The most appalling cartoon to leap from the ashes of September 11 was surely that of Ted Rall, who was brought to a high pitch of moral indignation by a particular class of malefactors. His cartoon—which enjoyed a brief stint on the New York Times website before being whisked away by mortified editors—jibed at one of the World Trade Center widows, depicting her as she chortled, “Fortunately, the $3.2 million I collected from the Red Cross keeps me warm at night.”

Rall himself has been kept warm by the notoriety his cartoon earned him. Now he is to be found on the college lecture circuit, defending his work on the high ground of principle. As he declared in an interview with the student paper at Brown, “The best cartoons work by making fun of sacred cows, in trying to inflict the uncomfortable” (meaning, perhaps, “afflict the comfortable”). This of course is self-exculpatory boilerplate, but from it Rall draws an interesting corollary. Since, he claims, the point of cartooning is to challenge the status quo, there can be no such thing as a politically conservative cartoon: “I mean, what would a conservative cartoonist do? Make fun of poor people? Make fun of the handicapped?”

At least not of widows. But this gets to the heart of the matter. Rall is right that a political cartoon is by its nature an attack on the status quo, a diminutive but plucky rebellion against the order of things. But what is the order of things, and whose order? Especially these days, there would seem to be ample agents of the status quo to draw the amused ire of a conservative-minded cartoonist: teachers’ unions, trial lawyers, the mainstream media, the corporate-shakedown industry. By Rall’s theory, indeed, this ought to be a golden age of conservative cartooning. And so it is—though in limited and finally problematic ways.

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A political cartoon is a peculiar thing: out of the practice of politics, which is conducted essentially through words, it makes an image. In fact the words and the image are inextricably linked, since most (although not all) political cartoons also bear a caption, and the caption is often a cant political phrase of the day. It is the combination of the two elements, neither of which needs to be intrinsically funny, that must be comical if the cartoon is to succeed. Fatuous oratory and bombast are particularly good candidates for the cartoon’s brand of parody, as with the first President Bush’s pledge not to raise taxes (“Read My Lips”) or Bill Clinton’s “Bridge to the 21st Century.”

It is not a high art. Ephemeral by nature, often slapdash in execution, the cartoon is incapable of complex argument or fine distinction. But it is superbly suited to presenting terse epigrammatic truths (or untruths). Like a monument, a great cartoon can render a complex idea in a single thrilling and grand summation. Unlike a monument, it is also able to illustrate processes and systems—cause and effect, unintended consequences, and the like—and to suggest the dynamic way that things work, lodging its ironic or caustic point in the mind of a reader with potentially indelible effect.

To do this, one need not be a great artist. Benjamin Franklin, not otherwise celebrated as a draftsman, produced a simple sketch in 1754 of a snake severed into thirteen sections. The drawing was diagrammatic and conceptual, but its curt caption, “Join or Die,” gave it an almost incendiary power. This was America’s first political cartoon of note, and more than a century would pass before anything matched it. For the first half of the 19th century, American caricature remained a provincial outpost of the English world, cribbing from James Gillray, the jolly satirist of Napoleonic France. Political cartoons in this country were scurrilous and crudely drawn affairs, burdened with ponderous allegorical symbols and verbose captions.

All this changed with Thomas Nast (1840-1902), America’s greatest political cartoonist. A congenial ruffian, Nast found a craft dominated by other ruffians and hacks and made it respectable. In a sense, the discipline of American editorial cartooning is his creation.

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Nast’s father was a picturesque figure, a revolutionary-minded trombonist in the Bavarian army who fled with his family to America when Thomas was still a child. The young artist absorbed his father’s politics, and even spent a summer marching with Garibaldi in Italy before joining Harper’s Weekly as a sketch artist. This was in 1862, at the start of the Civil War, just as the railroad and telegraph were making it possible for a nation to follow a war as it occurred, in what we would call real time.

Nast’s boisterous and intricate style suited the printing technology of the day, when drawings could not yet be photographed and reproduced as halftones but had to be first translated into wood engravings before being printed. The most successful images were boldly linear, with lively contours and extensive use of hatching and crosshatching to create shades. This curiously impersonal technique played to Nast’s strengths, including his great feel for physiognomy. Bringing certain characteristically German qualities to his art—precision of line, a delight in the rendering of physical objects, theatricality, and a robust sentimentality—he struck the right note for his time. In contrast to earlier cartoonists who could muster but a single tone (gleeful malice, for the most part), Nast’s emotional range was vast—from furious outrage to mock pathos to elegiac grandeur.

Nast was also a fecund inventor of graphic symbols, or props, whose recurrence in his work gave it the momentum of a serial novel. Most are forgotten, but three remain essential tropes of American life: the modern image of Santa Claus (1863), the Democratic donkey (1870), and the Republican elephant (1874). But the central event of his career, and the inspiration of his best work, was the campaign against Tammany Hall in the person of Boss Tweed.

At bottom this was a shabby patronage swindle of merely local interest—the Tweed ring controlled the graft on all municipal contracts in New York—but Nast’s cartoons turned it into an eagerly watched national drama. His accomplishment was to take the newspaper accounts of the scandal, with their dry recitations of police testimony and huge sums of money gone missing, and to personify them in grotesque but hilarious caricature. The principal figure in Nast’s iconography was William Marcy (“Boss”) Tweed, the commissioner of public works of New York City, arguably not the most important of the four ring members but by far the most mockable, with his portly figure and his deep, close-set eyes peering out at the world like a slightly dazed raccoon.

Tweed’s physiognomy seemed to encapsulate the unquenchable appetite of the ring, and Nast quickly moved him to center stage. In his single most famous cartoon, he rendered Tweed’s facial features with nothing more than a dollar sign on a money bag. By the time of Tweed’s arrest in late 1871, Nast’s comic crusade had tripled the circulation of Harper’s Weekly.

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Nast bequeathed two very different legacies to subsequent cartoonists. On the one hand, he gave the cartoon its enduring association with progressive or, more broadly, anti-establishment politics. On the other hand, he made the cartoon respectable, freeing it from the stigma of its low origins and turning it into a full-fledged instrument of editorial policy. In other words, he brought the political cartoon into the establishment. And he brought the cartoonist as well, ending his own days as Theodore Roosevelt’s envoy to Ecuador, where he immediately caught the malaria that killed him.

Most of Nast’s successors, lesser talents all, have similarly tried to have it both ways: to play the defiant scourge of established authority even while enjoying its privileges and status. This was especially so in the case of the most successful cartoonist of the last century, Herbert L. Block, who signed his work Herblock. No one matched Herblock’s longevity: born in 1909, he was first syndicated nationally in 1933, joining the Washington Post in 1946 and remaining at work until a few weeks before his death in 2001. And just as Nast’s reputation was made with Tweed’s fall, Herblock’s was made by his dogged campaign against Joseph McCarthy, during the course of which he coined the term “McCarthyism.”

Herblock’s cartoons were the official art of the liberal establishment. His perennial targets were Republicans and the “money interests”; fittingly, for a man who began his career at the start of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, his mental universe remained that of the early New Deal. In the world of his cartoons, the government is forever the advocate of the little man, protecting him against the depredations of Wall Street. Even when he adopted new causes, including gun control (which he championed from the 1960’s until his death), the overall attitude remained the same: there was no social problem that could not be remedied if government were not made just a little bigger.

From the aesthetic point of view, Herblock’s success seems mystifying. He did not draw very well, and his caricatures were only approximations. Nor did they vary much in their spatial construction: generally two or three figures arranged around a desk or podium, or perhaps the portico of a public building. Metaphors were invariably perfunctory: a missile with a face on it was the Arms Race, a man with a gun and a bag of money was the Gun Lobby.

The latter problem, one might say, was generic. The Left’s essential mental instrument is class analysis, according to which society is best understood in terms of the competing interests of aggregate groups: workers, peasants, capitalists, rentiers. These collective abstractions go with but also against the grain of cartooning; although it relishes stereotypes, it delights still more in the specific and the particular—the precise detail, the finely observed vignette. This is what makes the buffoonish Boss Tweed so much funnier than any stock “capitalist.”¹

Herblock’s cartoons were not very funny; it is unlikely that any reader of the Post ever turned to him first upon opening the paper. Instead, his cartoons had the reassuring effect of an editorial laying down the conventional wisdom, restating that wisdom in a way that rarely provoked and never startled. They were polite, bland, and easily digestible.

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Herblock suffered from another incapacity, which would lead decisively to his eclipse. As a member of the establishment, he was unable to exploit the great revolution within the establishment that marked the overthrow of President Richard Nixon. Here was a subject, Nixon himself, whose physiognomy seemed fully as predestined for parody as Boss Tweed’s, and here were circumstances uncannily congenial to parody: bungled break-ins, telephone taps, secret tape recorders. But Herblock’s status, combined with his formulaic approach and limited gift for caricature, prevented him from exploiting the great comic potential of the scandal.

The opportunity was seized instead by a visually more anarchic and for the most part younger group of cartoonists that included Paul Conrad, Pat Oliphant, and Jules Feiffer. It was not Herblock, the dean of the guild, but Paul Conrad, who served as chief cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times from 1964 to 1993, who won a coveted slot on Nixon’s enemies list. In one brilliant offering, a play on Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick, Conrad depicted Nixon as the melancholy Dane, perched atop a vast pyramid of skulls and keening, “Alas, poor Spiro, and Dean, and Liddy,” and so on, in a long, brooding litany set against a background of political carnage.

But the fall of Nixon was only one, albeit crucial, event in a period that saw many other changes in settled ideas of the status quo (to revert to Ted Rall’s usage). By the 1970’s, labor and capital, the power blocs of New Deal America, were no longer the chief players in American political life, and a cartoonist who continued to treat them as such—well into the 70’s, Herblock was drawing the American plutocrat as a fop in a silk top hat, tails, and striped pants—was perpetuating an anachronism. As power in America began to be organized along entirely different lines, whole new fields of opportunity began to present themselves to cartoonists, especially to cartoonists who were not themselves prisoners of yesterday’s form of anti-establishmentarianism.

Jeff MacNelly of the Chicago Tribune was one cartoonist who noticed that the cultural and even the financial clout once reserved to the banker, the general, and the clergyman was now being wielded by Supreme Court Justices, foundation presidents, educators, and journalists; as MacNelly himself would put it, “the liberal Democratic apparatus was the establishment.” MacNelly hit his stride during the Carter administration (1976-1980), which he was the first to capture in visual terms. While others concentrated on goofy caricatures of Carter’s gleaming dentition, MacNelly sought a more hidden prey, the essential psychological atmosphere of the administration. He hit upon the happy idea of showing the White House as a rural Appalachian landscape—an unmowed lawn littered with rusting and cannibalized pickup trucks. Here Carter’s ineffectualness—the chaos in foreign and monetary policy, the opéra bouffe of Billygate and Bert Lance—was rendered visually in terms of dishevelment, an image all the more effective for its utter lack of viciousness.

MacNelly’s distinctive hallmark was his scruffy line, which meandered in a loose and genial quaver. To this he brought an exuberant imagination that expressed itself in a torrent of outlandish visual puns. One of the finest was Tobbacow: a dairy cow is being milked with one hand by a corpulent Uncle Sam while a string leads from the other hand to a guillotine shimmering above the cow’s head. “I wish he’d make up his mind,” sighs the poor animal. At a time when virtually every American cartoonist was still representing the tobacco industry as a mighty pillar of the establishment, MacNelly took note of its essential and ever-increasing powerlessness.

At his best in opposition, MacNelly suffered somewhat during the Reagan years, when he turned his main efforts to his syndicated cartoon, Shoe, a comic strip whose low-key humor was reminiscent of Robert Benchley. Under Bill Clinton, he returned with a vengeance. While he could not seem to work up an intense visceral dislike of Clinton himself, he did for Janet Reno, Clinton’s attorney general. Hounding her throughout her troubled reign at the Justice Department, he succeeded in making her look at once incompetent, comically rigid, and dangerous. In one of the saddest of his creations, the Cuban boy Elian Gonzales, forcibly returned home by our government, plays blissfully on a swing suspended from the barrel of an American tank. But this was to be MacNelly’s last campaign; he died in 2000 at the age of fifty-two, leaving a gap that has yet to be filled.

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If the shifting cultural and political climate of the last decades offered new opportunities for conservative cartoonists, developments of another sort were beginning to spell trouble for the entire enterprise. On the little stage of life that is the political cartoon, there is no room for explorations of character or nuanced discussions of motive. A cartoonist, political or otherwise, relies on a shorthand language of signs and symbols, the more conventional the better. Ours, however, is the age of political correctness, and the range of permissible symbols has been vastly constricted.

Not long ago, Pat Oliphant, the (liberal) cartoonist of the Boston Globe, made the mistake of depicting a Chinese figure running a laundry; for this he was sternly rebuked by his professional peers in the Asian American Journalists Association. His sin? The suggestion “that all Chinese ran laundries.” By using a conventional device to identify a group—which is to say, by using the inherently symbolic language of cartooning—Oliphant was found guilty of artistic profiling.

This returns us to September 11. In an age that has banned from respectable discourse the very words “blind,” “short,” and “fat,” what would have been more demeaning or hurtful, and therefore out of order, than to depict bearded, turbaned, Arab figures in a menacing posture? Even the beloved Doctor Seuss was being scolded, posthumously, on the re-publication of some of his “racist” World War II-era cartoons and found to be in violation of today’s code of tolerance.

Of course the taboo against generalizations and group stereotypes is elastic. Ted Rall’s rule—“The best cartoons work by making fun of sacred cows”—suggests that vicious stereotypes are permissible, so long as they are the right cows. The trick lies in knowing which those are. One obvious exception to the embargo on offensive stereotypes has been the Catholic priest or bishop—witness Pat Oliphant’s “Celebration at St. Paedophilia: The Annual Running of the Altar Boys,” which shows dozens of leering priests swarming out of church in pursuit of terrified boys who are fleeing as if before the bulls of Pamplona. Another has been the state of Israel, especially in the person of its prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Israel’s new security fence was recently depicted by Tony Auth of the Philadelphia Inquirer as a barbed-wire concentration camp for Palestinians in the shape of the Star of David. (Auth cannot have been happy when an uncannily similar Nazi prototype of the cartoon turned up; it has since been widely circulated on the Internet.)

In the confused weeks after the attacks of September 11, many cartoonists struggled between their inhibitions and their need to express a wholly appropriate outrage. One way out was abstraction: numerous cartoons inveighed against such solemn generalities as hatred, terrorism, or vengeance, often presented as a smoking cloud of destruction or a snarling monster. Another was to concentrate on the domestic response. More than one cartoonist came up with the motif of an angry Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeves to fight.

These, however, were platitudes, formal expressions of pious sentiment, and they were hardly satisfying. In stark and frequently gaudy contrast stood, and stands, the work of another contemporary talent, Sean Delonas of the New York Post. Delonas’s art is a bizarre cross between Jack Davis of Mad Magazine and Hieronymus Bosch. Rather than tiptoeing around visual stereotypes, Delonas revels in them: his lawyers are drooling ambulance chasers, his policemen grotesquely fat donut-chompers, his teachers sub-literate, his gay men invariably mincing on tiptoe with one knee bent. It is astonishing that he can get away with it, and in New York of all places, although it may be precisely the mantle of New York, where everything goes (or used to), that protects him—that, and the sheer manic energy of his stereotypes, which seem somehow to convey good will rather than malice.

Toward al Qaeda, in any event, malice was assuredly the order of the day. Delonas quickly realized that it was more effective to mock the terrorists than to curse them. As the first captured al-Qaeda prisoners were being brought to Guantanamo, he played wittily on the Islamic idea that 72 compliant virgins await each martyr in paradise. This subject was being treated predictably enough by other cartoonists, with the usual punch line involving a confrontation between the eager martyr and some ghastly harpy in hell. Choosing a totally different tack, Delonas showed a bleak federal penitentiary into which is being led a column of bedraggled mullahs. From somewhere in one of the upper cellblocks, a muscular goon of a jailbird gesticulates excitedly: “Look, 72 virgins!”

This was quintessential Delonas: a vivid and well-drawn architectural setting, broadly caricatured stereotypes, and an invitation to the reader to imagine what is about to unfold. There was more morale-boosting power in this image than in dozens of pious smoke clouds labeled Hatred and Terror. Rather than making the enemy into a large solemn abstraction, Delonas reduced the enemy by making him specific. In all of this there was also a certain cruelty, a reminder of how much of the art of the schoolyard bully depends on a knack for mimicry.

Delonas is a big one for props, ever the cartoonist’s friend. In the wake of September 11, a Pakistani supporter of al Qaeda had copied Osama bin Laden’s image from a website in order to make political posters. Unnoticed by the Pakistani was another figure in the picture; the website was a satirical one, and impishly paired with bin Laden was the amiably dopey character Bert from the children’s television series Sesame Street. As a result, the head of Bert the Muppet was soon being hoisted aloft on the streets of Karachi alongside the frowning visage of Osama bin Laden. For Delonas, this was gold: for months to come, he had Bert regularly at Osama’s side, sharing a cooked shoe in a cave or teaching his henchmen the Sesame Street alphabet of terrorism.

The accumulation of props is firmly in the Nast tradition, which Delonas has clearly studied. He had made particularly good use of it in his many antagonistic cartoons about Bill Clinton, whose omnipresent alter ego was a pot-smoking chicken with love beads that eventually also acquired Monica Lewinsky’s trademark beret. Delonas’s most peculiar Clinton prop, an inscrutable fetish object, was a hand-cranked egg-beater with an open-mouthed fish mounted at the end: an icon for the polymorphous sexuality of the Clinton White House.

Delonas’s gift for the vulgar is given ample room for play in his cartoons—another distinguishing characteristic of his art. When Michael Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley in 1994, Delonas depicted them on a sofa together, she in her wedding dress and he in his full fusiliers regalia. Holding his hand, she asks, urgently, “Michael, is there someone else?” In the thought balloon over his head is a freckle-faced urchin on a tricycle. A bold stroke, verging on the obscene; and yet Delonas’s vulgarity is more nearly joyful or Falstaffian than vicious, not so much a deficiency of manners as an excess of vitality.

Delonas is not the only cartoonist to take up a politically conservative attitude. Michael Ramirez of the Los Angeles Times and Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, two professed admirers of MacNelly, have done so as well, and with considerable success. But they, and a scattered cadre of others in regional papers, are the sum total of conservative cartooning today. And in many ways their future is as clouded as that of their liberal colleagues.

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I have already named the hobbling factor: the overarching judgmentalism of today’s regime of political correctness. There is reason to fear that the modern American sensibility has become so touchy and literal-minded that it can no longer accept the free-wheeling metaphorical language on which a cartoon culture thrives. If so, the political cartoon, that rambunctious child of the 18th century, will not outlast the 21st.

This is not only a matter of squeamishness about visual stereotypes. In July, Michael Ramirez lampooned the political scandal of the moment: the uproar over President Bush’s claim in his State of the Union Address that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Nigeria. His cartoon paraphrased one of the most famous images of the Vietnam war, the 1968 photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan in the act of shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head. Ramirez’s version shifted the action from Saigon to Iraq, making Bush the would-be victim with the gun to his head while the general coolly taking aim was simply labeled “politics.”

Plain enough, one would think; but in the ensuing contretemps Ramirez was widely condemned for making terroristic threats against the President and was duly investigated by the Secret Service. The surprised cartoonist, a reliable supporter of the administration, was reduced to defending the fitness of his imagery: “President Bush is the target, metaphorically speaking, of a political assassination because of sixteen words that he uttered in the State of the Union.”

As metaphors go, Ramirez’s was hardly esoteric. But that may be the point: the misreading of his intent suggests how essential to the life of the cartoon is the capacity to appreciate metaphor. We often hear that ours is a visual age, and that many of our brightest young people, users of computers and consumers of videos rather than readers of books, have developed in compensation remarkable powers of visual acuity and swiftness of perception. Obviously, though, one may consume visual material without being visually literate; indeed, the highly schematic nature of television and video promotes a habit of reading images only in their non-figurative sense. When symbolism as straightforward as Ramirez’s eludes the reader, the cartoon is in a sorry way indeed.

But that is only one and perhaps the lesser problem. If the ability to appreciate metaphor is in decline, the regime of political correctness frowns on metaphor altogether. (It is striking that today’s cartoons of the political Left, from Pat Oliphant to Tom Tomorrow, tend to rely more and more on verbal didacticism rather than on visual puns.) In the combined crossfire of these two tendencies, it begins to seem doubtful that the political cartoon can survive, at least in a form more sophisticated than that of a propaganda poster. It is no consolation that the same concern may be raised for American political humor in general, and for much else besides.

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¹ This problem dogged the cartoons of The Masses (1911-1917), the famous socialist periodical that published such important artists as John Sloan and Stuart Davis. In a typical example, a general contemplates a strapping, barrel-chested behemoth, complete except for his missing head, and exclaims in delight, “At last, the perfect soldier!” The point is that the modern imperialist state wants its soldiers to be mindless cannon fodder. But this is a visualization of a slogan rather than a visual thought: a poster rather than a cartoon.

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