Illustrating Freedom of Speech: "An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire"

VISUAL ART REVIEW INTERVIEW

Richard Nixon by Pat Oliphant. Image from the Clement Rare Manuscript Library..

Pat Oliphant, Richard Nixon, charcoal sketch, 2008. Courtesy of the Wallace House Center for Journalists.

Journalists are the white blood cells of democracy, and their ability to report news and share opinions without repercussions is one of the best measures of a free society's hardiness.

 

The right to employ comedy and satire freely is another solid assessment of a democracy's health, and the Clements Library's online and in-person exhibition An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire is a compelling reminder of illustrative journalists using humor to make a point.

 

The University of Michigan exhibition—produced with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum and loaned original art from the Wallace House Center for Journalists—ties into a multi-event program this semester on how the arts interact with presidential politics during this election year.

 

“I think using Clements Library materials to help people think about the democratic processes in the country, and how we have historically talked about elections is important,” says Paul Erickson, the director at Clements. 

'Cheney leading Bush' by Pat Oliphant. Image from the Clement Rare Manuscript Library.

Pat Oliphant, Cheney Leading Bush. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, charcoal sketch, 2009. Courtesy of the Wallace House Center for Journalists.

While several political cartoonists feature in An Ungentle Art, Pat Oliphant is the star of the show. He got his start at a paper in Adelaide, South Australia, and used his outstanding talent to immigrate to the United States and work at the Denver Post before eventually becoming syndicated nationally.

 

When Oliphant immigrated to the U.S. after World War II, journalism was much more localized and financially stable than it is now. It used to be normal for every town of a meaningful size to have at least one daily newspaper, and they often employed a cartoonist to sum up the local zeitgeist in a single-panel illustration that commented on recent events and used unflattering facts to put the big egos of the time in their place. 

 

“They were pretty passive at the end of World War Two. Coming out of a war, cartoonists didn’t really want to confront anything—they were very conservative, and they were basically illustrated headlines,” says Chris Lamb, a journalism professor from Indiana University-Indianapolis. “It wasn’t until the '50s that you had Bill Mauldin, who came out of World War II writing about soldiers and was strong on civil rights; Herbert Block at The Washington Post; and you had Paul Conrad, who was also a very strong, kind of good punch-you-in-the-nose sort of guy. Oliphant came out of that school of cartoonists going from the establishment point of view to the ‘there are a lot of problems in society, and we need to address them’ point of view. The idea of the cartoonists now was not just that they wanted to give the readers a chuckle. They wanted to grab 'em by the shirt collars, yell at them: ‘Aren’t you paying attention? There’s a lot of things wrong with this country!’”

 

Oliphant won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, and he kept working well into this century, but much of his heyday was in the mid to late 20th, coinciding largely before, during, and after Gerald R. Ford’s time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Spiro Agnew by Pat Oliphant. Image from the Clement Rare Manuscript Library.

Pat Oliphant, Spiro Agnew, charcoal sketch, 2009. Courtesy of the Wallace House Center for Journalists.piro Agnew by Pat Oliphant. Image from the Clement Rare Manuscript Library.

Ford’s brief mid-1970s administration happened because he was the Speaker of the House of Representatives when Richard Nixon resigned under the crushing weight of the Watergate scandal. Since Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned just before he did, Ford was next in line to become president. (A University of Michigan grad who was raised in Grand Rapids, Ford’s presidential library sits between Ann Arbor’s VA hospital, the Arborcrest Cemetery, and North Campus.)

 

All the drama with Nixon, plus Ford's presidency, which included two assassination plots and losing to Jimmy Carter in 1976, as well as the Cold War, unfinished business of the Civil Rights Era, and the still-fresh memories of the Vietnam War, kept Oliphant very busy.

Jimmy Carter & the "Killer Rabbit" by Pat Oliphant. Image from the Clement Rare Manuscript Library.

Pat Oliphant, Jimmy Carter and the “Killer Rabbit,” charcoal sketch, 2009. Courtesy of the Wallace House Center for Journalists.

The cartoonist turned Nixon’s iconic moment when he left the White House for the last time—when he turned around and smiled with his trademark double peace sign to the cameras—into a caricature where the president gave the country two middle fingers. Oliphant was just as skewering to Democrats, portraying Carter as a helpless little boy being attacked by the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which came out just before Carter became president. 

 

Oliphant’s style is sketchy—a black, white, and gray world of exaggerated proportions and pointed opinion. It is sometimes minimalist, where blunt reality rules in the same way a show like The Simpsons is not especially pretty because that isn’t the point. Like any good political cartoon, it is the moral argument and the telling truth to power thrust of the panel that matters—and it isn’t Oliphant’s problem if you aren’t well-read enough to get his meaning. 

William Wells, “The Bower of Bliss, or, Paradise Regain’d,” hand-colored etching (London: W. Wells, April 21, 1783).

William Wells, The Bower of Bliss, or, Paradise Regain’d, hand-colored etching (London: W. Wells, April 21, 1783).

Their work depicts what used to be standard American cultural morays, prejudices displayed with no filter, and political issues now remembered only by historians. 

Civil War-era cartoons often depict realism-influenced line drawings with thought-bubble-like art. While political cartoons from the post-World War II period onward exaggerate physical features, verbal tics, and political ideologies of public people, pre-WWII art frequently distorted people for racist or classist reasons as often as they did for political ones. 

James M. Reilly, “Hallowe’en Card from Grandpa T.R.,” ink drawing with watercolor (n.p., c. 1909).

James M. Reilly, Hallowe’en Card From Grandpa T.R., ink drawing with watercolor (n.p., c. 1909).

In the flood of media across a fractured spectrum of echo chambers, it can be refreshing to find a medium like political cartoons, especially if you care deeply about what is happening but are exhausted by the constant flood of short-form videos, talking heads on cable news, and endless social media arguments.

 

While political cartoons have to compete with contemporary media overload, the methodology of the medium remains the same—it is just delivered differently according to Natalia Mielczarek, an associate professor of communications at the University of Virginia, and the author of The Trump Presidency in Editorial Cartoons, a study of how political cartoons changed during the Trump Administration. 

 

“These days there are fewer than 30 staff employed editorial cartoonists at newspapers” across the United States, Mielczarek says. While the exact number of full time cartoonists are hard to pin down, and there are numerous freelancers, Mielczarek says, “[A]t the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than 2,000. … With the internet, and the crisis of the newspaper business model, the first thing to go were the cartoons, because they weren’t deemed as essential.”

 

But you can still find them, especially online.

 

"It’s pretty ironic that now we have social media and a free way to disseminate, but you don’t really see much of that on social media," Mielczarek says. "The transition has been harsh for cartoons and cartoonists simply because the business model doesn’t really fit them into the business anymore.” 

Promo poster for An Ungentle Art featuring details from various cartoons.

Political cartoonists might be a rare breed these days, but some of the best contemporary examples are found in cerebral magazines like the The New Yorker, nationally distilled collections like at Politico, or national newspapers like The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

 

And some of the best historical examples of pointed cartoons are found in An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire.


Drew Saunders grew up in Whitmore Lake, and fell in love with A2 when he started going for karate lessons downtown at Keith Haffner’s. Studying journalism at Eastern Michigan University, he began freelancing in 2013 with the Ann Arbor Observer, and then so many other publications. He obtained a Master of Science degree in the field from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2019. In addition to writing for Pulp, Saunders specializes in business and environmental journalism. 


"An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire" is available to view online and in person at the University of Michigan's William Clement Library, 909 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor.