punch (founded 1841) – the father of the genre and, by the 1950s, a bastion of middleclass British conservatism – dug deep into its own archives and refashioned classic tropes from the golden age of the imperial political cartoon to comment on the British Empire’s changing fortunes. The French weekly Le Canard enchaîné (founded 1915) had a long history of leftist commentary and used Orientalist imagery in its response to the Suez Crisis. In the aftermath of the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, which overthrew the monarchy and brought a group of military officers to power, the Egyptian weekly Ruz al-Yusuf (founded 1925) became an organ of the revolutionary government and adhered closely to the new regime’s official line. Its cartoons reflect how classic imperialist tropes could be reappropriated to project a searing critique of western intervention in the Cold War context. These three periodicals spanned the ideological spectrum yet they used similar imagery, even at times borrowing from one another, in order to comment on the altered power dynamic between the western powers and their former colonies. The Suez Crisis signalled the end of over 70 years of British imperial influence in Egypt, the culmination of a long, gradual process of decolonisation.4 The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and in 1875 Britain purchased Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal Company in return for funds to pay off the debt incurred as a result of the Khedive’s expensive plans for modernisation and westernisation.5 The security of the Suez Canal would serve as a key consideration in Britain’s future policy decisions towards Egypt. In 1882 Britain occupied Egypt for both strategic [ 243 ]

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and economic reasons, and this ‘temporary’ occupation was formalised in 1914 with the declaration of a British protectorate at the outbreak of the First World War.6 Britain’s unilateral termination of the protectorate in 1922, largely in response to post-war upheaval and anti-British protests, gave Egypt nominal independence while still protecting Britain’s right to intervene over issues relating to imperial communications, defence, protection of foreigners, and the Sudan.7 The 1936 treaty placed further limitations on British power in Egypt, but still allowed for the continued presence of British troops in the Suez Canal Zone and gave Britain the right to increase its military presence in wartime.8 Britain invoked this right during the Second World War as Cairo became the staging ground for the North African campaign, and the war saw a reassertion of British influence in Egypt.9 In the post-war period British troops remained in the Canal Zone and became a source of widespread discontent, contributing to growing anti-British sentiment. After the 1952 revolution Egypt pushed for the renegotiation of this relationship. The 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement set a June 1956 deadline for the final withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone.10 Britain faced a number of challenges in the Middle East as this deadline approached, and Prime Minister Anthony Eden saw the hand of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser behind most of them.11 Egypt not only refused to join the British-sponsored Baghdad Pact, which Nasser viewed as thinly veiled British imperialism, but actively pressured other Arab states, including Jordan, not to join either. In March 1956 Jordan expelled Glubb Pasha, the long-time British advisor to the Arab Legion, in an attempt to distance itself from Britain.12 Arab–Israeli tensions had heated up with Egyptian-sponsored incursions into Gaza in 1955, leading Egypt to turn to Czechoslovakia for weapons.13 The United States and Britain pledged financial assistance to help Egypt build the Aswan High Dam, a key development goal of the new Nasser regime, in the hope that this might keep Egypt from falling under Soviet influence.14 At the same time, western leaders grew increasingly concerned that Nasser’s policy of ‘positive neutralism’, or engagement with both superpowers, was actively undermining western interests.15 British cartoonist Leslie Gilbert Illingworth commented on this evolving Anglo-Egyptian relationship in a 21 March 1956 ‘big cut’ Punch cartoon titled ‘Mark Antony Eden Prostrate Before Cleopatra Nasser’ that encapsulates many of the key themes that would emerge in the later cartoons of the Suez Crisis (Figure 9.1). Drawing on Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was transformed into ‘Mark Antony Eden’ and declared, while lying at Cleopatra Nasser’s feet: ‘I’m dying, Egypt, dying.’ This multi-layered [ 244 ]

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Figure 9.1  Leslie Illingworth, ‘Mark Antony Eden: “I am dying, Egypt, dying”’, Punch, 21 March 1956, p. 327.

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cartoon employed an array of techniques – the appropriation of classic Orientalist images; the use of historical analogies and artistic or literary symbolism; and spatial positioning – to represent the changing balance of power. The Orientalist imagery of Ancient Egypt made the subject recognisable to British readers exposed to recent discoveries in the field of Egyptology, and the use of the Antony and Cleopatra story as its focal point added a gendered dimension to the commentary. In Shakespeare’s version (well known to middle-class Britons since the days of Linley Sambourne – see above, Chapter 2 – Figure 2.3) Cleopatra tried to maintain Egypt’s independence from the Roman Empire (in this case the British Empire), but was also a temptress who pulled Mark Antony away from affairs in Rome and ultimately caused his downfall. Nasser as Cleopatra was at once powerful and duplicitous, as reflected in Egypt’s manoeuvring against the Baghdad Pact and British interests in Jordan. Viewed through a post-Suez lens, Illingworth’s image is prophetic: March 1956 was a turning point for Eden, when he became convinced that Nasser was a threat who needed to be removed from power.16 Eden’s single-minded fixation on Nasser would destroy his ministry just as Antony was ruined by his obsession with Cleopatra. While much of the imagery in this multi-layered cartoon looked to the past, the two shadowy figures in the background pointed to the role that economic issues would have in the outcome of the Suez Crisis. The presence of King Saud of Saudi Arabia, standing behind Nasser, reminded the reader of Britain’s long-standing feud with Saudi Arabia over the oasis of Buraimi, valued as a source of oil. The Buraimi conflict hurt Anglo-American relations and drew Egypt and Saudi Arabia into an uneasy (and temporary) alliance against Britain.17 The other figure, an American in a Hawaiian shirt holding a large bag of money, served as a reference to the American offer to help finance the construction of the Aswan Dam. Illingworth was both head cartoonist at Punch and a staff cartoonist for the conservative newspaper the Daily Mail.18 While he commented on the events of the Suez Crisis in both publications, his Punch cartoons are particularly notable in the context of this study.19 The cartoonists of Punch had created some of the most iconic cartoons of British imperialism, and artists working in the period of decolonisation often reappropriated these images to comment on Britain’s declining fortunes in the Middle East. This technique of drawing visual comparisons to the imperial past was a way to speak to the political sensibilities of Punch’s conservative middle-class readership, whose views and assumptions Illingworth largely shared.20 His Antony and Cleopatra stood in [ 246 ]

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stark contrast to Bernard Partridge’s 3 December 1924 Punch cartoon from a different era in Anglo-Egyptian relations that also drew on the image of Cleopatra (Figure 9.2).21 The 1922 Declaration that ended the protectorate gave Egypt limited independence, yet the assassination of Sir Lee Stack, Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army and GovernorGeneral of the Sudan in 1924, served as a cautionary tale of how concessions to local sovereignty could go awry.22 Punch responded to this event with a cartoon that showed a sullen Cleopatra, representing Egypt, being sternly rebuked by mighty Britannia, who warned that the freedoms so recently given could be revoked. The size disparity and positioning of Partridge’s Britannia and Cleopatra, compared to Illingworth’s Antony and Cleopatra, reflected the changing nature of the Anglo-Egyptian relationship. The Egyptian press, not surprisingly, offered a very different interpretation of Anglo-Egyptian relations in the 1950s that highlighted the theme of Britain in decline and Egypt ascendant. The political cartoons that appeared in the Egyptian humour weekly Ruz al-Yusuf transformed these sentiments into images. Founded in 1925 by the famous Cairo performer Ruz al-Yusuf (born Fatma al-Yusuf), this humour weekly had become one of the most widely read Egyptian newspapers after the Second World War and a strong supporter of the 1952 revolution. Part of a long, rich tradition of Egyptian political cartoons, Ruz al-Yusuf was closely tied to the Nasser regime, and in fact fell under state control in 1960.23 Its cartoons, then, can be read as reflections of official Egyptian policy in the early revolutionary period. Ruz al-Yusuf used a mixture of the heroic and the humorous to project a consistent message of Egyptian strength in the face of imperialism, not only at home but also in the international arena. In 1955 the magazine hired a number of young artists whose cartoons reflected the new, revolutionary Egypt, including Salah Jahin and Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, whose work is examined here. Both young artists contributed to a new genre of Egyptian cartoon which combined the language and symbols of political cartoons with social commentary. Jahin’s work drew inspiration not only from ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and Islamic art and famous Egyptian cartoonists such as Sarukhan (whose work Keren Zdafee explores in Chapter 8), but also western cartoonists in Punch and other British humour magazines. Al-ʾAduwi’s artistic pen and ink cartoons incorporated globally recognised symbols, a reflection of the influence of western cartoonists such as David Low, but also his own awareness of the international reach of his message at a time when the new revolutionary regime was projecting its power not just at home but to the broader Arab world as well.24 [ 247 ]

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Figure 9.2  Bernard Partridge, ‘To All Whom it Concerns’, Punch, 3 December 1924, p. 631.

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Ruz al-Yusuf reinforced key messages through multiple cartoons over multiple issues. In 1960 Egypt’s literacy rate was 26 per cent of the population over age 15, and Egyptian cartoonists used powerful visual techniques such as disparity in size, readily recognisable anthropomorphic images, and frequent repetition to convey meaning even to those who could not read the captions.25 While the percentage of the population that would have been able to read Ruz al-Yusuf was fairly limited, numerous scholars have demonstrated that political cartoons had a greater impact in the Arab world than revealed by the circulation figures of the publications in which they appeared, as cartoons and articles were often the subject of lively conversation and debate in coffee houses and other public spaces.26 The great Victorian Punch cartoonist Sir John Tenniel drew some of the most iconic cartoons featuring the British lion as an anthropomorphic representation of the might of the British Empire, including his August 1857 ‘British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger’ (see above – Chapter 1) and the 25 February 1876 cartoon ‘The Lion’s Share’, which had particular resonance in the Anglo-Egyptian context.27 This classic image showed a powerful British lion with his paws on the key to India, while British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli purchased the canal shares from Egypt in the background. British cartoonist David Low dismissed the iconography of the British lion and John Bull as obsolete, observing in his 1957 Autobiography that ‘New models were required for a world in which as science annihilates time and space, with its speed machines, its sound machines, its vision machines, it is annihilating also regional peculiarity’.28 Times might have changed, but images such as the British lion, French chanticleer, John Bull, and Marianne remained powerful tools in the hands of cartoonists of the mid-twentieth century, refashioned and repurposed for the era of decolonisation. At the hands of the cartoonists of Ruz al-Yusuf the British lion was transformed into a battered, scrawny beast and held captive in a circus in two spring 1956 cartoons. The 7 April cover image by George al Bahjuri, another of the new generation of Egyptian cartoonists, showed Nasser as a lion-tamer facing the British lion balanced on a ball labelled ‘Alliance’ (a reference to the Baghdad Pact).29 The caption noted that Britain was attacking Nasser just as all animals tried to attack their keeper. A 4 June 1956 cartoon showed the British lion with its head inserted into the mouth of a lion-tamer labelled ‘the Middle East’. The ironic caption identified ‘the courageous lion’ to highlight the way that the growing tensions in the Middle East were devouring Britain. The circus imagery in these cartoons was a particularly powerful portrayal of captivity and dominance, as the once mighty lion was now forced [ 249 ]

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to perform at will. Egyptian cartoonists were not alone in adopting the circus environment to tame the lion; Illingworth had himself used this imagery in a 17 October 1951 Punch cartoon commenting on Mussadiq’s nationalisation of the Iranian Oil Company, and French cartoonists would return to this trope in their post-Suez cartoons (see below). National personifications, such as the British John Bull, or the French Marianne, also made frequent appearances in the Suez cartoons. Al-Masri Effendi, a respectable middle-class man wearing a tarboosh (fez) and suit, represented Egypt in the cartoons of the interwar period. Zdafee demonstrates in Chapter 8 that national caricatures such as al-Masri Effendi not only reflected the reading public’s image of itself but were also designed to mobilise that public into action.30 Once a regular fixture in the pages of Ruz al Yussuf, by 1956 al-Masri Effendi had become increasingly rare, replaced by an idealised fellah (a member of the Egyptian peasantry wearing a galabieh) or the image of Nasser himself as the symbol of the nation.31 This new iconography reflected the populist impulse of the revolution and the new regime’s conception of itself and of the Egyptian public, providing examples of the power of cartoons to serve, as Scully and Varnava note in this volume’s first chapter, ‘as a means of mass-dissemination of auto-imagery.’32 The cartoons in Ruz al-Yusuf not only showed Nasser as the patron of Egypt, investing in development and protecting it from western encroachment, but Nasser as an international figure. For the revolutionary regime, the growing cult of Nasserism, as reflected in the pages of Ruz al-Yusuf, was a way to build loyalty to the state; to western leaders it was yet one more indication of Nasser’s dictatorial inclinations. With the approach of the June 1956 deadline for the evacuation of British troops from Egypt, many in Britain were gravely concerned about the wisdom of this new concession. The Suez Canal might no longer be the key to India, which now had independence, but it was still, in the words of Maurice Hankey, ‘the jugular vein of World and Empire shipping communications’.33 Had Britain made a terrible mistake by placing the defence of this vital waterway in the hands of Egyptian President Nasser, whose recent actions revealed a worrying tendency to act against western interests? For the French, Nasser’s expansionist tendencies were apparent in the assistance he provided to the Algerian revolutionaries in the form of both arms and propaganda.34 Ruz al-Yusuf celebrated this aid with a number of images that portrayed French weakness in the face of Algerian resistance, and the solidarity of all colonised peoples against the western powers. Journalist Keith Kyle, in his detailed history of the Suez Crisis, recounted [ 250 ]

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a conversation between French Premier Guy Mollet and the American Henry Luce of Time-Life. Mollet observed that Nasser was ‘somebody we created’. It was right to want to see Farouk replaced, but not to go overboard for Nasser. ‘Everyone seemed to have to go on a pilgrimage to Cairo. Dulles went. My Foreign Minister went. M. Pineau now knows what a mistake that was … We were certainly responsible in part for the fact that [Nasser] got a swelled head.’ Mollet brought out his well-thumbed copy of The Philosophy of the Revolution. ‘This is Nasser’s Mein Kampf. If we’re too stupid to read it, understand it and draw the obvious conclusions, then so much the worse for us.’35

Both British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion shared this interpretation of Nasser’s writings and viewed him as another Hitler or Mussolini.36 The Second World War analogies were pervasive in western political circles and the press as the Suez Crisis developed and weighed heavily on Eden, who as Foreign Minister had been one of the strongest opponents of the Munich settlement, even resigning his office in protest.37 The analogy raised the question: would Eden stand up to Egypt in this new Munich moment? As Mollet observed, many felt that the western leaders had only themselves to blame for Nasser’s growing power, a sentiment reflected in a cartoon titled ‘The Triumph of Nasser’ that appeared on the front page of the 25 June 1956 issue of the French leftist weekly humour magazine Le Canard enchaîné.38 Cartoonist Pol Ferjac portrayed a racialised caricature of Nasser as pharaoh, using a whip to drive the four chariot pullers – American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmitri Chepilov, French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden – against a backdrop of the sphinx, the pyramids, and oil rigs (Figure 9.3). The accompanying article contextualised this cartoon, noting that Nasser was surrounded by western diplomats during a recent parade in Cairo.39 The French representative put on a good face even though the parade included French tanks that Egypt had just purchased at the same time that officials at home were denouncing Nasser’s interference in Algeria. At the middle of the diplomatic corps stood ‘pharaoh Nasser’, wearing the smile of one who knew that, if these men showed the least sign of disapproval, it would only take the small gesture of closing the oil pipeline to calm them. The western leaders found themselves slaves to the new pharaoh of Egypt, and the presence of the oil rigs in the background gave a hint as to why. This French cartoon reflects the growing fear that the west had contributed to Nasser’s inflated sense of self and aimed to shame western [ 251 ]

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Figure 9.3  Pol Ferjac, ‘Le Triomphe de Nasser’, Le Canard enchaîné, 25 June 1956, cover. All rights reserved.

leaders who were supporting Nasser even when he acted directly against their own interests. It also introduced the ancient Egyptian iconography that Le Canard would use in its commentary throughout the developing crisis. Not only were pharaonic images widely recognisable as Egyptian, but they also highlighted the long French association with Egyptology dating back to the Napoleonic occupation. But the appeal of ancient Egyptian imagery went beyond the instant recognition it brought. As the chariot cartoon demonstrated, the portrayal of Nasser as an authoritarian pharaoh with his own cult of personality complemented the image the west tried to project of Nasser as a dictator. Nasser’s attempts at playing both sides in the Cold War had long raised concerns among western leaders as to his loyalties. Egypt’s decision to recognise communist China was the final straw for US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. On 19 July 1956 the United States informed Nasser that they were withdrawing the joint Anglo-American plan to fund the Aswan High Dam, a major infrastructure project that promised to modernise the Egyptian economy.40 In response, Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. In a speech given in Alexandria, he laid out the rationale for taking this drastic step. True independence was economic as well as political, yet every attempt by Egypt to achieve this goal was met with western plots to reassert influence. If the west was going to withdraw funding, Egypt would nationalise its most important resource, the Suez Canal, and use the money raised from canal user fees to finance the construction of the dam.41 [ 252 ]

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Figure 9.4  Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, ‘The “mortar” that will build the High Dam’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 30 July 1956, p. 3.

The first issue of Ruz al-Yusuf to appear after Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal included a range of cartoons that combined the heroic and the humorous to show the humiliation of the imperial powers as a result of this action, and the strong Egyptian state standing up to them. If the great nineteenth-century Punch cartoonist Sir John Tenniel felt that cartoons often required ‘dignity, not impudence’, the same could be said for the images of Ruz al-Yusuf at a time when a young revolutionary regime was still attempting to consolidate control.42 Zahdi al-ʾAduwi’s distinct style of pen and ink illustrations best reflected this heroic and dignified ideal, using personification and popular metaphors to convey political messages which were, as one commentator noted, as clear as the slogans on political posters.43 Zahdi al-ʾAduwi’s 30 July 1956 cartoon in the heroic vein titled ‘The “Mortar” that will Build the High Dam’ reflected the arguments in Nasser’s nationalisation speech (Figure 9.4). Egyptian workers hand carried mortar from a cement mixer labelled ‘nationalisation of the Suez Canal’ and used it to build the emerging structure in the distance labelled the High Dam. In his speech Nasser described the blood and sweat that Egyptian labourers sacrificed in building the Suez Canal in the nineteenth century, only to benefit the imperial powers; in this image al-ʾAduwi portrayed the [ 253 ]

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blood and sweat Egyptians would sacrifice to build the High Dam, this time for the benefit of Egyptians themselves. Douglas and Douglas observed that the nationalisation speech was well received by the general public ‘partly because Nasser adopted an informal style and made jokes at the expense of the agents of those Western diplomatic and financial powers which had recently humiliated Egypt’.44 In keeping with this style, the nationalisation issue of Ruz al-Yusuf also included humorous cartoons. One image showed Dulles and Nasser playing chess, and Nasser declaring ‘checkmate’ by moving a piece labelled ‘nationalisation of the canal’. That same day the American weekly magazine Time published an article titled ‘The Dramatic Gambit’ that also adopted the chess analogy, noting: ‘On the broad chessboard of international diplomacy, the US moved decisively last week in a gambit that took the breath of professionals’ by withdrawing funding for the dam.45 Nasser was an avid chess player, and Dulles had himself used the chess analogy for relations with Egypt, giving this cartoon special significance.46 In another 30 July image a sweaty John Bull fanned an exhausted Marianne, wilting under the heat of a sun labelled ‘the Arab struggle’ in a cartoon with the caption: ‘the heat has risen quite a bit in the Middle East’. Punch commented on this momentous event by reissuing one of the classic cartoon images of Anglo-Egyptian relations: Tenniel’s 11 December 1875 cartoon ‘Mosé in Egitto!!!’ (Figure 9.5). Holding the key to India, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli stood in front of the Great Sphinx, whose face was a reflection of Disraeli’s own. The cartoon commemorated Disraeli’s purchase of the Khedive of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal Company. The title had multiple meanings, at once referencing Rossini’s 1818 opera of the same name; the Biblical story of Moses in Egypt; and Disraeli’s Jewish heritage.47 Illingworth updated the cartoon for the 25 February 1953 issue as a commentary on the Anglo-Egyptian agreement signed earlier that month granting Sudan greater self-rule, an agreement which would open the way for renegotiation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (Figure 9.6). The status of the Sudan had long been a point of contention between Britain and Egypt, and as the cartoon demonstrated, the power dynamic had changed. It was now the Sphinx tapping his nose and holding out his hand to take from Eden the key to the canal, which no longer bore the label ‘the key of India’ (as India had gained its independence six years earlier). Disraeli’s powerful posture was replaced by a less confident Eden, scratching his chin as if deciding how to respond. The new caption of the 25 February 1953 cartoon, ‘O, Whither Hast thou Led me, Egypt?’, was drawn from Mark Antony’s lines in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (Act 3, Scene 11) and, as in Illingworth’s Antony and [ 254 ]

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Figure 9.5  John Tenniel, ‘Mosé in Egitto!!!’, Punch, 11 December 1875, p. 245.

[ 255 ]

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Figure 9.6  Leslie Illingworth, ‘Mosé in Egitto!!!’, Punch, 25 February 1953.

Cleopatra cartoon (see again – Figure 9.1), reflected a Britain led astray by Egyptian statesmen. Punch editor Malcolm Muggeridge reinforced this sentiment in the accompanying article ‘Eden in Eggitto’, which also included Tenniel’s original cartoon to erase any doubt as to the reference. Muggeridge was highly critical of the new agreement and quoted from [ 256 ]

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the December 1875 issue of Punch in which Tenniel’s original cartoon had appeared, noting that the magazine had declared that ‘England … having got a hold of the Suez Canal, and paid for it, knows how to keep it and means to keep it’: a warning that Muggeridge believed Britain needed to be reminded of at a time when they were planning to make concessions to Egypt, ‘a people so notoriously untrustworthy and unstable’.48 The two cartoons reappeared side by side in the 1 August 1956 issue of Punch, the first to appear after Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Illingworth’s 1953 cartoon was given a new caption: ‘Eden in Egitto!!’ The enduring nature of this iconic 1875 cartoon, refashioned in 1953 and then reprinted, once again next to the original, three years later, speaks to the evolution of Anglo-Egyptian relations and implies that Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal was just the type of concession that Muggeridge had warned about. The Sphinx was a recurring image in Punch cartoons on Anglo-Egyptian relations, but this series is noteworthy for the way in which the same image was refashioned and reissued three different times. The reference back to Punch’s staunch support for the purchase of the canal shares in 1875 reminded readers of just what Britain would be sacrificing in accepting the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Punch and Le Canard enchaîné lay at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but their Suez cartoons shared a common theme, warning of the dangers of Nasser’s growing megalomania as exemplified by his nationalisation of the canal. Turning the page from the 1 August 1956 reissue of the Tenniel–Illingworth cartoons discussed above, readers saw a Ronald Searle cartoon that showed Nasser proclaiming from the top of a minaret, ‘Nasser is great, and Suez is his profit’. On 15 August Illingworth portrayed the Egyptian leader as a giant bullfrog with a puffed up throat in a cartoon titled ‘Bloated Bullfrog of the Nile’. Le Canard enchaîné, preoccupied with the Algerian conflict, offered little coverage of developments in Egypt before the nationalisation of the canal but Nasser’s actions in July 1956 catapulted events in Egypt to the front page, and they maintained a prominent place there for several months.49 Not only had Nasser nationalised the French-run Suez Canal Company, a fact often overlooked in Anglophone commentary, but he was also providing weapons to Algerian revolutionaries and fighting against France’s Israeli ally.50 As Guy Mollet’s comments had demonstrated, the conviction that Nasser was a new Hitler (or Mussolini) permeated western responses to Egypt’s actions in 1956. It is therefore no surprise that the imagery of fascism, so easily recognisable to readers worldwide only 11 years after the end of the Second World War, was frequently used in political [ 257 ]

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cartoons as the Suez Crisis developed. Le Canard enchaîné appropriated the Munich analogy right away in the first issue to appear after the nationalisation of the canal, with a stylised image of an ancient Egyptian with his arms and legs contorted into the shape of a swastika. France’s many concerns were brought together in Pol Ferjac’s 8 August 1956 cartoon of an obelisk covered in hieroglyphics, meant to represent the Egyptian obelisk of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde in Paris which had been shipped to France in 1830 (Figure 9.7). The caption notes that ‘the Champollions of Canard’ had succeeded in translating the hieroglyphics for their readers, a reference to Jean-François Champollion, the French ‘father of Egyptology’ and Orientalist par excellence. In this cartoon one of the great visual images of western dominance of the east was appropriated as the canvas for an extensive commentary on the situation in Egypt after the nationalisation of the canal, using the language and signs of ancient Egypt to convey a satirical message. The hieroglyphics on the obelisk showed ‘the great pharaoh Gamel Abd el Hitler Nasser’ prohibiting traffic on the sacred canal of Egypt, with the Soviets offering encouragement. Oil rigs were identified as the ‘sacred oil of Egypt’, reflecting the economic dimension of the crisis. Le Canard was particularly critical of the role of the United States in provoking the crisis by rescinding the funding for the High Dam, and the obelisk included an image of ‘the sacred American eagle who is behind all of this’. The ‘emblem of the sun god’ was a swastika with the Latin inscription ‘Nil novi’, or ‘Nothing new under the sun’, a phrase Le Canard used as the title of numerous cartoons on the crisis. Nasser rested in the fountain at the base of the obelisk, taking the form of one of the tritons in the Maritime Fountain. According to the caption, Nasser, ‘the genius of the Nile’, was holding a sacred crocodile, the Egyptian god Sobek who protected ancient Egyptians from the Nile floods. Thus a fountain that represented France’s maritime tradition was transformed into a commentary on a conflict over the waterways of Egypt: the Suez Canal and the Nile River. The Suez cartoons in both Le Canard and Punch highlight the important role that Orientalist images played in the iconography of decolonisation of the Middle East.51 They shared many characteristics with the classic Orientalist texts in the way that they maintained the positional superiority of western technology and culture over the rest of the world, in the lack of specificity in the images presented, for example timeless Egypt, and in the use of exotic or historical examples in an ahistorical manner. Douglas observed of racial stereotypes in the anti-colonial cartoons of Le Canarde Enchaîné in the 1920s: ‘The Canard was able to introduce its nonconformist message partly because it wrapped it in humor. To be heard it had to engage, and exploit the [ 258 ]

Figure 9.7  Pol Ferjac, Untitled, Le Canard enchaîné, 8 August 1956. All rights reserved.

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realities of French opinion of the time, from racial and ethnic stereotypes to political engagements.’52 The cartoons in Le Canard commenting on foreign affairs in the 1950s reflected a similar tension, although in this case the paper’s politics were more complex. Deeply critical of the French colonial presence in Algeria, Le Canard was also unrelenting in its attacks on Nasser during the Suez Crisis, while at the same time strongly critiquing the actions of both the French and British governments. Ancient Egyptian imagery filled the pages of Le Canard enchaîné but it was notably absent from the Egyptian periodical. The exception was when Ruz al-Yusuf reprinted western cartoons that used these symbols. Political cartoons of the Suez Crisis reflected the crosspollination that occurred between humour publications in various countries, yet this borrowing of images meant that the same cartoon could be used to send a completely different message in a new context. The June 1956 Canard cartoon of Nasser as pharaoh (again, see Figure 9.3) was reprinted in the 30 July issue of Ruz al Yussuf, the first to appear after the decision to nationalise the canal. Not only was the audience different, but the facts on the ground had changed as well. The caption identified the image as ‘Jamal Abdel Nasser as he was drawn in the French newspaper Le Canard enchaîné according to the New York Journal-American’, indicating that the French image arrived in Egypt via the American press. While the cartoon in its French context aimed to shame the western powers into standing up to the pharoah Nasser, translated into an Egyptian context after the nationalisation of the canal it highlighted Nasser’s powers vis-à-vis western leaders, and demonstrated that the French themselves were aware of this positional shift. Western leaders employed numerous tactics from the diplomatic toolbox in an attempt to resolve the problems created by Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal.53 These failed negotiations inspired a powerful Illingworth cartoon in Punch (5 September 1956) that used Auguste Rodin’s statue ‘The Burghers of Calais’, based on an episode from the Hundred Years’ War, to comment on imperial decline (Figure 9.8). The French chronicler Jean Froissart recorded that while Calais was under siege and facing starvation in 1347, six of its leaders surrendered themselves to save the city, wearing nooses around their necks and carrying the keys of the city out to the waiting English.54 A cast of the statue stands in the Victoria Tower Gardens adjacent to Britain’s Houses of Parliament, ensuring that the historical analogy would not be lost on Britain’s politicians. Illingworth’s version was titled ‘The Burghers of Suez by Gamal Nasser after Rodin’. As in the Disraeli and Eden cartoons cited earlier (Figures 9.5 and 9.6), the Suez [ 260 ]

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Figure 9.8  Leslie Illingworth, ‘The Burghers of Suez by Gamal Nasser after Rodin’, Punch, 5 September 1956.

Canal was again represented as a key, this time held by Australian Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies in reference to the visit of the Menzies mission to Egypt to offer a plan for internationalisation of the canal.55 As in Rodin’s sculpture Illingworth’s burghers were truly pathetic figures: emaciated, wrapped in chains, heads bowed, and the image [ 261 ]

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conveyed the sense of British and French humiliation at having to appeal to Nasser for concessions. When all of these efforts at negotiation failed, Britain, France, and Israel devised the Protocol of Sèvres, a plan to retake the canal.56 The secret plan was carried out when, on 29 October, Israeli troops entered the Sinai Peninsula, and the next day Britain and France issued ultimatums to Egypt and Israel to end hostilities or they would occupy the Canal Zone to ensure free passage for international shipping. When the 12-hour window expired, Britain began bombing operations.57 The military conflict was the main subject of the cartoons in the November issues of Ruz al-Yusuf. From the heroic, to the humorous, to the historic, these images used a wide variety of tactics to project Egyptian valour in battle, the weakness of the European adversaries, and the sense of betrayal at the invasion. Cartoonist Zahdi al-ʾAduwi turned Britain and France’s personification of Nasser as a new Hitler back against them to highlight western aggression against Egypt. A 5 November cartoon portrayed Hitler running to Eden with open arms, while the 12 November cover showed an elderly Eden dressed in a baggy German uniform with a swastika on his arm badge, tying a noose around his own neck. Mollet, portrayed as an ageing woman with saggy arms, held a mirror for him. In this case, the western powers were the aggressors, but they were portrayed as old and weak. Salah Jaheen used a different historical analogy in his 5 November cover image of a defiant Nasser, arms crossed, surrounded by tanks, facing down a nineteenth-century British warship (Figure 9.9). The image alluded to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the event that signalled the beginning of Britain’s imperial presence in Egypt, but the caption noted: ‘The words are from 1882 … but we live in 1956!’ The cartoon also turned the usual positional superiority of western technology on its head. In this case it was a powerful Nasser, surrounded by the military might of Egypt, facing down a weaker, obsolete British force, giving the image propaganda value as a sign of Egyptian strength. The disparity in the size of the characters portrayed was an easily recognisable means of conveying relations of power, and the cartoonists of Ruz al-Yusuf frequently deployed this technique during the Suez Crisis to convey a sense of weakening empires and British and French decline. Zahdi al-ʾAduwi used this technique to great effect in a 5 November cartoon that portrayed a tiny Eden standing in front of a giant chair, gazing into a large mirror labelled ‘the United Nations’. An astonished Eden commented, ‘I thought that I was bigger than that!’ (Figure 9.10). A consistent message in the Egyptian cartoons was that, not only were the western powers the aggressors, but they were also weak in the face of a young, vigorous Egypt and united world opinion. [ 262 ]

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Figure 9.9  Salah Jaheen, Untitled, Ruz al-Yusuf, 5 November 1956, cover.

[ 263 ]

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Figure 9.10  Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, ‘I thought I was bigger than that …’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 5 November 1956, p. 4.

The Napoleonic occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801 provided yet another rich historical analogy for cartoonists to mine in the context of the November 1956 military operations. Le Canard enchaîné published a cartoon titled ‘The Battle of the Pyramids, by Pol Ferjac’ on 7 November (Figure 9.11). A clear reference to the famous lithographs of French artist Auguste Raffet, it showed ‘Namolléon Bonaparte’ surrounded by his troops in front of the pyramids, with paratroopers in the background. This operation obviously differed from the historical reference as it was a joint Anglo-French undertaking and ultimately unsuccessful. Zahdi al-ʾAduwi offered a very different interpretation of the Napoleonic legend in the 19 November 1956 issue of Ruz al-Yusuf, referencing not Napoleon’s 1798 victory in Egypt, but his defeat in Russia in 1812 (Figure 9.12). Captioned ‘Retreat’, it showed Eden as Napoleon, limping with a crutch and a cast on his leg, speaking with a shivering ‘Josephine Pineau’. She observed that they were cold during the Russian retreat because it took place in winter, but she wondered why they were cold now in Egypt? The answer lay in the snow falling from the sky, labelled ‘wrath of international public opinion’. The Anglo-French relationship was often portrayed as a marriage, and this cartoon was one of many in Ruz al-Yusuf in the months surrounding [ 264 ]

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Figure 9.11  Pol Ferjac, ‘La Bataille des Pyramides’, Le Canard enchaîné, 7 November 1956. All rights reserved.

the Suez Crisis that used the traditional male–female pairing of John Bull and Marianne, in this instance recast as Napoleon and Josephine, to allude to a marriage in trouble.58 The joint military operations ended on 6 November, and as the ‘Retreat’ cartoon suggested, they failed not due to military defeat on the ground but through the weight of international opposition.59 US President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles were furious that France and Britain had entered Suez without telling them first, deflecting attention from the Hungarian uprising and providing an opportunity for greater Soviet intervention in the Middle East, all on the eve of a presidential election.60 In retaliation the US withdrew key financial support from Britain, forcing the Anglo-French forces to leave Egypt without having accomplished their mission. At the UN General Assembly special session on 1 November, Dulles proposed a resolution calling on Britain, France, and Israel to cease the attack on Egypt. British and French troops were withdrawn, UN peacekeepers moved into Sinai, and the Suez Canal stayed in the hands of Egypt. The end result was [ 265 ]

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Figure 9.12  Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, Retreat, Ruz al-Yusuf, 19 November 1956.

a humiliated Britain and France (ultimately leading to Eden’s resignation, and the weakening of Mollet’s position as Premier), and an energised Egypt poised to assume leadership of the Arab world.61 The figure of world opinion frequently appeared in different guises in Zahdi al-ʾAduwi’s cartoons as the force holding Britain, France, and Israel accountable for their aggression and exposing their actions. This personification was in keeping with Egypt’s internationalist message in the 1950s and Nasser’s position as a leader of the Third World after the Bandung Conference, solidified as a result of Suez.62 By contrast, Britain and France portrayed themselves as victims targeted by world opinion for trying to restore order in Egypt, rather than aggressors. The campaign in Suez coincided with a violent Soviet crackdown on demonstrations in Hungary, and both Britain and France protested the hypocrisy of UN action against the Suez operation without similar action against the Soviets.63 British frustration with this double standard was highlighted in a 28 November 1956 Illingworth cartoon in Punch [ 266 ]

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Figure 9.13  Zahdi al-ʾAduwi, Untitled, Ruz al-Yusuf, 24 December 1956.

which showed Eden, Pineau, and David Ben Gurion (the Israeli prime minister) as schoolboys, writing ‘I must not bully’ under the glaring eye of schoolmarm UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, with a smiling Nasser looking on. At the same time, in the background a Soviet official pommelled a boy labelled Hungary. This cartoon reinforced a theme apparent in many of the Suez cartoons: the crisis signalled not only Anglo-French imperial decline, but also the changing of the imperial guard, with the banner of empire now held by the Cold War superpowers with their own form of economic imperialism. Cartoonists reflected on the fallout of the Suez Crisis for months afterward. Zahdi al-ʾAduwi used the Christmas holiday to present a humorous commentary on Eden’s changing fortunes in the 24 December 1956 issue of Ruz al-Yusuf (Figure 9.13). The caption informed readers that it was a Christmas tradition to present a turkey to the Master. The world, sleeves rolled up, was busily plucking the feathers from a turkey with Eden’s face. A book titled ‘How to Cook Imperialism’ lay under the table. Salah Jahin offered a blunt commentary on the changed relationship in a 7 January 1957 cartoon which showed a decapitated John Bull with a bloody knife, labelled ‘abrogation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty’, protruding from his back. He gasps, ‘that is enough … I am finally dead!’ (Figure 9.14). [ 267 ]

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Figure 9.14  Salah Jahin, Untitled, Ruz al-Yusuf, 7 January 1957.

Monuments to past imperial triumphs took on new meaning in the aftermath of Suez. In a 19 December 1956 cartoon in Le Canard enchaîné, J. Lap (Jacques Laplaine) appropriated the imagery of the obelisk of Luxor at the Place de la Concorde (the same monument featured in the August cartoon cited above – Figure 9.7). A tour guide showed visitors this powerful symbol of French Orientalism and imperial power, and then pointed out a tiny obelisk standing next to it, which he described as the monument to 1956. Pol Ferjac adopted Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’, used with great effect by Illingworth in Punch in September (Figure 9.8), for a 28 November cartoon in Le Canard (Figure 9.15). ‘The Burghers of Calais, 1956 version’ showed ‘the model of a statue which will replace the statue of de Lesseps at the entrance to the Canal’. Originally erected to celebrate western ingenuity and engineering prowess, the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, developer of the Suez Canal project, had become an embarrassment to Egypt as a symbol of western imperialism. In this imagined sculpture, Mollet and Eden sadly [ 268 ]

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Figure 9.15  Pol Ferjac, ‘Le Bourgeois de Calais (version 1956)’, Le Canard enchaîné, 28 November 1956. All rights reserved.

handed Nasser and Eisenhower the keys to Port-Said. Only a month after this cartoon appeared the statue of de Lesseps was blown up, a sign of how hated a symbol it had become.64 Salah Jahin also appropriated the de Lesseps statue in a 24 December 1956 Ruz al-Yusuf cartoon that showed the statue toppling off its base into the water. Titled ‘The Masses Destroy the De Lesseps Statue’, the caption included the moral: ‘whoever digs a hole … falls into it!!’ (Figure 9.16). Pol Ferjac used anthropomorphic images of the British lion and the French rooster and the imagery of the circus to portray imperial decline in Le Canard. His 24 April 1957 cartoon titled ‘Suez (Conclusion)’ showed Nasser as the ringmaster, holding hoops while an exhausted British lion and a scrawny French chanticleer jumped through. This image would have been quite at home in Ruz al-Yusuf, which had used similar imagery (mentioned above) in the lead-up to Suez. Another Pol Ferjac cartoon from 10 April 1957 provided a commentary on declining Anglo-French fortunes in the face of an ascendant United States. Titled ‘In the Cage’, it showed the same exhausted British lion and French rooster in a cage labelled ‘Uncle Ike’s menagery’, with the cowboy-hatted Eisenhower standing guard with his whip (Figure 9.17). The lion asked [ 269 ]

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Figure 9.16  Salah Jahin, ‘The Masses destroy the De Lesseps Statue’, Ruz al-Yusuf, 24 December 1956.

the rooster, ‘And Waterloo, do you remember that?’ And the Rooster replied, ‘Those were good times’. In the old days it was a simple case of Anglo-French rivalry, but the arrival of the United States as a major power dramatically altered the situation. Taken together these images conveyed a message of old imperial powers being supplanted by, on the one hand, the newly decolonised states and, on the other, a new imperial power in the form of the United States of America. The second cartoon was part of a special supplement of Le Canard devoted to Anglo-French relations in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s first state visit to France. The supplement included work by guest British cartoonists, including Ronald Searle, highlighting not only the shared sense of national defeat at Suez, but the cross-fertilisation that occurred between these publications. Illingworth also returned to the theme of imperial decline in a 9 January 1957 Punch cartoon entitled ‘Britannia in Decline’ (Figure 9.18). Old age as a symbol of weakness was a technique used in many of the cartoons of decolonisation, and in this case once-mighty Britannia was now an elderly woman, her shield was merely one of the wheels on her wheelchair, and her trident was the steering mechanism. This [ 270 ]

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Figure 9.17  Pol Ferjac, ‘Dans La Cage’, Le Canard enchaîné, 10 April 1957. All rights reserved.

Britannia stood in stark contrast to the mighty warrior of Bernard Partridge’s 1924 cartoon (see above – Figure 9.2). Illingworth’s image was accompanied by a parody of ‘Rule, Britannia’ titled ‘Fool, Britannia’.65 Humorist Sir Alan Patrick Herbert offered new lyrics that painted Britain’s imperial decline in terms of wasted and unappreciated efforts at development and progress, a theme apparent in many of the poems scattered through the Punch issues of the mid-1950s. After outlining the sweep of imperialism, from investment in colonies to ungrateful colonial subjects who failed to appreciate Britain’s sacrifices, the poet warned those at home who still believed in Britain’s obligations to her former subjects: ‘But no, Britannia, Britannia keep your gold, And let them bu-i-i-i-i-ild their own damned dams. Fool, Britannia! Too generous [ 271 ]

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Figure 9.18  Leslie Illingworth, ‘Britannia in Decline’, Punch, 9 January 1957.

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and rash. Cut your lo-o-o-o-oss and keep your cash’. Like Le Canard’s ‘In the Cage’ cartoon, the poem concludes with a reference to the glory days of the Napoleonic Wars: ‘Fool, Britannia! Forget the Nelson touch: Learn to dwi-i-i-i-indle, like the Dutch’. The Suez Crisis is viewed not only as the closing act of the British and French empires in the Middle East, but also as one of the most egregious examples of diplomatic duplicity. The cartoons examined here are particularly valuable because they allow the twenty-first-century viewer to separate what is now known about the crisis from what was known as the events unfolded. Malcolm Muggeridge, editor of Punch during the Suez Crisis, observed that the power of the political cartoonist lay ‘in his power to capture, in a way which is possible in no other medium, the fleeting, dancing particles of history. Words which belong to the moment for the most part perish with the moment.’66 These images provide an immediacy missing from historical accounts of the conflict or from memoirs drafted with posterity in mind. They are also valuable because they show both coloniser and colonised coming to terms with rapidly changing power dynamics in the context of decolonisation and turning to traditional imperialist imagery to do so. Whether it was the Punch technique of recrafting famous imperial cartoons to fit the new context, Le Canard’s appropriation of classic Orientalist tropes or repeated use of the slogan ‘Nil Novi’, or Ruz al-Yusuf’s use of visual techniques such as national personification and anthropomorphism, all three publications drew extensively from the deep well of imperialist cartoons and imagery of Anglo-Egyptian relations to comment on the new post-imperial relationship. For Egypt the crisis represented a moment of national triumph with Nasser as the hero.67 For many French and British observers the crisis represented the nadir of imperial fortunes, leading to the fall of governments and national soul-searching. Egyptian cartoonist Zahdi al-ʾAduwi observed, ‘Cartoons are a means to make you swallow the medicine without bitterness.’68 While in 1956 he was busy recording this moment of Egyptian triumph, perhaps the cartoons of his French and British counterparts at Punch and Le Canard enchaîné helped their readers to swallow the bitter medicine that was the Suez Crisis.

Notes 1 In addition to the other chapters in this volume, see: Roy Douglas, ‘Great Nations Still Enchained’: The Cartoonists’ Vision of Empire 1848–1914, New York: Routledge, 1993. For an example of the ways in which these images were reappropriated in the context of Indian decolonisation, see: Ritu Gairola Khanduri, Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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C RI TI Q U E O F EM P IR E 2 The Suez Crisis has inspired a wealth of historical studies, including Keith Kyle’s definitive work: Suez (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), and Guy Laron’s reassessment of the roots of the crisis: Origins of the Suez Crisis (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013). 3 Timothy S. Benson and Anthony Gorst tell the story of the crisis through the wonderful collection of political cartoons they have assembled in: Suezcide: A Cartoon History of the 1956 Suez Crisis, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2006. 4 For historical background see: Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr, Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation-State, second edition, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004, pp. 41–102; Robert T. Harrison, Britain in the Middle East 1619–1971, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016; Kyle, Suez, pp. 12–21. 5 Zachary Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, pp. 245–259; Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt, pp. 35–36. 6 Donald Malcolm Reid, ‘The ‘Urabi Revolution and the British Conquest, 1879–1882’, and M. W. Daly, ‘The British Occupation, 1882–1922’, in M. W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 217–238 and 239–251; Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt, pp. 46–53 and 64–66. 7 Daly, ‘British Occupation’, pp. 249–251; Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt, pp. 66–72. 8 Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt, pp. 77–78. 9 Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt, pp. 85–89; Selma Botman, ‘The Liberal Age, 1923–1952’, in M. W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 298–304. 10 Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt, pp. 90–108. 11 Anthony Eden, Full Circle: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden, London: Cassell, 1960, p. 352. 12 Anthony Nutting, No End of a Lesson: The Inside Story of the Suez Crisis, New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967, pp. 17–18 and 31–35; Kyle, Suez, pp. 89–96. 13 Kyle, Suez, pp. 72–78. 14 Laron, Origins of the Suez Crisis, pp. 136–140. 15 Reem Abou-El-Fadl, ‘Neutralism Made Positive: Egyptian Anticolonialism on the Road to Bandung’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42 (2), 2015, p. 220; Rami Ginat, ‘Nasser and the Soviets: A Reassessment’, in Elie Podeh and Onn Winckler (eds), Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004, pp. 230–250. 16 Kyle, Suez, pp. 95–96; Nutting, No End of a Lesson, pp. 17 and 31–35. 17 Michael Quentin Morton, Buraimi: The Struggle for Power, Influence and Oil in Arabia, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014, pp. 192–204; J. B. Kelly, ‘The Buraimi Oasis Dispute’, International Affairs, 32 (3), July 1956, pp. 318–326. 18 Timothy S. Benson, Illingworth: Political Cartoons from the Daily Mail 1939–69, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2009, pp. 15–18; Mark Bryant, Illingworth’s War in Cartoons: One Hundred of His Greatest Daily Mail Drawings 1939–1945, London: Grub Street, 2009, pp. 21–25. 19 Benson and Gorst, Suezcide; Benson, Illingworth, pp. 137–145. 20 Benson, Illingworth, p. 19. 21 Bernard Partridge, ‘To All Whom It Concerns’, Punch, 3 December 1924, p. 631. 22 Goldschmidt, Modern Egypt, p. 74; Botman, ‘The Liberal Age’, p. 291. 23 Khalid Muḥammad Aḥmad Manṣur ʻAzab, and Muḥammad Sayyid, Ruz al-Yusuf: 80 sanah ṣiḥafah, Cairo: Maktabat al-Iskandariyah, 2006, pp. 274–306. 24 For biographical sketches of these cartoonists see: Mansur ‘Azab and Sayyid, Ruz al-Yusuf, pp. 334–345. 25 Literacy rate taken from World Bank, World Development Report, 1960, quoted in: Paul Rivlin, ‘Nasser’s Egypt and Park’s Korea: A Comparison of Their Economic Achievements’, in Podeh and Winckler (eds), Rethinking Nasserism, p. 268. 26 For the role of political cartoons in the Middle East see the chapters by Marilyn Booth, Eliane Ursula Ettmueller, and Elif Elmas in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013, pp. 187–303; Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, ‘The Cartoon in Egypt’, Comparative Studies in Society

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27

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28 29 30

31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

and History, 13 (1), 1971, pp. 2–15; and Fatma Müge Göçek, ‘Political Cartoons as a Site of Representation and Resistance in the Middle East’, in Fatma Müge Göçek (ed.), Political Cartoons in the Middle East, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998. Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume I: The Founders, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, pp. 128–130 and 132; Frankie Morris, Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005, pp. 241–242; Shefali Rajamannar, Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012, pp. 170–172. David Low, Low’s Autobiography, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, p. 211. For a brief biography of the cartoonist see: Mansur ‘Azab and Sayyid, Ruz al-Yusuf, pp. 350–352. See above – Chapter 8, by Keren Zdafee; Marsot, ‘Cartoon in Egypt’, pp. 13–14; Lucie Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity through the “New Effendiya”’, in Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni (eds), Re-Envisioning Egypt 1919–1952, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005, pp. 124–163. Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996 [reprint of Oxford University Press, 1992], pp. 191–192. Gordon includes a number of cartoons from Ruz al-Yusuf from the early revolutionary period in the Appendix. Leonard Binder, ‘Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser: Iconology, Ideology, and Demonology’, in Podeh and Winckler (eds), Rethinking Nasserism, pp. 45–71; Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 40–41. For representations of Nasser in various mediums, see: Omar Khalifah, ‘Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary’, Dissertation, Columbia University, 2013, pp. 6–9. See above: Scully & Varnava, Chapter 1. Quoted in: Kyle, Suez, p. 43. Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 102–116. Quoted in: Kyle, Suez, pp. 144–145. Elie Podeh, ‘Israeli Perceptions of Nasser and Nasserism’, in Podeh and Winckler (eds), Rethinking Nasserism, pp. 72–99; Kyle, Suez, pp. 95–96. Eden, Full Circle, pp. 440–441; David Dutton, Anthony Eden: A Life and Reputation, London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 384–388. The French satire magazine Le Canard enchaîné first appeared in 1915. Translated as ‘the chained duck’, this magazine took the name of an old newspaper of the 74th infantry regiment. It also took advantage of the popular use of the word ‘canard’ as a slang term for newspapers and the word ‘enchaîné’ was added to protest and mock increasing censorship during the First World War. For the early years of le Canard see: Allen Douglas, War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor: The Canard Enchaine and World War I, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Le Canard’s average circulation for 1956 was 146,315. Laurent Martin, Le Canard enchaîné or les Fortunes de la vertu: Histoire d’un journal satirique 1915–2000, Paris: Flammarion, 2001, p. 700. It became the most popular of the French leftist weeklies and politically the paper was known for being anti-clerical, anti-imperialist, and pacifist. Pierre Albert, Louis Charlet, Robert Rang, and Fernand Terrou, Histoire Générale de la presse française, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972, pp. 385 and 568; Jean Egen, Messieurs du Canard, Paris: Editions Stock, 1973. Also see: Stéphanie Krapoth, ‘Le Canard enchaîné (1915 puis 1916 …, Paris)’, Ridiculosa, 18 – Le revues satiriques francaises, 2011, pp. 279–283. ‘On se l’arrache!’, Le Canard enchaîné, 27 June 1956. Kyle, Suez, pp. 127–130. Gamal Abdel Nasser, ‘Speech by President Nasser, Alexandria, July 26 [extract]’, in The Suez Canal Problem: July 26–September 22, 1956: A Documentary Publication, Washington, DC: US Department of State, 1956, pp. 25–30.

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C RI TI Q U E O F EM P IR E 42 Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 139; Low, Autobiography, p. 21. 43 Mansur ‘Azab and Sayyid, Ruz al-Yusuf, p. 337. 44 Douglas and Douglas, Arab Comic Strips, p. 38. 45 ‘The Dramatic Gambit’, Time, 30 July 1956, p. 9. 46 Laron, Origins of the Suez Crisis, p. 146; Kyle, Suez, p. 130. 47 Anthony S. Wohl, ‘“Ben JuJu”: Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian Political Cartoon’, Jewish History, 10 (2), Fall 1996, pp. 89–114 and Anthony S. Wohl, ‘“Dizi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as Alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (3), July 1995, pp. 375–411. 48 Muggeridge, ‘Eden in Eggitto’, Punch, 25 February 1953, p. 254. 49 Martin, Le Canard enchaîné, pp. 299–310. 50 Connelly, Diplomatic Revolution, pp. 102–116. 51 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979. For analysis of Orientalist imagery in comic strips, see: Lahsen Azerki, ‘L’image de l’Orient dans la literature dessinée Occidentale’, L’Image Pédagogie et Education: Cas de la Bande Dessinée, Conference Proceedings, Méknes: Université Moulay Ismail, 1992, pp. 133–137; Y. Ait Hammou, ‘L’Image de l’Arabe dans la B.D’, L’Image Pédagogie et Education: Cas de la Bande Dessinée, Conference Proceedings, Méknes: Université Moulay Ismail, 1992, pp. 139–147. 52 Allen Douglas, ‘Between Racism and Antimilitarism: The Canard Enchaîné and France’s Colonial Wars of the 1920s’, in L. Carl Brown and Matthew S. Gordon (eds), Franco-Arab Encounters: Studies in Memory of David C. Gordon, Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1996, p. 92. 53 For a detailed discussion of these varied attempts, see: Kyle, Suez, pp. 135–331. 54 For background on the sculpture see: Richard Swedberg, ‘Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais: The Career of a Sculpture and its Appeal to Civic Heroism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 22 (2), 2005, pp. 45–60. For the persistent appeal of Froissart’s work for cartoonists, see: Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume III: Heirs and Successors, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, pp. 80–82. 55 Kyle, Suez, pp. 219–222. 56 Kyle, Suez, pp. 314–331 and 565–567. 57 Kyle, Suez, pp. 347–352 and 382–385. 58 Richard Davis, ‘The Anglo-French Relationship as seen through British Political Cartoons, from the Third to the Fifth Republic’, Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, 1 (1), 2003, pp. 19–25, at: https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/3118, accessed 14 April 2019. 59 Kyle, Suez, pp. 392–396. 60 Steven Z. Freiberger, Dawn Over Suez: The Rise of American Power in the Middle East, 1953–1957, Blue Ridge Summit: Ivan R. Dee, 2007, pp. 117–119. 61 Laron, Origins of the Suez Crisis, p. 184. 62 Christopher Lee, ‘Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung’, in Christopher Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010, pp. 15–18. 63 Kyle, Suez, pp. 376–380 and 558–559. 64 Karabell, Parting the Desert, p. 270. 65 ‘Fool, Britannia’, Punch, 9 January 1957, pp. 84–85. 66 Quoted in: Bryant, Illingworth’s War in Cartoons, p. 29. 67 Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 50–53. 68 Quoted in: Mansur ‘Azab and Sayyid, Ruz al-Yusuf, p. 336.

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Punch and the Cyprus emergency, 1955–1959 Andrekos Varnava and Casey Raeside

In recent years numerous scholars have published studies on the views of Punch on British politics, foreign policy, and imperialism, especially from the 1870s to the 1910s, which show that Punch was critical of British foreign and imperial ventures. This chapter shifts the focus onto the end of empire, exploring one of the few violent episodes of British decolonisation, the case of Cyprus. During the early hours of 1 April 1955, in what the British soon realised was no April Fool’s Day joke, the Greek Cypriot nationalist group EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών – National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) attacked British targets and government and military personal on the island, aiming to force the British government to cede Cyprus to Greece (enosis). During the four years of violence, which consisted of both state and non-state terror that led the island into civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriot armed groups and the British security forces, successive British Conservative governments, under Anthony Eden and then Harold Macmillan, attempted to hold onto the island because of its perceived strategic importance to British Middle East defence policy. What views did Punch and its cartoonists, traditionally critical of imperialism, take of this violent episode during the end of empire? Did it support the Conservative government’s policies and propaganda efforts, or was it critical of them? This chapter, by focusing on the six Punch cartoons on the Cyprus ‘emergency’, shows that although Punch had not lost its humour it had lost its acerbic radical critical thinking. The historiography of the Cyprus ‘emergency’, from 1955 to 1959, is very rich, certainly by comparison to other periods of British rule of Cyprus, between 1878 and 1960.1 Numerous books and journal articles have been published: mainly on why the Greek Cypriot right-wing [ 277 ]

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leadership reverted to violence to achieve enosis and why there was no compromise until 1959; on how the British reacted to the violence; on how the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey reacted; and on the ramifications for the Cypriots during and immediately after negotiations resulted in independence.2 Very little has been published on ‘the emergency’ and the media.3 The exception is the excellent work by Susan Carruthers, which was a detailed exploration of the print media on British interpretations of EOKA violence, British official propaganda in Cyprus, the British presentation of EOKA’s activities, and the focus on Archbishop Makarios III, the political leader of the enosis movement, as the ‘arch-terrorist’.4 Carruthers also discussed the importance of images, focusing on newspapers and film, but did not explore Punch and cartoons from other sources.5 The historiography of cartoons and Cyprus also features only one publication, an article dealing with the British occupation in 1878.6 It is of interest as a comparison for two reasons: first to compare the position of Punch on the policies of a Conservative government in crisis in Cyprus; and secondly to compare the approach and style of the cartoons themselves. It will be seen that Punch had not totally lost the comparatively radical views it held in the 1870s or its criticism of imperialism, yet the criticism was far more subtle, and there were those who supported the position of the government. Also the cartoons of the 1950s were not as humorous or as acerbic as those from the 1870s and they expressed more a resignation that the empire was in decline rather than a criticism of empire. As is well known, Punch or the London Charivari was a satirical journal founded in 1841 by Henry Mayhew, Ebenezer Landells, and Mark Lemon, after being inspired by the satirical French periodical, Le Charivari.7 From the beginning Punch editors claimed political impartiality, demonstrated through their statement that ‘“Punch” has no party prejudices’.8 This impartiality was not necessarily adhered to throughout its history. Mayhew began Punch with a Liberal-Radical lean, which at various points in its history waned and strengthened according to the particular editor.9 Often the illustrators and editors had different political sympathies, which would play itself out in the pages of Punch. When engaging with cartoons as historical sources it is necessary to examine the historical political context of the cartoon to understand the intended meaning. Richard Scully states this explicitly: historians using cartoons must research the cultural context in which a cartoon was created, including not only the background of the cartoonist,

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or the political leaning of its publisher, but also the contemporary allusions made by the cartoonist in putting his/her message across.10

It is important to explore the political nature of the periodical and the individual editors and cartoonists involved in the production of the cartoons. Unfortunately there has been no general study of the history of Punch post-Second World War, and much of the scholarly work surrounds the Victorian cartoonists and the first 50 years of the publication.11 It is therefore necessary to explore the cartoonists and editors, and their politics, in this light. There were two editors during the period of the Cyprus emergency. Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor between 1953 and 1957, was the son of Henry Thomas Benjamin Muggeridge, a Labour MP during the interwar years, but after visiting Russia in the 1930s developed anti-communist sympathies, and some right-wing views.12 Bernard Hollowood followed Muggeridge, who resigned in 1957 after the circulation of Punch fell, and ran Punch until 1968. Hollowood, unlike Muggeridge, was a career illustrator and editor, with less political motivation.13 Both editors used a variety of illustrators throughout their editorships, each with their own political views and style. As was often the case with Punch, the editors allowed the illustrators significant leeway, thus making analysis of the illustrator more important than the editor. Yet the illustrators worked within the environment set by Muggeridge and Hollowood, who gave ultimate approval for the publication of their cartoons. From the early days of Punch the editors gathered with the writers and artists at the ‘Punch Dinner’. The purpose of this was and remained to broaden the men’s view of things, to produce harmony of tone and singleness of aim, to keep the Editor constantly in touch with his whole Staff, and through them with the public; and thus to secure the fullest advantage which their combined wit and counsel could afford.14

Punch contributed to the political debates on imperial and foreign affairs from its inception and it was no different after the Second World War. On the events in Cyprus after the outbreak of violence in April 1955, Punch published six cartoons referring to ‘the emergency’. Though focused on different themes, they were remarkably consistent in presenting a defence of the Conservative governments’ (under Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan) desire to not surrender Cyprus. The cartoons viewed the violence in Cyprus as a Greco-Turkish feud, started by the Greek Cypriot demand for enosis, and not by British imperialism. Yet the cartoons from 1958 also exhibit a subtle criticism of the British policy in allowing the crisis to get out of control and a resignation that the British Empire, at least in relation to this case, was in decline. [ 279 ]

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On 1 April 1955 bombs exploded throughout Cyprus. The armed struggle of EOKA for enosis had started. The Cyprus ‘problem’ does not begin nor does it end on this day; this period, known as ‘the struggle’ by some Greek Cypriots, or by the British as ‘the emergency’, was merely one phase of a series of hot and cold conflicts since about 1910. In order to understand the main focus of this chapter, it is important, albeit in brief, to understand the dynamics of ‘the emergency’, particularly why the enosis movement became violent. The enosis movement crystallised after the Second World War and even then not every ‘Greek’ Cypriot was behind it, let alone supportive of the use of violence. In the traditional historiography, enosis ‘naturally’ developed in the course of the growth of nationalism in the island, justified because it was the desire of the majority of the population, with the violence from 1955 being attributed to Greek Cypriot frustrations.15 In reality, most of the secular political and economic elites and the Cypriot Orthodox Church hierarchy did not unite behind enosis until the decade-old archiepiscopal dispute ended in 1910 with a win for the pro-enosis camp.16 Even then there were ups and downs for the movement, while it did not begin to really penetrate the masses, mostly peasants and rural agricultural labourers, until after the Second World War.17 During the interwar years the enosis movement became very autocratic and absolutist, leading to the disastrous riots of October 1931 that burned down government house. In the traditional historiography, including the British evaluation of the causes, enosis leaders are blamed.18 Indeed many were exiled. But this interpretation conflates two different movements: one from the peasants protesting against government policies (and inaction) in light of the Great Depression hitting the island; and another from the enosis and communist leaders, who both sensed an opportunity.19 In the crackdown that followed the enosis movement petered out, but the British refused to work with the new pro-constitution leaders that emerged.20 The most extreme pro-enosis elements became even more extreme, even going as far as assassination against those working with the colonial government.21 It was only after the Second World War that it became clear that the British had lost the ‘battle’ for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the rural and labouring population, in part because the enosis leaders still alive were rehabilitated. The enosis movement re-emerged under old and new nationalist leaders, especially Archbishops Makarios II, a former exile (1931–1946), and the young Makarios III, who succeeded him after his death in 1950. The movement was decidedly anti-communist, especially since the formation of AKEL (Ανορθωτικό Κόμμα Εργαζόμενου Λαού – The Progressive Party of Working People) in 1942 resulted in a more inclusive [ 280 ]

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communist movement that adopted enosis, pushing the right/nationalists into the inflexible ‘enosis and only enosis’ position, which led it to reject British constitutional proposals.22 This lack of representative institutions (since they were suspended in 1931 and rejected in 1946) and the halt to political modernisation in Cyprus partly explains the recourse to violence in 1955 by EOKA – the political elites in Cyprus had no experience of representative government and pluralism, especially given the opposition to enosis from the 20 per cent minority of Muslim Turks.23 The violence was led by a Cypriot-born colonel in the Greek army, George Grivas, who Makarios III had authorised to make plans for violence in 1951.24 On 2 April 1955, The Times reported on the EOKA sabotage and explosions in the island with the following headline: ‘Terrorism in Cyprus. 16 Simultaneous Outrages. Explosions in four Towns. Men Detained.’25 Punch, along with leading newspapers – such as the Daily Mail (started commenting in May), and the Illustrated London News (started commenting in July) – took a while to report and comment.26 One of the first significant comments in Punch on ‘the Cyprus emergency’ was an article by the well-known Irish journalist Claud Cockburn on 23 November 1955. Cockburn, in his ‘Over-All Outlook’ satirically covering the events of the year, from a cynical perspective, included a paragraph on Cyprus: Keep your mind off Cyprus: it did not exist until a certain type of sensational newspaper found it necessary to invent it. The same is true of Smog and that man diving through the ice on the Serpentine.27

The ‘sensational newspaper’ was probably The Times, which had been writing about the events in Cyprus. Telling Punch readers to keep their minds off Cyprus was interesting, because it could be read in two ways: 1) as reflecting the government position that the crises would be resolved, and indeed a State of Emergency was not declared until 26 November; or 2) as criticising the government for taking such a flippant attitude. Given that Punch had published very little on Cyprus, it is probably the former.28 Yet after the debate on Cyprus in the House of Commons on 5 December 1955, it started making frequent references to the Cyprus crisis. The cartoon ‘Mr Griffiths’ (Figure 10.1) appeared in Punch on 14 December 1955, drawn by Michael Cummings, a Conservative political supporter, Churchill’s favourite cartoonist, and a prolific cartoonist on the Cyprus emergency, producing at least 27 cartoons on Cyprus between 1955 and 1959.29 Cummings had begun working for Punch in 1953 and continued with them for the next 30 years.30 Punch had not discussed [ 281 ]

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Figure 10.1  Michael Cummings, ‘Mr Griffiths’, Punch, 14 December 1955, p. 712.

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Cyprus much following the outbreak of violence, but after the 5 December debate in the House of Commons Cummings decided to change that. It appeared on the same page as the regular Punch article ‘Essence of Parliament’, written by Christopher Hollis, who had earlier in the year retired from his Conservative seat after having been a centrist Tory; he had supported many policies that his party opposed, such as the abolition of capital punishment.31 His independent thinking was reflected in his comment on Cyprus: Mr Macmillan, it now appears, stands for self-government now, and self-determination ‘some time’ and Archbishop Makarios for selfgovernment now and self-determination ‘at some fixed point in the future’. The British people notoriously dislike foreign ecclesiastics who interfere in politics … yet the difference between the two parties is, as Mr Macmillan, says, ‘narrow’ … a narrow difference with Mr Macmillan is not necessarily bridgeable … Yet it will be a tragedy if out of such a narrow difference a running sore of guerrilla warfare is allowed to develop.32

Clearly Hollis did not think Macmillan, the Foreign Secretary, who had failed to get his way at the London Conference on Cyprus in August, was the best person to resolve such a delicate situation. The cartoon, however, takes a swipe at the Labour opposition. It refers to the speech in the House of Commons on 5 December 1955 by James Griffiths, a senior Welsh Labour politician and former Secretary of State for the Colonies (February 1950 to the 1951 election). The cartoon caricatures Griffiths preaching a sermon from a pulpit, wearing underneath an outer white robe the traditional attire of an Eastern Orthodox Archbishop, with black clerical garments and the klobuk: a cylindrical flat hat (kamilavka) and long veil (epanokamelavkion) that covers the hat and hangs over the shoulders. Cummings drew a direct correlation between Griffiths and Archbishop Makarios III, thus equating Griffiths’s sympathies with Makarios’s. Griffiths is also wearing an alb (white overgarment worn by Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist clergy) over the top of the black clerical garments. Over each shoulder he has a stole, a band of cloth that sits on the shoulders and back of the neck and hangs down on both sides, which is also worn by the same western Christian denominations as the alb. Cummings linked the enosis cause of the Cypriot Eastern Orthodox Church with that of the Anglican Church, even though Griffiths was a non-conformist. To the contemporary readership the outer garments would be readily recognised as representing the state religion of the Church of England. During 1955 the Church of England, Catholic Church, and the Council of Churches had become vocal in denouncing the Cypriot crisis,33 even [ 283 ]

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supporting Makarios,34 while his sermons were particularly inflammatory towards British rule.35 Griffiths, who was a passionate speaker, hence his tears, was being accused of being pro-Makarios, since he is speaking like him. Indeed Cummings criticised Griffiths for accepting the principle of self-determination, mocking the title of his speech: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’. This suggests that Griffiths wanted to give Cyprus away – enosis. In his real speech Griffiths stated nothing of the sort: We have still not got it clear whether the Government now accept and recognise the principle of self-determination as applied to Cyprus … Let us be perfectly clear, therefore, that, unless we accept the principle as applying to the people of Cyprus, there can be no settlement.36

Griffiths believed, despite what Hollis wrote on Macmillan, that the government was not willing to concede the right of self-determination to Cyprus and that this was the direct cause of the crisis. Cyprus, he believed, should not be allowed to ‘drift’,37 like Malaya and Kenya; therefore it was paramount to concede self-determination to the Cypriots. Griffiths was roundly criticised on various points by Conservative Members of Parliament, reflected in what Lord Balniel, Robert Lindsay, said: at the moment the magic word ‘self-determination’ is synonymous with union with Greece … The one cry which we do not hear in the Eastern Mediterranean is the cry of ‘Cyprus for the Cypriots’.38

Cummings was reflecting Balniel’s views. In advocating for selfdetermination for Cyprus, Griffiths was supporting enosis. In attempting to instil in his readers that Griffiths was Makarios, Cummings was arguing that Griffiths and the opposition members were supporting Makarios and the terrorists. The debate on 5 December 1955 was the most significant parliamentary discussion of the Cypriot issue since 4 May 1955. Griffiths represented a large section of the Labour members in his plea to allow self-determination for the Cypriots, not just self-government. Balniel represented the Conservative opinion to reject it because it equated to enosis, in order to maintain British interests in the region. Eden’s position was represented in the debate by Macmillan and Allan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary. Both were restrained and presented the government’s position as one of developing ‘institutions of self-government with a view to the organised opinion of a territory being in a position to play its full part in determining its political future’.39 Punch, and Cummings in particular, openly attacked the idea of granting selfdetermination to the Cypriots and implicitly supported the rhetoric of [ 284 ]

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the Eden government, with a general criticism of the Labour and church views as being merely a tool in the hands of Makarios and Greece. Interestingly, Hollis took a different approach, believing that Macmillan had accepted the principle of self-determination for some time later, reflecting the differing views of Punch contributors. On 12 September 1956 ‘The Grivas Diaries’, by Mervyn Wilson, appeared in Punch (Figure 10.2). Wilson illustrated for Punch from 1935 until his death in 1959. Percy Venners suggested that Wilson’s great skill was his ability as an illustrator combined with a ‘special brand of harmless idiocy’.40 Wilson was not particularly political, though Muggeridge was still the editor in 1956. This cartoon refers to the events of September 1956, when 15,000 French troops joined the British in Cyprus in the build-up to the joint Anglo-French ‘Operation Musketeer’, the British-French-Israeli intervention in Egypt. 41 EOKA pamphlets threatened violence against the French troops if they assisted the British.42 French and British relations in Cyprus were tense, resulting in fights in Nicosia’s bars after the Egyptian operation. French soldiers attempted to demonstrate to the Cypriots that they did not support the British action in Cyprus.43 It was also discovered that the French had ‘leaked’ a large amount of weapons to EOKA.44 On 7 June 1956, while the British were searching for Grivas, alerted by search dogs, he escaped, but left behind some personal belongings, including parts of his diary.45 On 26 August, after the discovery of more sections of his diary, Lennox-Boyd shared extracts with the public,46 aiming to link Grivas and Makarios, who, according to the diaries, were in communication. The government condemned Makarios and later justified his exiling by the new governor, Sir John Harding, the former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in March 1956.47 The government had achieved a major propaganda coup and The Times lent its support on 27 August with the headlines ‘Archbishop Makarios Unmasked. Captured Documents Prove Terrorist Leadership. Apologists’ Theories “Blown Sky High”’.48 The British government further published 10,000 words from the diary out of a possible 250,000 words.49 It was during this intense interest in the diaries that the French military were in Cyprus as part of the Suez operations and that Wilson drew ‘The Grivas Diaries’. Wilson’s cartoon was more light-hearted than the other cartoons on Cyprus, yet just as political. His major character is a French officer who asks a Greek Cypriot newspaper-stand owner: ‘You ’ave ze Grivas Diaries in French?’ In the background Wilson reminds his readers that Cyprus is a war zone, with two British soldiers standing beside a tank. It is also a subtle criticism of the French while in Cyprus, who seem to be more interested in reading about the leader of the insurgents than [ 285 ]

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Figure 10.2  Mervyn Wilson, ‘The Grivas Diaries’, Punch, 12 September 1956, p. 294.

contributing to keeping the peace, leaving that to the British soldiers. The stall tender is caricatured as a Greek Cypriot. He is shown as lazy, unshaven, and fat: an example of the myth of the lazy native.50 His facial response to the question by the French soldier is priceless: he looks annoyed. The discovery of the Grivas diaries must have been aggravating for those Greek Cypriots who supported him. [ 286 ]

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Given his attack on the Times of Cyprus, which hangs in the Greek Cypriot’s stall, Wilson had some knowledge on the ‘emergency’. The editor of the Times of Cyprus during the emergency was Charles Foley (who from 1940 to 1955 was the foreign editor for The Daily Express), an enosis and Grivas sympathiser, stating in 1958: ‘I have sympathy for the Cypriots as a civilized people who have for generations been denied the ordinary rights of self-rule and freedom’.51 In 1956 Foley had been arrested for publishing anti-British articles,52 and after the conflict had ended he edited the English edition of Grivas’s memoirs. Therefore, Wilson linked the Greek Cypriot in the stand with Foley and as a Grivas supporter. Wilson is trying to say three things in this cartoon. He highlights the ignorance of the French soldiers on the Cyprus ‘emergency’. The French did not assist the British in preventing EOKA from damaging the Suez military preparations and operations,53 and they even sympathised with EOKA. He criticises the French for this, while the British troops, in the background, are doing the dirty work. Wilson also lumps all the Greek Cypriots into the EOKA camp. Eden’s government had used the diaries to score a propaganda victory against Makarios. However to the Greek Cypriots it was not news that Makarios and Grivas were working together, even though Makarios was increasingly unable to influence Grivas,54 and Greek Cypriot EOKA supporters were annoyed that their secret was out. On 25 June 1958, the cartoon ‘Next Round in Cyprus’ appeared, by Norman Mansbridge, the first of three cartoons in Punch by him on the Cyprus ‘emergency’ (Figure 10.3). Mansbridge had first illustrated for Punch in 1937, joining the Punch table in 1958, and was known for having no political convictions.55 At the time of this cartoon Hollowood had replaced the more political Muggeridge. Mansbridge’s cartoons on Cyprus still demonstrated a Conservative lean, although they also exhibited a subtle criticism of the party’s approach to the crisis. By June 1958 the situation in Cyprus had deteriorated significantly. Most of the Turkish Cypriot leaders, and the Turkish government and military, had become fully engaged with the events in Cyprus, through their militant organisation, TMT (Türk Mukavemet Teşkilati), and with the political future of the island, advocating taksim, partition of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey.56 All three sides committed violent acts against each other57 as the island drifted into a civil war, which the British could not control,58 and which was supported by two governments, Greece and Turkey. The third government involved, the British, encouraged this state of affairs in order to hold onto the island, and demanded that its strategic interests take precedence. By June 1958 [ 287 ]

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Figure 10.3  Norman Mansbridge, ‘Next Round in Cyprus’, Punch, 25 June 1958, p. 829.

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Macmillan, now the British Prime Minister after Eden’s Suez escapade fell foul, proposed the ‘Partnership Plan’ for Cyprus. Although claiming that the British only wanted bases in Cyprus, Macmillan’s government did not offer to relinquish total sovereignty over the entire island. The plan proposed the continuation of British sovereignty over all of Cyprus unless a tri-condominium was accepted, whereby sovereignty would be shared between Britain, Greece, and Turkey, and small bases retained under exclusive British sovereignty; meanwhile, under British rule, Greece and Turkey would have representatives in a new government, while the Cypriots would be granted a constitution with separate houses of representatives for each community. Macmillan pursued this plan, even though Greece opposed it and Cypriot leaders would not work with the British to implement it, thus leaving one partner, Turkey.59 This was the environment in which Mansbridge situated his cartoon. He drew a boxing ring with two young and fit fighters, their identities determined by the country on the trainers’ backs (one from Greece and the other from Turkey) and various stereotypical features. The Greek fighter appears determined, confident and uninjured, and is being loudly and vehemently supported, with his trainer urging him on, and by an unmistakable Archbishop Makarios, who is smiling from ear to ear in approval of his performance. The Turkish fighter is also determined, confident and uninjured. His trainer, in keeping with the stereotype of the more stoic Turk, is providing more measured encouragement. His supporters in the crowd are as loud as the Greeks, and both are holding guns, with the Turkish supporters also carrying swords, representing the military support of Greece and Turkey to EOKA and TMT. The referee, Macmillan, is dishevelled and in distress, hanging onto the ropes, seemingly unable to control the fight. While the two boxers appear uninjured, Macmillan, who appears to have been their target, is being fanned by an official from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in an effort to resuscitate him for another round, without getting too close or personal, whereas the Turkish and Greek trainers are in the faces of their fighters. Apart from the individual supporters, the fight is being viewed by a large crowd of well-dressed men, possibly the international community. Seated at or around the judges’ table, these men are wearing suits and some are smoking cigars. This international audience is watching a fight over Cyprus between Turkey and Greece, with Britain and NATO in the middle trying to keep the two sides apart and to ensure a clean fight. The audience relates to Eden’s original tactic to internationalise the problem, following on from Makarios’s internationalisation efforts at the UN and the Bandung conference.60 To this end Macmillan, then the Foreign Secretary, had organised the Tripartite Conference in 1955, [ 289 ]

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which as he told the Cabinet aimed to embrace a policy whereby ‘the more unlikely it appeared that the Greeks and Turks would be able to accept our proposals, the more forthcoming such a plan should be’.61 Eden said as much in his memoirs: ‘it was well … that they [the Turks] should speak out, because it was the truth that the Turks would never let the Greeks have Cyprus’.62 Turkey, Britain’s ally in the Baghdad Pact, formed only a few days after EOKA started its activities, was only too willing to become involved, leaving the British in the position of arbitrator between two sides who were unlikely, at least in the Conservative government’s calculations, to compromise. Macmillan asked whether the Cyprus crisis was a ‘colonial problem, an international problem, a political problem, or a strategical [sic] problem? I think … that it partakes of all those problems’.63 Mansbridge was drawing the international community, sitting back and watching the fight over Cyprus with emotionless interest. They do not appear to support the British and NATO. The inclusion of NATO on the British side when it came to Cyprus was incorrect. NATO had often declared an interest to mediate between the three NATO allies, but the British had rebuffed them until March 1957, and then in summer 1957 Macmillan rejected NATO’s preferred solution, independence, in deference to a tri-condominium.64 The main question with the cartoon is whether Mansbridge supported the British government’s tactic to position itself between Greece and Turkey in order to hold onto Cyprus. He clearly shows that the fight was not finished and that there would be a ‘next round’, but asks whether Macmillan can go another round. In the cartoon Macmillan is on the verge of collapse and in reality so is the British position in Cyprus, whereas Greece and Turkey, supporting and supported by the Greek and Turkish Cypriots respectively, can go on and on. Although Mansbridge does not criticise the Macmillan government’s desire to hold onto Cyprus, he is saying that its tactic of positioning itself in the middle and framing the conflict as a Greco-Turkish dispute would backfire unless it was willing to continue to take the blows. Finally, Mansbridge, as with his next cartoon, does not include the British as perpetrators of the violence, but as its victims. He claims that the violence was not merely on the ground in Cyprus, but also in the diplomatic arena. His second cartoon, which appeared on 16 July 1958 (Figure 10.4), clearly answers whether Macmillan can go another round, since the British Empire, represented as a dead (or sleeping) lion, is obviously in decay. As mentioned, by July 1958, Cyprus was almost in a state of civil war and the British government’s proposed solution, Macmillan’s Partnership Plan, was not acceptable to the Greek side. In this cartoon Mansbridge agrees with Harding, now Lord Harding of [ 290 ]

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Figure 10.4  Norman Mansbridge, ‘And Passed By on the Other Side’, Punch, 16 July 1958, p. 67.

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Petherton, who was replaced as governor by Sir Hugh Foot,65 who claimed in Parliament that peace could return to Cyprus only if the Greek and Turkish prime ministers, and Makarios, stopped turning a blind eye to the violence on the island. Yet he also argues that the British Empire is asleep or worse dead and therefore, unless the lion wakes up, there is no turning back – Cyprus will be severed from the empire. The cartoon depicts a story known to anyone familiar with the New Testament. Mansbridge reproduced the Good Samaritan story, in which an individual is assaulted, two religious leaders pass by without assisting, with a third, the victim’s enemy, stopping to help.66 Mansbridge, however, changes the traditional story to one where nobody stops for the victim, which is interesting because he could have drawn a British figure, perhaps Macmillan, in this role. The three characters walking by are: the prime ministers of Greece and Turkey and between them Archbishop Makarios III. The victim is a man strewn over rocks at the base of a cliff, with ‘Cyprus’ on his pants, and clearly he is a British soldier, lying, as he does, on the paw of the lion that represents the British Empire. The setting is Cyprus, with its bare mountains and valleys. The main point is that the three men are turning a blind eye to the violence that is killing the island, which they are accused of being responsible for, while the British have either already been defeated or are merely sleeping and thus allowing this to transpire. This is shown in the caption, which is a quote from Harding’s speech in Parliament on 8 July 1958, where he added that the crisis could never be resolved through military action alone and that ‘unless the three men whom I have named are prepared to act, there will continue to be violence and disorder in Cyprus’.67 Mansbridge referred directly to only the content of that one particular phrase as captioned, but he does not ignore the rest of Harding’s speech. Harding definitely placed the majority of the blame on the ‘three men’, yet he finished his speech by appealing to the government to work with the ‘guilty men’: If it is shown throughout this country that we as a nation accept the principle of partnership as applied to Cyprus, and are determined to see it established for Cyprus, and to foot whatever bill may come our way in the process of seeing that principle established, then I think that in time it will be accepted, and peace, which we all so ardently desire for Cyprus, will come back to all the people whose homes are in that lovely island.68

To be sure, Mansbridge does not blame the British for the violence, but he does, as Harding does, claim through the sleeping or dead lion [ 292 ]

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that the British Empire is either finished in Cyprus or sleeping on the job. The British are seemingly, once again, shown not to be in control. Ultimately, Mansbridge was warning of further carnage in Cyprus because of the inaction of the three guilty men, and warning that the British Empire in Cyprus was coming to an end. In his speech Harding suggested that if the ‘three men’ did not curb the violence then British forces would be required to do it, and if that were to happen ‘then the battle between the forces of law and order on one side, and those who seek to take the law into their own hands on the other, will have to be fought to a finish’.69 This would result in the crippling or even killing of Cyprus by the British forces. Leaving aside whether the British had the ability or will to follow through with this approach, Mansbridge agrees with the Harding mentality that to avoid more bloodshed the prime ministers of Greece and Turkey, and Makarios, must compromise from their maximalist positions. Yet Mansbridge also argues that the British are unlikely to increase the violence, for they are at best asleep and at worst already dead in Cyprus. On 30 July 1958 Punch published a full-page cartoon by Ronald Searle, one of the most versatile artists of his day, titled ‘Summit’, which situates Cyprus alongside various other violent crises raging in the world.70 The cartoon features a volcano erupting (Figure 10.5). Out of the volcano appear the words ‘Middle East’, ‘Germany’, ‘Formosa’, ‘H-Bomb’, ‘Cyprus’, and ‘Algeria’, and thus the cartoon refers to various violent crises in the world. The violence in Cyprus, as previously stated, was worsening by the day by mid-1958. Turkish and Greek Cypriot fighters were fighting each other and the British security forces, who were increasingly struggling to keep the peace, and resorting to their own violent methods of state repression. On 15 July 1958 William Ward, the Earl of Dudley, a Conservative politician in the House of Commons, drew attention to the murder of two British servicemen shot in the back when they were buying groceries in Famagusta on 8 July 1958.71 The British were losing control of what they argued was a strategic asset, since they could not maintain the security of their own forces. On 15 May 1958 the Turkish Foreign Minister, Fatin Rustu Zorlu, had told the British ambassador to Turkey, Sir James Bowker, that if the British could not restore order in Cyprus, ‘a small Turkish force might be dispatched to do the job’.72 Macmillan’s Partnership Plan was being introduced but with no partners. By including Cyprus, Searle shows he considered the ‘emergency’ on a par with the other crises. The Cypriot crisis, along with the other crises – a mixture of colonial (French Algeria) and postcolonial (Middle [ 293 ]

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Figure 10.5  Ronald Searle, ‘Summit’, Punch, 30 July 1958, p. 131.

East) crises, with Cold War interests at play, including nuclear weapons – threatened to destabilise the fragile world order, represented in the cartoon by the three onlookers, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and Macmillan. [ 294 ]

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The three world leaders are looking up at the eruption, brought on by these crises, as bystanders, having no power to stop them. In all of the cases except Algeria, one or more of these leaders were intricately and intensively involved in the decisions that led to crises emerging. Therefore for Searle to suggest that the three had no other option but to watch the eruption caused by these events indicates that these men had pursued policies that had caused the eruption and now could only helplessly look on. An erupting volcano brings to mind a building natural disaster that will eventually explode due to the pressure. That the international order might explode, even literally with atomic weapons, was not a new thought in 1958; however the idea that the three most powerful men in the world had no control over what was about to happen is a definitive critique on their actions. Again, as with Mansbridge’s cartoon depicting NATO on the British side, the Cyprus crisis is linked to the Cold War. This time, Searle shows that the Cypriot emergency was not merely a concern for Macmillan, but for Eisenhower and Khrushchev as well. Macmillan was clearly only interested in the British maintaining control of areas of the island which could be used exclusively by the British military and therefore under British sovereignty only, while the rest of the island would be shared with Greece and Turkey, in order that there would be no local opposition to the stationing of nuclear weapons in the island.73 For Eisenhower the major concern was for no destabilisation of NATO by the rift between Greece and Turkey and Greece and Britain. Khrushchev, on the other hand, was pleased by the NATO divisions over Cyprus, and is playing it cool by ensuring that the strong communist movement on the island, represented by AKEL, remained out of the fighting.74 On 25 February 1959 a third cartoon by Mansbridge was published in Punch, this time referring to the Zurich–London Accords that had ended the conflict (Figure 10.6). On 11 February 1959 Athens and Ankara signed the Zurich Accords, which stipulated that Cyprus would become independent under a consociational (power-sharing) constitution, guaranteed by Britain, Greece, and Turkey, with the British retaining sovereign base areas, and all three guarantors had the right to intervention in case anything went wrong.75 The British were kept at arm’s length during the negotiations, led by the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers. On 19 February 1959 at Lancaster House the British government and the Cypriot leaders (Makarios and Dr Fazil Kutchuk) signed the Zurich Accords, which thereby became known as the Zurich–London Accords. Enosis and taksim were both prohibited. Makarios assented to the agreements after expressing his displeasure about the limitations imposed from the outside.76 Macmillan portrayed the agreements as a victory because it was agreed that Britain would maintain sovereignty over its [ 295 ]

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Figure 10.6  Norman Mansbridge, ‘Hello, what’s this?’ Punch, 25 February 1959, p. 275.

military base areas in perpetuity.77 Macmillan presented this victory at the House of Commons that night, 19 February. I think that the honourable members on all sides of the House will welcome this agreement. I believe that we have now closed a chapter of bitterness and strife in the history of Cyprus and that we are now embarking

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together with our Greek and Turkish allies, and the people of Cyprus themselves, on a new approach where partnership and co-operation take the place of strife and dissension.78

It is possible that at the time of the talks in London the British security forces in Cyprus had surrounded Grivas, but Macmillan directed them not to proceed to capture or kill him. This was to ensure that no negative reaction from Greece or Greek Cypriots should take place at the time of the conference.79 Mansbridge refers to these two events in his cartoon. The cartoon depicts two British soldiers attempting to inspect a cave. In front of them is a white dove gripping an olive branch in its mouth, the universal symbol for peace (Figure 10.6). One of the bewildered soldiers asks: ‘Hello, what’s this?’ Mansbridge is comparing the peace agreements signed in London the week before and the violent nature of the conflict in Cyprus. Proclaiming peace in the Cyprus conflict and the fact that the parties were all working together surprised the security forces in Cyprus, who were still fighting insurgents. In fact there was no overwhelming cheer or celebration of the peace terms in Cyprus initially. A 21 February report in The Times was headlined with ‘British Forces Again on Patrol in Nicosia’.80 It is unlikely that the press, and in particular Mansbridge, knew that the British security forces had found Grivas, though it was common knowledge that they were still looking for him. The surprise of the soldiers also reflected the British position that Greece and Turkey would never compromise over Cyprus.81 Once more there was no comment on the British government. The cartoon’s focus is that the soldier, and by extension the security forces, was surprised to discover peace in Cyprus, rather than how peace was achieved (through a compromise between the Greek and Turkish governments). Yet there is again a subtle criticism of the British government: it did not contribute to the peace process and the British were not the authors of it. Mansbridge could be criticising the British for being absent, but he could also be agreeing with the view, as in his ‘Passed by on the other side’ (Figure 10.4), that it was Greece and Turkey that held the keys to a resolution of the crisis (even if this involved a severing of the British Empire and Cyprus). Punch had already commented on the peace deal on 18 February 1959, when David Langdon, who joined the Punch table in 1958, in writing the regular summary of events, stated: A sigh of relief from all parties … greeted the hopeful news for a final settlement in Cyprus … There must be no repetition of the Egyptian business – with the British handing over, getting out, losing their base, going in again, and going out again. Enough of that … but all the signs

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are that for some years at least the Turks, Greeks, Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots and British will be happy to leave well alone.82

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There was no hint at ‘blame’, only relief. It was not for another month that some subtle criticism appeared in Punch. On 25 March 1959 Punch, commenting on the debate on Cyprus in the House of Commons, claimed that: the major word-eating came clearly from the Government … it is beyond argument that for a long time the Government did give the impression to its supporters that we could never surrender sovereignty over Cyprus and that now we are surrendering it.83

Was Punch upset that the government had caved in? Or was it saying that it should have offered this solution itself ages ago? The six Punch cartoons on the Cypriot emergency show a remarkable consistency in some but not all of their commentary on the crisis. There is a consistency in blaming the violence on Greece, Turkey, and the Cypriots, particularly the Greek Cypriots, especially in the form of Makarios. Yet the images from 1958 also exhibit a subtle criticism of the handling of the crisis by Macmillan’s government. The three cartoons by Mansbridge show a concern that the Conservative government has allowed the crisis to drift by positioning itself in the middle of a conflict between its two NATO allies, Greece and Turkey. This tactic of successive Conservative governments in their aim to hold on to Cyprus had only resulted in the British being ‘stuck’ and unable to manoeuvre, watching as ‘bystanders’ as the British Empire in Cyprus was coming to an end. The Punch cartoons recognised that the British had been forced into some serious fighting on the island not of their choosing, but that the government could have been doing more to negotiate a resolution. When it came, it left the British surprised, as it did in reality since it was a Greek and Turkish government initiative. Interestingly, Punch did not express an opinion on whether the British should remain on the island for the strategic purposes that the government stated it needed to. This silence suggests that it did not question the reasons underpinning the British government’s desire to hold on to the island. Punch blamed the violence on Turkey, Greece, and Makarios, yet its artists engaged in a subtle critique of the government’s positioning itself as an arbitrator because the Greek, Turkish, and Cypriot sides would outlast the British. In the end the British were given a fait accompli by the Greek and Turkish sides, yet stood undefeated despite taking blows from all three sides, to the surprise of the British government and of Punch. [ 298 ]

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This case study has shown that Punch was not monolithic and that the cartoonists represented their own personal political views as well as those of Punch when taken as a whole. While the main aim to satirise politics and society remained a constant from the nineteenth century, the critical approach to imperialism was less pronounced and certainly nowhere near as acerbic, even if it was accurate in predicting that the 80-odd year British imperial connection with Cyprus would be severed.

Notes 1 Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009, pp. 8–11. 2 For the period of the emergency, see: Charles Foley, Island in Revolt, London: Longmans, 1962; Nancy Crawshaw, The Cyprus Revolt, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978; Robert Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998; David French, Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–1959, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 3 When published, the following PhD thesis promises to fill this void: E. Antoniades, ‘The Liberation Struggle in Cyprus and the Greek Cypriot Press – “Eleftheria”, “O Phileleftheros” and “Haravgi” 1955–60’, unpublished PhD thesis, Cyprus University of Technology, 2015. 4 Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–60, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995, pp. 194–259. 5 Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds, pp. 244–247. 6 Andrekos Varnava, ‘Punch and the British Occupation of Cyprus in 1878’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 29 (2), 2005, pp. 167–186. 7 R. G. G. Price, A History of Punch, London: Collins, 1957. 8 M. H. Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’, London: Cassell & Co., 1895, p. 107. 9 Spielmann, History of ‘Punch’, p. 107. 10 Richard Scully, ‘Behind the Lines: Cartoons as Historical Sources’, Agora, 45 (2), 2010, pp. 12–13. 11 See: Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in MidVictorian London, London: The British Library, 2010. 12 Richard Ingrams, Muggeridge: The Biography, London: HarperCollins, 1995; Richard Ingrams, ‘Muggeridge, (Thomas) Malcolm (1903–1990)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, at: www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/40165, accessed12 January 2015. 13 Mark Bryant, Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists, London: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 115–116. 14 Spielmann, History of ‘Punch’, p. 58. 15 See: Foley, Island in Revolt; Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus. 16 Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, pp. 179–181, 183–186. 17 For the Great War see: Andrekos Varnava, ‘Recruitment and Volunteerism for the Cypriot Mule Corps, 1916–1919’, Itenerario, 38 (3), 2014, pp. 79–101; For the interwar years see: Alexis Rappas, Cyprus in the 1930s: British Colonial Rule and the Roots of the Cyprus Conflict, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. 18 G. S. Georghallides, Cyprus and the Governorship of Sir Ronald Storrs: The Causes of the 1931 Crisis, Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1985. 19 Rappas, Cyprus in the 1930s, pp. 1–5, 11. 20 Rappas, Cyprus in the 1930s, pp. 88–122.

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C RI TI Q U E O F EM P IR E 21 Andrekos Varnava, ‘Against the Grain: Who was Behind the Assassination of Antonios Triantafyllides in Colonial Cyprus in 1934’, under review. 22 Rolandos Katsiaounis, Η Διασκεπτική, 1946–1948: Με Ανασκόπηση της Περιόδου, 1878–1945 [The Consultative Assembly, 1946–48: With a Survey of the Period, 1878–1945], Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 2000. 23 Andrekos Varnava and Christalla Yakinthou, ‘Cyprus: Political Modernity and the Structures of Democracy in a Divided Island’, in John Loughlin, Frank Hendriks, and Anders Lidstrom (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 455–477. 24 George Grivas, The Memoirs of General Grivas, Charles Foley (ed.), London: Longmans, 1964, pp. 12–32. 25 The Times, 2 April 1955, p. 4. 26 Daily Mail, 5 May 1955, p. 4; Daily Mail, 9 May 1955, p. 8; Daily Mail, 19 May 1955, p. 9; Daily Mail, 23 May 1955, p. 9; Daily Mail, 25 May 1955, p. 1; Illustrated London News, 2 July 1955, p. 9; Illustrated London News, 23 July 1955, p. 138; Illustrated London News, 24 September 1955, p. 511; Illustrated London News, 24 September 1955, p. 516; Illustrated London News, 24 September 1955, p. 517. 27 Punch, 23 November 1955, p. 4. 28 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 98. 29 Robert Allen, Voice of Britain: Inside Story of the ‘Daily Express’, London: Patrick Stephens Ltd, 1983; Search on British Cartoon Archive (Any Text=Cyprus, Artist or Creator=Michael Cummings, Date=1955-1959), at: https://archive.cartoons.ac.uk/ Advanced.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog, accessed 14 April 2019. 30 Adrian Room, ‘Cummings, (Arthur Stuart) Michael (1919–1997)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edition, October 2007, at: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/69184, accessed 5 November 2014. 31 T. F. Burns, ‘Hollis, (Maurice) Christopher (1902–1977)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edition, May 2011, at: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31248, accessed 12 January 2015. 32 Punch, 14 December 1955, p. 33. 33 Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza, Lost Opportunities: The Cyprus Question, New York: Caratzas Publishing Co., 1986, p. 72. 34 The position of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Fisher, in condemning the deportation of Makarios was quite clear. See: Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 123. 35 Chrysostomos Pericleous, Cyprus Referendum: A Divided Island and the Challenge of the Annan Plan, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 88. 36 James Griffiths, Hansard, 5 December 1955, volume 547, c. 46. 37 James Griffiths, Hansard, 5 December 1955, volume 547, c. 46. 38 Lord Balniel, Hansard, 5 December 1955, volume 547, c. 68. 39 Harold Macmillan, Hansard, 5 December 1955, volume 547, c. 32. 40 P. V. Bradshaw, London Opinion, September 1946, p. 47. 41 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918–1969, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 234. For French motivations, see: H. Luethy and D. Rodnick, French Motivations in the Suez Crisis, Princeton: Institute for International Social Research, 1956. For the role, use, and abuse of the media during the crisis see: Tony Shaw, Eden, Suez, and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1996. 42 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 154. 43 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 154. 44 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 324. 45 Grivas, Memoirs, pp. 66–67. 46 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 152. 47 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 152. 48 The Times, 27 August 1956, p. 8. 49 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 151. The government published Terrorism in Cyprus: The Captured Documents, London: HMSO, 1956.

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PUNCH A N D TH E C YPRU S EM ERG E N C Y , 1 9 5 5 – 1 9 5 9 50 Hussein Sed Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1977; Andrekos Varnava, ‘Recreating Rural Britain and Maintaining Britishness in the Mediterranean: The Troodos Hill Station in Early British Cyprus’, The Cyprus Review, 17 (2), 2005, pp. 47–79. 51 ‘The Press: Tough Times’, The Times Magazine, 15 September 1958, at http:// content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,863833,00.html, accessed 5 November 2014. 52 The Times, 3 January 1957, p. 8. 53 Grivas, Memoirs, pp. 85–88; Harding’s daily situation reports, CO 926/418, in Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig, The Cyprus Conspiracy, London: I. B. Tauris, 1999, pp. 38–39. 54 Jan Asmussen, ‘Terrorism in Cyprus – The Grivas Diaries’, Journal of Cyprus Studies, 13 (32), 2007, p. 1. 55 Bryant, Dictionary, p. 151. 56 Crawshaw, The Cyprus Revolt, pp. 256, 274, 277, 287, 303–305. 57 See: Varnava and Yakinthou, ‘Cyprus: Political Modernity’. 58 Sir Hugh Foot [Lord Caradon], A Start in Freedom, London: Harper & Row, 1964, p. 169. 59 Andrekos Varnava, ‘Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy, 1957–1960’, The Cyprus Review, 22 (1), 2010, pp. 79–106. 60 Ioannis D. Stefanidis, Isle of Discord: Nationalism, Imperialism and the Making of the Cyprus Problem, London: Hurst & Company, 1999, pp. 41–73. 61 Minutes of ministerial committee, 17 August 1955, CAB130/109. 62 Anthony Eden, Full Circle: The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Sir Anthony Eden, London: Cassell, 1960, p. 400. 63 Harold Macmillan, Hansard, 5 December 1955, volume 547, c. 33. 64 Varnava, ‘Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy’, pp. 84–85. 65 David Hunt, ‘Harding, John [Allan Francis], first Baron Harding of Petherton (1896–1989)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edition, May 2008, at: www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/40129?docPos=12, accessed 4 November 2014. 66 Luke 10: 30–37. 67 Lord Harding of Petherton, Hansard, 8 July 1958, volume 210, c. 705. 68 Lord Harding of Petherton, Hansard, 8 July 1958, volume 210, c. 707. 69 Lord Harding of Petherton, Hansard, 8 July 1958, volume 210, c. 705. 70 Mark Bryant, ‘Searle, Ronald William Fordham (1920–2011)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2015, at: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/104610, accessed 14 January 2015. 71 Earl of Dudley, Hansard, 15 July 1958, volume 210, c. 1106. 72 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 266. 73 Varnava, ‘Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy’, pp. 89, 93–94, 102. 74 See: Claude Nicolet, United States Policy Towards Cyprus, 1954–1974: Removing the Greek–Turkish Bone of Contention, Mannhein: Bibliopolis, 2001. There is no study on Soviet policy in relation to the Cypriot conflict. 75 Nicolet, United States Policy Towards Cyprus, pp. 95–99. See also: Christalla Yakinthou, Political Settlements in Divided Societies: Consociationalism and Cyprus, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 52–72. 76 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, pp. 315–317. 77 Varnava, ‘Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy’, p. 98. 78 The Earl of Home, Hansard, 19 February 1959, volume 214, c. 431. 79 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, p. 313. 80 The Times, 21 February 1959, p. 6. 81 Varnava, ‘Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy’, p. 98. 82 Punch, 18 February 1959, p. 2. 83 Punch, 25 March 1959, p. 26.

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P AR T III

Ambiguities of empire

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CHA P T E R E L E VEN

Outrage and imperialism, confusion and indifference: Punch and the Armenian massacres of 1894–1896 Leslie Rogne Schumacher

On 30 September 1895 a demonstration organised by the Armenian socialist party – known after their party organ as the Hunchaks – gathered in Constantinople to call for reforms in the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian provinces.1 Consisting of perhaps more than 2,000 people, the demonstration descended into chaos and violence when shots were fired after Ottoman gendarmes attempted to block the group’s procession to Bab-i Ali (i.e. the Ottoman governmental complex known in Europe as the ‘Sublime Porte’).2 Thousands of the city’s Armenian Christians were killed in the ensuing days, as their Muslim neighbours murdered them indiscriminately for having committed the alleged crime of acceding – automatically by ethnoreligious affinity – to a nationalist line represented by the Hunchaks. Brutal though the carnage at Bab-i Ali was, however, it was only one event in a series of massacres of Armenian Christians by Ottoman authorities, and their regional affiliates, between 1894 and the end of 1896. These killings – also known as the ‘Hamidian Massacres’ after the role Sultan Abdulhamid II played in orchestrating them – claimed the lives of likely more than 100,000 Ottoman Armenians (as well as other Ottoman Christians) and formed a key precedent for the Armenian Genocide a generation later.3 As with previous massacres of Ottoman Christians, British society watched the affair with a mixture of indignation, confusion, anger, and equivocality. In a culture dominated by Orientalist fictions and tropes, Britons’ understanding of the nature of Muslim–Christian relations in the Ottoman Empire was opaque at best. The British media was not exempted from an imprecise and reductive attitude towards Ottoman affairs; indeed, it relied on, renewed, and sustained that attitude, not least for the motive of profit.4 For Europe in general, the Eastern Question [ 305 ]

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(i.e. the events, dynamics, and issues related to the perceived decline of the Ottoman Empire) had an identity of its own, with its invocation referring more to domestic, regional, and imperial matters of concern in European states rather than to Ottoman affairs.5 In this context, an examination of British media accounts of the 1894–1896 Armenian massacres is a useful way of accessing the language and values of the British public in that era. This brief study looks at one source, the popular illustrated magazine Punch, or the London Charivari, focusing on what its more than fifty cartoons that directly reference the massacres (most drawn by Sir John Tenniel, Punch’s chief cartoonist; or by Edward Linley Sambourne, who served as Tenniel’s deputy until Tenniel retired in 1901) reveal about how the British understood their role and their empire’s role in the Ottoman Empire and in the world at large. Several conditions for my inquiry require clarification. First, there were clearly other influential illustrated newspapers and magazines in Britain besides the, in general, Whiggishly Liberal Punch, ranging across the political spectrum (such as Judy on the Tory side; the Illustrated London News in the centre; and, historically, Fun to Punch’s left).6 Richard Scully is correct that ‘historians have tended to focus exclusively on [Punch], overlooking the London Charivari’s main competitors’.7 With this important consideration in mind, this chapter focuses only on Punch because of its reach as a cultural and political force in nineteenth-century British society, particularly among the middle class.8 As Dominic Williams puts it in his study of Tenniel’s depiction of ‘Eastern atrocities’ between 1876 and 1896, ‘Punch offered a particular class an image of itself, its nation, and its place in the world’.9 This does not mean, however, that I intend at all to advance a claim that Punch represents Britain and its peoples totally, much less the other way around. A larger study would go further in providing comparative data, and so the limitations of my comments here on British society at large are duly noted. Second, my intent here is, more broadly, to explore British imperial identity in the context of Britain’s Eastern policy and to broaden our understanding of the significance of illustration and satire in historical discourse. I do not track the rise of an ‘Armenian question’ in Britain or in general – a task excellently carried out by Michelle Tusan in her recent work.10 And in reference to the controversies surrounding the subject matter of this study (viz. abuses against Ottoman Armenians), I am not concerned with providing further evidence of what is already clearly a reality, much less to challenge or test them on revisionist grounds.11 Instead of treating this topic as merely one that accessorises, via British history, a much more vigorously oppositional discourse, I feel that insight can be gained by looking at the 1890s British view on its [ 306 ]

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own terms (as much as that is ever possible, of course). By focusing specifically on the reaction to the massacres of 1894–1896 as seen in Punch, one may better understand how broader British domestic, foreign, and imperial policies were suggested in popular media in relation to anti-Armenian events and initiatives. This goal, when considered in the light of the horrors Armenians faced during the First World War only a generation later, should motivate questions about the ways in which the west has absorbed and reformulated eastern issues for its own purposes, and thus the ways in which this model of interaction with the east reinforced (and continues to reinforce) selfish, ignorant, and dismissive western attitudes, with often catastrophic results. In terms of organisation, my discussion proceeds chronologically through three general phases of Punch’s coverage of the massacres: first, a phase in which the magazine sought to consider the massacres in the context of previous Ottoman slaughters, especially the 1876 Bulgarian Atrocities; second, a phase in which Punch commented on the range of responses proposed by British authorities and other influential figures vis-à-vis the massacres; and third, a phase in which Punch’s coverage of the massacres began to reflect both Britain’s increasing prioritisation of imperial policy as well as the formation of new international relationships that anticipated the eventual First World War blocs. From the very beginning, Punch’s response to the massacres leaves no doubt that discussions over Ottoman abuses of power were of central importance to late Victorian politics and society. When news of massacres of Anatolian Armenians began to appear in British newspapers in the latter half of 1894, the killings were ‘swiftly politicised’.12 This was part of a longer arc of gravitation towards British advocacy for Armenian rights and protection that had been in progress since at least the 1870s, with the late 1880s seeing a great increase in media coverage of Armenian affairs.13 The massacre of around 12,000 Bulgarian Christians in 1876 – a key part of the larger series of Ottoman and European conflicts referred to as the ‘Eastern Crisis’ of 1875–1878 – had seen a peculiarly vigorous form of pro-Christian, Turcophobic politics emerge in Britain, which had until then been generally aligned with the Ottoman Empire politically, if not always culturally.14 However, despite the fact that Britain had, on an official level, registered something amounting to support for the Ottomans during the Eastern Crisis, the presiding flavour of popular opinion in 1876 and 1877 had been of popular indignation over the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’, as the massacres were called. Led by the former (and future) Liberal prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone (later referred to in Punch and elsewhere as the ‘G.O.M.’, for ‘Grand Old Man’) and other assorted [ 307 ]

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important politicians and elites (such as the Duke of Argyll and the Duke of Westminster), a hastily organised campaign called for a shift in British policy against the Ottomans. The conflict between the Tory Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield – and his old enemy Gladstone during the Eastern Crisis brought the matter home in such a way that Eastern affairs became for a time a domestic concern, with massive public demonstrations taking place from late 1876 to the middle of 1878. As a reflection of fault lines in British society, though, these demonstrations were not exclusively pro-Bulgarian: by late 1877 and early 1878, many Britons had begun calling for intervention on the side of the Ottomans against the Russians, who had invaded the Ottoman Empire in 1877 (using the massacres as an excuse). This faction marched to the Russophobic, pro-war, imperialist song ‘By Jingo!’ (and even, at times, raised the Ottoman flag during their demonstrations).15 Still, the 1878 Congress of Berlin that resolved the Eastern Crisis gave a degree of credibility to Ottoman Christian self-determination in the form of an autonomous Principality of Bulgaria (and the semi-autonomous territory of Eastern Rumelia), while, two years later, Gladstone returned to power in 1880 on the back of a campaign that highlighted Disraeli’s foreign policy sins as a way of offering a more holistic Gladstonian Liberal alternative. Thereafter, on the level of Near Eastern affairs the unresolved issue of Anatolian and Middle Eastern Christians, with Armenians chief among them, became a regular part of British political and cultural discourse. Punch’s first cartoon on the 1894–1896 massacres – titled ‘An Old Offender’ (Figure 11.1) – was clear, forceful, and unambiguous. A sullen caricature of the Turk stands at the right with his arms folded over a bloody dagger in one hand and his back turned to a tall, female, crowned, frowning ‘Europa’; she holds a furled document titled ‘Armenian Atrocities’ with one outstretched hand, while the other hand points behind her at a sword on the wall on whose blade is etched ‘Treaty of Berlin’.16 Below the image is the caption: ‘Europa: Again! But this time I have a weapon at hand!’ Accompanying the image is a supremely Turcophobic poem (probably by E. J. Milliken, Punch’s chief literary editor) positing a neat demonstration of problem, cause, and solution: Red Man of the Orient, ruthless, untamable, Neighbour, by fortune, in nothing near kin. Humanity’s brotherhood surely is blameable, Leaving him free from Law’s bondage to win! … In sheer self-defence we muzzle and shackle This wolf of the world; snatch its poor prostrate prey

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Figure 11.1  Sir John Tenniel, ‘An Old Offender’, Punch, 15 December 1894, p. 283.

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From its crimsoning fangs. … There hangs the good Berlin-blade, consecrated By common agreement to Justice’s work! Be its blow not this time, as aforetime, belated! Let Europe not bleed for the sin of the Turk!

The message of the image and the accompanying poem is clear: the Turk is evil because of religious and racial predisposition; he was not stopped in the past because of European weakness; and Europe must now use force to stop his crimes against Armenia – a sort of eastern outpost of Europe stranded in occupied territory. The interjection of violent coercive imagery (sword, muzzle, shackle) to contain and punish the Ottoman Empire also shows the narrow space between international pressure and military threat in the language of British imperialism. Two subsequent cartoons developed on this politically charged racialism. The first, on 12 January 1895, depicts Gladstone as a ragged, elderly dog, whose tired ears heard in the Armenian massacres an echo of their Bulgarian counterparts.17 An included poem speaks of this G.O.M. as Grand Old Dog in the florid language of late Victorian biological racism: The Istamboul sort are his favourite sport Rabid rodents who raven, red-fanged, in foul hordes Turco sewer-bred legions, who earth’s fairest regions Would ravage like Tamerlane’s Tartar-swung swords.

Another Punch cartoon from March shows a hyena stalking a barren, bone-strewn field, with a quotation on the massacres from, interestingly, the Tory-aligned Daily Telegraph below the image.18 (Figure 11.2). On the facing page, a quote from a natural history text judges the hyena ‘repulsive’, with ‘lucifers’ for eyes and a penchant for ‘strangl[ing] what is weak’.19 Another poem then describes ‘this hoar hyena of the East’ as ‘a scourge Attila-like from age to age … Malign, inexorable, untamed’; proclaiming the Turkish hyena ‘loves the night/But crouches at the threatening hand/It glimpes in the breaking light’.20 The recommendation that western powers use cleansing violence to re-establish light over a darkened land ruled by rapine, animal-like cowards is plainly exhibited. The poem’s writer (again, probably Milliken) would likely have agreed with the judgement of Sir Edwin Pears (who had been the Daily News’ correspondent during the 1876 Bulgarian massacres) that the Armenian massacres were a case of ‘inferior races’ assaulting their racial betters, as had been the case in Bulgaria and elsewhere.21 Later, as Lord Rosebery’s Liberal ministry (in power since March 1894) began to falter over a diverse array of issues, the confused character [ 310 ]

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Figure 11.2  Sir John Tenniel, ‘Disturbed!’, Punch, 9 March 1895, p. 115.

of Britain’s official response to the Armenian massacres offered a vector for the resolution of domestic political squabbles. Rosebery, who had taken over as leader of the Liberals on Gladstone’s final retirement in the spring of 1894, was criticised for merely relying on the eastern policy of his predecessor without adjusting to acute conditions in Ottoman Armenia.22 Further confusing – as a Punch cartoon in May 1895 illustrated – was the feeling that Gladstone might return again to power (a quite regular fear in the mid-to-late 1890s) on the back of another popular indignation campaign related to Britain’s eastern policy. The cartoon, titled ‘The Old Crusaders!’, features a two-page, vertical spread (in the manner of a bisected poster) in which Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll appear astride pacing chargers, hands clasped while, in their free hands, the former holds a lance and the latter a spear-tipped pennant with a cross on it.23 This cross, which also appears on the riders’ tunics, is rendered in the manner of the Cross of Saint George, which had long been explicitly connected with Richard I’s crusade to recapture the Holy Land, adding to the sense that what is being represented is a composite of Christian and British identities and values in [ 311 ]

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the context of resolving Muslim rule over Christian lands.24 The caption is plain: ‘The Duke of Arg-ll and Mr. Gl-dst-ne “Brothers in Arms” Again! Bulgaria, 1876. Armenia, 1895’, referencing the two’s close comradeship at the time of the Bulgarian massacres and harking to a possible reunion between them (that is, after having broken with one another over the issue of Irish Home Rule in 1886). Clearly, though, Punch’s implication was not only that these two crusaders were bold and driven, but also that they were fighting against the march of time on a personal and, perhaps, a society level – 1895 was not 1876. Indeed, Punch cartoons during the Armenian massacres exposed the shifted perspective from the 1876 condition of Britain’s goals in the east and those of 1895. The option of true military intervention against the Ottomans over the 1876 Bulgarian Atrocities was not associated with credible figures in Britain’s pro-Bulgarian movement, as it would have spelled the destruction of the Crimean system that required an Ottoman–British alliance. The calls for war came from the Conservative side, and they were for war against Russia and not the Ottomans. However, by 1895 the Crimean system was mostly dead anyway, and the previous decade or so of rapid imperial expansion and adventuring had made Britons much more used to military intervention in general. Punch’s take reflects this shift, with the 15 June 1895 cartoon ‘Deeds – Not Words!’ (Figure 11.3) depicting the Turk standing at the centre, scimitar hanging from his wrist and next to a tied-up, weeping, female Armenia whose face is buried in her lap and obscured by unbound hair – a common trope for depicting abuses against Ottoman Armenians in Punch and elsewhere.25 John Bull stands to the right, hand on sword hilt, with Russia and France behind him. Bull refuses to take the Turk’s outstretched hand, saying ‘Look here,— we’ve had enough of your palaver! Are you going to let the girl go, or have we got to make you?’ The question of whether to intervene over the massacre of Ottoman Christians may have been unclear to Rosebery (and surely would always be to Gladstone, no matter his age), but Punch here matches more neatly with the persona of Rosebery’s successor, Tory leader Lord Salisbury, who took power at the end of June 1895 and was thought by many, as The Spectator put it, to be more willing to take ‘independent action … worthier of the position of England’ than Rosebery had been.26 A less collaborative and more imperialist phase of Britain’s response to the Armenian massacres therefore followed the ascent of a ministry led by figures who supported this global outlook: like Salisbury, his Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, and Commons leader Arthur Balfour. These men advocated Britain’s ‘splendid isolation’, as Salisbury’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Goschen, put it in 1896 (and who, like Chamberlain, had left the Liberals for the Tories over the issue of [ 312 ]

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Figure 11.3  Sir John Tenniel, ‘Deeds – Not Words!’, Punch, 15 June 1895, p. 283.

Irish Home Rule). The mingling of Britain’s domestic, foreign, and imperial policies in Britain’s response to the Armenian massacres became more pronounced as anti-Home Rule (‘Unionist’) politicians contemplated the protection and expansion of the empire on which they staked their entire identity.27 In this regard, we see the Armenian massacres used as a token in an ongoing debate in Britain over the country’s imperial programme. The autumn of 1895 brought new developments in the progress of the massacres, as well as a new phase in the British response. Two weeks after the Bab-i Ali demonstration on 30 September 1895, the British weekly newspaper The Spectator published an article on the event, referencing a Punch cartoon from 12 October 1895. ‘This business in Constantinople’, the article proclaimed, ‘must gravely increase Lord Salisbury’s already heavy anxieties.’28 Of his anxieties, Salisbury was at that time managing pressures related to the shape Britain’s response to the anti-Armenian pogrom in the Ottoman capital should take, among which was Queen Victoria’s recommendation to him that the [ 313 ]

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Dardanelles Straits be occupied by British forces (a rather radical idea for a generally unradical monarch).29 The article continued:

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Sir John Tenniel in this week’s Punch may depict ‘Ultimatum’ as a bull-dog ready to be let loose, and irresistible by any worn-out dragon, but the Foreign Secretary has to remember that this offender is an old lion, and that other strong dogs will at once be in the arena on hearing the bull-dog’s growl. The situation is bad enough anyway, and so much may happen that is unexpected.30

The cartoon to which The Spectator refers depicts Salisbury dressed in a Privy Councillor’s uniform (referencing Salisbury’s recent accession to the premiership) and holding the lead of a bulldog on which is drawn the word ‘ultimatum’.31 The dog strains to reach a cowering dragon representing China (to which Salisbury had recently issued an ultimatum regarding anti-western rioting in Szechuan), while over an adjacent wall peers a shocked and worried-looking version of the Turk. Underneath the title, ‘Good Dog!’, Salisbury is made to say ‘Very useful dog this – I may want him again!’, while ‘The Unspeakable’ (i.e. the Turk) exclaims ‘Oh, Lor!!’ In other words, Salisbury’s Chinese ultimatum could be used as a model for handling Ottoman affairs. The New York Times’ London correspondent put this Middle East–Far East dynamic best by saying that, after reports of the Bab-i Ali killings and of the movement of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, ‘the pendulum of popular interest swung back from Asia to Europe, and the rest of the week has been given over to … the violently reopened Eastern Question. Both in the Turkish and the Chinese waters these British fleets remain, however, very prominently in view.’32 Another cartoon in October also interjected a violent form of intervention, taking as its metaphor a pantomime popular during the late Victorian era that Ottomanised the story of the murderous Bluebeard and his wife Fatima. Depicting the climax of the plot, ‘Rescue!’ (Figure 11.4) shows Bluebeard at the point of death, as Fatima’s brothers put their swords to the man who had killed all of his previous wives, as his present one sits on the floor, barefoot and weeping into her lap as she is saved at the last moment.33 Underneath the title are the dramatis personæ: ‘Bluebeard ... Turkey. Fatima ... Armenia. The Three Brothers ... England, Russia, France’. A shift from the original folk story (of French or Breton origin) is in the relationship shown in the image between Fatima/Armenia and her three brothers: here they are dressed as crusaders rather than fellow Orientals, wearing the heraldry of their respective Christian kingdoms. Fatima/Armenia, then, is no Oriental but a European living under Muslim occupation, and the east’s salvation therefore comes not from within but from foreign heroes drawn there [ 314 ]

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Figure 11.4  Sir John Tenniel, ‘Rescue!’, Punch, 26 October 1895, p. 199.

with a mind towards Christian order and justice and united by a common foe. For readers who had seen the pantomime (which was quite likely, given its popularity at the time), it probably also would not have escaped them that, after Bluebeard is killed, the plot concluded with Fatima inheriting all his wealth. A new Armenian empire, it seems, would spring up in the wake of the Ottoman one’s death, with all the riches and power that entailed. As a cartoon the next month put it more plainly, it was ‘Kismet!’ (i.e. destiny, fate) that the Turk would die: here, the Turk relaxes in a boat as it approaches a waterfall, not willing to lift himself from his cushion to glimpse the inevitable.34 Whether killed by Europe’s sword or providence’s whim, then, the Turk’s time was up. Still, as Fatima/Armenia’s inheritance suggests, questions about Britain’s imperial interests hang in the air in Punch cartoons: should Britain ignore Ottoman decline, profit from it, or help a more deserving successor to power? These were not resolved issues in British society at the time in general; it would be a damaging presumption to assume that all Britons desired a rapacious, land-grabbing form of empire. Instead, [ 315 ]

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Figure 11.5  Sir John Tenniel, ‘Armenia’s Appeal’, Punch, 21 December 1895, p. 295.

as Punch shows, imperial interests were woven together with foreign policy, and often it was important for the British Empire to appear to be leading the world morally rather than territorially. And despite high hopes from pro-Armenian Britons for Salisbury’s ministry, they became more and more frustrated as massacres continued throughout the autumn and early winter of 1895, amid a perceived lack of government action.35 Indeed, the crusader theme was inverted in a December cartoon, ‘Armenia’s Appeal’ (Figure 11.5), in which Armenia calls on the five Great Powers, standing impassively in crusader guise, to draw their swords for her.36 A song on the preceding page, suggested to be ‘sung sotto voce’ by the ‘Grand Chorus of all the Powers’, identifies the ‘real Eastern Question’ to the tune of 1878’s pro-war ‘By Jingo!’: We don’t want to fight. In all lingoes, if we do, We’ve massed the ships, we’ve massed the men, we’ve massed the money too. We’ve often fought before, we’re consistently untrue. The question is, “Who’ll have Constantinople?”.37

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Next to the song is a doodle (by J. Priestman Atkinson) of a child-sized admiral happily preparing some snuff for his enormous nose, his eyes obscured by a bicorn several sizes too big and his sword resting on the ground. It is not a triumphant pose. Indeed, as 1896 dawned and the massacres showed no sign of stopping, Punch suggested that it was Europe’s divided attention that had allowed Armenia’s plight to take on a side-role right when it needed aid the most. A cartoon by Sambourne on 18 January spoke to how the Ottoman government was using the scrum of global politics as a screen for continuing their policy of Armenian oppression. In the cartoon, a caricature of Sultan Abdulhamid thumbs a Gurkha-style blade, while carrion birds feast on naked bodies in the background.38 At his feet lies a copy of the Westminster Gazette, a Liberal paper, whose headlines read ‘England & Venezuela’, ‘United States’, ‘South Africa Transvaal’, and ‘Germany’. Underneath is a copy of The Times. Below the title, ‘A Free Hand’, the caption has ‘The Unspeakable Turk’ saying: ‘Ha! Ha! There’s no one about! I can get to business again!’39 On its face, this image expresses a frustration that Britain’s complex global involvements meant that the Armenian massacres were allowed to continue without obstruction. But it also conveys an awareness that the Ottoman government used the European media to gather information on how it should and could act, which it certainly did.40 Indeed, the next month, Punch responded acerbically to its ‘exclusion’ from Ottoman circulation by the Sultan’s decree, with another Sambourne cartoon showing Mr Punch (Punch’s mascot, the Punch-and-Judy puppet) striking a Sultan puppet on the head.41 Below, Mr Punch yells ‘What! You exclude me, will you?’ while the Sultan supplicates on his knees, saying ‘Oh no, my dear Mr. Punch! I didn’t mean it! Come back again, and I won’t allow any more atrocities!’ No doubt the Ottoman authorities had taken umbrage at Sambourne’s cartoon from January, and Punch commented on the sanctions with characteristic slyness by simultaneously condemning the act and admitting that the matter of Punch’s presence in Ottoman circulation would have no impact on whether or not the massacres continued. To be sure, alongside the bellicose imagery such as that described above, in many of Punch’s cartoons related to the Armenian massacres there is a profound sense of the inevitable: the massacres would not end if one relied on the Great Powers, who could not be counted on to do anything together. A song (again, probably a creation of Milliken) in the 29 February 1896 issue had the Sultan singing that: The opprobrium of the so-called ‘Powers’ Is mu-ta-bil-i-ty;

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… They grunt and groan, I sit alone, And slaughter on – by proxy. … I still play off Prince Lobanoff [Russia’s Foreign Minister] Against Sals-bu-ree, … But Russia really knows me best, I do not change, she does. ’Tis changeless East ’gainst changeful West, I wade in blood – they buzz!42

Other cartoons from early 1896 back up this frustration with Russia’s response. One rendered the Tsar as the demon Mephistopheles, who calls on Turkey’s Faust to sign a ‘compact’.43 The outcome of this compact for Turkey could be summed up with a joke, ‘Cave Ursum! [i.e. Beware of the Bear!]’, on the preceding page: ‘According to the latest intelligence from St Petersburg the bloated Turkey is likely to be boiled down into Bear’s Greece’.44 Another cartoon had the Russian bear dressed as ‘Nurse Bruin’ (Figure 11.6), exclaiming with adoration of a diminutive version of the Turk, covered in blood and wielding a scimitar: ‘What a spirit he has! Dear little chap! Interfere with him, indeed; not while his old Nana is here’.45 Neither could Britain and its mighty empire be brought to bear on the problem, Punch supposed. A hypothetical scene from a play in a late February issue had citizens in the ‘Metropolis of a Mighty Empire’ give a ‘forced cheer’ of ‘Glorious, By Jingo!’ for an imperial war machine bogged down by ruinous expenses.46 A cartoon the following month had the Sultan attempting to persuade John Bull to let go of ‘Miss Egypt’ – here a robed beauty nestled into Bull’s strong embrace – and allow her to ‘return to the arms of her loving Uncle’.47 Another March cartoon by W. Alison Phillips depicted the Sultan reading from British poet William Watson’s book The Purple East: A Series of Sonnets on England’s Desertion of Armenia (a Turcophobic work that laid the blame for the escalation of the massacres at Britain’s feet), surrounded by more copies of the book and issues of the Liberal Morning Chronicle.48 Abdulhamid exclaims ‘Bismillah!’ on hearing himself described by Watson as among ‘the brightest of Hell’s aureoles … beyond all mortals, damned!’ Underlying this image, as with Sambourne’s ‘A Free Hand’, is both a recognition of Ottoman knowledge of British society, as well as an expression of Britain’s flaccid response to the massacres. Indeed, a Punch poem in March ventured that Watson’s ‘purple East’ referred not to the colour one wore in later mourning, but to the colour one’s nose turned on confronting winter’s eastern winds, quipping, ‘When [ 318 ]

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Figure 11.6  Linley Sambourne, ‘Nurse Bruin’, Punch, 29 February 1896, p. 98.

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Britons generally have got the blues/How can one listen to Armenia’s woes?’49 Less mirthful was a cartoon that had the ghost of General Charles Gordon, who had died at the Siege of Khartoum a decade earlier, bid John Bull to ‘Remember!’ on Parliament’s authorisation of the reconquest of Sudan.50 Britain may have challenged Ottoman power by taking independent action in Sudan (as a later cartoon showing the Sultan chasing after Britain’s Sudan force put it), but there is a subtle connection here between Britain’s imperial project and its lack of action on Armenia.51 Namely, subduing a band of dervishes in the desert for imperial glory had easily calculated costs and rewards, while taking imperial action on the Armenian problem did not. Confronting the massacres seemed to require the extirpation of Ottoman rule – a job that no amount of ships, let alone patriotic songs and Union Jack bunting, could easily do. Indeed, by the middle of 1896 British pro-Armenian groups had begun to register their frustration at what appeared to have been the Ottoman government’s success in outlasting the attention span of the Great Powers in regard to addressing the Armenian massacres. A poem from Watson’s The Purple East called ‘Craven England’ summed up the exasperation many felt at Britain’s inertia: ‘Never, O craven England, nevermore/Prate thou of generous effort, righteous aim!/Betrayer of a people know thy shame!’52 However, other matters of an eastern character intervened to allow pro-Armenian voices to sustain their pressure for a British response, especially the escalation of an ongoing rebellion in Ottoman Crete. Signalling calls to make amends in Crete for Britain’s inaction on the Armenians, a 22 August Punch cartoon depicted the Sultan having second thoughts on stepping into ‘A Turkish Bath’, whose floor is marked ‘Crete’.53 He pulls back, a bare foot raised as its shoe remains just inside the room, exclaiming ‘They gave it me pretty hot in that Armenian room! But – Bismillah! This is – phew!!’ Another cartoon had a bent and wizened Abdulhamid carry bags and rolls of paper marked ‘Concessions’ through the doors of the ‘European Advance Agency’.54 Below it, Punch references an article (from the short-lived Daily Paper) claiming that ‘financial considerations’ had led the Sultan ‘to adopt towards the Cretans a conciliatory policy’, while his avatar conspiratorially says ‘I wonder if they will lend me anything on this little Lot?’ Still, despite the influence that servicing the Ottoman debt had on matters related to the treatment of Ottoman Christians in Crete, Armenia, and elsewhere, dissatisfaction with Britain’s official response remained acute. This only increased after another massacre of Armenians in Constantinople occurred in late August 1896, following the seizure of the Ottoman Bank by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the [ 320 ]

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Dashnaks) in an attempt to force the Sultan to stop the killings and institute reforms. Much worse than the Bab-i Ali massacres of the previous year, the Ottoman capital saw around 6,000 of its Armenian subjects killed over two days by armed Muslim bands.55 As with earlier massacres, there were (and there remain) suspicions that the Sultan and his advisors incited the reprisal killings; however, reliable evidence confirms little on this front other than that Ottoman authorities made no attempt to stop the killings.56 Particularly significant during this episode was the threat felt by Constantinople’s foreign embassies, which led the British Embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires, Michael Henry Herbert, to call on two British ships stationed close by – the gunboat HMS Dryad and the yacht HMS Imogene – to land a squadron of ‘bluejackets’ (i.e. sailors) for protection.57 Reuters reported that the sailors protected several Armenians from the mobs by mounting a counterattack – a violent intervention whose details and significance have largely been overlooked in historical narratives of this period.58 One Armenian political group was so struck by the bluejackets’ action that they wired the Admiralty with a message of thanks, reading: ‘Lords Admiralty, London. – Armenian Defence League deeply grateful gallant protection British Bluejackets Constantinople. God save the Queen!’59 For Punch, the bluejackets’ stand against the anti-Armenian mobs was – no matter how limited – a signal of the impact a muscular British response could have, harking back to earlier images of imagined British interventions such as June 1895’s ‘Deeds – Not Words’. Indeed, a cartoon from the 12 September 1896 issue depicts one of Herbert’s bluejackets as ‘The Man for the Job!’ (Figure 11.7).60 European leaders – including, fascinatingly, John Bull himself – stand impassively at the right as the Sultan raises a scimitar and pistol in the background. On the left, a Royal Navy seaman (‘Jack Tar’) rolls up his sleeves and says to the leaders: ‘A terrible Turk is he! And you don’t care to tackle him! Well, sirs, just leave him to me!’ Below Jack Tar’s boast is reproduced a quote from Herbert saying that ‘given the same condition of things, English sailors would do it again’. In a society in which the navy and the empire were tightly intertwined, this statement (and this cartoon) referenced the supposedly corrective effect of imperial actions – a kind of remedial violence that, sometimes, required doing even without the imperial authority’s sanction. Two weeks later, another cartoon attempted to show the consequences of Britain’s official policy. Here, a sketch by E. T. Reed of a statue ‘proposed … to be erected in Constantinople’ (Figure 11.8) features a decrepit Abdulhamid, holding knife and pistol and seated on a crescentand-star-topped throne outlined by hissing serpents and held up by a dead man and a dead woman (ostensibly Armenians). His bare feet rest [ 321 ]

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Figure 11.7  Sir John Tenniel, ‘The Man for the Job!’, Punch, 12 September 1896, p. 127.

on two skulls, which totter atop a fallen cross. Behind the throne are two stone giants: a saluting skeleton in Ottoman uniform wearing a sash marked ‘Massacre to Order’; and a maniacally smiling, half-naked figure whose sash says ‘Homicidal Mania’ and who wields a curved knife and torch. Below the macabre scene is the inscription: ‘Abdul Hamid Assassin – Under the Kind Patronage of the Christian Powers!’61 An angry poem in the previous week’s issue anticipates the statue image, asking: Who’ll stir? Who’ll strike? Scant answer yet! The throned assassin lolls and lowers, Mocking, with Crescent crimson-wet, Powerless things called ‘Christian Powers’.62

If the bluejackets had struck, but their masters back in London were unmoved, what was it that would move them? More finely put: what were the political conditions that impeded their movement or diminished their desire to do so? One aspect, already mentioned above, was the less-than-figurative ‘ancient’ nature of the problem, namely the advanced [ 322 ]

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Figure 11.8  E. T. Reed, ‘Design for Proposed Statue to be Erected in Constantinople. (Subscription Invited)’, Punch, 26 September 1896, p. 146.

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age of many of Britain’s leading proponents of the Ottoman Christian cause in the 1870s. Voices of the 1876 pro-Bulgarian movement, such as Gladstone, Argyll, and Westminster, were extremely old by the standards of the day at 86, 73, and 71 respectively. All would be dead by 1900, while another key pro-Bulgarian leader, Charles Bradlaugh, had already died in 1891. Jo Laycock may be right that Gladstone’s anger over Rosebery’s inaction on the massacres was so great that, despite the former’s retirement, it was a chief cause of Rosebery’s resignation as Liberal leader in October 1896.63 And certainly Punch felt the G.O.M. still had energy, as shown by a cartoon from September (Figure 11.9) that depicted Gladstone, girded for war and with sword held aloft, exhorting Britannia to draw her own blade and join the fight against a mob of Turkish caricatures in the background. 64 Still, as Dominic Williams says, this image also ‘points to the difficulty of representing convincing action’, as Gladstone was neither well positioned nor energetic enough by that point to do anything substantive beyond make a protest.65 Indeed, perhaps Punch put the vigour left in Gladstone best when it mused on ‘A Possible Page from a Grand Old Diary’ elsewhere in the same issue: Saturday. – Cannot remain inactive any longer. Asked to speak at a public meeting to denounce the lowest scoundrel that ever disgraced the nineteenth century! Of course I will, and what’s more, if they don’t listen to me, I will raise the nation in revolt, provoke a general election, come in at the head of the poll, and resume my old rooms in Downing Street! to think of the knave continuing his roguery! Well, it is not too late, and I am fit for anything! Sunday. – Customary service. Very soothing. Calm and sedate. Perhaps, after all, I had better reconsider the situation or at any rate curtail the programme.66

In reality, Gladstone had already become something of an artefact, to be deployed at will when signifying a time of Liberal unity prior to its destruction – by a cruel irony – in Gladstone’s staking of the party’s future on his support for Irish Home Rule. He was, in a way, already dead, eulogised, and venerated, as Punch showed in a cartoon from October, just after Rosebery’s resignation as Liberal leader. Here, Sir William Harcourt (the Liberals’ chief in the Commons and Rosebery’s successor), in hunting costume and with a shotgun under his arm, chides Rosebery on not bothering to help clear out the ‘Armenian covers’.67 On a pedestal in the background, a bust of Gladstone glowers down on the scene, disapproving but incapable of action. Certainly, there were some effects. They may merely have been felt and represented less in Punch and more broadly in British society. As [ 324 ]

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Figure 11.9  Sir John Tenniel, ‘A Strong Appeal’, Punch, 26 September 1896, p. 151.

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Michelle Tusan has shown, younger participants in the movement of 1876, like the churchman Malcolm MacColl and, particularly, the famous newspaperman W. T. Stead, still had energy and maintained a degree of political influence during the Armenian massacres.68 Furthermore, pro-Armenian activism featured throughout the period in Britain, such as the relief work undertaken by Ann Mary Burgess, who led the Friends’ Armenian Mission in Constantinople and had myriad connections to powerful political figures (especially upper-class women who led humanitarian organisations and were associated with the Liberal Party).69 However, neither MacColl, nor Stead, nor Burgess (nor any other person, ultimately) had enough influence with those who held the political authority to act, it seems, to have made much actual difference. As she says of the official response to the ‘horror and outrage’ elicited by reports in the media during the massacres, in the end ‘humanitarian diplomacy faltered when it faced its first major test after the Bulgarian crisis’.70 It could simply be that it was easier for British politicians in 1896 than it had been in 1876 to duck responsibility over abuses of Ottoman Christians. Britons, like Sambourne’s imagined version of Rosebery (and, by this stage of his career, the real statesman himself), just did not care as much as they once had about such matters. This could certainly be debated: Michelle Tusan makes a characteristically compelling argument for quite the opposite trend in her work.71 However, judging degrees of imperial British ‘public interest’ in foreign matters is always an exercise in determining relationships and effects rather than merely accruing a volume of data. In this regard, the Armenian massacres of the 1890s seem to have reflected and impacted the changing world of European international relations, and Punch’s reaction to the massacres offers insights into the plasticity of the international environment before the 1914 combatant blocs took their final form. Some of these relationships were surprising for the time. For example, it would have been unthinkable in previous decades for there to be a suspicion, as Punch’s ‘Nurse Bruin’ cartoon shows, that Russia was passive when it came to abuses of Ottoman Christians. A striking illustration of this development comes from an October 1896 cartoon (Figure 11.10), which showed the Turk dressed as a gladiator, his sword bloodied and his foot on the throat of his lesser foe, whose broken blade and shield (marked ‘Armenia’) lies on the ground.72 The Turk stands impassively ‘Waiting the Signal’ from Caesar, whose banner and face mark him out as Tsar Nicholas (flanked by German Kaiser Wilhelm II), while Armenia raises his hand in a last, desperate appeal. At the same time, Britain – which for a half century had been a quite Russophobic place – also saw a warming of its relationship with Russia [ 326 ]

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Figure 11.10  Sir John Tenniel, ‘Waiting the Signal’, Punch, 17 October 1896, p. 187.

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during the years of the massacres (a trend that eventually led to their formal alliance in 1907).73 Indeed, the allusion made in the cartoon is to a conference between the Tsar and Salisbury held in September 1896, where they agreed that no action taken on the massacres should alter their mutual goal of improving relations (in this, the tone of the cartoon rather perfectly matched the officially secret conclusion the leaders reached).74 And even apologists for Salisbury, like Peter Marsh, note that he chose to focus on what the massacres meant for British policy rather than on determining an effective response to them.75 In a way, then, the massacres brought two powers, which had been antagonists in eastern affairs, closer together. Salisbury even told the Tsar that Ottoman control of Constantinople was no longer considered a key part of Britain’s Indian strategy – a bold move for Disraeli’s heir!76 The Armenian massacres, then, occasioned radical changes in European relations at the expense of non-European spaces, neatly in line with the general theme of an era that had seen Africa and Asia carved into spheres of influence in order to stave off conflict in the home continent, even if this proved ultimately to be an ineffective strategy. A cartoon from December 1894 says it best: here the Russian bear walks arm in arm with the British Lion, saying in unison: ‘What a pity we didn’t know each other before!’77 An accompanying article cites speculation in Russia’s media of an Anglo-Russian alliance, while below the Russian bear wonders whether ‘the Teutonic Eagle [i.e. Germany]’ regarded the new friendship ‘a leetle jealously’.78 Further triangulations produce more pictorial evidence of international changes occurring in the context of the massacres, such as a Punch cartoon from 10 October 1896 that has Britannia congratulating France following the latter’s threats of intervention made against the Sultan (who broods in the background) over the continuation of the killings.79 ‘Well done, sister’, Britannia says, ‘I am with you heart and soul!’ Good Anglo-French relations had long been the case, of course, but this expression of goodwill during the early years of the 1894 Franco-Russian Alliance is an intriguing foreshadow of the Entente Cordiale of 1904 and the Triple Entente, which the 1907 Anglo-Russian treaty formalised. If the ‘Teutonic Eagle’ looked on ‘jealously’, then it was in many Britons’ and Russians’ minds the result of German ambitions in the Middle East, as signified by German involvement in Ottoman railways and other industries. Britain, Russia, and France rather ironically saw their shared competition in the region morph into a set of shared priorities when confronted with a new competitor. The fact, then, that German leaders were reluctant to antagonise the Ottomans over the Armenian massacres was a consequence of German foreign and imperial policy, while at the same time its Armenian policy negatively influenced [ 328 ]

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Germany’s (and, of course, the Ottomans’) international relationships.80 However, Germany never appears as a specifically negative character in Punch cartoons on the massacres, which occurred before events and trends – like the Boer War and the acceleration of Germany’s naval programme – that soured a relationship between Britain and Germany that had previously been relatively good.81 In this regard, as in many others, Britain’s famous First World War Germanophobia was not yet a fait accompli. Given all the coverage the Armenian massacres got in 1896, the end of that year saw Punch turn away rather rapidly from the massacres towards other issues deemed more acute. ‘The Turkish Fox’, as a Punch cartoon in November put it, had not only escaped the Great Powers (who argued over the direction to go in a field of tall grass marked ‘Eastern Question’), but also escaped the fickle clutches of British discourse in general.82 This is not to say that the Ottoman Empire lacked for attention: the following year saw dozens of cartoons and articles in Punch on the 1897 Greco-Turkish War (an outgrowth of the ongoing rebellion in Crete). However, the image of Armenia had died in the sand of Punch’s arena, the ‘signal’ given more by the Great Powers in general than by any one of them. Indeed, when it came to redress of grievances over the massacres, the enduring tactic of holding the Ottoman Empire hostage over its debt was the closest Europe ever came to any kind of intervention. A Punch cartoon in late November referenced this approach, depicting the Sultan reading of a proposed company called the ‘Reorganisation of the Ottoman Empire’, which had £5,000,000 in capital and would be directed by ‘Russia. France. England’.83 Underneath the title, ‘Turkey Limited’, the Sultan says: ‘Bismillah! Make me into a limited company? M’m – ah – s’pose they’ll allow me to join the board after allotment!’ Even this tactic failed, however, as by the time the Great Powers threatened action the Ottomans were gearing up for war against Greece, and any interference now had different implications in terms of the Ottoman response to antagonism.84 Not only had the bluff failed, but Europe had never really sold the bluff in the first place. An examination of Punch and the Armenian massacres of the 1890s leaves us with enigmatic – though no less compelling – insights into British opinion at the turn of the twentieth century. On the one hand, there was a significant volume of coverage in Punch during the height of the massacres. As an episode, Punch treated it seriously and connected it with a host of other domestic, foreign, and imperial issues and preoccupations. On the other hand, the subject never truly went beyond that of a political and cultural sideshow. As Dominic Williams aptly sums it up, Punch’s coverage of the Armenian massacres never succeeded [ 329 ]

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‘in making any significant political point’, much less a consistent set of points.85 This was not 1876, which had seen the country truly up in arms over the massacre of Christians in Bulgaria – where, indeed, the death toll was at least ten times smaller than proved the case in Armenia in the 1890s. To be sure, Punch may not have reflected every aspect of British opinion, but its coverage is representative of the mixture of bluster and indifference that characterised Britain’s regard for the Armenians before the First World War. With so much for the British Empire to concern itself with, little time was ultimately spared for the plight of a couple of million eastern Christians, who by 1918 would number about a million fewer.

Notes 1 A note on terminology: any time the words ‘Turk’, ‘Turkey’, or ‘Turkish’ appear without quotation marks in my prose in this chapter, it is not done with the intention of ignoring the complex and multi-ethnic character of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, any use of these words is in reference to the common Orientalist caricature of the Ottoman Empire, its leaders, and its peoples employed in Punch (and, indeed, in Britain more broadly and elsewhere in the West in general). Hunchak, which means ‘bell’ or ‘clarion’ in Armenian, was the party newspaper of Ottoman Armenian social democrats from 1887 to 1915. Party affiliates were therefore often referred to as ‘Hunchaks’. 2 Arman J. Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question from the 1830s to 1914, Princeton: Gomidas Institute Books, 2003, pp. 227–228. 3 See: Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, New York: Metropolitan, 2006, p. 42. 4 See, for example, the discussion of the circulation figures of the Illustrated London News in relation to Orientalist subject matter: Andrew C. Long, Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880–1930, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014, pp. 81–84. 5 For a discussion of the Eastern Question’s role in the formation of European identities, see: Leslie Rogne Schumacher, ‘The Eastern Question as a Europe Question: Viewing the Ascent of “Europe” Through the Lens of Ottoman Decline’, Journal of European Studies, 44 (1), 2014, pp. 64–80. 6 Richard Scully, British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 136. From 1893, Fun shifted towards a more conservative tone, expressing support of Liberal Unionist policies (Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists – Volume II: The Rivals of ‘Mr Punch’, London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018, pp. 162–163). 7 Scully, British Images of Germany, p. 136. 8 Despite Henry Miller’s assertion that Punch is a problem – and often imagined to represent British opinion more broadly – the essential importance of Punch for nineteenth-century Britain is difficult to dispute. See: Henry Miller, ‘The Problem with Punch’, Historical Research, 82 (216), 2009, pp. 285–302; and Brian Maidment, ‘The Presence of Punch in the Nineteenth Century’, in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (eds), Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013, pp. 15–44. 9 Dominic Williams, ‘Punch and the Pogroms: Eastern Atrocities in John Tenniel’s Political Cartoons, 1876–1896’, RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne, 42 (1), 2017, p. 32.

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PUNCH AN D TH E A RM EN I A N M A SSA C R E S O F 1 8 9 4 – 1 8 9 6 10 See: Michelle Tusan, The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill, London: I. B. Tauris, 2017; Michelle Tusan, Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Also, for a more basic background on this matter in the context of British foreign policy, see: Michelle Tusan, ‘Britain and the Launching of the Armenian Question’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 7 (4), 1976, pp. 465–483. 11 Robert Melson’s work is among the best at tracing the connections between the 1894–1896 massacres in relation to the Armenian Genocide. See, for example: ‘A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24 (3), 1982, pp. 481–509. 12 Jo Laycock, Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, Ambiguity and Intervention, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009, p. 78. 13 Tusan, Smyrna’s Ashes, p. 31. 14 For more information, see: Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 15 See: ‘The Hyde-Park Meetings’, Daily News, 25 February 1878, p. 1. 16 Sir John Tenniel, ‘An Old Offender’, Punch, 15 December 1894, p. 283. 17 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Who Said – “Atrocities”?’, Punch, 12 January 1895, p. 19. 18 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Disturbed!’, Punch, 9 March 1895, p. 115. 19 ‘Disturbed!’, Punch, 9 March 1895, p. 114. 20 ‘Disturbed!’, p. 114. 21 Edwin Pears, Turkey and Its Peoples, London: Methuen, 1911, p. 294. For a discussion of Pears, who was long considered a leading expert on the Ottoman Empire, see: Akaby Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question, 1915–1923, London: Croom Helm, 1984, pp. 39–40. 22 Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question, pp. 187–188. 23 Sir John Tenniel, ‘The Old Crusaders!’, Punch, 18 May 1895, pp. 233–234. Argyll is also identified by the shield he holds, which bears his house’s crest. 24 See: Muriel C. McClendon, ‘A Moveable Feast: Saint George’s Day Celebrations and Religious Change in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1), 1999, pp. 1–27. 25 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Deeds – Not Words!’, Punch, 15 June 1895, p. 283. For a primer on the Armenian-as-violated-woman trope, see: Leshu Torchin, ‘Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, and the Formation of Witnessing Publics’, American Anthropologist, 108 (1), 2006, pp. 214–220. 26 ‘The Armenian Question’, The Spectator, 27 July 1895, p. 105, quoted in Arman J. Kirakossian (ed.), The Armenian Massacres, 1894–1896: British Media Testimony, Dearborn: Armenian Research Center, 2008, p. 228. 27 See Eugenio F. Biagini’s work on this issue, especially: Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; and British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 28 ‘The Suspense in Constantinople’, The Spectator, 12 October 1895, p. 476. 29 Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question, p. 229. See also: Roy Douglas, ‘Britain and the Armenian Question, 1894–7’, The Historical Journal, 19 (1), 1976, pp. 113–133. 30 ‘The Suspense in Constantinople’, The Spectator, 12 October 1895, p. 476. 31 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Good Dog!’, Punch, 12 October 1895, p. 175. 32 ‘Lord Salisbury’s Difficult Task’, New York Times, 6 October 1895, p. 1. 33 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Rescue!’, Punch, 26 October 1895, p. 199. 34 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Kismet!’, Punch, 19 November 1895, pp. 234–235. 35 Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question, p. 251. 36 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Armenia’s Appeal’, Punch, 21 December 1895, p. 295. 37 ‘The Real Eastern Question’, Punch, 21 December 1895, p. 293.

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A M BI G U I TI ES O F E M P IR E 38 Linley Sambourne, ‘A Free Hand’, Punch, 18 January 1896, p. 26. Interestingly, the Gurkha sword (or kukri) has elsewhere been considered a literary and visual symbol of British imperialism. See: Kate Thomas, Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 184. 39 Sambourne, ‘A Free Hand’, p. 26. 40 See: Doğan Gürpınar, Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy: A Political, Social and Cultural History, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014, pp. 147–148. 41 Linley Sambourne, ‘Turkey and the Power’, Punch, 1 February 1896, p. 57. 42 ‘The Song of the Sultan’, Punch, 29 February 1896, p. 102. 43 Linley Sambourne, ‘The Compact’, Punch, 8 February 1896, p. 62. 44 ‘Cave Ursum!’, Punch, 8 February 1896, p. 61. 45 Linley Sambourne, ‘Nurse Bruin’, Punch, 29 February 1896, p. 98. 46 ‘Glorious, By Jingo!’, Punch, 29 February 1896, p. 97. 47 Linley Sambourne, ‘Turk the Sublime!’, Punch, 7 March 1896, p. 110. 48 W. Alison Phillips, Untitled, Punch, 15 February 1896, p. 77. Also see: William Watson, The Purple East, London: John Lane, 1896. 49 ‘The Real Eastern Question’, Punch, 7 March 1896, p. 111. On the symbolism of the colour purple, see: Beth Newman, Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004, p. 53. 50 Sir John Tenniel, ‘In the Desert!’, Punch, 28 March 1896, p. 150. 51 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Left Behind!’, Punch, 4 April 1896, p. 163. 52 Watson, The Purple East, p. 17. 53 Sir John Tenniel, ‘A Turkish Bath’, Punch, 22 August 1896, p. 91. 54 Linley Sambourne, ‘Trying It On’, Punch, 5 September 1896, p. 110. 55 Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 139–140. 56 Akçam, A Shameful Act, p. 42. 57 ‘The Riots at Constantinople’, The Times, 31 August 1896, p. 3. 58 See: ‘The Constantinople Horror’, Evening Post, 12 October 1896, p. 2. Also, see: Tusan, British Empire and the Armenian Genocide, pp. 82–83. 59 Quoted in: ‘The Riots at Constantinople’, The Times, 31 August 1896, p. 3. 60 Sir John Tenniel, ‘The Man for the Job!’, Punch, 12 September 1896, p. 127. 61 E. T. Reed, ‘Design for Proposed Statue to be Erected in Constantinople’, Punch, 26 September 1896, p. 146. 62 ‘The European Powers’, Punch, 19 September 1896, p. 138. 63 Laycock, Imagining Armenia, p. 79. 64 Sir John Tenniel, ‘A Strong Appeal!’, Punch, 26 September 1896, p. 151. 65 Williams, ‘Punch and the Pogroms’, p. 45. 66 ‘Retirement in Retreat’, Punch, 26 September 1896, p. 147. 67 Linley Sambourne, ‘A Day Over the Armenian Covers’, Punch, 10 October 1896, p. 170. 68 Tusan, British Empire and the Armenian Genocide, pp. 72, 74–76. 69 Tusan, British Empire and the Armenian Genocide, pp. 86–89. 70 Tusan, British Empire and the Armenian Genocide, p. 58. 71 See: Tusan, British Empire and the Armenian Genocide, pp. 57–89; Tusan, Smyrna’s Ashes, pp. 30–39. 72 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Waiting the Signal’, Punch, 10 October 1896, p. 187. 73 On British Russophobia, see: John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950; Michael J. Hughes, ‘British Opinion and Russian Terrorism in the 1880s’, European History Quarterly, 41 (2), 2011, pp. 255–277; Michael J. Hughes, ‘The English Slavophile: W. J. Birbeck and Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review, 82 (3), 2004, pp. 680–706; Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 74 Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question, pp. 269–273.

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PUNCH AN D TH E A RM EN I A N M A SSA C R E S O F 1 8 9 4 – 1 8 9 6 75 See: Peter Marsh, ‘Lord Salisbury and the Ottoman Massacres’, Journal of British Studies, 11 (2), 1972, pp. 63–83. 76 Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question, p. 272. 77 Sir John Tenniel, ‘All’s Well!’, Punch, 1 December 1894, p. 259. 78 ‘All’s Well!’, Punch, 1 December 1894, p. 258. 79 Sir John Tenniel, ‘France to the Fore!’, Punch, 10 October 1896, p. 175. 80 For an exploration of the massacres’ place in the rise of the German–Ottoman relationship, see: Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘“Down in Turkey, Far Away”: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (1), 2007, pp. 80–111. 81 See: Peter J. Hugill, ‘German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896–1914’, The Geographical Review, 98 (1), 2008, pp. 1–23. Also: Scully, British Images of Germany, pp. 213–260. 82 Sir John Tenniel, ‘The Turkish Fox’, Punch, 14 November 1896, p. 235. 83 Sir John Tenniel, ‘Turkey Limited’, Punch, 28 November 1896, p. 259. 84 Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question, p. 280. 85 Williams, ‘Punch and the Pogroms’, p. 46.

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Ambiguities in the fight waged by the socialist satirical review Der Wahre Jacob against militarism and imperialism Jean-Claude Gardes (translated from the French by Narelle Fletcher; from the German by John Clifton-Everest) The golden age of the German satirical press occurred during the Second Reich, and particularly during the Wilhelmian era (c.1890–1914), and a number of the great satirical reviews of the time are still held in high regard today, such as the famous Simplicissimus. Der Wahre Jacob, a publication affiliated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), is less well known today than Simplicissimus; however, it was the satirical review that enjoyed the greatest popular success in the Wilhelmian era.1 Its attitude towards the major issues and problems of Wilhelmine Germany (and beyond) are therefore a valuable window onto this period; and its relative neglect as a source opens up the prospect of new understandings and interpretations. Its socialist leanings mean that matters of empire and militarism – fundamental underpinnings of the pre-1914 Kaiserreich – were of particular interest to the editors and cartoonists of Der Wahre Jacob. The brief survey of such attitudes in what follows indicates a critical (but somewhat ambiguous) attitude towards the internal machinations of German imperial, commercial, and military elites; it also adds to our understanding of Germany as an internal and external context for, and exponent of, imperialism. This has been a focus of recent scholarly attention, and is not defined simply as the ‘Prussianisation’ of Germany; but rather that empire and imperialism was a necessary component of the ongoing unification and functioning of the German nation-state, not merely an extension of it (and nor, indeed, was it only a policy pursued by reactionary or opportunist sectors in German politics and society).2 In this context, Der Wahre Jacob seems to have been more wedded to attacking particular instances of colonial and imperial activity, rather than opposing the idea or the policy itself; and it was certainly in line with the rest [ 334 ]

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of the social democratic world in (paradoxically) supporting the war in 1914. Der Wahre Jacob was founded in 1879 in Hamburg, but it rapidly fell victim to censorship because of the minor state of emergency decreed in that town in the framework of Bismarck’s struggle against the socialist movement. Der Wahre Jacob appeared for a second time in 1884 (Figure 12.1), when it was published by the great publisher Johannes Dietz, based in Stuttgart. During the emergency laws which were extended until 1890 (commonly called the anti-socialist laws, which had first been passed by Bismarck in 1878), the review had to take great care to avoid any bans. It nevertheless managed to achieve great popular success, as its circulation in 1890 (with its Munich counterpart Süddeutscher Postillon) rose from just 40,000 in 1887 to 100,000 copies.3 This success continued to increase throughout the Wilhelmian era: on the eve of the war, the review was selling almost 400,000 copies (having reached 380,500 in 1912). When we consider that no other satirical paper of the time managed to consistently sell more than 100,000 copies, we realise what an amazing audience Der Wahre Jacob actually had. The title of the review gives a specific indication of its objectives. It refers to a popular expression at the end of the nineteenth century which has almost completely disappeared from the language of today: Das ist der wahre Jacob (‘that’s truthful Jacob’). This expression was used to refer to someone who was noteworthy for their common sense and the fairness, wisdom, and humour of their remarks. Der Wahre Jacob had a very stable financial basis because of the large number of subscribers, and it always remained a publication that was supported by the Social Democrats. Thus, in the party’s annual reports can be found accounts of the contents of the review and, occasionally, comments on its editorial line. It is therefore not surprising that the review reported on the fights waged by social democracy and on the great hopes that the people invested in the SPD. Der Wahre Jacob was not very fond of light humorous pieces, or illustrations that were purely for entertainment; its favourite themes were overtly political: the denunciation of the imperial regime and its representatives; criticism of the defenders of the established order (police, judiciary, army, churches, Junkers, bourgeoisie, and capitalists); support for the social, cultural, and electoral struggles of social democracy, including the fight against (Prussian) militarism and German and European imperialism. Indeed, this struggle occupied a choice position in the columns of the review. Analysis of the contents of the illustrations on the front page, which generally set the tone for the issue, provides valuable indications in this regard. For the period 1892–1913, out of a total of 572 illustrations, militarism is evoked in 57 front pages, international [ 335 ]

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Figure 12.1  Unknown artist, Der Wahre Jacob, 1, 1884, cover.

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tensions in 51, external policy in 20, and colonialism in 19. Even if it is not practicable to add these figures together, because the front page frequently covered several themes which were largely interwoven, it can be estimated that approximately one illustration in five addressed the struggle against militarism and imperialism, which places this theme in third position behind the criticism of the Kaiser and his chancellors (138 front pages) and Social Democratic Party propaganda (127 front pages). The figures cited for this struggle would be even higher if we took into account the caricatures promoting workers’ internationalism, which aimed at overcoming international tensions. It should be noted that this theme was particularly evoked in three distinct phases: at the beginning of the 1890s; in 1899–1901; and then during the three years preceding the war. The peaks in these years can easily be explained by the tensions accumulating during those times, either in internal policy when the defence budget posed a problem, or in external policy with the multiplication of conflicts (such as in 1899–1901 with the expedition to China; and in 1911–1914, surrounding the international crises that led to war). In fact, the editors of and contributors to Der Wahre Jacob did not insist excessively on the reasons for such opposition, undoubtedly believing that the legitimacy of the fight against nationalism and imperialism did not need to be explained. However, a certain number of elements were regularly put forward as reasons for opposition – namely that imperialism and militarism were: (1) a means of diversion from real issues; and (2) an unfair and unjust source of revenue for the upper middle class. The review firstly highlighted the idea that militarism based on fear was another means for Germany’s leaders to divert attention from social and political injustice. Already, under the emergency laws, Der Wahre Jacob endeavoured to unmask the use of militarism for this purpose; this theme allowed the internal problems in Germany and other countries to be somewhat hidden. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the review frequently returned to this theme and accused the government and its supporters of diverting the workers’ attention by making them believe in a foreign threat. Thus Max Kegel, one of the most well-known satirists of the paper, wrote in a poem in 1892: Wo steht der Feind, der starke, schlimme Der brechen will ins Land herein, Der uns bedroht mit solchem Grimme Daß unsrer Krieger Zahl zu klein? Wir sehn ihn nicht!

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Where is the Enemy, so strong and evil That seeks to invade our land, Who menaces us with such ferocity That the number of our warriors is too small? We do not see him! 4

This accusation was forcefully expressed during the first decade of the Wilhelmian era, particularly in 1893 during social democracy’s antimilitarist campaign. It was evoked much less from 1900. From 1890 numerous references can be found in the review which seek to show to what extent the upper middle class supported the nationalist cause, and its associated imperialism, in order to increase its volume of business and therefore its capital. The following poem – where Der Wahre Jacob purportedly gives the floor to Krupp and his associates – is indicative of the tone of the textual or graphic satires: Jede Schlachtschiff-Vermehrung Bringt uns ‘ne feine Bescheerung; Jeder Marineplan Füllt unsre Kasse an, Zuckt Tirpitz mit den Wimpern, Hôrt man’s im Kasten klimpern! Jedes Hurrahgeschrei: Wir machen’s Geschäft dabei! Jedes ‘Alldeutschland hoch!’ Uns trägt es Zinsen noch. (…) Werden wir zu Wasser stark, Kriegen wir noch viel mehr Mark. Drum schrei’n wir unverwandt: ‘Für Gott, König und Vaterland!’ Each increase of the battlefleet Gives us a nice payout; Each naval plan Fills our till When Tirpitz flashes his eyelashes You can hear a jingling in the cash-registers! Every time they cheer ‘Hooray!’ It means good business for us! Every ‘Up with Germany!’ pays us more interest (…) As we become mighty on the seas, We rake in more Marks. And so with no hesitation we cry: ‘For God, King, and Fatherland!’5

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This struggle of course took place within a much more global context: that of the fight against capitalism, with the paper seeking to reveal the latter’s mechanisms which it deemed perverse. The capitalist is a shameless businessman whose nationalism is built exclusively on his business sense. This criticism was directed against all forms of imperialism, both German and non-German. Thus Rata Langa (‘Galantara’) attacked the British during the Boer War, showing John Bull feeding his plant, whose flowers are gilded with the blood of the Boers (Figure 12.2).6 This same Rata Langa – the key cartoonist at the turn of the century – presented the European intervention in China in this same period in a caricature with an evocative title, Die drei Unzertrennlichen [The three inseparables]: the intervention is symbolised by a warrior who is accompanied by death and by a war profiteer who calls out in happiness: Ich rieche Blut, Gevatter! [I smell blood, cousins!].7 These capitalists were logically ready to deny their nationalist bias when it came to selling cannons. Still, in relation to the intervention in China, which was the very symbol of European imperialism at the turn of the century, the caption of a caricature showing German soldiers in difficulty reads: Die Kruppschen Geschütze haben ihre Ueberlegenheit dargethan. Den deustchen Soldaten war es ein Trost, den Tod durch vaterländische Kanonen zu erleiden [Krupp’s artillery has demonstrated its superiority. It was a consolation for the German soldiers to suffer death from the guns of the Fatherland].8 Krupp observed the strictest ‘neutrality’ during international conflicts. During the war, which saw the Japanese and the Russians opposed to one another in 1904–1905, the company’s authorised representative addressed a subordinate in these terms: Die russischen Aufträge legen Sie rechts, die japanischen links – damit nur keine Verwechslung vorkommt! [Put the Russian orders on the right and the Japanese ones on the left – just as long as they don’t get mixed up!].9 These few examples are quite indicative of the general discourse of the writers and cartoonists. This specific campaign against Krupp became even more intense at the beginning of the 1910s, particularly during the 1913 trial of the German officers who had forwarded military secrets to Krupp’s representatives.10 These officers, along with two company managers, were sentenced to imprisonment by the military tribunal. It was Karl Liebknecht – at the time a Social Democrat deputy – who, from 18 April, had forcefully denounced to the Reichstag the attempts by Krupp’s company to corrupt the soldiers in order to obtain information about the material used.11 Der Wahre Jacob’s caricaturists and satirists revelled in this affair and commented on it extensively, showing unbridled delight in the sentences that were handed down, as in the caricature by Erich Schilling (Figure 12.3), where Bertha von Krupp and [ 339 ]

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Figure 12.2  Rata Langa (Galantara), ‘Internationale Revue.’, including ‘John Bulls Sabbathfeier’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 17 July 1900, p. 3288.

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Figure 12.3  Erich Schilling, ‘Die Firma Krupp und die Kornwalzen’, Der Wahre Jacob, 707, 23 August 1913, p. 8035.

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Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach are about to be impaled on bayonets.12 This recurrent discourse somewhat refutes the thesis of the East German researcher Klaus Völkerling, for whom Der Wahre Jacob – unlike the other Social Democrat publication founded in 1882 in Munich, Süddeutscher Postillon – gave little acknowledgement of what militarism represented for the upper middle class.13 During the Wilhelmian era, the German liberal parties were divided between the Nationalliberale Partei and the progressives (who successively formed the Liberale Vereinigung of 1880, then the Deutsche Freisinnige Partei in 1884, and then merged with the Deutsche Volkspartei to form the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei from 1910). For several years, the review still had some hope in the liberal, anti-militarist bourgeoisie, thinking that it could find an ally there. But these hopes were quickly dashed, and documents testify to the evolution in this relationship and the link which was formed between this liberal middle class, which the proletariat was fighting, and the army. A caricature from the end of 1892 illustrates this situation very clearly: thrown by his Social Democrat horse, the rider Eugen Richter (the leader of the Progressive Party) addresses a representative of the army in the following terms: Fang’ mir nur den wieder ein, – ich bewillige alles! [Get it back for me – I shall agree to anything!].14 Subsequently this common interest was frequently denounced, such as when the army intervened to safeguard the interests of company leaders or to fight the demands of the unemployed (Figure 12.4).15 The review’s anti-militarism fed more and more on the tangible support given by the army to the political and social system in place. Moreover, in 1905 the war minister Karl von Einem did not hide the fact that in his eyes, the army offered the best possible protection against socialists and anarchists.16 It was logical that the army figured regularly among the pillars of society denounced by Der Wahre Jacob’s cartoonists.17 It goes without saying that the threat posed by militarism and imperialism to the understanding between peoples was very frequently evoked. In this context, the illustrators often relied on illustrations where pathos was present and where the allegories used were not particularly original: there are countless doves of peace, and angels of peace in grave danger, while the soil is strewn with the dead, representations of soldiers in the form of skeletons, soldiers seated on their arsenals, leaders perched on mounds of skulls or swimming in blood. As the different peace conferences did not produce any tangible result, the angel of peace frequently appeared as an armour-clad warrior, such as in the wake of the relative failure of the second peace conference at The Hague in 1907 (Figure 12.5). The review liked to show the extent to which certain sectors of the population were not aware of the [ 342 ]

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Figure 12.4  Willy Steinert, ‘Der kleine Katechismus des Soldaten’, Der Wahre Jacob, 711, 18 October 1913, p. 8099.

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Figure 12.5  Unknown cartoonist, ‘Der Friedensengel des Imperialismus’, Der Wahre Jacob, 546, 25 June 1907, p. 5440.

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consequences of the growing militarism in German society. The Berlin philistine had to have a bad dream in order for him to perceive the danger represented by the arms race.18 During the Wilhelmian era, various draft laws designed to strengthen military numbers or military potential were submitted to the arbitration of the Reichstag and were most often passed. The budget allocated to arms therefore continually increased, going from 10 marks per inhabitant in 1890 to 26 marks in 1913.19 A consequence of militarism was therefore a significant drop in the standard of living of the people, particularly the working class. This phenomenon was continuously denounced by the review’s contributors, who were infuriated by the harm caused by the Weltpolitik implemented by Kaiser Wilhelm II, particularly in 1892–1893 and 1899–1900. The criticisms were sometimes designed to be ironic: Es giebt noch immer unpatriotische Philister, die eine Kaffekochmaschine für wichtiger halten, als eine Mordmaschine, und die ein kräftiges Mittagessen einer kräftigen Weltmachtpolitik vorziehen. Solche Kreaturen zu zerschmettern, muss hinfort die einzige Aufgabe unserer Parlamente und der deutschen Presse sein. There are still some unpatriotic philistines who consider a coffee machine more important than a slaughtering machine, and prefer a mighty lunch to a mighty policy of world power. The crushing of such creatures must be henceforth the sole task of our parliaments and of the German press.20

However, the illustrators and contributors often fell into pathos; such as in Rata Langa’s caricature Aus Deutschlands Zukunft [From Germany’s Future], where the German Michel and his family, who are thin from hunger and clothed in rags, lament around an empty table while their dresser is overflowing with little soldiers, cannons, and ships (Figure 12.6).21 Reference was often made to the disproportion between the amounts allocated to the army and navy (which experienced considerable expansion under Wilhelm II), and the budget allocated to the Minister for the Interior for the implementation of social measures. In a superb caricature by Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, Krupp and Karl Stumm (another very influential captain of industry who founded the Freikonservativen party) are happily steering a cart filled with banknotes for the development of the navy while Arthur, Graf von Posadowsky-Wehner (who was then Vice-Chancellor and Secretary of State for the Interior) watches them from the steps of the Reichstag, carrying social reforms in a very small briefcase.22 In another illustration by Otto Emil Lau, the militarism and ‘marinism’ car driven by Tirpitz and Gossier has a resounding victory over the social reform snail ridden by Posadowsky.23 However, [ 345 ]

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Figure 12.6  Rata Langa, ‘Aus Deutschlands Zukunft’, Der Wahre Jacob, 364, 3 July 1900, p. 3277.

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it is impossible to find any figures which would enable us to evaluate this disproportion. The repressive methods implemented by the soldiers in the colonies or during armed conflicts are part of the recurrent themes addressed in Der Wahre Jacob. While the Germans were not spared, certain other countries with more extensive colonies were even more frequently denounced.24 Often the cartoonists did not hesitate to use horrible images to stigmatise the cruelty practised by the settlers or the army to impose respect. Thus, an image (Figure 12.7) can be seen of a soldier cutting off the nose and hands of a Congolese national; another shows King Edward VII bathing in blood (not shown); while in another, John Bull waters his plants with the blood of the Boers.25 These images were not unique to the caricaturists of Der Wahre Jacob; most of the main satirical reviews of the time, led by Simplicissimus, regularly offered similar images. In a famous illustration by Thomas Theodor Heine on the art of colonising (mentioned in the Introduction to this volume – Figure 1.2), a Belgian soldier (possibly King Leopold II himself) sits at a table eating the head of a native he is roasting; a tweed-clad English aristocrat is gorging an African with whisky so that he can endure the suffering inflicted by a soldier who is greedy for money (also being soothed by an Anglican vicar); and a German officer (with Wilhelm II-style moustaches) makes the giraffes march in the middle of the desert, and forbids snow and rubbish to be placed under a palm tree.26 In the face of the atrocities that were committed, the writers liked to comment ironically on the so-called cultural mission of the colonising countries. In Germany, numerous sectors of the population were aware of the nationalist and imperialist ideology, and of the Weltpolitik conducted by Kaiser Wilhelm II, yet they accepted the idea that ‘the Reich could only achieve the rank of a world power by a policy of brutal force’.27 Numerous pressure-group associations or leagues had been created to provide support for this nationalist militarism (which was often tinged with anti-Semitism). Most notably, these were the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband); the Naval League (Flottenverein); and the Military League (Wehrverein) or the Kyffhäuserbund, which was created in 1898 and grouped together various associations of war veterans. Der Wahre Jacob continually mocked these associations, particularly the Naval League. It reproached them for always calling for more resources to develop the army and the navy: Milliarden hat die Flotte schon, Die grosse, aufgefressen; Euch ist es nicht genug, ihr wollt Aus Micheln noch mehr pressen.

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Figure 12.7  Rata Langa, details from ‘Negerfrisur am Kongo’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 17 July 1900, p. 3288.

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Billions has the navy devoured, big as it is, already; it is not enough for you You want to squeeze still more from Michel.28

The review thus attacks the (decidedly bourgeois) German Michel who can dream about nothing else apart from ships or airships for war, the patriot who only aspires to win war medals and is ready to endure any sacrifice or humiliation to encourage the nationalist trend.29 In the face of this militarism and nationalism, which touched quite a number of European countries at the time, Der Wahre Jacob rarely took sides in the contests in which the major powers confronted one another. It was almost always a neutral observer of the fluctuations in the international situation, which it did not always seem to want to try to understand (Figure 12.8). Sometimes, it even did not seem to realise the full gravity of the conflicts. Thus, during the second Moroccan crisis of 1911, Jotthif Nauke (who commented on current affairs every week in a delightful Berlin dialect) declared: Diesmal fand de Explosion in Marokko statt. Ernstere Foljen werden ja woll nich entstehen [This time the explosion happened in Morocco. So presumably there will be no more serious consequences], and he added that this crisis was only a temporary display of fireworks providing journalists with subjects for discussion.30 This neutrality and this relative lack of seriousness in analysing the international situation were most often dictated by the desire to affirm that the conflicts being waged were not working-class conflicts and that the diplomatic comedies only concerned governments. During this same Moroccan crisis, a poet exclaimed: Was kümmert uns der Herrscher Zwist? [What concern is this squabble of the rulers to us?].31 If Der Wahre Jacob demonstrated great impartiality in most of the conflicts between the major powers, it was, however, always ready to stigmatise these countries’ imperialist aims, or more specifically the brutality and cruelty of the settlers.32 During the bloody confrontations in China, it expressed more indignation at the violence committed by the colonial expedition than at the acts of cruelty perpetrated by the Chinese. On the other hand, the review’s contributors hardly ever attacked the actual principle of colonialism or imperialism; first and foremost, they reflected on the vicissitudes of colonial expeditions and international tensions. It was symptomatic, for example, that in the 1892 poem Die Patrioten, the author was simply upset by the fact that the African [ 349 ]

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Figure 12.8  Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, ‘Das europäische Gleichgewicht’, Der Wahre Jacob, 663, 2 December 1911, p. 7321.

patriots who died in battle did not have a monument dedicated to them: Doch kommen nicht die Poeten gerannt, Zu singen und preisen die Toten, Die sich geopfert fürs Vaterland Als edelste Patrioten; Es steht auch kein ehernes Denkmal da, Die Nachwelt auf sie zu verweisen – Es sind ja nur Neger in Afrika, Die kämpften gegen die Deutschen! And yet the poets do not come running to praise and to celebrate the Dead, who sacrificed themselves to the Fatherland As the most noble Patriots; And there stands no bronze memorial To point them out to posterity Those are but negroes in Africa, Who fought against the Germans!33

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The following statements almost even suggest that the review was not against the idea of ‘civilising’ the world:

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Aber zum wahren Patriotismus gehört noch etwas anderes, nämlich ein gewisser Nationalstolz. Ein guter Patriot muß den Namen der deutschen Nation zu Ehren bringen und muß dazu beitragen, daß die Deutschen geachtet und angeshen sind. Achtung und Ansehen genießen aber nur freie Männer. Als Beispiel hierfür kann dienen, daß die Angehörigen des mächtigen chinesischen Reiches unendlich geringer geachtet werden als die Staatsbürger der kleinen republikanischen Schweiz. But true patriotism requires something more, namely a certain national pride. A true patriot must bring honour to the German nation and contribute to the winning of regard and respect for the Germans. But regard and respect are only enjoyed by free men. One may see an example of this in the fact that members of the mighty Chinese Empire are infinitely less regarded than the citizens of the small republic of the Swiss.34

The vision of the authors and illustrators very often remained strongly Eurocentric. They were undoubtedly still influenced by the global context of the era and the justifications which were frequently given to explain colonialism. In 1899 Eduard Bernstein wrote in his seminal work on revisionism, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie [The Prerequisites of Socialism and the Obligations of Social Democracy]: Sonst liegt wohl Grund vor, bei Erwerbung von Kolonien stets deren Werth und Aussichten streng zu prüfen und die Abfindung und Behandlung der Eingeborenen, sowie die sonstige Verwaltung scharf zu kontrolliren, aber kein Grund, solchen Erwerb als etwas von vornherein Verwerfliches zu betrachten. Additionally there is surely reason, when acquiring colonies, to examine their value and prospects, and the fate and treatment of natives, as well as keeping a strict watch over their administration; but there is no reason to regard their acquisition as something to be rejected a priori.35

With regard to L’Assiette au Beurre, Élisabeth and Michel Dixmier make a similar statement in their study of French periodicals of the period: ‘The legitimacy of colonisation was not really called in question […] The time had not yet come when anticolonialism firstly went through the stage of recognising the identity of the colonised people, and then led to active support for their struggle for independence.’36 [ 351 ]

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Der Wahre Jacob constantly tried to convince the working class that it was the only true victim of militarism and imperialism, and that its enemy could not be the proletariat from a neighbouring nation. For Wilhelm Liebknecht in his 1899 article ‘Im Thale des Friedens’ [In the Valley of Peace], there are only two different nations: the nation of oppressors and exploiters and the nation of the oppressed.37 In reference to what has just been expressed above, it should be noted that the representation of the proletarians did not take into account the human diversity in the world: proletarians were all men who were white. For the review, the only possible reaction was that the proletarians should unite (e.g. Figure 12.9). This faith in workers’ internationalism was forcefully expressed each time a socialist international congress was held: Er (der Kongreß) zeigt der haßdurchtobten Welt Ein Bild von Menschenliebe. Indeß zum Krieg gerüstet stehn Die Heere aller Lande, Wie brüderlich vereinigt sehn Der Arbeit Abgesandte. It (the Congress) shows to a world inflamed with hatred An image of love for humanity. While standing armed for war are the armies of all countries, In brotherly unity are observed The delegates of the workers.38

The same was true each time a peace conference failed, each time a German or foreign orator recommended disarmament, and each time the nationalists enthusiastically celebrated the anniversary of the victory at Sedan (2 September 1870). Thus, in 1895, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of this victory, the review devoted a large proportion of its issue (number 235) to proclaiming workers’ internationalism, notably publishing a poem by Béranger, Der heilige Bund der Völker [The Sacred Bond of Peoples], and an article by Emile Zola, Der Zusammenbruch [The Collapse]. Oddly enough, Der Wahre Jacob almost never explicitly incited the masses to protest against militarism and did not give a lot of attention to anti-militarist protests: thus, the protests against the Moroccan policy which brought together more than 200,000 people in Berlin in 1911 only earned a small mention in number 657. The poems Der gute Michel [The Good Michael] and Wir demonstrieren! [We Demonstrate!] remain very vague and do not directly call on the reader to protest, while the caricature Die Berliner Marokko-Demonstration [The Berlin [ 352 ]

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Figure 12.9  Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, ‘Mai-Feier’, Der Wahre Jacob, 385, 23 April 1901, p. 3485.

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Morocco Demonstration] above all analyses the relations between the protesters and the police. In fact, it is hardly surprising that these demonstrations were barely covered by the review, given that an evolution in the fight against militarism and imperialism can be observed from the beginning of the twentieth century. Even if it cannot be claimed, as Klaus Völkerling does, that henceforth all the articles and caricatures relating to the question of militarism and imperialism only addressed the necessity of carrying out reforms in the army, it is nevertheless clear that from this time the majority of contributors essentially attacked public demonstrations, subsequently condemning wars solely for moral reasons.39 The internationalist declarations were losing their vigour, and it was often a case of simply opposing the arms race, while the rejection of German and European imperialism increasingly came down to a condemnation of methods of repression, not imperialism itself. This evolution quite faithfully reflects the evolution in the major current of social democracy. As early as 1899, Eduard Bernstein had criticised Karl Marx and Frierich Engels’s principle that the proletariat did not have a homeland, affirming that nothing obliged social democracy to support the renunciation of the defence of present and future German interests.40 From 1900, the current that was favourable to the government’s concept of national defence had strengthened in the Social Democratic Party. In 1907, at the party congress in Essen and at the international congress in Stuttgart, August Bebel had declared to the Reichstag that the homeland must be defended in the face of aggression; while Gustav Noske affirmed ‘in agreement with the Minister for War: German soldiers must have the best arms’. A large number of Social Democrats had therefore come to minimise the danger of war, only highlighting the cost and the cruelty of militarism and imperialism and renouncing ‘calling for action on the part of the masses to influence the policies of the leaders’.41 It can be seen from the example of the proceedings brought against Rosa Luxemburg in 1914 how much Der Wahre Jacob followed the party’s evolution. Obviously, the review’s contributors took her side, supporting her anti-militarist struggle: in a caricature by Arthur Krüger the accused becomes the accuser (Figure 12.10).42 She is also seen draped in a red dress and armed with a sword – a symbol that was used less and less often in this era – as she leads working men and women of all countries into battle, proclaiming: Befreierin und Rächerin und Richterin, das Schwert entblößt, Ausrecken den gewalt’gen Arm werd’ich, daß er die Welt erlöst!

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Figure 12.10  Arthur Krüger, ‘Der Militarismus auf der Anklagebank. Aus dem Prozeß Rosa Luxemburg’, Der Wahre Jacob, 731, 25 July 1914, p. 8417.

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Liberator, avenger and judge, with naked sword I shall stretch forth my powerful arm to redeem the world!43

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However, it appears clear from other contributions that the review’s contributors did not totally espouse Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas. Richard Wagner, for example, alludes to one of the principal sentences which led to the latter being accused: Habt nichts mit Völkermord zu schaffen; Den Fremden zeigt ein friedliches Gesicht! Erhebt des Mordes scharf geschliffene Waffen Auch gegen Frankreichs Arbeitsbrüder nicht! 44 Have no truck with the murder of Peoples; Show a peaceful demeanour to strangers! Nor raise the sharpened weapon of murder Against your brother workers of France!

But he interprets it in his own way: Mit diesen Worten, die ein Weib gesprochen, Sei Deutschlands Sieg in Frage schon gestellt. Der ganze Kriegsplan sei damit durchbrochen, Versagten nur drei Leute in dem Feld. With these words, spoken by a woman, Let Germany’s victory be put in question. Let it wreck the entire plan of war, If but three people fall in the field.45

He does not dismiss the possibility of war, and even seems to accept it in principle. Like the whole party, Der Wahre Jacob seems to have wanted to take advantage of Rosa Luxemburg’s popularity without adopting her radical positions. On the eve of the war, its criticisms above all concerned the tax burden imposed on workers and the barbarity of war. Sometimes it even treated this subject in a not very serious manner: in number 731, which in part focused on the second trial, a caricature announced the end of militarism. An Italian engineer has discovered a means of destroying the brains of the warlords, which means they cannot invent any new arms.46 Consequently, the unreserved rallying of social democracy, and therefore of the review Der Wahre Jacob, to the national cause from the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 should not really be surprising; especially considering the virulent anti-Tsarist campaigns of the pre-war years, in which Russia often appeared not only as a bastion of repression, but also as the epitome of conquering imperialism. For the review’s [ 356 ]

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contributors, the war was first and foremost a defensive war against Russia: Der Reichstag sprach. Er sprach nicht lang. Es war kein zages: Gott helf! Es sprachen ein kräftiges Manneswort Die roten Hundertelf: ‘Das Land, das uns geboren hat, Das unsre Sprache spricht Das lassen wir dem Henkerzar Auf Tod und Leben nicht. Denn was auch war und werden mag, Das eine gilt noch jeden Tag: Wir wollen auf deutschen Erden Nicht Zarenknechte werden!’ The Reichstag spoke. But not at length. It was no craven: God help us! And they spoke a stalwart and manly word Did the red hundred-and-eleven: ‘This land, that has given us birth, And speaks our language We shall not abandon it to the executioner-Tsar To determine whether it shall die or live. For whatever has been and yet may be one thing is true every day: We wish on German soil Not to be the Tsar’s slaves!’47

Endorsing the statements of Hugo Haase – who had declared during the debates at the Reichstag that it was a matter of safeguarding Germany’s culture and independence and that the Social Democrats would never abandon their homeland in a period of distress – the review joined in the general elation and decided, like the Kaiser – who had declared ‘I no longer know any parties, now I only know Germans’ – to make a clean slate of past differences.48 The front page of number 733, from 28 August, even illustrates with relish the Kaiser’s words, ‘Nun aber wollen wir sie dreschen’ [‘Now we are going to give them a thrashing’]. Playing with the double meaning of the word ‘dreschen’ (threshing wheat; giving a thrashing), the illustrator depicts stout German peasants threshing wheat, while underneath Russian, British, and French soldiers make sorry figures (Figure 12.11). However, Der Wahre Jacob would soon gradually regain its self-control. [ 357 ]

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Figure 12.11  Unknown cartoonist, ‘Nun, kinder, drauf los! Zekt hilft nur noch das Dreschen’, Der Wahre Jacob, 733, 28 August 1914, p. 8441.

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Notes 1 I refer in the following paragraphs to my doctoral thesis: Der Wahre Jacob (1890–1914), Paris VIII, 1981. It should be noted that no library has the full collection of the magazine; however, it has been digitised in part, and can be consulted on the excellent website of the Heidelberg library, at: www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/helios/fachinfo/ www/kunst/digilit/artjournals/wahre_jakob.html, accessed 17 April 2019. 2 Recent perspectives on German internal, as well as external, imperialism include: Philipp Ther, ‘Imperial Instead of National History: Positioning Modern German History on the Map of European Empires’, in Alexei Miller and Alfred J. Rieber (eds), Imperial Rule, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004, pp. 47–66; Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2008; Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘The German Empire: an Empire?’, History Workshop, 66, Autumn 2008, pp. 129–162; and Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 3 Maria Effinger, ‘Der Wahre Jacob – digital’, 5 July 2018, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, at: www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisch/helios/fachinfo/www/kunst/ digilit/artjournals/wahre_jakob.html, accessed 17 July 2018. 4 Max Kegel, ‘Wo brennt’s?’, Der Wahre Jacob, 162, 1892, p. 1325. 5 ‘M. E.’ [Max Eitelberg], ‘Krupp und Konsorten’, Der Wahre Jacob, 348, 1899, p. 3121. 6 ‘Galantara’ [Rata Langa], ‘John Bulls Sabbathfeier’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 1900, p. 3288. The cartoon’s title – ‘John Bull’s Sabbath Feast’ – raises some interesting questions. It was not rare for the upper middle class to be presented as Jews, and the supposed Jewish element in the South African gold mining community was often a target of anti-Semitic attack (see, for instance: Claire Hirshfield, ‘The Anglo-Boer War and the Issue of Jewish Culpability’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (4), 1980, pp. 619–631. 7 ‘Galantara’ [Rata Langa], ‘Die drei Unzertrennlichen’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 1900, p. 3295. 8 ‘Aus China’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 1900, p. 3287. 9 ‘Neutralität bei Krupp’, Der Wahre Jacob, 483, 1905, cover. 10 David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 331. 11 Werner Otto, Liebknecht contra Rüstungskapital: Karl Liebknechts Kampf gegen Krupp, Imperialismus und Kriegsgefahr, 1913–1914, Berlin: Dietz, 1961, p. 10. 12 Erich Schilling, ‘Die Firma Krupp und die Kornwalzen’, Der Wahre Jacob, 707, 23 August 1913, p. 8035. It was after Bertha von Krupp that the wartime 16.5-inch howitzer ‘Big Bertha’ was named. 13 Klaus Völkerling, ‘Die politisch-satirischen Zeitschriften Süddeutscher Postillon (München) und Der Wahre Jacob (Stuttgart). Ihr Beitrag zur Herausbildung der frühen sozialistischen Literatur in Deutschland und zur marxistischen Literaturtheorie’, unpublished thesis, Potsdam, 1969. 14 ‘Das liberale Bürgerthum’, Der Wahre Jacob, 166, 1892, p. 1359. 15 ‘W. S.’ [Willy Steinert], ‘Der kleine Katechismus des Soldaten’, Der Wahre Jacob, 711, 18 October 1913, p. 8099. 16 These statements were cited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in his influential study of internally focused German imperialism and militarism (and the Primat der innenpolitik), Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1975, p. 159. 17 It should be pointed out that towards the end of the Wilhelmian era, the two sectors in society which were most often taken to task were the churches and the Junkers. This reveals a relative lack of awareness of the true power relations in the Kaiserreich on the eve of the war. 18 ‘Schrecklicher Traum eines Berliner Spiessbürgers’, Der Wahre Jacob, 386, 7 May 1901, p. 3498. The Berlin citizen, pierced by bayonets, shouts: ‘Aber, Jotte doch, ick habe ja jar keene Revolution jemacht!’ [‘But, by God, I do not have a Revolution!’].

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A M BI G U I TI ES O F E M P IR E 19 On this subject, see: Pierre Guillen, L’empire allemand 1871–1918, Paris: Hatier, 1970, pp. 156–157. 20 Viktor Schweinburg, ‘Ein Mahnruf’, Der Wahre Jacob, 349, 5 December 1899, p. 3129. 21 ‘Galantara’ [Rata Langa], ‘Aus Deutschlands Zukunft’, Der Wahre Jacob, 364, 3 July 1900, p. 3277 [cover]. 22 Hans Gabriel Jentzsch, ‘Flotte und Sozialreform’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 17 July 1900, p. 3285 [cover]. After a fierce fight against social democracy, Posadowsky adopted a policy aimed at pursuing Bismarck’s social policy. He therefore introduced Sunday rest, a ban on hiring children under 13 years of age, and so on. 23 Otto Emil Lau, ‘Das Wettrennen’, Der Wahre Jacob, 399, 5 November 1901, p. 3624. 24 It should be remembered that Bismarck – who was keen on maintaining the European balance and isolating France after the war of 1870–1871 – had never been interested in the colonies, except as useful bargaining chips in the international game of diplomacy, and as a means of placating the German liberals and the influential pressure group, the Deutscher Kolonialverein. The German colonial empire therefore never rivalled that of Great Britain or France. See: Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 21–23. 25 ‘Galantara’ [Rata Langa], ‘Negerfrisur am Kongo’, Der Wahre Jacob, 365, 17 July 1900, p. 3288; ‘Der Herr von und über Transvaal’, Der Wahre Jacob, 401, 5 December 1901, p. 3644. 26 Thomas Theodor Heine, ‘Kolonialmächte’, Simplicissimus, 9 (6), May 1904, p. 55. 27 Guillen, L’empire allemand, p. 160. 28 ‘Aus der Küche der Flottenwüteriche’, Der Wahre Jacob, 582, 10 November 1908, p. 6009. 29 Examples include: ‘Schwungvolle Phantasie’, Der Wahre Jacob, 579, 29 September 1908, p. 5953; Untitled illustration, Der Wahre Jacob, 576, 18 August 1908, p. 5910; ‘Der Patriot’, Der Wahre Jacob, 578, 15 September 1908, p. 5952. 30 Jottlif Nauke, ‘Um Strand vom Agadir’, Der Wahre Jacob, 653, 1 August 1911, p. 7151. 31 ‘Wir demonstrieren!’, Der Wahre Jacob, 657, 26 September 1911, p. 7218. 32 Even if the periodical did not always reprimand all the major powers with the same vigour: thus, Russia and Britain were more criticised than France, which remained a friendly country (simply because it was more friendly to socialism) in the eyes of the authors and illustrators. 33 ‘Die Patrioten’, Der Wahre Jacob, 159, 1892, p. 1301. 34 ‘Etwas über Patriotismus’, Der Wahre Jacob, 250, 22 February 1896, p. 2128. 35 Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, Stuttgart: Ursprünglich veröffentlicht von J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolg. (GmbH), 1899, at: www.marxists.org/deutsch/referenz/bernstein/1899/voraus/ kap4.html#p4, accessed 20 July 2018. 36 Élisabeth Dixmier and Michel Dixmier, L’Assiette au Beurre, revue satirique illustrée, Paris: Centre d’historie du sydicalisme, 1974, p. 211. 37 Wilhelm Liebknecht, ‘Im Thale des Friedens’, Der Wahre Jacob, 333, 25 April 1899, pp. 2976–2977. 38 ‘Zum Brüsseler Arbeiterkongreß’, Der Wahre Jacob, 132, 1891, p. 1069. 39 Völkerling, ‘Die politisch-satirischen Zeitschriften’, p. 167. 40 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Moscow: International Publishers, 1948, p. 28. On this subject see: Guillen, L’empire allemand, p. 172. 41 Gilbert Badia, Rosa Luxemburg – Journaliste, Polémiste, Révolutionnaire, Paris: Editions Sociales, 1975, pp. 189–190. 42 ‘Der Militarismus auf der Anklagebank. Aus dem Prozeß Rosa Luxemburg’, Der Wahre Jacob, 731, 25 July 1914, p. 8417. 43 Mai-Gedanken, p. 8297, cover of number 724 of 18 April 1914. 44 Völkermord might also be translated as ‘genocide’. 45 Richard Wagner, ‘An Rosa Luxemburg’, Der Wahre Jacob, 722, 21 March 1914, p. 8274.

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46 ‘Das Ende des Militarismus durch die Technik’, Der Wahre Jacob, 731, 25 July 1914, p. 8422. 47 ‘Gegen den Zarismus’, Der Wahre Jacob, 733, 28 August 1914, p. 8442. 48 Wilhelm II, 1 August 1914, quoted in: Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II: Volume 2 – Emperor and Exile, 1900–1941, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 209. Hugo Haase had also affirmed that the Social Democrats felt they were in agreement with the Internationale, which – according to him – had recognised the right to national autonomy and self-defence for every people. A large part of this speech was reproduced in the review after the war, in Haase’s funeral notice: ‘Hugo Haase’, Der Wahre Jacob, 870, 5 December 1919, p. 9850.

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CHA P T E R T HIRTEEN

The ‘confounded socialists’ and the ‘Commonwealth Co-operative Society’: cartoons and British imperialism during the Attlee Labour government Charlotte Lydia Riley

This chapter explores the post-Second World War Labour government’s imperial policies through their depiction in newspaper and magazine cartoons. The chapter uses cartoon representations of news stories to explore the popular perception of the Labour Party’s approach to imperial affairs. In doing so, it is focused on high party politics and imperial foreign policy, but it approaches this subject from a popular cultural viewpoint; in this way, it aims to reinsert the ‘ordinary’ reader’s gaze into a political history. In keeping with this focus on ‘popular’ representations of empire, this chapter focuses mainly on editorial cartoons produced in the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Evening Standard, Daily Herald, and Daily Mirror. These papers all ran an editorial cartoon for at least part of the period under study, and many of the most famous post-war cartoonists – including David Low, Michael Cummings, Ronald Carl Giles, Ronald Niebour, Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Philip Zec, and Victor Weisz – were drawing for these papers at this time.1 This focus on the tabloid press is further justified by the fact that the readership across these papers was significantly larger than that of the so-called ‘quality’ titles such as The Times and the Daily Telegraph: in the 1930s, ten times larger.2 Editorial cartoons are, first and foremost, supposed to provoke a response. For the politicians that are being lampooned, this might be frustration or anger, or alternatively humour or even pride. For the reader, although there have been occasions when cartoons have carried ‘a unique … capacity to enrage, upset and discombobulate’, the response is often one of wry recognition.3 The cartoon shows the historian how the readers of a particular newspaper viewed – literally – contemporary [ 362 ]

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issues and current affairs. This means that cartoons can be slippery to deal with as a historian. They provide a particular type of evidence: a kind of current affairs shorthand. They give a snapshot of topical concerns, presented in a manner that relies on the recognition of in-jokes, caricatures, and pop cultural references that are often long dead. If these obstacles are navigated, however, cartoons can be extremely rewarding sources for a historian. The British Empire had its own rich and elaborate visual culture, which saw its tropes repeated across political, aesthetic, and consumer issues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the sheer familiarity of imperial imagery meant that the topic was ripe for satire.4 Visual sources are therefore critical to understanding how empire was experienced in the daily lives of British people. In this way, this study can be understood as a contribution to the movement for a ‘new imperial history’.5 The Labour Party’s reputation for anti-imperialism is a trope that runs through cartoon representations of their colonial policy during this period. The government is frequently portrayed, especially by the more conservative newspapers, as desperate to jettison the empire, and with it Britain’s prestige, power, and glory; or as standing by haplessly as the empire sinks beneath the waves. Stephen Howe, in his work on anti-colonialism on the British left, describes among the Attlee government ‘a general lack of concern for colonial issues as compared with the urgent tasks of post-war reconstruction, nationalisation, and extending welfare provision’.6 In fact, as a more nuanced reading of the cartoons of the time demonstrates, the Labour government had a more complex relationship with empire and imperialism than this would allow. In fact, for some members of the new Labour government, colonial issues were at the forefront of their minds during the immediate post-war years. The hopes for regeneration of the British economy based on colonial bounty, buoyed by the mobilisation of the empire during the Second World War, came to a head in 1948 with the establishment of the Colonial Development Corporation. The Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones, but also Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, John Strachey, and Clement Attlee himself, all engaged with the issue of colonial development, both as a way to contribute to the British domestic economy, and as the basis for a reimagined relationship between periphery and metropole. The newspaper coverage of colonial development is dominated by commentary on the East African Groundnut Scheme (an infamous example of a failed project for development in the colonies), although again there is a wide spectrum of views represented across editorial cartoons from the time. This chapter will explore the two themes of anti-imperialism and colonial development, examining how Labour’s imperial policies are depicted, and how historians can approach [ 363 ]

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popular understandings of the politics of empire during this period through newspaper cartoons. The period immediately after the Second World War was a time of challenge and change for Britain, and this is as true for the empire as it is for the metropole. The post-war period is often perceived as a time of steady and irresistible decline in British imperial power, helped along by Labour’s supposed anti-imperial nature; marked by the independence of India and the withdrawal from Palestine.7 However, the imperial policies of the 1945–1951 Labour government were not simply those of managed decline, and nor were they indicative of an attempt to break up the empire. Instead, in this period the Colonial Office, working under the Secretary of State for the Colonies Arthur Creech Jones, pursued a series of ambitious projects of growth and development in the empire. Far from being ‘anti-imperial’, the Labour Party embraced its new colonial role, managing the process of Indian independence that had been set in motion by the previous government, but rejecting immediate independence for the African colonies in favour of a gradual move towards decolonisation.8 Cartoon coverage of the empire in this period often uses ideas about the empire to explore notions of Britishness. Many of the cartoons use symbols to represent Britain or ‘the British’ in a homogenising manner, creating a sense of national unity; this unity can either be with the colonial populations, or set against them. This often took the form of John Bull or Britannia, the traditional cartoon representatives of England and Great Britain respectively, which have been used as a visual shorthand for centuries, and which usually – but not always – represent only the metropole and exclude the colonies.9 Two Leslie Illingworth cartoons (Figures 13.1 and 13.2), printed by the Daily Mail, demonstrate this trope effectively. The first, from the summer of 1945, shows Britannia queuing with Marianne (the symbolic female representation of the French republic), outside two shops: the first, the ‘Empire Emporium’, is boarded up, with a sign on the front which reads ‘Blitzed but still open’; the second, the ‘US Stores’, has ‘plenty of everything’ but for ‘dollar holders only’ (referencing the British dollar shortage and abrupt withdrawal of American Lend-Lease at the end of the Second World War).10 The second, printed in the summer of 1947, shows John Bull carrying the globe on his back, with the prized colonial possessions of ‘Africa’ (in its entirety), Canada, Australia, and New Zealand marked; the whole of Africa, regardless of other European colonies on the continent, is labelled the ‘heartland of the empire’, while the other territories are praised in relation to their potential for migration (‘room for millions’). India, which was to become independent two months later, is not highlighted.11 Britain is also sometimes depicted in cartoons [ 364 ]

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Figure 13.1  Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 27 August 1945.

about empire as an ‘everyman’ figure. A Giles cartoon from 1947, for example, shows a farmer ploughing a field in torrential rain under a dark sky, muttering that ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire, do it?’12 In this image, ‘empire’ is a unifying notion, which includes within it the metropole, as well as the colonial territories, all assumed to be sharing the same miserable weather. As well as using ‘empire’ as a broad category of reference, cartoonists often focused on particular Labour policies or politicians; and in turn, many newspapers also attributed either successes or failures in imperial policy specifically to the Labour Party or selected Members of Parliament. To fully understand why this was, and what effect this might have had on the audience for these cartoons, it is necessary to explore the [ 365 ]

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Figure 13.2  Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 23 June 1947.

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relationship between the Labour Party and press at the beginning of the twentieth century. For as long as the Labour Party has been established, its members have considered the British media to be inherently biased against them, and supportive of their counterparts in the Conservative Party.13 Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, for example, has written that ‘throughout its life, the Labour Party has been faced with a mainly hostile press’.14 This has been somewhat supported by research and comment from outside the party. The journalist and academic Roy Greenslade, for example, agrees that ‘the popular press’s bias against Labour “is a truth with which Labour has lived”’.15 This perception of bias against the Labour Party is pervasive, but not necessarily supported by historical evidence. During the Second World War, the media in fact shifted ‘noticeably left’; newspapers had been instrumental in setting a progressive agenda in issues such as the welfare state, thus enabling the Labour Party to establish itself as a credible force in the 1945 general election. For example, there was widespread acceptance of the trope of the ‘hungry thirties’ in the print media, and a sense that there was a need for a ‘people’s peace’ to improve living conditions – despite the fact that much of the population, particularly in the south, had experienced the decade in relative affluence.16 This was assisted by the fact that the Labour Party had worked hard in the interwar period to implement better media communication strategies, to enable it to compete with the Conservatives and the Liberals in a new era of mass-media politics.17 Herbert Morrison and Hugh Gaitskell had particularly embraced this new world of propaganda and media management, and this continued after the war; for example in Morrison’s campaigns to develop ‘propaganda for the consumer and the housewife’ in the 1950 general election.18 Morrison went so far in his attempt to manage the press as to orchestrate a Royal Commission into press ownership and concentration, which investigated concerns shared with other members of his party about the lack of neutrality in the British media when reporting Labour policy. However, the commission found that, although newspapers were overwhelmingly partisan, distortion, partiality, and bias was ‘often as bad’ in the left-leaning papers as in those on the right.19 On the other hand, it was true that the numbers, both in terms of readers, and perhaps more importantly in terms of the wealth of newspaper proprietors, had been traditionally skewed against Labour. Lord Beaverbrook owned both the Daily Express and, after 1923, the Evening Standard. Beaverbrook, a Canadian by birth, was a self-made millionaire before he was 30; politically right-wing; and fiercely loyal to the empire. He was fundamentally opposed to socialism and to the Attlee government. He was not, however, unwavering in his support [ 367 ]

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for the Conservative Party: he pursued a campaign against Stanley Baldwin, for example, from 1923 until well after Baldwin’s death.20 However, the Beaverbrook papers were not entirely controlled by their proprietor, and employed a number of left-wing journalists, among them the future Labour Party leader Michael Foot. Most significantly for the present study, David Low, who drew for the Evening Standard until 1950, did not share his proprietor’s political stance and famously did not allow him any control over the contents of the editorial cartoon, although it is believed that Beaverbrook refused to publish at least 40 different pieces.21 From 1922 (and the death of his brother Alfred Harmsworth, first Viscount Northcliffe), Harold Harmsworth, first Viscount Rothermere, controlled the vast majority of the rest of the British newspapers. Although he sold The Times to John Jacob Astor V, first Baron Astor of Hever, he continued to manage the Evening News, Sunday Pictorial, Sunday Dispatch, and the Daily Mail, as well as the Daily Mirror (which was managed by Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew). Rothermere and Beaverbrook were believed by many on the left to have turned the British press into ‘a servant of capitalist interests’ and were both perceived as fundamentally antagonistic to left-wing politics of any kind.22 Indeed, in the 1930s they were both associated with political parties – the Empire Free Trade Crusade and the United Empire Party – which promoted free trade and tariff reform and put pressure on the Conservative Party to do the same. They were not naturally inclined to support the Labour Party’s policies towards the empire or, indeed, anything else.23 By 1945, only the Daily Herald could be counted on as sympathetic to Labour Party policies. Founded by George Lansbury in 1912, it was the home of noted Labour cartoonist Will Dyson for much of his career, and was handed over to the TUC (Trades Union Congress) and the Labour Party in 1922.24 It was then run by Odhams Press as a moderately pro-Labour paper until it was relaunched by Rupert Murdoch as the Sun in 1964 (the paper retained its pro-Labour stance until the 1979 election).25 The Daily Mirror, which had been reimagined by King into a paper for the working classes, was significantly more anti-Tory than pro-Labour in this period, although it had been notionally supportive of the Labour Party from the 1945 election onwards.26 It is also important to note that newspaper affiliations were not static and allegiances could not be counted on. In the 1951 election campaign, for example, the Manchester Guardian was so aggrieved by Aneurin Bevan and his supporters (the ‘hate-gospellers’), and so disillusioned by the ‘pessimistic and defensive’ Labour Party, that its editorial policy was actually reluctantly pro-Churchill and the Conservatives; the paper [ 368 ]

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believed that a period of opposition would enable the Party to ‘find afresh its faith’.27 Overall, although historically the popular press had been massed against the Labour Party, by 1945 support was split more evenly across papers and circulation, with the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and the Daily Graphic supporting the Conservatives, and the Daily Herald, Daily Mirror, and the News Chronicle either actively supporting the Labour Party or at least having a strongly anti-Conservative position.28 The two biggest daily newspapers in 1947 were the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror: at opposite ends of the political spectrum, each selling around 4 million copies.29 As James Thomas points out, up to a third of Labour voters actually read by preference those newspapers associated with Conservative viewpoints, and, according to the Mass Observation social research project, many ‘just [did] not read political news and comment’.30 This may actually have bolstered the effect of editorial cartoons, which were quicker to take in; as Steve Bell has said, people ‘read’ them ‘in a second’.31 Depictions of the Labour Party’s imperial policy in this period were also governed by the conventions of caricature and comic art. Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan may have been frequently caricatured because of his fiery rhetoric peppered with ‘expressive phrases’ (‘Tories are lower than Vermin’), but his ‘larger-than-life qualities’, his easily recognisable side-parting and fierce eyebrows, were also instrumental in his heavy representation in editorial cartoons on both the right (for example, Cummings in the Daily Mail) and on the left (Vicky, in the Daily Mirror).32 This function of caricature governs who (or what) can be easily or successfully depicted in editorial cartoons, especially as political cartoonists are keen to avoid strategically ‘labelling’ images to make them easier to understand, being dismissive of shortcuts like ‘drawing a snail and writing “IMF” on it’.33 Despite these limitations, cartoons provide a shorthand guide to major political issues, and they can therefore illustrate how complex issues were framed by the popular media, functioning as they do as ‘editorials in pictures’.34 In 1945, along with government, the Labour Party and its supporters inherited the vast swath of imperial territory with a distinct feeling of discomfort. The party had historically been critical of imperial expansion in Africa and would now have to govern an empire that they had had no hand in acquiring. Stephen Howe has highlighted the ideological and practical implications of the anti-imperial tradition in the Labour Party.35 However, in doing this he avoids in-depth discussion of the ways in which the Labour Party was forced practically to engage with the politics of imperialism (for example, in the colonial development schemes), in order to focus on areas of Labour ideology and practice [ 369 ]

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that fitted into a broader narrative of left-wing anti-imperial thinking. Although ideologically the Labour movement had traditionally been broadly anti-imperial, it would be simplistic to argue that Labour was therefore committed to the immediate dismantling of empire after the Second World War. Rhiannon Vickers identifies a tension at the heart of Labour’s imperial policies: although the party, especially the grassroots members, erred towards ‘support for nationalist movements and for national self-determination’, this contradicted the leadership’s ‘belief in continuing Britain’s continuing world and imperial role’.36 This tension was embodied in Arthur Creech Jones, the Secretary of State for the Colonies for most of the period. Creech Jones was critical of previous colonial policy, which had been marked by ‘abuses and exploitation’, but believed simultaneously that many problems in colonial societies were due to ‘the poverty of nature and the backwardness of people [who were] tied by tradition and tribalism and oppressed by ignorance and superstition’.37 His approach to the empire during his tenure as Colonial Secretary balanced his impulse to right the past wrongs of imperialism by granting self-government and eventual independence, with a paternalistic scepticism about colonial peoples’ ability to govern themselves. Many cartoons from the period address Labour’s reputation for antiimperialism, although they vary in their depiction of the nuances within the party’s imperial policies. The title for this chapter comes from a cartoon published in the Daily Mail in 1948: an elderly member of the establishment, a Colonel Blimpish figure, complete with three-piece suit and fulsome moustache, is seen interrogating a left-wing man (identified by his casual tweed jacket) with the words ‘And what do you confounded socialists intend to use in place of “British Empire” – “Commonwealth Co-operative Society”?’ (Figure 13.3).38 This cartoon clearly implies to Daily Mail readers that the Labour Party would exercise a socialist approach to imperial rule, whatever form this might take; however, the cartoon’s satirical target remains ambiguous, as it can be read as critiquing Blimpish imperialists and their attachment to empire, as well as the question of Labour’s imperial policy itself. Similarly, the Evening News in 1949 ran a cartoon by Joseph Lee (Figure 13.4), which showed two elderly men in a luxurious gentlemen’s club, both holding newspapers. The caption reads ‘Terrifying days, Caversham. Attlee in charge of the British Empire and babes-in-arms playing for England’ (a reference to the selection of 18-year-old Brian Close to play a Test match against New Zealand).39 The Evening News was edited at the time by Guy Schofield, who would leave journalism in 1955 to become director of publicity for the Conservative Party; the paper was one of many owned by Viscount Rothermere. The cartoon, again, is ambiguous [ 370 ]

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Figure 13.3  ‘And What do You Confounded Socialists Intend to Use in Place of “British Empire” – “Commonwealth Co-operative Society”?’ NEB [Ronald Niebour], Untitled, Daily Mail, 29 October 1948.

as to the attitudes depicted: is it critiquing the ‘clubland’ attitude that trivialises empire as another ‘gentleman’s sport’ like cricket, or is it sympathetic to the elderly gentlemen and their horror at a rapidly changing world? Cartoons from the time that engaged with the idea that the Labour Party was ideologically anti-imperialist were also able to argue that [ 371 ]

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Figure 13.4  Joseph Lee, ‘Terrifying Days’, Evening News, 20 July 1949.

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the Attlee government was hypocritical or vacillating in its imperial policies. A Cummings cartoon from the Daily Mail in 1949 depicts his character ‘Zilliboy Shinbag’ – a fictional character, amalgamated from the names (at least) of Konni Zilliacus and Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell and representing the ‘Keep Left’ faction in the Labour Party – having a temper tantrum, tearing apart a newspaper with the headline ‘Australia Kicks Out Labour’ (Figure 13.5).40 The caption – ‘Cripps was absolutely right, in 1935, about liquidating the British Empire’ – refers to a statement by Stafford Cripps in the Hull Daily Mail, in which he was reported as saying that it was ‘fundamental to Socialism that we should liquidate the British Empire as soon as we can’.41 Shinbag is responding to the news that the Australian general election had seen the incumbent Australian Labor Party government, led by Ben Chifley, defeated by Robert Menzies’s Liberals (also see below – Chapter 14). The cartoon has three functions: first, it demonstrates to the Mail’s readers that left-wing parties are not unassailable in their position of power; secondly, it reminds them that important figures in the Labour Party have historically been opposed to the empire; and finally, and most importantly, it shows the left wing of the party as petulant and childish, motivated in their supposedly anti-imperial policies by emotion rather than rational thought. The hard left of the Labour Party is depicted as perfectly happy to support imperialism while the EmpireCommonwealth is governed by its sister left-wing parties; as soon as the colonial electorates move to the right, the British left returns to its criticism of imperial rule. Interestingly, Cummings invoked this quotation again a couple of months later, in a cartoon with a somewhat different tone. The cartoon shows three large wardrobes, with skeletons just visible through their bulging doors, labelled ‘Cripps’s Cupboard’, ‘Strachey’s Cupboard’, and ‘Bevan’s Cupboard’. The skeletons are labelled ‘… We should Liquidate the British Empire …’ and ‘… Socialist Society evolves, in time, into the Communist Society’ (the second quotation was from Strachey in 1938, and had recently been unearthed by the Evening Standard).42 This cartoon is intriguing, however, because it is not specifically or only critical of the Labour Party. The three Labour MPs are shown clustered around a smaller wardrobe to the other side of the panel, opening the door to reveal a skeleton labelled ‘What Churchill said about the Tories in 1908’ (Figure 13.6).43 In fact, Cummings almost seems sympathetic to Cripps, or at least to the idea that all politicians might have said things in the past that they would later regret, and he uses Cripps’s views on empire to illustrate this. Some of the cartoons alluding to Labour’s supposed anti-imperialism presented the issue in a more nuanced manner, which considered the [ 373 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Figure 13.5  ‘Cripps was Absolutely Right, in 1935, about Liquidating the British Empire’. Michael Cummings, Untitled, Daily Express, 12 December 1949.

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Figure 13.6  Michael Cummings, Untitled, Daily Express, 17 February 1950.

potential validity of this approach to the empire. One cartoon by David Low in 1947 (Figure 13.7) shows ‘Sir Tartly Crosstalk’ (a comic rendering of Sir Hartley Shawcross, Labour MP for St Helen’s, and Attorney General 1945–1951) speaking to ‘Dotty’, a housewife. Crosstalk tries to reason with Dotty: Britain’s resources are ‘strictly limited’ and cuts need to be made. He suggests a series of possible cuts (bread, clothing and shoes, cigarettes, films, housing, and the reconstruction programme), while Dotty becomes more and more irate. Finally he suggests that Labour might ‘sell part of the empire to the USA’, at which point she exclaims ‘What? Cut the Empire?’ and hits him over the head with her shopping basket. In the final panel she proclaims ‘What we need is a government that takes no notice of economics and don’t give a damn for the future’.44 The idea of ‘selling’ the empire to the USA plays on contemporary fears – in the context of the wartime destroyers-forbases agreement, Marshall Plan, and the beginning of the Cold War – of American dominance, made more alarming in this context by America’s traditional rhetoric of anti-imperialism. It is notable that the various cuts build towards empire, thus setting it up as the dramatic last resort; [ 375 ]

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Figure 13.7  David Low, ‘One Thing Leads to Another’, Evening Standard, 18 June 1947.

however, this also serves to undermine the idea that Labour is fundamentally anti-imperial, instead presenting this decision as potentially a rational choice given Britain’s dire financial straits. There were also some cartoons that presented a more positive view of Labour’s approach to empire. The Mirror ran a cartoon by Philip Zec in 1945 that was altogether more optimistic about the future of British imperialism (Figure 13.8).45 A white, presumably British, man holds a pen labelled ‘co-operation’ to a black man, presumably of Caribbean or African origin, asking him to sign up to Labour’s promises for the empire: ‘Come on – let’s put it down in black and white!’ The promises are listed in a large book, labelled ‘New Chapter in British History’, and comprise ‘full development of colonial resources – expanding freedom for native people – independence for India – Commonwealth unity for prosperity’. These promises clearly demonstrate a new rhetorical approach to imperialism, in which nations will ‘cooperate’ under the mantle of [ 376 ]

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Figure 13.8  ‘Come on – let’s put it down in black and white!’ Philip Zec, Untitled, Daily Mirror, 21 September 1945, p. 2.

the Commonwealth; the invocation of a ‘new chapter’ suggests that this represents a break from historic colonial attitudes. The colonial subject is anonymous, but depicted dressed respectably in a shirt and trousers and his participation in the process is being requested; the white man is smiling, paternal but approachable in an open-necked shirt. The use of ‘black and white’ in the caption echoes the illustration of the two men and depicts the empire as built on bi-racial harmony. In a similar vein, a David Low cartoon from May 1946 shows Attlee standing in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza and the pyramids. This was published three days after the Prime Minister announced in the House of Commons that Britain would be withdrawing all troops from Egypt. He is clutching a map marked ‘changed world’, a plane (helpfully marked ‘jet’), a small model bomb (‘atom’), and a notebook labelled ‘new set-up’. In front of him, four men have their heads buried in a pile of sand marked ‘Traditions of Empire’: they appear to be talking through loudhailers held between their knees, and Attlee looks rather taken aback (Figure 13.9).46 The message here is clear: Labour’s approach to imperialism and foreign relations is modern, as befits the post-war [ 377 ]

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Figure 13.9  David Low, ‘Heads in the Sand’, Evening Standard, 10 May 1946.

world; those who object, including Winston Churchill – who forcefully condemned the announcement in the House – are blindly following tradition without regards for the consequences.47 These cartoons have served to illustrate general perceptions of the Labour Party’s approach to empire in the immediate post-war period: some saw them as socialists out to destroy the empire, while others believed them to be modernisers who understood the future of imperialism. These themes converge in the newspaper cartoon coverage of the colonial development schemes implemented by the Attlee government, which also serve to highlight some of the ideological issues surrounding Labour’s approach to empire in this period. The Labour government’s colonial development programmes can be read as a rhetorical, ideological, and practical struggle between altruism and exploitation in imperial rule. 48 Fundamentally, all colonial rule was extractive. The earlier acquisition of British territories in [ 378 ]

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Africa had been driven by businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, and the continent had been eagerly anticipated as a repository of raw industrial materials and precious metals, leading to tensions between occupying colonial powers.49 Colonial development in Africa after the Second World War was partly driven by this urge to exploit raw materials and labour on the continent, tempered by genuinely humanitarian concerns about the quality of life and potential for advancement of African populations; for Arthur Creech Jones, colonial development programmes would offer ‘political advance, economic improvement and social welfare’, and were seen as a necessary precursor to colonial populations being ‘set on the road’ to independence.50 The policy was therefore a product of political conditions and ideological context at every level, from the Cabinet and the Colonial Office, to the colonial administrations in the territories and African people themselves. The tension inherent in colonial development policy was illustrated in a Zec cartoon in the Daily Mirror. The cartoon has two panels: the first showing rows of crosses and labelled ‘the Empire’s sacrifice for war’; the second showing a ploughed field, labelled ‘food for Britain’, and captioned ‘the Empire’s sacrifice for peace’ (Figure 13.10).51 Zec’s

Figure 13.10  Philip Zec, ‘All Empire Roads Lead Home’, Daily Mirror, 5 September 1945, p. 2.

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relation of the imperial contribution to the war effort, to development policies – 2.5 million colonial subjects and citizens joined up to fight with Britain, and colonial governments loaned millions of pounds to support the war effort in the metropole – challenges the idea that development was a reward for colonial wartime service. Instead, Zec argues, it is a further burden on the colonial peoples, who, even if they survived the violence and deprivations of wartime, are now called on to ease the metropole’s peacetime scarcities. Colonial development was, however, mainly critiqued in the metropole for being ineffective, rather than exploitative, and one programme became especially emblematic of colonial development failure. The East African Groundnut Scheme was an ambitious attempt to instigate the extensive farming of groundnuts (peanuts) on more than 3 million acres of land, which had previously been entirely unexploited because of the prevalence of tsetse fly and the dense bush that overwhelmed the region.52 It was intended to implement the mechanised production of groundnuts across Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, and Kenya, in 107 ‘farms’, each 30,000 acres.53 The scheme was heralded at its inception as a ‘great African project’ with ‘immense significance’ for the agricultural development of the colonial territories, although in reality the Colonial Office and the Ministry of Food were enthusiastic primarily because they saw it as a possible solution to the worldwide oil and fats shortage at the end of the Second World War.54 Within months, the attitude towards the Groundnut Scheme had changed dramatically. The project was seen as an expensive mistake, which demonstrated the incompetence, or at least the naivety, of the British government in colonial affairs.55 Agriculturally, the scheme clearly failed: the overall cost was around £36 million to produce 9,162 tons of shelled nuts, actually less than was imported in seed, alongside smaller amounts of other crops such as maize and sunflowers.56 The Groundnut Scheme – and, to a lesser extent, the Gambia Poultry Scheme – became a figurehead issue for colonial development for its detractors.57 Cartoon depictions of colonial development vary, with early announcements of the programme being met with some amusement. The first editorial cartoon featuring the groundnut programme ran in the Evening News in 1946 and showed monkeys chaotically harvesting what look like coconuts for the ‘Great Nut Collection for Britain’ to provide ‘fats for cooking [and] soap for washing’; the cartoon is captioned ‘Keep going! Keep going! The Old Folks at Home are hungry … dirty …’ (Figure 13.11).58 The cartoon also lightly echoes Philip Zec’s critique of development as an approach, as one monkey is shown standing on a soapbox proselytising and holding a placard that reads ‘more nuts for monkeys, less for capitalist humans’.59 Similarly, a Giles cartoon from [ 380 ]

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Figure 13.11  ‘Keep going! Keep going! The old folks at home are hungry … dirty …’. Joseph Lee, ‘London Laughs: Nut Collection for Britain’, Evening News, 26 March 1946.

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two years later imagines a scene from the groundnut programme.60 In this image, black workers are driving heavy farm machinery, trying to clear the land (and, in one case, herd a large number of elephants). Another two African workers are using a machine to grind nuts into ‘ground nuts’, a pun that the readers would presumably have appreciated. Two white British overseers, dressed in typical colonial garb and drinking exported scotch and soda, are looking over ‘plans’ while leaning on a comatose hippopotamus. One says to the other: ‘Letter here from a lady in Cheltenham – says in view of the fact that we’re spending £25,000,000 of her taxes can we let her have a few nuts for her cake’.61 This cartoon comes from the beginning of the scheme, before its significant failings have been realised; it is gently amused by the existence of the programme, and lightly critical of its cost. This approach changed as it became clear that the colonial development programme as a whole was not progressing as planned: cartoons became more sharply critical of the Groundnut Scheme, focusing almost exclusively on its failures. A David Low cartoon in 1949 shows a white farm worker, dressed in colonial shorts and long socks, hiding his face from Britannia behind his wide-brimmed hat and offering her a sack of ‘wild oats’; the caption reads ‘and now what about trying to grow some nuts?’ (Figure 13.12).62 This cartoon satirises the low productivity of the colonial development schemes by juxtaposing them with the idea of the empire as a sexual playground for white males; Britannia’s

Figure 13.12  David Low, ‘And now what about trying to grow some nuts?’, Evening Standard, 3 November 1949.

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role in this cartoon is to critique this idea and demand some real results for Britain from the colonial administration. Another Low cartoon, taken from his end-of-year ‘almanac’ of satirical prophesies for the coming months, features Minister of Food John Strachey alongside Leslie Plummer (who was at the time the chairman of the Overseas Food Corporation). The cartoon is captioned ‘Strachey and Plummer start the Groundnuts Scheme over again from scratch, this time planting an expert with every bush for individual care’ and, sure enough, the heads of bespectacled, trilby-hatted experts poke up above the soil next to each plant (Figure 13.13).63 A Lee cartoon (Figure 13.14) in the Evening News shows a couple of impresarios chatting outside a theatre with a poster advertising the ‘Grand Christmas Pantomine’; one says to the other, ‘The topical gags should be dead easy this year, laddie. Just mention ‘nuts’ and Strachey and they’ll roll off their seats’.64 The Gambia Poultry Scheme also became a subject for mockery, as it became clear that it too would not meet its targets. The Daily Mail ran a cartoon (Figure 13.15) showing two civil servants, with pinstriped trousers and winged collars, one clutching a copy of the ‘Gambia Poultry Farm Report’ and the other juggling with eggs. The caption reads ‘I hope you realise that if you drop one of those, you’ll involve the country in a loss of roughly 500 pounds’.65 This variety of images demonstrates that the general public were clearly familiar with the development programmes, despite claims by historians as diverse as John MacKenzie and Bernard Porter that the

Figure 13.13  David Low, ‘Old Low’s Almanack – Prophecies for 1950’, Evening Standard, 9 December 1949.

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Figure 13.14  ‘The topical gags should be dead easy this year, laddie. Just mention “nuts” and Strachey and they’ll roll off their seats’. Joseph Lee, ‘London Laughs: Topical Gags like Groundnuts’, Evening News, 8 November 1949.

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Figure 13.15  ‘I hope you realise that if you drop one of those, you’ll involve the country in a loss of roughly £500’. NEB [Ronald Niebour], Untitled, Daily Mail, 1 March 1951.

British public’s attitude to empire in the 1940s was characterised by ignorance.66 The Groundnut Scheme even made it into an instalment of Dan Dare in September 1950, when Dan and his companions were on an adventure in the ‘wilds of Venus’ trying to combat famine on Earth.67 The comic features a mock-up of a newspaper, the ‘Daily World Post’, which reports Dare’s disappearance as well as news from ‘famine [ 385 ]

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trouble spots’ around the world; in the bottom corner is a story, ‘Success in East Africa – Peanut Arrives in London’, which reports a ‘touching ceremony’ at the ‘Strachey Memorial’ where ‘a whole unblemished peanut’ was handed over to the British government by ‘the native tribes in the groundnut area and the survivors in the Strachey scheme’.68 As Dan Dare is set in the then-distant future of 1995, the joke would have been apparent to most parents, if not their children. Not all of the cartoons depicting colonial development schemes were as light-hearted as those mentioned. One, by Leslie Illingworth in 1949 (Figure 13.16), shows Strachey bundling John Wakefield, the architect of the Groundnut Scheme, into a sack, while in turn ignorant of the man, labelled ‘public opinion’, looming over him with a ‘sack for Whitehall bunglers’.69 But generally the subject matter – peanuts and chickens – had too much comic potential for much truly biting political satire. It is also clear that although colonial development policies were enacted entirely in the periphery of the empire, not the metropole,

Figure 13.16  Leslie Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 21 November 1949.

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there is very little depiction of colonial subjects in these images. Another Giles cartoon shows a number of African workers engaged in a variety of activities, many of which are comic (although importantly not at the expense of the African subjects themselves).70 Joseph Lee’s cartoon is more complex (see above – Figure 13.11); the workers on the schemes are depicted as monkeys, and this functions both as a critique of the development programmes as unrealistic or laughable, but it is also undeniably the racialisation of the African colonial workforce for the comic appreciation of a conservative readership.71 Generally, however, the colonial subjects are absent from these depictions of the colonies; the British Empire is a blank space on which British ideas are projected. One NEB cartoon in the Daily Mail (Figure 13.17) takes this to a grotesque extreme: Attlee, in his bowler hat and pinstriped trousers, is shown shaking hands with John Strachey who is dressed in a stereotyped and exaggerated costume of a ‘tribal African’.72 He wears a grass skirt with a skull slung from his waist, his bare chest reveals ‘tribal’ tattoos, his hair is spiked and held with a hair-band, and his face appears to be shaded dark. He stands next to a plane, clearly having just returned from overseeing the Groundnut Scheme. The caption, ‘Excuse this get-up – but I was obliged to practise a little witchcraft to break that drought’, demonstrates a racialised, imperialist attitude to ‘traditional’ African practices, played for laughs; it ridicules Strachey for his ineptitude and desperation and depicts him as just as ‘irrational’ as African colonial subjects. Colonial development is presented as a white man’s endeavour in an empire from which colonial subjects are largely absent; it is a way to explore existing ideas about the British Empire, but also domestic British politics, in an unusual and eye-catching setting. In conclusion, it is clear that newspaper cartoons can add to historians’ understanding of the popular culture of British imperialism. Coverage of imperial issues in cartoons varied across newspapers, in line with differences in wider coverage of the British Empire itself. In this period, the cartoonists of the Evening Standard and the Daily Express were most concerned with imperial issues, while the Daily Mirror had the least coverage of these topics; for the left-wing, sometimes Laboursupporting tabloid, domestic issues such as the housing shortage and arguments over nationalisation were deemed far more worthy of visual commemoration. This fits with broader arguments that the British working classes were generally less steeped in imperial culture than their middle-class counterparts.73 It also seems that more right-wing tabloids were more adept at using imperial issues to critique the government, compared to the Mirror, which found far more fertile ground in domestic policies. This correlates broadly to an interpretation of imperial history which places imperial identity and a sense of ‘pride’ in the [ 387 ]

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Figure 13.17  Ronald Niebour, Untitled, Daily Mail, 22 December 1949.

empire on the right-hand side of the political spectrum. However, this runs the risk of overly simplifying both the cartoonist’s art, and the relationship between the views of the cartoonist and the editorial stance of the newspaper. For example, David Low drew prolifically for both the Evening Standard and the Daily Herald over this period, and produced pieces with a consistent voice, satirising jingoistic attitudes towards imperialism, regardless of where they were to be published. [ 388 ]

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Often, the empire is used as a backdrop against which domestic political issues can be played out – so cartoons depicting the bungling, short-sighted politicians and managers who dreamt up the state-led enterprises of the Gambia Poultry Scheme and the East African Groundnut Scheme are reiterating and supporting the messages in other cartoons, such as those about the perils of nationalising domestic state industries like coal. Sometimes the empire is an unfamiliar terrain, into which familiar figures can be parachuted and lampooned – John Strachey, in his top hat, in the middle of an African field. Part of the power of editorial cartoons is the manner in which they present an idea to the audience with a shrug of the shoulders; the recipient is invited to join the dots, and to guess exactly what argument is being made.

Notes 1 David Low (1891–1963) started working as a cartoonist in Australia in 1907; he moved to Britain at the end of the First World War, first to work for the Evening Star before moving to the Evening Standard in 1927. He stayed with the paper, despite its clash with his own political beliefs, until 1950, when he moved to the Daily Herald. Michael Cummings (1919–1997) started at the Tribune in 1939 and moved to the Daily Express in 1958, where Ronald Carl Giles (1916–1995) also worked as a cartoonist (and, during the Second World War, as the war correspondent). Both men also drew for the Sunday Express. Ronald Niebour (1903–1972), who signed his work ‘NEB’, drew for the Daily Mail from 1938. Leslie Gilbert Illingworth (1902–1979) began his career as a cartoonist at Punch in 1937, and also drew for the Daily Mail from 1939. Philip Zec (1909–1983) drew for the Daily Mirror from 1937, although less prolifically after the end of the war; he was the editor of the Sunday Pictorial from 1950–1952. Victor Weisz (1913–1966), who worked under the name ‘Vicky’, began his career in Berlin but moved to London in 1935; he worked on various publications in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming a staff cartoonist on the News Chronicle in 1941 before joining the Daily Mirror in 1954. Also see above: Chapter 7 – ‘David Low and India’. 2 Laura Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 18. 3 Victor S. Navasky, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, p. xxi. 4 See, for example: Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham (eds), Art and the British Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007; Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Elizabeth Ann Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000. 5 Stephen Howe, ‘Introduction: New Imperial Histories’, in Stephen Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010, pp. 1–20. 6 Stephen Howe, Anti-Colonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 147. 7 See, for example: John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate, Oxford: Wiley, 2006, passim. 8 See, for example: John Saville, The Politics of Continuity: British Foreign Policy and the Labour Government, 1945–51, London: Verso, 1993; R. M. Douglas, The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939–1951, Abingdon: Routledge,

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2004; or Martin Lynn (ed.), The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival?, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Miles Taylor, ‘Bull, John (supp. fl. 1712–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edition, May 2006, at: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68195, accessed 14 November 2014; Virginia Hewitt, ‘Britannia (fl. 1st–21st cent.)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edition, May 2012, at: www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/68196, accessed 14 November 2014. Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 27 August 1945, ILW0967, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 23 June 1947, ILW1266, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Ronald Carl Giles, Untitled, Daily Express, 29 April 1947, CG/2/5/526, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Alan Mumford, Did Cowards Flinch?: A Cartoon History of the Labour Party, London: Political Cartoon Society, 2006, p. 2. Neil Kinnock, ‘Foreword’ to Mumford, Did Cowards Flinch?, p. 3. Roy Greenslade, Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 606. James Thomas, Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, p. 27. Beers, Your Britain, p. 202. Beers, Your Britain, pp. 202–203; Dominic Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 42 Thomas, Popular Newspapers, pp. 28–29. Philip Williamson, ‘Baldwin’s Reputation: Politics and History, 1937–1967’, The Historical Journal, 47 (1), 2004, p. 133. Colin Seymour-Ure, ‘Low, Sir David Alexander Cecil (1891–1963)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edition, May 2008, at: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34606, accessed 14 November 2014. For more information about Low’s political leanings and his relationship with his proprietor, see David Lockwood’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 7). Stuart Macintyre, ‘British Labour, Marxism and Working Class Apathy in the Nineteen Twenties’, The Historical Journal, 20 (2), 1977, p. 482. The two parties joined together for the South Paddington by-election in October 1930, when their candidate Sir Ernest Taylor beat the Conservative Party, although they never repeated this success and Taylor joined the Conservative Party after the 1931 general election. See: David Powell, British Politics, 1910–1935: The Crisis of the Party System, Abingdon: Routledge, 2004, p. 156; Robert W. D. Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads 1919–1932: A Study in Politics, Economics and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 252. Ross McMullin, Will Dyson, Australia’s Radical War Artist, Carlton North: Scribe Publications, 2006, pp. 83 ff. Thomas, Popular Newspapers, pp. 72–73. Mumford, ‘Preface’, in Did Cowards Flinch?, p. 10. Editorial, ‘Time for Change?’, Manchester Guardian, Monday 22 October 1951, p. 6. Thomas, Popular Newspapers, p. 15. Michael Bromley, ‘The Media’, in Jonathan Howell (ed.), Britain Since 1945, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, p. 214. Thomas, Popular Newspapers, p. 28. Navasky, The Art of Controversy, p. 39. Kinnock, ‘Foreword’, p. 3. Helen Lewis, ‘Ink-stained Assassins: Can Political Cartoonists Survive in the Digital Age?’, New Statesman, 23 August 2012, at: www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/ religion/2012/08/ink-stained-assassins-can-political-cartoonists-survive-digital-age, accessed 14 November 2014.

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CARTOON S, I M PERI A LI SM A N D A TTL E E ’ S G O V E R N M E N T 34 Colin Seymour-Ure, ‘Cartoons’, in Bob Franklin (ed.), Pulling Newspapers Apart – Analysing Print Journalism, Abingdon: Routledge, 2008, p 79. 35 Howe, Anti-Colonialism in British Politics, pp. vii–ix. 36 Rhiannon Vickers, The Labour Party and the World: Vol. 1, The Evolution of Labour’s Foreign Policy 1900–51, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 8. 37 Arthur Creech Jones, ‘The Labour Party and Colonial Policy’, in Arthur Creech Jones (ed.), New Fabian Colonial Essays, London: Hogarth Press, 1959, p. 23. 38 NEB [Ronald Niebour], Untitled, Daily Mail, 29 October 1948, NEB0629, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. 39 Joseph Lee, ‘Terrifying Days’, Evening News, 20 July 1949, JL4121, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. 40 Michael Cummings, Untitled, Daily Express, 12 December 1949, CU0057, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. 41 ‘Sir S Cripps on Aims of Socialism’, Hull Daily Mail, 2 March 1936, p. 7. 42 Oddly, given the rich source material, Bevan’s skeleton remains unlabelled: perhaps Cummings had faith that his audience would be able to fill in a suitable sentiment. 43 Michael Cummings, Untitled, Daily Express, 17 February 1950. Churchill in 1908 was standing in the Dundee by-election as a Liberal candidate, a party of which he was a member from 1908 to 1925, having abandoned the Conservatives in 1904. It is not clear here precisely which proclamation about the Tories Cummings is referring to, although in his campaign Churchill claimed that Tory rule would lead to ‘corruption at home, aggression to cover it abroad … patriotism and imperialism by the imperial pint … dear food for the millions, cheap labour for the millionaire’. See: Jim Tomlinson, ‘Responding to Globalization? Churchill and Dundee in 1908’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (3), 2010, p. 271. 44 David Low, ‘One Thing Leads to Another’, Evening Standard, 18 June 1947, DL2730, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. 45 Philip Zec, Untitled, Daily Mirror, 21 September 1945, p. 2. 46 David Low, ‘Heads in the Sand’, Evening Standard, 10 May 1946, DL2571, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. 47 William Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 239–240. 48 See, for example: Charlotte Lydia Riley, ‘The Winds of Change are Blowing Economically: The Labour Party and British Overseas Development, 1940s–1960s’, in Andrew W. M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen (eds), Legacies of Tangled Empires: British and French Decolonisation in Africa, London: UCL Press, 2017, pp. 43–61; and Charlotte Lydia Riley, ‘Tropical Allsorts: The Transnational Flavour of British Development Policies in Africa’, Journal of World History, 26 (4 – Special Issue), 2015, pp. 839–864. 49 For example, the Witwatersrand Gold Rush had been a major contributing factor to the Jameson Raid of 1896 and the Second Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902. 50 Creech Jones, ‘The Labour Party and Colonial Policy’, pp. 20, 36. 51 Philip Zec, ‘All Empire Roads Lead Home’, Daily Mirror, 5 September 1945, p. 2. 52 Edith Tilton Penrose, ‘A Great African Project’, The Scientific Monthly, 66 (4), 1948, p. 322. 53 Tilton Penrose, ‘A Great African Project’, p. 322. 54 Tilton Penrose, ‘A Great African Project’, p. 322. 55 J. S. Hogendorn and K. M. Scott, ‘The East African Groundnut Scheme: Lessons of a Large-Scale Agricultural Failure’, African Economic History, 10, 1981, p. 81. 56 Hogendorn and Scott, ‘The East African Groundnut Scheme’, p. 108. For a more in-depth account of the scheme and its failings, see: Matteo Rizzo, ‘What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? Development Disaster and Labour Market in Southern Tanganyika 1946–52’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6 (2), April 2006, pp. 205–238. 57 The Gambia Poultry Scheme was an ambitious project, started in 1949, which intended to produce annually 20 million eggs and one million pounds of dressed poultry on ten thousand acres of land in Gambia (the timber from which would be cleared and sold to fund the project). By 1951, the Colonial Office (then under James Griffiths) was forced to abandon the scheme as a failure, after producing

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only 34,500lbs of meat and 28,440 eggs; among other problems, there had not been sufficient investigation into whether it was possible to grow chicken feed in Gambia, and so it had had to be imported throughout the programme. See: E. R. Wicker, ‘The Colonial Development Corporation (1948–1954)’, The Review of Economic Studies, 23 (3), 1955–1956, p. 222. Joseph Lee, ‘London Laughs: Nut Collection for Britain’, Evening News, 26 March 1946, JL3282, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Lee, ‘London Laughs: Nut Collection for Britain’. Giles, Untitled, Daily Express, 13 December 1948, CG/1/1/1/3875, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Giles, Untitled, Daily Express, 13 December 1948. David Low, ‘And Now What About Trying to Grow some Nuts?’, Evening Standard, 3 November 1949, DL3082, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. David Low, ‘Old Low’s Almanack – Prophecies for 1950’, Evening Standard, 9 December 1949, DL3097, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Joseph Lee, ‘London Laughs: Topical Gags like Groundnuts’, Evening News, 8 November 1949, JL4211, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Ronald Niebour, Untitled, Daily Mail, 1 March 1951, NEB0802, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. For a more detailed exploration and critique of these claims, see David Lockwood’s chapter in this volume: ‘David Low and India’. ‘Dan Dare’, The Eagle, 29 September 1950, p. 1. ‘Dan Dare’, The Eagle, 29 September 1950, p. 1. Leslie Illingworth, Untitled, Daily Mail, 21 November 1949, ILW1690, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Giles, Untitled, Daily Express, 13 December 1948, CG/1/1/1/3875, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. Lee, ‘London Laughs: Nut Collection for Britain’. Ronald Niebour, Untitled, Daily Mail, 22 December 1949, NEB0696, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent. See, for example: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2006, p. 111; Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 321–364; Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 307.

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Australian cartoonists at the end of empire: no more ‘Australia for the White Man’ David Olds and Robert Phiddian

When Sir Frank Packer took over the Sydney-based Bulletin magazine in late 1960, he handed editorship to Donald Horne. The first thing Horne did was to take the slogan ‘Australia for the White Man’ off the banner. This removal was not merely cosmetic, because Horne was determined to refashion the symbolic organ of White Australian cultural nationalism in a new internationalist way. While Horne’s politics at the time were Cold War libertarian, he was already a maverick, and showed this by hiring Les Tanner as chief cartoonist and art director. Tanner was an ex-communist who seized the opportunity to lead and mentor a new generation of progressive cartoonists. They came to dominate Australian newspapers and magazines from the 1960s well into the 1990s and (to some extent) continue to do so into the twentyfirst century. Tanner and his protégés started a process of lifting the national tradition out of its imperialist and racist mode, to turn away politically and culturally from Britain and empire towards a much more modern and liberal (often left-wing) nationalism. The next step occurred in 1964 when Rupert Murdoch set up The Australian as the first national newspaper, with Bruce Petty as editorial cartoonist. This new newspaper was culturally and politically antiestablishment for its first decade, and Petty was quite consciously anti-colonial in many of his cartoons even before the anti-Vietnam movement gathered momentum in Australia (and elsewhere). In the early 1960s he and Tanner led a group of cartoonists who were in the vanguard of this social and political change towards a consciously post-imperial nationalism that was well established by the end of the decade. By the late 1960s, ‘Australia for the White Man’ was well on the way to becoming a fringe position held only by extreme reactionaries, [ 393 ]

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and it is the contention of this chapter that political cartooning not only reflects this but also played an active role in fomenting the change of cultural climate. In this chapter, cartoons are read both as a symptom of socio-political change and as a material, contributing factor to that change. In the decades before and after Federation in 1901, Australian cartoons were closely connected with the rise of a distinctive nationalist but empire-loyalist sensibility.1 Then and thereafter, cartoons developed the visual palette of the bush larrikin tradition of Australian identity, particularly in the weekly journals The Bulletin (1880–2008) and Smith’s Weekly (1919–1950).2 In one sense, they played a decolonising cultural role in helping Australians imagine themselves as members of an independent nation rather than as members of disparate colonies under the British Crown. However, the national identity assayed in the situational and caricature stereotypes of these journals remained profoundly imperial and British in character. Australia federated as a British nation within the empire, and remained distinct, particularly from the Asian region to the country’s north.3 Certainly, there was an anti-establishment thread in the bushman, most obvious in an enthusiasm for ridiculing ‘new chum’ Britishers whose sense of class structure inclined them to lord it over the colonials. The bushman was, nevertheless, a laconic, male, and white figure. Even when the protagonists of cartoons left the bush to go to war or into the urban factories and offices of the twentieth century, overwhelmingly they kept their gender and colour intact.4 For The Bulletin, this settler culture identity was explicit for many decades, with a slogan on the masthead: ‘Australia for the White Man’ (changed from ‘Australia for Australians’ in 1886). It had been one of the fundamental conditions of Federation, especially for workers fearful of capital’s inclination to replace them with cheaper imported labour from Asian countries.5 The classic cartoon illustration of this attitude is Phil May’s great and terrible Mongolian Octopus, given a full two-page spread (Figure 14.1). This image has echoed through Australian cartoon history because it speaks to a paranoia never far below the surface, an anxiety about being swamped by ‘the yellow peril’ from the north. The cartoon amplifies fear, disgust, and moralising outrage at the outsiders who threaten the nation’s women, its institutions, and its public health. It is uniquely powerful because the ‘Mongolian’s’ sinisterly caricatured face is so terrifying, but it is sadly typical of a lot of the sentiment about foreigners expressed in The Bulletin’s cartooning well into the 1950s (for example, Figure 14.2). [ 394 ]

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Figure 14.1  Phil May, ‘The Mongolian Octopus – His Grip on Australia’, The Bulletin, 21 August 1886, pp. 12–13.

Like May’s, this is a thoroughly imperial and xenophobic cartoon, and was given a full-page treatment. The immediate threat has changed to world communism and the imperial protector has, implicitly, moved across the Atlantic, but the effect is scarcely more ‘modern’. Lindsay was a great draughtsman, but his iconography here is strangely archaic, closer to First World War depictions of ‘the Hun’ than anything happening in the US around 1950. It illustrates a point we will pursue in more detail below, that – by 1960 – the cartooning tradition of The Bulletin was thoroughly reactionary. This reflects (if in exaggerated form) the wider situation of cartooning in the conservative post-Second World War decades dominated by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, when political cartoons were seldom a challenge to a white and isolationist sense of Australian identity.6 Change happens most profoundly, no doubt, due to underlying sociopolitical forces, but in media history there is always a rich micro-context of personal and institutional happenstance that could easily have played [ 395 ]

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Figure 14.2  Norman Lindsay, ‘Nearer, Clearer, Deadlier …’, The Bulletin, 7 June 1950, p. 5.

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out differently. It is therefore instructive to look at precisely what occurred in terms of ownership and staffing at The Bulletin in late 1960.7 Donald Horne inherited The Bulletin on 23 October 1960. A week earlier, Frank Packer had telephoned Horne at home (on a Sunday), primarily to install him as editor of the Australian Women’s Mirror. Packer had bought the Mirror in order to head off a bid from the young Rupert Murdoch, who was in an acquisitive phase. Packer seemed to regard it as inconsequential that the Mirror’s sister publication, The Bulletin, was included in the deal, along with the building that housed the two magazines. Horne had been employed by Packer since 1954, initially as editor of Weekend (described by Horne as ‘a very foolish magazine’), and subsequently (from 1958) on the more serious Observer.8 Weekend was the forerunner of a spate of populist magazines, unashamedly pursuing sensationalism, celebrity, and salaciousness. At the same time, The Bulletin seemed to be heading towards a natural death in obscurity; circulation was falling and, since the end of the Second World War, it had been in the hands of a triumvirate of deeply conservative editors. David Adams adhered strictly to a format devised between the wars, supported by Associate Editor Jim Blair (previously editor of the Australian Women’s Mirror), and Douglas Stewart, Literary Editor, who had taken responsibility for The Bulletin’s Red Page book review section since 1940. Stewart had been heavily influenced by Norman Lindsay, and he chose to maintain ‘a strong anti-modernist editorial policy which helped to extend Bulletin traditions throughout his term’.9 Horne says ‘Most of them weren’t there for the Bulletin, but for their own lives and interests, which The Bulletin served by paying their modest salaries.’10 Horne’s passion at this time was The Observer magazine. Packer had promised to finance ‘a small intellectual journal’ in exchange for the excruciating task of editing Weekend.11 The first issue of The Observer duly emerged on 22 February 1958. Favourably compared to Tom Fitzgerald’s journal, Nation, The Observer was seen by some as on the right, compared to Nation’s left, but both magazines sought genuine intellectual engagement with issues of the time.12 Horne’s Cold-War-Warrior leanings could be seen in his view that ‘The Observer was more hard-headed than Nation, realistic, sceptical, aware that it was an unfriendly world out there, in which the unexpected consequences of almost any action might be dire, unless it was an action that particularly appealed to me.’13 Horne acknowledges that Nation’s urgings to abandon the White Australia policy were right, while The Observer’s pragmatic support for the policy was wrong. He says that ‘both magazines were an affirmation of the possibility of intellectual life in Australia’14. [ 397 ]

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The Observer featured the work of academics and writers, including Henry Mayer, Michael Baume, Robert Hughes, Bob Raymond, Bruce Beresford, and Desmond O’Grady. Horne adds:

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We lived, partly, on a certain openness to change – of which some of the best random specimens were drawn by pen in black ink when Les Tanner joined us. Tanner sketched an urban Australia of back-garden patio philosophers and espresso-bar pundits in a way that was unmatched.15

The cartooning was thus a prominent part of the intellectually avantgarde ethos of this purpose-built journal of ideas. Then Packer happened. Offhandedly, in the telephone conversation of 16 October he said, ‘The point is: do we kill The Bulletin or do we kill The Observer?’16 Horne chose to relinquish The Observer, in a decision that seems coldly rational. Despite his obvious, possessive enthusiasm for his pet magazine – and for the intellectual mission it embodied – he was most likely swayed by the commercial realities of the situation: although in decline, The Bulletin was still selling 27,000 copies to The Observer’s best figure of 9,000, and had a solid national presence, a useful subscription list, and better resources.17 Given his commitment to the project of intellectualising Australia, it is likely that he immediately formed the intention to revamp The Bulletin, radically but from within. Horne was not yet notorious as the author of The Lucky Country (1964) – his book-length indictment of post-war Australia – and it would not be until 1968 that he began to use the term ‘New Nationalism’ to describe the realignment of Australian culture.18 Nonetheless, his concern with the changing nature of Australian identity is clear in his 18 January 1961 editorial, where he wrote: We intend to maintain ‘The Bulletin’ as an Australian paper, written by Australians and concerned with Australian problems and attitudes … There can be no more senseless way of approaching the social and cultural life of this country than to ignore the fact that it is now a country of revolutionary change. The old patterns are fading.19

This approach led to wholesale changes to almost every aspect of the magazine, including a complete staff replacement.20 Horne notes that Les Tanner, on his return from a year in the UK, ‘cleared out all remaining Old Bully artists by the ingenious device of taking each of them out in turn for a drink and then speaking so enthusiastically about what we wanted to do that they stopped bringing in their contributions’.21 The old Bulletin had maintained a very limited number of staff illustrators and solicited cartoons from a wide range of freelancers and enthusiastic amateurs. This was and remained the pattern for the journal, with the notable qualification that there was an almost total changing of the guard. [ 398 ]

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The reinvention of The Bulletin under Horne was total and prefaced a new desire in the broader Australian community to sweep away the trappings and actualities of modes of authority that were rooted in imperialism. Instead, there would be an intellectual project: a national conversation, facilitated by journals and magazines like Nation and The Bulletin, that would establish a new understanding of Australian society, and that would address the relationship between Australia, its Asian neighbours, and the wider world. The evolution of the political cartoon would be a significant element of this conversation, and would be inspired by the work of Les Tanner. Horne was clearly aware of the influential nature of political cartoons. The changes he instigated at The Bulletin generated significant criticism and ill-will from the traditional readership base, who lamented the great days of yore and decried any change. One strategy Horne used to counter this line of criticism was to run a series of the cartoons that had appeared in The Bulletin in earlier decades, under the title of ‘Look Back at Anger’ (Figure 14.3), ‘to demonstrate how very much better drawn they were than now, to give examples of The Bulletin’s republican contempt for the British, the wowsers and all jingoists, but also to give examples of its racism’.22 In a generational change, and as a part of Tanner’s clean sweep, veteran cartoonist Ted Scorfield left in June 1961, after 37 years. Scorfield’s preoccupations included support for Menzies, anti-communism, and unquestioning loyalty to the Anzac spirit.23 His cartoons featured fine draughtsmanship, but there was no room for ambiguity, and no intellectual challenge – there can be only one interpretation of his iconography, and it places loyalty and security above curiosity. These are cartoons that preach to the converted: those who made up the conservative, Anglocentric White Australia of the Old Bully; who voted for Menzies over Ben Chifley’s Labor Party in 1949 (see Figure 14.4); and who saw in Australia’s involvement in Korea a continuation of the Anzac Legend founded in the two world wars (Figure 14.5). During Horne’s editorship there was a steady increase in the number and variety of cartoons in The Bulletin, drawn by a diverse group of cartoonists. For example, the 4 November 1961 issue contains 15 cartoons, by ten artists, in addition to Tanner’s cover illustration. Perhaps five of these cartoons may be considered political (Tanner, Sid Black, Clarrie King, Martin Sharp), while the remainder are either purely ‘funnies’ or else social comment. Additionally Tanner was running a series titled Tanner’s Seven Deadly Australians, depicting stereotypically Australian versions of the Sins (‘Anger’ for this issue). It is evident that Horne considered Tanner, as art editor, to have a vital strategic role [ 399 ]

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Figure 14.3  William McLeod, ‘The Germans and British in New Guinea’, The Bulletin, 10 January 1885 [reprinted 17 May 1964, The Bulletin, p. 10].

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Figure 14.4  Ted Scorfield, ‘Going my way – on a full petrol-tank?’, The Bulletin, 30 November 1949, p. 5.

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Figure 14.5  Ted Scorfield, ‘The More It Changes the More He Remains the Same’, The Bulletin, 23 April 1952, p. 5.

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in The Bulletin’s new mission, and he must have provided him with a fairly liberal budget to permit the purchase of work from so many illustrators. Les Tanner had, with Packer’s blessing, left The Observer in 1959 in order to spend a year in the UK, drawing ‘funnies’ for the Daily Sketch. At the time, Ronald Searle was there, entering a period of great success with a proliferation of whimsical drawings and cartoons. These caught an emerging mood of optimism in the UK, which soon led to the Beatles, a revival of satire, and a renewed interest in surreal art.24 Tanner nominates Searle as an early influence.25 Searle’s styles ranged from the stark reality of his wartime drawings, through the wicked line drawings of the St Trinian’s schoolgirls, to the detailed, intricate caricatures of ‘society people’.26 His surrealistic cat drawings were ubiquitous. Tanner also drew inspiration from American cartoonists, despite these being muffled politically by McCarthyism, but Searle himself noted in 1957 that ‘bad as I think the majority of American cartoonists are, you have four or five who are probably finer than any in the world’.27 American political cartoonists, such as Paul Conrad, seemed to retain a preference for detailed drawings and caricatures, but an emerging aesthetic in ‘funnies’ used simpler, sparse line drawings, as in Harry Mace’s Saturday Evening Post cartoons. Tanner says ‘I stole from anyone I could lay my hands on if I thought I could get away with it.’28 From these borrowings, he evolved a distinctive style that won for him the 1961 London Cartoonists’ Club award for ‘most promising newcomer’.29 Tanner, possibly in response to his post-war experiences in Japan, joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1948, and remained a member until the brutal Russian quelling of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. By the time of his return to Australia and commencement at The Bulletin in 1961, his personal politics had moved towards the centre, and there is no explicit evidence of alignment to any political party. Although his appointment was announced in the 3 May 1961 issue, his work did not appear until 8 July, when he provided a drawing for the cover, as well as a cartoon about escalating tension over the threat posed by Iraq to Kuwait’s new independence.30 Initially, Tanner was assigned a half-page vertical column on page 7, necessitating the use of narrow, vertical images, a form that was ideal for ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (Figure 14.6), appearing on 5 August 1961. The target here is lazy, superior colonialism; it inverts Rudyard Kipling’s urge to imperialism (see above – Chapter 4). The romantic, heroic strivings of Kipling’s poems have become a bloated, ineffectual bureaucracy, incapable of handling the dying days of colonialism across the world. This cartoon, while sympathetic to the plight of native [ 403 ]

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Figure 14.6  Les Tanner, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, The Bulletin, 5 August 1961, p. 7.

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subjects of British colonies in general, lacks any particularly Australian perspective, and does not acknowledge any specifically Australian anti-imperialist stirrings (rather, the issue is seen as a broader, British Commonwealth problem). Tanner’s ‘back-garden patio philosophers’ appear as duffel-coated university types for the 12 August 1961 issue, reflecting an escalating war of words between Russia and the US. ‘The Americans have a better prose style’ (Figure 14.7) succinctly captures the absence of ‘realpolitik’ instincts among Australia’s intelligentsia. This cartoon perfectly complements Horne’s drive towards more rigorous intellectual understanding and debate, demonstrating not only the absurdity of Cold War rhetoric, but also the pointlessness of much academic debate in Australia. Furthermore, it was an accurate critical statement. By the end of September 1961, Tanner had carved out a whole page (usually page 7) for his work, freeing him to draw more complex and less constrained images, in a more balanced format. His work for 30 September 1961 (Figure 14.8) recalls the influence of Searle in its attention to detail, the dimensions of the characters, and the social setting. The cartoon depicts a diplomatic nightmare, as (presumably) the wife of an Australian civil servant grapples with the complex doublethink required in the face of the inherent hypocrisy of Australia’s foreign and domestic policies of the time. ‘You Asians’ not only illustrates that Australians at that moment did not regard themselves as part of Asia, but also echoes their unsophisticated, simplistic categorisation of a diverse and multi-ethnic gathering of diplomats as indistinguishable ‘Asians’, while simultaneously amplifying the discomfort of maintaining the White Australia policy. Tanner revisited this theme from time to time (‘How can we expect Indonesia to develop to Western levels of civilisation without them gaining experience as imperialists?’; ‘Gaining face in Asia calls for more flexibility in abandoning principles’).31 While it would be an exaggeration to say that an argument for a new orientation towards Asia is a dominant theme in Tanner’s cartoons, it is a significant undercurrent, and one at odds with the isolationism of the old Bulletin. Both Horne and Tanner had experienced life in London during the 1950s. Despite the bombsites, the rationing and the queues, London could still offer theatre, concerts, sophisticated dining, and spirited conversation. By contrast, on returning to Australia, Horne found that All of Sydney seemed second-rate and run-down: I saw myself as an exile from the old world – itself shabby, but with a shabbiness rich in meaning. Australia was mindless, I would say to myself. Where were the art museums and theatres, the intellectual debate?32

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Figure 14.7  Les Tanner, ‘The Americans have a better prose style’, The Bulletin, 12 August 1961, p. 7.

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Figure 14.8  Les Tanner, ‘It’s difficult to approve of you Asians …’, The Bulletin, 30 September 1961, p.7.

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Though we have not found a direct account by Tanner of his London experience, evidence of a certain disappointment emerges in some of his cartoons, especially the ‘Seven Deadly Australians’. Running each week from 14 October 1961, these consisted of a full-page treatment of each of the deadly sins, interpreted for an Australian context. Each panel used a large, central image, with a border formed from small vignettes of examples of the sin in question. These cartoons depict Australians whose worst sins are unimaginative, petty and parochial, a people who are generally unattractive, small-minded, and shallow. With these cartoons, Tanner began a process of self-examination of Australian society and culture, contrasted to European (but not primarily British) sophistication, in which the old values of ‘The Bush’ no longer appear either adequate or desirable. Soon, this examination lacked the direct supervision of Donald Horne. In February 1962 Packer dropped another bombshell: Horne was to be taken off The Bulletin, and assigned to revamping Everybody’s magazine – an unlikely agglomeration of the old Australian Women’s Mirror and Weekend, which was failing badly. Peter Hastings took over at The Bulletin, and immediately changed the attitude to cartoons. Henceforth, Tanner would be unlikely to appear on the cover. His regular cartoon was reduced to half a page, and usually only one other cartoon would appear in the magazine (often a business-related cartoon by Clarrie King or Stewart ‘PEP’ McCrae, in the business section). This was a reduction in the significance the cartoons had enjoyed under Horne, but did not mark a significant change in their ideological trajectory towards a modern and internationalist perspective. Britain’s application in 1961 to join the European Common Market (unconsummated until 1973, due to De Gaulle’s opposition) shocked Australia into a re-evaluation of its global trade and strategic arrangements. Tanner engaged with different aspects of the emerging postcolonial adjustment: the question of tariff protection; the relationship with China; the relationship with the US; influence with Britain; and the particular attitude of Menzies to maintaining the British relationship. In general Tanner’s commentary was low-key. He was by no means baying for a republic; merely pointing out the need to resolve a range of practical issues and consequences. An anti-colonial line – particularly in the light of events to the north in ‘Malaya’ [sic], Indonesia, and finally Vietnam – was an inevitable consequence of actions instigated outside Australia. Inside Australia, the repercussions were of a nationalist nature; a need to take stock of oneself and one’s nation, in facing a new global dynamic. In August 1962, Tanner changed format to a strip-cartoon that extended across page 4 into page 5. This allowed him to depict conversations, [ 408 ]

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to develop ‘traps’, and to deliver punchlines. Coinciding with this development, Australia was experiencing a troublesome relationship with Indonesia’s President Sukarno. Sukarno had led Indonesia out of Dutch colonial rule (with assistance from wartime Japan), and – in the early 1960s – was leaning towards the left, with preferential treatment for the Indonesian Communist Party.33 Sukarno’s expansionism threatened Australian interests in the region, with the take-over of western New Guinea in 1961. Sukarno became a favourite target for Tanner, although he often acknowledged the inherent hypocrisy in one imperial organisation criticising the imperialist ambitions of another. His 2 February 1963 strip (Figure 14.9) is a typical example, though he has used a sketchier drawing style than was usual. Australian relations with Indonesia were further jeopardised in 1963 when Indonesia deployed military intervention in Malaysia (during the ‘Konfrontasi’), in an attempt to destabilise the process of securing the independence of Sarawak and North Borneo from Britain, and their incorporation into the Malaysian Federation. Despite a strong desire to avoid direct confrontation, Australia bowed to British pressure and sent small-scale forces to Malaysia and Borneo.34 By now, events were also beginning to move in Vietnam, at a time when Australian defence capability had been allowed to decline. Tanner – no doubt aware of the sensitivity of Australians to criticism of the armed forces – managed to comment on the plight of Australian defence resourcing using an echo of Scorfield’s ordinary Diggers (Figure 14.10). Whereas Scorfield made his point through the use of meticulous detail, Tanner used a simpler and more explicitly thought-provoking drawing technique to create his effect. While the soldiers stand proud, disciplined and ready for action, the officer and sergeant major seem unperturbed by the absurdly thin numbers in Australia’s armed forces; a situation comically exaggerated but not fundamentally distorted in the caption. Tanner makes it clear that the predicament is due to a failure at the command level, not in the quality of the troops themselves, who would fit in well enough in Scorfield’s band of brothers. It is a simple but dramatic realisation of the nation’s plight, on the eve of its becoming embroiled in Vietnam. A common thread through many of Tanner’s Bulletin cartoons is the use of ordinary Australians – those ‘back-garden patio philosophers’ – to comment on the running of their country (Figure 14.11). Gone are the politicians and holders of high office, and gone are the specific representative stereotypes of earlier days at The Bulletin. Despite their naivety, their tortured morality, and their sometimes distorted values, these are ordinary people beginning to take responsibility for their own lives, no longer prepared to defer to masters, colonial or otherwise. In [ 409 ]

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[ 410 ] Figure 14.9  Les Tanner, ‘Colonists and Imperialists …’, The Bulletin, 2 February 1963, pp. 4–5.

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Figure 14.10  Les Tanner, ‘That’s Carmichael our commitment to Malaysia …’, The Bulletin, 14 November 1964, p. 12.

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Figure 14.11  Les Tanner, ‘Sheer McCarthyism …’, The Bulletin, 31 July 1965, p. 12.

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that sense, Tanner normalised a new anti-establishment narrative with a left-wing underpinning, and paved the way for the great social and political upheavals of the later 1960s. These ‘ordinary people’ were in some degree an extension of the independent-mindedness of the bushman of the Old Bully tradition, but their urban and liberal concerns marked a significant ideological turn. In the first half of the 1960s, these were vanguard attitudes towards reform of the ‘lucky country run mainly by second rate people’ (in Horne’s words) towards a more expansive and broadly liberal new nationalism.35 The next stage in the renovation of Australian cartooning’s visual style and satirical purpose required the restless ambition of a young newspaperman called Rupert Murdoch to create a national newspaper, and the peculiar graphic talent of Bruce Petty to draw for it. Murdoch had a generalised hostility towards ‘the establishment’ that in those days took a decidedly liberal and internationalist form.36 He was being locked out of the major Australian media ‘properties’ by the incumbent forces of the Packer and Fairfax families and the Herald and Weekly Times group, so he decided quixotically to launch a new national broadsheet, designed to shake up the conservative media landscape and to launch a new image of Australia. He employed the iconoclastic Maxwell Newton to launch the venture, and its first edition came out on 15 July 1964, with Bruce Petty as the editorial cartoonist.37 While Tanner’s perspective at the Bulletin was broadly antiestablishment and only incidentally anti-colonial, a more deliberate decolonising spirit can be seen in Petty’s work. That had come – logically enough – from his spending much of the 1950s working as a caricaturist at the centre of empire in London. There the pace and scale of decolonisation were more vivid than in the 1950s Australia he had left, as the incoming rush of Afro-Caribbean and other peoples from the empire led to the 1962 immigration restrictions. He left post-war White Australia from the Port of Melbourne in 1954 and, in an important sense, never returned to that placid, Eurocentric country. The turning point occurred on the way over: We stopped at Aden, and I was doing a bit of drawing everywhere we stopped. I just remember, I was doing this drawing of these people and a couple of guys came towards me, and they were a bit sinister, said they wanted me to go away. They didn’t want me to draw. They said – they didn’t have much English – but they said ‘It’s dangerous’. And I couldn’t believe it. I said ‘I’m Australian, y’know; I’m no danger.’ And I thought, ‘well there’s something going on here’. I just remember thinking ‘You don’t understand, you people. We’re Australian, we don’t … we’re on the right side.’ It was just intuitive to me that these people were wrong and

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yet I couldn’t explain the mistake they were making. So off I went to London. God knows what they did after that.38

This is a fall from innocence, a recognition that the fair go at the heart of Australians’ traditional self-image needed to be much more than a reflex assumption of goodwill masking an insular superiority. The experience in Aden was his first inkling that being Australian could be a complicated thing. Petty went to London, seeking art and work as a caricaturist. More unexpectedly, he also found decolonisation, the Cold War, and the early stirrings of the social revolution that would flower in the 1960s. By the time he had been in London for a while, he had become a partisan of the anti-colonial cause. He felt that ‘it really did look like what was happening in the West was so arrogant and appalling, and that colonialism was such an appalling and disfiguring set of events that we were on the wrong side’.39 Socialism; decolonisation; nuclear bombs; immigration from Asian, African, and Caribbean Commonwealth countries; and the early movements towards a European Common Market, were all hot issues. ‘There was Ghana and then Rhodesia and Malawi … I don’t know how many new countries there were in the years I was in London. Suddenly there seemed to be a new world, and that is when I got interested in it’.40 The experience of British decolonisation and nascent Europeanisation in the mid-1950s was intensely felt at the centre of a still substantial but increasingly unstable empire, and he brought that perspective back with him to the quieter backwaters of Australia in 1960.41 He was not immediately successful in gaining a cartooning job that permitted the expression of his critical and satirical impulses, so in 1961 he decided to travel in Australia’s immediate region: Just having come back from Britain which was extricating itself from the colonies, it seemed to me that you had to know who were the geographic scene you were with and the cultural scene that is next door. … I went to South East Asia … You sort of knew, there was an emergency in Indonesia – the Indonesia–Malay emergency – and there were still Chinese Communists in Malaya, and the Brits were trying to get them out … Sukarno was in Indonesia and you knew that they were huge populations, and that we ought to know about them.42

The result is an extraordinary, timely, and beautiful book – Australian Artist in South East Asia – which is a graphic journey through the culture and politics of Laos, Thailand, Malaya (as it then was), Indonesia (Figure 14.12), South Vietnam (Figure 14.13), and Singapore. Significantly, Petty kept the inevitable strain of Orientalism to a minimum by simply drawing what he saw, and taking the daily concerns of his subjects [ 414 ]

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Figure 14.12  Bruce Petty, ‘President Sukharno …’, An Australian Artist in South East Asia; Introduction by Ronald Searle, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962, p. 86.

seriously. For the time (for any time), he was remarkably successful in this, and admirably close to being colour-blind. The elegant, hourglass figures of some of the women are a bit stereotyped, but the occasional puffy-faced European carpetbagger – businessman, tourist, politician, adventurer – is more thoroughly caricatured. Petty’s drawings have the drama and immediacy of photo-journalism.43 A fascination with how it all works, politically and practically, energises the more complex images such as the one in Figure 14.14. Tanner’s attachment to the example of Ronald Searle has been noted above, and it is worth noting here that Searle provided a generously admiring introduction to Petty’s book. Both artists have recorded candid scenes in hurried, surreptitious moments, with startling eloquence. They share a busy, more nervous, and openly thought-provoking graphic line that puts them at odds with the classic imperial traditions apparent in the various Punches, or The Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reception of his first book also indicates that Petty’s work was still a bit ahead of its time, in both style and subject matter. The book was one of the first publications of a Melbourne art publisher – Les Gray’s Grayflower – and did not sell well. Petty remains apologetic [ 415 ]

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Figure 14.13  Bruce Petty, ‘4 Viet Cong prisoners …’, An Australian Artist in South East Asia; Introduction by Ronald Searle, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962, p. 89.

about his contribution to the short life of this ambitious venture by Gray to bring beautifully produced art books to the Australian market. Certainly, a retrospective of Hans Heysen or Norman Lindsay would have been safer at the time; although the recent notoriety and success of the inaugural Adelaide Festival of Arts (March 1960) suggests that there were things stirring that Grayflower was only a little too far ahead of. Les Tanner reviewed the book enthusiastically in The Bulletin, but struck an ominous note: ‘His [Petty’s] work is esteemed much more in London and New York where originality is less of a vice than it is here.’44 It is just this middle-brow attachment to the safely derivative that appears in Arnold Shore’s review in the Melbourne Age newspaper: ‘My son, aged nearly ten, found these drawings very amusing when he inspected the book, which was lying on my desk, waiting for review. So did I, in a way, but …’.45 The scribbled images, Shore thought, were childish, and they lacked the underlying form of ‘Rembrandt, Poussin, [ 416 ]

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Figure 14.14  Bruce Petty, ‘Political Influences Problems’, An Australian Artist in South East Asia; Introduction by Ronald Searle, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962, p. 80.

Chardin, Cezanne, Seurat and Picasso’. (Certainly, they do, but that is not the point.) Petty lived for a while as a freelance cartoonist before being employed in 1963 as cartoonist on Murdoch’s recent purchase: the Sydney afternoon tabloid Daily Mirror. After 14 months there (months that included Menzies’s seventh consecutive election victory and, more notably, John F. Kennedy’s assassination) he came into his own as the avant-garde satirical genius of the self-consciously modern, disruptive, and internationalist Australian. He continued his Asian and postcolonial interests in many of the cartoons from the paper’s early years, being to a significant extent ahead of the tide of interest driven by Australia’s increasing involvement in the Vietnam War. On the newspaper’s first day (15 July 1964), Petty’s cartoon addressed Senator Barry Goldwater’s imminent nomination as the Republican candidate for the 1964 presidential election, marking a turn to the new dominant (even ‘imperial’) power of the era. By day three he produced the acerbic comment on white supremacy and casual racism at the Commonwealth Conference in London, found in Figure 14.15. Menzies – as the fattest and most imperious member of the white leaders’ club – tosses small change to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, [ 417 ]

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Figure 14.15  Bruce Petty, ‘Petty’s Comment’, The Australian, 17 July 1964, p. 6.

apparently expecting concern about apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia to remain unmentioned. The white leaders had suddenly become a splinter group at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, and are presented as failing to appreciate the real significance of the exclusion of Ian Smith’s white supremacist Southern Rhodesia. As recently as 1960, white leaders had been in a majority at such conferences, but by 1964 they were outnumbered three to one, and the new arrivals were overwhelmingly foundation leaders of newly independent nation-states. The body language of Menzies and the other members of the UK-Canada-New Zealand rump shows that they fail to realise that the old racial and imperial order has gone forever, but the cartoonist knows better. Moreover, it is only one of more than a dozen cartoons in July and August that address postcolonial and Third World concerns (from the war in Cyprus to Malaysia and Vietnam). These range in theme and content from the scathing comment on the treatment of Australian Aboriginals seen from a South East Asian perspective (in Figure 14.16), to the arresting collage on starvation in India in Figure 14.17. [ 418 ]

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Figure 14.16  Bruce Petty, ‘Petty’s Comment’, The Australian, 22 July 1964, p. 8.

Both these cartoons tie European Australians of the ‘Lucky Country’ to the harsher global consequences of imperialism and its legacies. They are also a visual assault on the well-drawn line of the black-andwhite Australian cartooning tradition, and a considerable amplification on the tendency towards a loose and intellectual line already evident in Tanner’s work at The Bulletin. From the beginning of his time at The Australian, Petty provided a persistent focus on international affairs, as viewed with a much more sceptical and open sense of nation than the empire-loyalism that characterised earlier decades. A typically complex and busy summary can be seen in the later cartoon in Figure 14.18. This cartoon (reminiscent of the eccentric creations of William Heath Robinson) depicts a complex world of warring interests, not an orderly world of British identity in empire loyalty. One has to look hard to find the United Kingdom, and it appears in much smaller script than either the superpowers, the US and the USSR, or the Asian giants China and India. It is a visual representation of a new world order for Australia, less than two months before the new prime minister Harold Holt attempted to stumble from one great and powerful friend to the [ 419 ]

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Figure 14.17  Bruce Petty, ‘Food for Thought’, The Australian, 3 September 1964, p. 10.

next by promising to ‘go all the way with LBJ’, in Vietnam (and, apparently, everywhere else).46 Petty’s new, disruptive aesthetic for Australian cartoons fitted this new context for national debate, and was in some ways more influential as a decolonising agent in public attitudes than the change of subject matter towards Asia. Asia is always being ‘discovered’ somewhere or other in Australia’s public discourse, and it is not really demonstrable that a lot of cartoonists followed Petty’s lead in topic matter until the full impact of the Vietnam War hit. They did, however, learn a lot from his style. Petty’s cartoons brought a much greater graphic freedom to Australian cartoons, with reference points in the US (with Thurber and the New Yorker cartoons) and Britain (in the work of Searle, Topolski, and others). Again, it is more a matter of a new nationalism driving interest in postcolonial perspectives for Australian politics and culture than a consciously anti-colonial enterprise. The cartoons reflect a turning-away from consciously British perspectives towards a new modernity more inflected by American, European, and (increasingly) Asian interests. It was not really until the anti-Vietnam War moratoria of the late 1960s that a distinctly anti-colonial thread became widely [ 420 ]

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Figure 14.18  Bruce Petty, ‘International Affairs’, The Australian, 7 May 1966, p. 6.

apparent thematically, but from the beginning of the decade the cartoonists were decolonising their style and attitudes from the tradition of Lindsay and Scorfield towards something more modern, more independent, and more international. Petty and Tanner were the major influential figures to set this change in motion. In 1967, Tanner went from The Bulletin to the Age (as that paper’s first serious political cartoonist). Packer had ordered an entire edition of The Bulletin pulped because of Tanner’s savage depiction of the Victorian Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, as a hangman for his pursuit of capital punishment in general, and Ronald Ryan in particular.47 By this stage public debate and cartooning were being overwhelmed by the dispute over Vietnam, and progressive social issues like opposition to capital punishment. Tanner and Petty were joined by a generation of politically activist cartoonists, some of whom were still active and prominent in the second decade of the new millennium (e.g. Michael Leunig, Ron Tandberg, John Spooner, Peter Nicholson, and Petty himself). This long generation of broadly progressive Australian cartooning owes a lot to the decolonising and newly nationalist turn of the early 1960s [ 421 ]

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described in this chapter. It is a rich historical irony that this turn was sponsored by proprietors such as that old reactionary Frank Packer, and the young Rupert Murdoch, who was soon to gravitate so definitively towards libertarian, free market views (except where they conflict with local monopolies for his titles). The left-wing colour of Australian political cartoons for the subsequent half-century has a lot to do with the avuncular influence of their employees: Tanner and Petty. In 1966, the Holt government amended the Migration Act to establish equality among migrants irrespective of race. This abolished the White Australia policy in form, but it has retained a ghostly presence in public debate and consciousness ever since. What has changed is that the cartooning tradition has become almost universally committed to an open, thoroughly postcolonial version of Australia, one without British or Eurocentric prejudices. May’s ‘Mongolian Octopus’ is still a reference point for cartoonists, but now overwhelmingly as an object of anti-racist rejection. Peter Broelman’s Murdoch-as-Octopus from the 2013 Federal Election campaign is particularly rich in irony. Though it does express a degree of paranoia (is Murdoch really as influential as he and his opponents like to suggest?), the satirical aim of this cartoon is not to protect an imperial identity, but to damage one. Clearly the cartooning of Tanner and Petty discussed in this chapter was influenced by wider forces in the history of the early 1960s, but we also contend that their work played a part in the decolonisation of Australian nationalism. They were among the first to notice that the long phase of Federation British identity was waning, and to offer their audiences a set of alternative critical ideas and images, promoting a more independent sense of nation and self.

Notes 1 See, for instance: Richard Scully, ‘The History of the Australian Satirical Press’, Ridiculosa – une publication annuelle de l’EIRIS, Hors série – La presse satirique dans le monde, 2013, pp. 527–541. 2 The scholarship on Australian cartoons remains thin, but see: Marguerite Mahood, The Loaded Line: Australian Political Caricature, 1788–1901, Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1973; Joan Kerr and S. H. Ervin Gallery, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White: The Most Public Art, Sydney: S. H. Ervin Gallery, National Trust of Australia, 1999; Scully, ‘The History of the Australian Satirical Press’, pp. 527–541. 3 For a standard presentation of this case, see: Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, third edition, Cambridge and Port Melbourne, Vic: Cambridge University Press, 2009 (especially chapters 6 and 7). For entrée to the wider debate, see: N. K. Meaney, James Curran, and Stuart Ward, Australia and the Wider World : Selected Essays of Neville Meaney, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013. 4 See, for example, Carmen Moran and Margaret Massam, ‘A “Trace of History”: Cartoons from the Australian War Memorial Christmas Books of the Second World

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War’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 39, 2003, at: www.awm.gov.au/ articles/journal/j39/cartoons, accessed 17 April 2019. V. Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia, London: Labour Publishing Co., 1923, pp. 74–75. Viewed online at: http:// adc.library.usyd.edu.au/view?query=Nationalist+sentiment+focussed+itself+round+ the+banner+of+the+Labour+Party+for+more+indirect+reasons&docId=ozlit%2Fxmlmain-texts%2Fp00052.xml&chunk.id=0&database=&collection=, accessed 17 April 2019. Sir Robert Menzies was prime minister from 1949 to 1966 – the longest tenure of power in Australian history. His Liberal Party of Australia has – since the Second World War – been the dominant conservative political party in the Australian landscape; and has also been the dominant political party overall. See: Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Deakin to Howard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (for a critical study), and Gerard Henderson, Menzies’ Child: The Liberal Party of Australia, Sydney: HarperCollins, 1994 (for a more flattering one). The most comprehensive records of this episode stem from Donald Horne’s own accounts in his autobiographical collections: An Interrupted Life (Pymble: Harper Collins, 1998), Into the Open (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000), and On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’ (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006). Horne provides additional context in his 1992 interview with Robin Hughes, Transcript, Donald Horne, Int. by Robin Hughes, 17 January 1992, at: www.australianbiography.gov.au/ subjects/horne/interview1.html, accessed 24 August, 2015. Bridget Griffen-Foley offers the Australian Consolidated Press (Packer) perspective, notably in: Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2003), and Sir Frank Packer: the young master (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000). Horne, Into the Open, p. 2. ‘The Bulletin’, Austlit Database, at: www.austlit.edu.au/page/C278241, accessed 12 July 2015. Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, p. 65. Horne, Into the Open, p. 2. Horne, Into the Open, p. 33. Horne, Into the Open, p. 33. Horne, Into the Open, p. 33. Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, p. 32. Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, pp. 55–56. Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, pp. 17 and 41. Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1964; Donald Horne, ‘The New Nationalism’, The Bulletin, 5 October 1968, pp. 36–38. Donald Horne, Editorial: ‘The Changes in The Bulletin’, The Bulletin, 18 January 1961, p. 4. Complete except for long-term server Malcolm Ellis, whose case was pleaded, via Packer, by Robert Menzies himself. Ellis remained a thorn in Horne’s side for the duration of his first stint as editor, finally resigning in 1965. See: Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, p. 54. Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, p. 54. Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, p. 49. The so-called Anzac spirit emerged from the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign launched by Britain and its allies in a bid to break the Great War’s Western Front stalemate. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915, as part of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War. Since then, this event has become the central pillar in a broadly conservative (and not uncontested) Australian nationalism. As Patrick Lindsay has argued: ‘The Anzac spirit forms the bedrock of the Australian and New Zealand characters. It was formed when soldiers of both nations instinctively banded together and developed a mateship that grew into something greater than

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27 28 29 30 31

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the shared experiences of brothers-in-arms’ (Patrick Lindsay, The Spirit of Gallipoli: The Birth of the Anzac Legend, Richmond: Hardie Grant Books, 2013, p. 138). On Anzac in Australian nationalism, see: Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004; Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography, Sydney: NewSouth, 2014; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (eds), What’s Wrong with Anzac?: The Militarisation of Australian History, Sydney: NewSouth, 2010. Britain’s ‘Satire Boom’ has not been widely examined; however, the boom and its context (and relevance to Australia) are addressed in: Humphrey Carter, That was Satire, That Was: Beyond the Fringe, the Establishment Club, Private Eye, That Was the Week That Was, London: Victor Gollancz, 2000; Stuart Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001 (esp. pp. 91–110); James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010. Les Tanner, Tanner with Words, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1981, p. x. Searle had been captured by the Japanese in Singapore, and had endured five years in Changi and on the Thai-Burma railway. Throughout, he drew sketches of the treatment of prisoners, and hid them in the hope that they would be found and used as a record of what happened. In the event he survived and the drawings were published. Stephen E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 34. Ann Turner, In Their Image: Contemporary Australian Cartoonists, Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2000, p. 56. Joan Kerr, ‘Les Tanner’, Design and Art Australia Online, at: www.daao.org.au/bio/ les-tanner/biography/, accessed 19 February 2017. Les Tanner, ‘Members Only: The Soul Of Brisbane’, The Bulletin and the Observer, 8 July 1961, front cover; Les Tanner, ‘It’s Great To Be Independent’, The Bulletin and the Observer, 8 July 1961, p. 7. Les Tanner, ‘How can we Expect Indonesia to Develop to Western Levels of Civilisation without them gaining Experience as Imperialists?’, The Bulletin, 18 November 1961, p. 7; Les Tanner, ‘Gaining face in Asia calls for More Flexibility in Abandoning Principles’, The Bulletin, 16 January 1962, p. 7. Horne, An Interrupted Life, p. 752. A good overview is: Bob Hering, Soekarno – architect of a nation, 1901–1970, Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2001. Nick van der Bijl, Confrontation: The War with Indonesia 1962–1966, Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military Press, 2007, p. 165. For Horne, the notion of New Nationalism sprang from his perception of a rising, well-educated intellectual middle class, much as depicted in Tanner’s affectionate but critical cartoons. Already, in the early 1960s, Penguin Australia – under Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris – was developing a stable of books about the changing Australian culture. In an April 1963 article for Nation, Dutton had criticised Britain’s ‘patronising pseudo-patronage at a time when our national identity is at last emerging in full adult strength’. Horne first used the term New Nationalism, borrowed from Canada’s parallel experience, in a 1968 Bulletin article examining the effects of prime minister John Gorton’s personal values. By 1971, in Time of Hope, Horne was describing the phenomenon as ‘the new middle-class enlightenment’. See: Horne, ‘The New Nationalism’, pp. 36–38; Donald Horne, Time of Hope: Australia 1966–72, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980, pp. 79–80. William Shawcross, Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus, Milsons Point: Random House, 1992 (chapters 3–4). In the large and combative Murdoch scholarship, Shawcross’s account of this phase of the life stands out as relatively dispassionate. Denis Cryle, Murdoch’s Flagship: Twenty-Five Years of the Australian Newspaper, Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2008; Robert Phiddian, ‘Petty Notions, Grand Designs’, Overland, 176, 2004, pp. 26–39. See also: Griffen-Foley, Party Games,

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chapter 7; and Robert Phiddian, ‘The Revolution in Political Cartoons and the Early Australian’, Media International Australia, 157, 2015, pp. 56–67. Bruce Petty, Interview with Robert Phiddian, 15 March 2004. Petty, interview, 15 March 2004. Turner, In Their Image, p. 31. It is worth noting here that Petty’s memory conflates something that did happen while he was in London (Ghana’s independence in 1957) with later events (independence in Malawi, 1964; and white supremacy in Rhodesia, 1965). For more detail on this phase of Petty’s life, see: Robert Phiddian, ‘One Who Didn’t Get Away: Bruce Petty Goes to London’, in Tully Barnett, Nena Bierbam, Syd Harrex, Rick Hosking, and Graham Tulloch (eds), London Was Full of Rooms, Adelaide: Lythrum Press, 2006, pp. 205–219. Bruce Petty, interviews with Robert Phiddian, 12 April and 15 March 2004. Bruce Petty, Australian Artist in South East Asia; Introduction by Ronald Searle, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962. Les Tanner, ‘Black and White Man’, The Bulletin, 11 August 1962, p. 37. Arnold Shore, Review of Australian Artist in South East Asia, The Age, 21 July 1962, p. 20. Holt made the rather awkward reference to the Democratic Party slogan at the White House on 29 June 1966. See: T. R. Frame, The Life and Death of Harold Holt, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005, p. 181. On the Ryan controversy – and Bolte’s involvement – see: Barry Dickens, Guts and Pity: The Hanging that Ended Capital Punishment in Australia, Sydney: Currency Press, 1996; Mike Richards, The Hanged Man: The Life and Death of Ronald Ryan, Melbourne: Scribe, 2002.

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INDE X

Abdulhamid II, Sultan 305, 309, 313, 317–318, 319, 320–322, 322, 323, 327, 329, 332n42 abolitionism 68, 70, 77, 82, 137, 144, 155n13, 156n41 Adams, John Quincy 69 Africa 1–3, 9, 12–14, 20n5, 20n8, 21n12, 23n50, 25n71, 33–39, 41–44, 46–47, 56, 60, 61n8–11, 62n12–22, 68, 94, 97, 116, 123–124, 138, 140, 147, 244, 317, 328, 347–350, 359n6, 363–364, 369, 377, 380–389, 391n48–56, 414, 417–418 feminisation of 33–39, 41–44, 56, 60 al-ʾAduwi, Zahdi 247, 253, 262, 264, 266–267, 273 Algeria 242, 250–251, 257, 260, 275, 293, 295 al-Masri Effendi (comic character) 15, 17, 216–241, 250 al-Taba’i, Muhammad 218, 221–222, 232 Althusser, Louis 88n2 al-Yusuf, Fatima 218, 221–222, 232, 234, 238n13, 247 Amistad 68–69, 89n9 Anderson, Benedict 88n2, 392n73 Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) 399, 423n23 appeasement 193–194, 199 Armenians 15–16, 218, 231, 305–333 Attlee, Clement 15, 207, 210, 362–392 Attwood, F. G. 115 Australia 9, 15, 17, 19, 124, 192, 192, 261, 364, 373–374, 389n1, 393–425 Australian (newspaper) 19, 393, 417–421 Austria 7, 26n91, 93, 101 Bakhtin, Mikhail 67, 73–74, 80, 88, 90n29 Balfour, Arthur 3, 17, 20, 312 Beaverbrook, Max Aitken, first Baron 193–194, 199–200, 367–368 Bell, Steve 369 Bevin, Ernest 363 Bildungsroman 67–68, 70, 72–75, 78–83, 87, 90nn21–31, 91n55 Bismarck, Otto von 31–32, 41, 43–44, 55, 62n12, 335, 360n22, 360n24 Bluebeard (pantomime character) 314–315 Boer War, Second (1899–1902) 97, 116, 123–124, 129n17, 329, 339, 347, 359n6, 391n49

Britain 1–4, 9, 11–19, 31–55, 60–64, 67–70, 76, 89n9, 89n14, 94–129, 132n65, 167, 192–212, 219, 226, 237n1, 242–273, 277–299, 305–330, 339–340, 348, 357–358, 360n24, 360n32, 362–389, 393, 408–409, 414, 420, 423n23, 424n24, 424n35 British lion 31–32, 40, 94, 97–101, 109, 112, 116, 120, 126, 242, 249–250, 269, 271, 290, 292, 314, 328 Mass Observation 194, 202–206, 210, 212, 369 Navy 47, 82, 314, 321–322 see also Britannia; John Bull Britannia (allegorical goddess) 11, 31, 94, 109, 111–114, 124, 126, 208, 242, 247–248, 270–273, 324–325, 328, 364–365, 382 British Periodicals database 76, 90n37 Bryan, William Jennings 120 Bulgaria 307–309, 310, 312, 324, 326, 330 Bulletin (magazine) 192, 393–425 Canard enchaîné, Le 242–243, 251–252, 257–260, 264–265, 268–271, 273, 275n38 Castro, Fidel 86–87 Catholic Church 147–149, 156n36, 231, 283 Chamberlain, Joseph 45, 112, 312 Charivari, Le 3 Chifley, Ben (Joseph Benedict) 373, 399, 401 China 13–14, 16–17, 19, 26, 31, 97, 101–102, 121, 127, 130, 138–142, 144–145, 153, 161–191, 209, 252, 314, 334, 337, 339, 349, 394–395, 351, 408, 414, 419, 421 Communist Party 163, 172, 178–179, 181, 183, 185–187, 189n34, 191n70 emigration to America 16, 138–142, 144–145, 153 emigration to Australia 394–395 First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) Guomindang 168, 178–179, 181–187, 189n34 Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) 161–191 Churchill, Winston 192–194, 199–200, 206, 213n47, 281, 368, 373, 375, 378, 391n43 class 6, 10, 18, 52, 61, 77, 91n48, 104, 116, 163, 199, 201–206, 210, 212, 215n78, 219, 223–224, 234, 239n36, 241n77,

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I N D EX 243, 246, 250, 306, 326, 337–338, 342, 345, 349, 352–353, 359n6, 368, 387, 394, 423n6, 424n35 classical world 31, 38, 42, 54–55, 62n17, 62n18, 94 Cleopatra (VII, of Egypt) 39–44, 62–63, 244–247, 254, 256 Cold War 9, 243, 252, 264, 267, 280, 294–295, 375, 393, 396–397, 405, 414 Columbia (allegorical goddess) 6, 31, 96, 109, 111–115, 132n64, 145–146 Corn Laws 69 Coupe, W. A. 8 Creech Jones, Arthur 363–364, 370, 379 Crusades 311–312, 314–316, 324–325 Cuba 13–14, 66–91, 112, 114, 116, 119 production of sugar in 69, 88n6 Revolution 83, 86–87 Cummings, Michael 281–284, 362, 369, 373–375, 389n1, 391n42–43 Cyprus 13, 15, 62n15, 277–301, 331n14, 418 Daily Express 241n65, 287, 362, 367, 369, 374, 375, 387, 389n1 Daily Herald 210, 362, 368–369, 388, 389n1 Daily Mail 246, 281, 362, 364–366, 368–371, 373, 383, 385–388, 389n1 Daily Mirror 362, 368–369, 376–377, 379, 387, 389n1, 391 Daily Telegraph 310, 362 Dalrymple, Louis 93, 97, 102, 106–107, 113, 117–118, 124–125 Dan Dare 12, 385–386 Dicey, Edward 110 Dilthey, Wilhelm 72–73, 90n25 Disraeli, Benjamin, first Earl of Beaconsfield 7, 18–19, 249, 254–255, 260, 308, 328 Dulles, John Foster (US Secretary of State) 251–252, 254, 265 Dyson, Will 368 East African Groundnut Scheme 363, 380–388 Eden, Anthony 244–246, 251, 254, 256–257, 260, 262, 264, 266–269, 277, 279, 284–285, 287, 289–290 Edward VII, King 247 Effendi 219, 221–226, 228–229, 231, 234–236, 237n5, 239n31, 239n36, 240n44, 240n46, 241n77, 250, 275n30 Egypt 15, 17, 39–44, 94, 97–98, 121, 124, 216–276, 285, 297, 218, 377 Anglo-Egyptian War (1882) 40, 97–98, 237n1, 243–244, 262 Aswan High Dam 244, 246, 252–254, 258 feminisation of 39–44, 244–247, 254 Revolution (1952) 224, 243–244, 247, 250–251, 253 Suez Crisis (1956) 15, 242–276, 285, 287, 289

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 265, 269, 271, 294–295 EOKA (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) 277–278, 280–281, 285, 287, 289–290, 299n2 Escalara conspiracy 69, 88n6, 89n10 Evening Standard 193, 198, 200–201, 203, 207–211, 362, 367–368, 373, 376, 378, 382–383, 387–388, 389n1 Fascism 181, 185, 194, 203, 257 Fearon, Percy ‘Poy’ 234 Ferjac, Pol 242, 251–253, 258–259, 264–265, 268–269, 271 Fielding, Henry 66–67 First Carlist War 70 Fliegende Blätter, Die 3 France 3, 6, 7, 9–13, 31–32, 35–37, 41, 52, 62n17, 64n40, 74, 76, 97, 101, 104, 120–121, 127, 167, 181, 236, 242–243, 250–252, 257–260, 262, 265–270, 273, 275n38, 278, 285–287, 293, 300n41, 312, 314, 328–329, 351, 356–357, 360n24, 360n32, 364 depiction of leaders 32, 127, 251, 265–269 rooster 249, 269–270 see also Marianne Fun 3, 15, 18, 111, 306, 330n6 Gandhi, Mohandas K. Mahatma 194, 197–200, 205–206, 209–209 George, M. Dorothy 7 Germany 3, 8, 15, 17, 26n94, 31–32, 35, 37, 43, 45–47, 49, 62n12, 67, 73, 90n29, 101, 104, 120, 140, 181, 183, 200, 236, 262, 293, 317, 326, 328–329, 333n80, 334–361, 400 German eagle 328 see also Michel Giles, Ronald Carl 362, 365, 380, 387, 389n1 Gillam, Victor F. 93–94, 116, 119–122, 132n64 Gillray, James 7, 10, 93 Gladstone, William Ewart 7, 18, 40–41, 55, 307–308, 310–312, 324 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 73–74, 78, 82 Gombrich, E. H. 7, 10, 31 Grant, Ulysses S. 6, 137 Greece 277, 284–285, 287, 289–290, 292–293, 295, 297–298, 318, 329 Grivas, George 281, 285–287, 297 Haggard, Henry Rider 37–38, 42–43 Hague Peace Conference (1907) 342 Harper’s Weekly 136, 138–145, 150–152 Heine, Thomas Theodor 3–4, 347 Hill, Draper 7 Hitler, Adolf 200, 242, 251, 257–258, 262 Hogarth, William 10, 66

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Hollowood, Bernard 279, 287 Holt, Harold 419 Horne, Donald 393, 397–399, 405, 408, 413, 423n7, 424n35 Howe, Susanne 73, 75, 80 Hughes, William Morris 192–193 Hunchaks 305, 330n1 Hungary 266–267, 403 Illingworth, Leslie Gilbert 18, 244–247, 250, 254, 256–257, 260–261, 266, 268, 270–272, 362, 364–366, 386, 389n1 India 14–15, 18, 31, 49–51, 121, 124, 192–215, 242, 249–250, 254, 273n1, 328, 364, 376, 418–419 Amritsar massacre (1919) 195–196, 203, 212 Indian National Congress 195–197, 199, 205, 208 Indonesia 405, 408–409, 414–415 Ireland 11, 13, 16, 124, 195–196, 199, 213n32, 312–313, 324 emigration to America 97, 138, 140, 149, 156n39 Israel 235, 244, 251, 257, 262, 265–267, 285 Italy 35, 101, 200, 356 Jaheen, Salah 262–263 Japan 13–14, 19, 97, 101–102, 161–191, 204–207, 339, 403, 409, 424n26 Jentzsch, Hans Gabriel 345, 350, 353 Jews 218, 235, 239n30, 254–255, 347, 355, 359n6 see also Israel Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 207–208 John Bull 16–18, 31–32, 35–37, 41–42, 45–47, 49, 60, 62n17, 77, 93–97, 101–109, 111–112, 114, 116–122, 124–127, 129n17, 226, 249–250, 254, 265, 267, 312, 318, 320–321, 339, 340, 347–348, 364 Jonathan, Brother and/or Master 43–44, 63n27, 66–91, 120, 129n9 Joseph Andrews 66; see also Fielding, Henry Judge 3, 93–94, 116, 119–120, 122, 132n64 Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal 3, 15, 18, 52, 306 Keller, George Frederick 145–147 Kemnitz, T. M. 8 Keppler, Joseph 85, 93, 97–98 Keppler, Udo 83, 93, 97, 99–100, 104–105, 124, 126, 129n17, 130n18 Khouloussy, Ihab 228 Kipling, Rudyard 121–123, 403 Kladderadatsch 3 Klu Klux Klan 139 Korean War 396, 399, 402 Krüger, Arthur 354–355

Kruger, Paul 97, 99 Krupp family 338–339, 341–342, 345 Labouchere, Henry 41, 62n22 Langa, Rata 339–340, 345–346, 348, 359n6 Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of 145–149, 154, 156n32 Lee, Joseph 370, 372, 381, 383–384, 387 Leech, John 6–7, 18, 41, 70–71, 78, 87–88, 129n17 Leopold II, King of Belgium 4, 347 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 268–270 Life 93, 106, 112, 115, 121, 124, 132n74 Lincoln, Abraham 111, 137 Lindsay, Norman 19, 395–397, 416, 421 López, Narcisco 70–71, 76, 79–81, 89n19 Loti, Pierre 45, 49 Low, David 7, 15, 19, 192–215, 247, 249, 362, 368, 375–378, 382–383, 388, 389n1, 390n21 Luxemburg, Rosa 354–356 Lu Xun 183, 186 McCarthyism 403, 412 MacKenzie, John M. xxii, 201–202, 383 McKeon, Michael 70 McLeod, William 400 Macmillan, Harold 277, 279, 283–285, 289–290, 292–298 Makarios III, Archbishop 278, 280–285, 287, 289, 292–293, 295, 298, 300n34 Malaya/Malaysia 205, 284, 408–409, 411, 414, 418 Manifest Destiny 14, 67–69, 104, 110, 135, 157n46 Mansbridge, Norman 18, 287–293, 295–298 Mao Zedong 168, 185, 187 Marianne 32, 242, 249–250, 254, 265, 364 Mashonaland 33–34 Mass Observation 194, 202–206, 210, 212n18, 215n75, 215n78, 369 May, Phil 64n41, 394–395 Menzies, Robert Gordon 261, 373, 395, 399, 401, 408, 417–418, 423n6, 423n20 Michel (‘German Michael’) 345–347, 349, 351–352 Milliken, E. J. 35, 37, 62, 308, 310, 317 Mollet, Guy 251–252, 257, 262, 265–266, 268 Moretti, Franco 67, 73–75, 80–81, 87, 91n55 Morgan, Matthew Somerville 111, 137 Morgenstern, Karl 72–74 Mormons see Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of Morocco 349, 352, 354 Muggeridge, Malcolm 273, 279, 285, 287, 256–257 Murdoch, (Keith) Rupert 368, 393, 397, 413, 417, 422, 424n36

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I N D EX Napoleon I 79, 221, 252, 264–266, 273 Napoleon III 6, 129n17 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 242–276 Nasserism 250 as pharaoh 251–252, 258–260 Nast, Thomas 6, 14, 16, 19, 134–157 Nazism 194, 199–200, 214n51, 235 Nehru, Jawaharlal 197, 206–209 New Zealand 15, 192, 364, 370, 418, 423n23 nianhua 161–191 Nicholas II, Tsar 127, 318, 326–328, 357 Niebour, Ronald (‘NEB’) 362, 371, 385, 387–388, 389n1 Nkrumah, Kwame 417–418 Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, first Viscount 368 novel (literary form) 66–68, 72–75, 78–81, 87–88, 136–137 Opper, Frederick 127–128, 234 Orentialism 10, 42, 219, 235, 238n10, 241n71, 243, 246, 258, 268, 273, 276n51, 305, 314, 330n1, 330n4, 414 Ottoman Empire 15–16, 223, 226, 228, 231, 237n1, 239n32, 305–333, 423n23 see also Turkey Packer, Sir Frank 393, 397–398, 403, 408, 413, 421–422, 423n7, 423n20 Palestine 242, 364 Partridge, (John) Bernard 7, 247–248, 271 periodicals 1, 3, 7, 11, 19, 52, 63n39, 64n40, 66–68, 76–78, 83, 90n37, 222, 226, 237n5, 239n25, 241n77, 243, 251, 254, 257, 260, 275n38, 278–279, 306–307, 351, 362, 393, 397, 399, 408 Petty, Bruce 393, 413–422, 425nn40–41 Philippines 13, 112, 116, 120–124, 153, 154n5 Plains Wars 134, 138–139 Porter, Bernard 201–202, 212, 214n58, 214n64, 383 Press, Charles 8–9 Puck 3, 19, 83, 85, 93–95, 97–103, 105–108, 111, 113, 116–118, 123–126, 128 Pughe, John S. 93–95, 101, 103, 106, 108, 120, 129n17 Punch, or the London Charivari 1–3, 6–7, 13–20, 31–65, 67–68, 70–71, 76, 78–80, 82–83, 87, 89n20, 90n37, 91n48, 94, 111, 120, 129n17, 239n25, 243–250, 258, 260–261, 266, 268, 270–273, 277–301, 305–333, 389n1, 415 race and racism 3, 14, 17, 31–61, 62n18, 77, 110, 121–122, 135–136, 138–140, 142, 144–150, 153–154, 192–193, 196, 310, 352, 376–377, 382, 387, 393–422

Anglo-Saxonism 3, 17, 109–111, 116, 120–124, 127, 192, 393–394, 397, 399, 403–405, 417–418, 422 anti-Semitism 235, 347, 359n6 Reed, E. T. 321, 323 religion 145–149, 154, 156n32, 156n36, 218, 224, 231, 235, 237n3, 239n30, 254–255, 280, 283, 285, 326, 335, 347, 355, 359n6, 359n17 Rhodes, Cecil John 1–3, 18, 33–34, 379 Rhodesia 380, 414, 418, 425n40 Rodin, Auguste 260–261, 268, 276n54 Roman Empire 6, 13, 40–42, 246, 326–327 Roosevelt, Theodore 120, 132n74 Rosebery, Archibald Primrose, fifth Earl of 310–312, 324, 326 Rowlandson, Thomas 10 Russia 13, 31–32, 97, 100–101, 120, 127, 165–167, 181, 187, 194, 222, 231, 264, 279, 308, 312, 314, 318, 326–329, 332n73, 339, 356–357, 360n32, 403, 405 Russian bear 31, 165–167, 318–319, 328 see also USSR Ruz al Yussuf 19, 218–223, 226–227, 232–233, 237n5, 239n30, 243, 247, 249–250, 253–254, 260, 262–264, 266–270, 273 Salisbury, Lord, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of 45–46, 312–314, 316, 328 Salt March 197, 199 Sambourne, (Edward) Linley 1–3, 14, 16, 18, 31–65, 246, 306, 317–319, 326 Samoa 16, 18, 32, 43–49, 57, 60, 63n26, 63n36, 121–122 Santes, Juan 218, 231–232, 235, 237n8, 238n9, 241n57, 241n71 Sarukhan, Iskandar 15, 216–241, 247 Schilling, Erich 339, 341 Scorfield, Ted 399, 401–402, 409, 421 Searle, Ronald 18, 257, 270, 293–295, 403, 405, 415–417, 420, 424n26 See, James 166–167 Shakespeare, William 31, 40–41, 43, 94, 137, 244–247, 254, 256 Shinminkai 168 Sidqi, Ismail 225, 232 Sima Guang 172, 174–175 Simon Commission 196–197, 213n33 Simplicissimus 3–4, 20n8, 334, 347 slavery 11, 62n18, 67–70, 76, 82, 89n10, 89n12, 121, 137, 144, 156n39, 251, 357 Slavery Abolition Act (1833) 68–69 Smith’s Weekly 192, 394, 415 socialism 15, 193–194, 305, 334–335, 342, 351–352, 360n32, 362, 367, 370–371, 373, 378, 414

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I N D EX Spain 12, 14, 67–70, 79, 89n7, 89n14, 101, 110, 112, 116, 124, 127, 133n89, 135, 138, 154n5, 194, 218 Civil War (1936–1939) 194 Spanish-American War (1898) 110, 112–116, 127, 133n89, 135, 154n5 Stanley, Henry Morton 38 Stead, W. T. 110, 112, 326 Steele, Wilbur 96 Steinert, Willy 343 Strachey, John 363, 373, 383–384, 386–389 Streicher, L. H. 8 Strube, Sidney ‘George’ 234, 241n65 Suez Canal 15, 40, 116, 237n1, 242–276, 285, 287, 289, 300n41 Tanner, Les 393, 398–399, 403–413, 415–416, 419, 421–422, 424n35 Tenniel, John 1, 3, 6–7, 18–19, 31, 41, 49–51, 61n1, 63n39, 111, 249, 253–257, 306, 309, 311, 313–316, 322, 325, 327 Tōa Shin Chitsujo 167, 172, 179 Townshend, George 10–11 Turkey 278, 287, 289–290, 292–293, 295, 297–298, 314, 318, 329, 330n1 see also Ottoman Empire Tweed, William ‘Boss’ 6, 137 Uncle Sam 16, 32, 45–48, 63n27, 83–86, 93–96, 101–109, 111–112, 114, 116–127, 130n37, 138–139, 144, 147 United Nations 262 United States of America African Americans American eagle 109, 116, 120, 167, 258 Civil War 109, 111–112, 120, 137, 156n41 Native Americans 136–157 Reconstruction 137–140, 150, 153, 155n18, 156n39

Spanish-American War (1898) 110, 112–116, 127, 133n89, 135, 154n5 western expansion 3, 11, 14, 16, 77, 94, 134–157 see also Columbia; Jonathan, Brother and/or Master; Manifest Destiny; Uncle Sam USSR 9, 169, 179, 181, 183, 186–187, 190n52, 194, 244, 251, 258, 265–267, 294, 301n74, 403, 419 see also Russia Utes 144, 153 Venezuela 70, 97, 111, 317 Venus (classical goddess) 35–39, 41–44, 46, 54–60, 62n15, 62n18, 64n47 Victoria, Queen 96, 313 Vietnam 242, 393, 408–409, 414, 417–418, 420–421 Wahre Jacob, Der 15, 19, 334–361 Walker, William H. 106, 121 Watson, William 318, 320 Weisz, Victor ‘Vicky’ 362, 369, 389n1 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 32, 95, 116, 121, 127, 132n65, 326–327, 345, 347 Wilhelm Meister see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Wilson, Mervyn 285–287 World Wars First 112, 165, 181, 193, 237n1, 244, 275n38, 307, 329–330, 389n1, 395, 399, 423n23 Second 194, 199, 231, 239n31, 242, 244, 247, 251, 257, 279–280, 362–364, 367, 370, 379–380, 389n1, 397, 399 yuefenpai 185–186, 173, 178 Zec, Philip 362, 376–377, 379–380, 389n1 Zulu 38, 97, 121–122

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