Stars of Political Cartooning

Each day this month I will be profiling a notable political cartoonist. Since the choices are vast, I've decided to slim the numbers down a bit and eliminate living cartoonists. Perhaps I will do a current political cartoon stars in the future.

Here's an archive of the artists mentioned already.

Today we finish the month out with a look at another cartoonist who was put on trial along with Robert Minor and Boardman Robinson, only this fellow was a bit more like the James Connolly to their Patrick Pearses.

Enjoy!

Art Young was born in Illinois in 1866. As a teenager, he decided he was going to be an artist, and in fact, by the age of 17, he was a published cartoonist.

In 1895, he moved to New York and became a cartoonist, first working for humor magazines like Puck and Judge as well as Life magazine (which used cartoons before it became famous as a photography magazine) before becoming involved with newspapers, as well (Young came around at an opportune time, for cartoonists were just becoming accepted as parts of newspapers at the time).

At this point, Young was mostly known as a conservative cartoonist, but as he began to follow the news more as a member of then newspaper fraternity, he began to change his viewpoints and slowly became more and more liberal until he was a socialist.

In 1902, Young was commissioned by Life to do an anti-immigration piece. After it was published, he refused his fee and determined that he would never again draw anything he did not believe in. Luckily, by this point, he was famous enough that the newspapers were willing to give him freedom.

In 1910, he helped co-found The Masses, and here he did some of his most powerful socialist cartoons.

Here is Young describing Capitalism...

Young was noteworthy in his frequent use of a hell motif, like THIS look at Capitalism...

He also spoke out about the ills of modern society...

These, too, he would tie into the hell motif...

Like Boardman Robinson, Young was a big fan of Daumier, as seen in this take on Daumier's classic Gargantua cartoon, this time responding to the struggles for reasonable working hours for workers...

Here's a great cartoon directed at one of Young's least favorite people, J.P. Morgan...

This is a great satirical look at the plight of strikers that works now as well as it did then...

Young was not unable to poke fun at radicalism, either, though, as seen in this cute anarchy joke...

Young loved the fact that The Masses was outside of the standard news system, as he deplored the news system, as seen in this piece about the "freedom" of the press...