Saturday December 24, 1921.

 

Saturday, October 29, 1921. The birth of Bill Mauldin.

On this day in 1921, Bill Mauldin, the great World War Two illustrator (cartoon doesn't suffice to describe his work) was born in New Mexico.

Mauldin while a Stars and Stripes cartoonist.  Mauldin was a tiny man and always looked younger than his hears.  Here he's wearing a mixed uniform, including the wool lined zipper pattern field jacket that some mistakingly now refer to as a "tanker's jacket", a khaki shirt, OD trousers, and paratrooper boots. The boots were a gift from paratroopers.

Mauldin would ultimately become a Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times, but he had an archetypical Western upbringing that impacted much of his personality. His father, Sidney Albert Mauldin, was the dominant person of his youth and was somewhat unstable.  A streak of instability existed in his mother's side of hte family as well.  His father, called "pops", was a very intelligent man but was given to starting and abandoning projects.  Mauldin claimed Native American heritage on his mother's side, and his own appearance suggested that the claim was well-founded.  It was noted in later years that the two characters of his World War Two cartoon series, Up Front!, resemlbed figures from his own family.

His father had served as an artilleryman in World War One and went on to be a farmer, but one who frequently started and abandoned projects of all types  His father's adoptive grandfather had been a civilian scout with the Army during the Apache Wars.  His parents ultimately divorced and Mauldin and his brother Sidney moved to Phoenix Arizona in 1937 to attend high school, with his brother as the primary caretaker, which unfortunately lead to at least an element of delinquency.  Mauldin started illustrating at that time and made money illegally painting pinups on spare car covers.  He did not graduate from high school and, like many men  his age, joined the local National Guard unit, in his case the New Mexico National Guard, when conscription commenced in 1940.  His talents quickly lead him to be an Army newspaper illustrator, and he is most famously associated with The Stars & Stripes.

Mauldin was a great cartoonist and illustrator, but he had a troubled life, probably caused both by his unstable youthful years and the Second World War.  He married his first wife Jean prior to shipping overseas in the war, but he was not faithful to her during the war, and she wasn't faithful to him.  This lead to a post-war divorce, although the marriage actually endured for well over a decade after the war, with the couple having several children.  He married twice more, but perhaps showing the true nature of his first marriage, his wife Jean returned to take care of him as he was invalided in his final months.

"Me future is settled, Willie. I'm gonna be a professor on types o' European soil."

Mauldin's wartime cartoons underwent a rapid evolution in every sense.  They were good early on, but perhaps not really notably different from cartoons that appeared in other military papers and magazines.  In North Africa, however, they suddenly changed and the brush and ink illustrations became very accurate illustrations, while still having a speaking cartoon element.  They were so accurate that only the outright illustrations of William Brody, which have no cartoon element to them at all, surpass them as American Second World War war art.

Yank magazine medic illustration by William Brodie

Indeed, Mauldin's illustrations are so accurate that a person can trace the introduction of uniforms and equipment, and when they were first used at the front, through his cartoons.  Zealous in his work, he traveled to the front for material and was wounded at Monte Cassino as a result, and therefore had the Purple Heart.  A few of his cartoons were censured by the Army for showing new equipment before its knowledge was widely known.

Mauldin's "dog faces" were not glamorous in any sense, and were routinely dirty and unshaven.  They complained about service life and about some things, such as the lack of new uniforms as they were introduced, frequently.  This famously lead him to be the focus of a blistering ill-advised lecture from Gen. George Patton, who hated his cartoons.

During the war Mauldin's Stars & Stripes illustrations were picked up by American newspapers, and he found that he was returning to a ready-made career.  He was uncertain of it however, and at first his cartoons focused on the lives of his two central characters as they went back into civilian life. Those cartoons always had a bit of a false nature to them, however, as it was clear that Willie and Joe only really knew each other due to their being in the Army, and having them as central cartoons in a civilian cartoon didn't make much sense.  Mauldin's cartoons had always had a bit of an "editorial" nature ot them anyhow, and soon he switched to editorial cartoons, although there was no clear demarcation line from one genre to the other.  AS this happened, however, his cartoons lost circulation.

They were good cartoons, however, and ultimately the St. Louis Post Dispatch picked them up.  In later years the Chicago Sun Times did, and he was associated as a first rate editorial cartoonist with both papers.  In retirement, after having been marred three times, he moved back to his native New Mexico.  

World War Two veterans never forgot him and the memory of his wartime cartoons remained fresh throughout his life.  He obtained the status as the greatest military cartoonist of all time, replacing Bruce Barnesfeather in that status during Barnesfeather's own lifetime.  His fame was such that he himself became a reoccurring topic in the great cartoon series "Peanuts", with the character Snoopy visiting him in the cartoon every Veteran's Day.

Colliers ran the following cover:

The Soviet Union announced that it would honor most of Imperial Russia's debt obligation.

The USSR, in spite of the image it was trying to portray to the world, was an economic mess and as continuing to face armed resistance within its borders.  Indeed, just earlier in the week it had been invaded by Ukrainian insurgents who were advancing in the Ukraine, having crossed the Polish border.  None of its neighbors was sympathetic to it, and it was desperately reaching the point where it was trying to secure foreign funding to rescue its economy and save it from starvation.

April 2, 1921. Contrasting views.

 

Stuck in the Zeitgeist of our own time. Looking back, but not.

I published this just the other day:

Lex Anteinternet: February 12, 1921. Covers, Installations, Rebelli...: February 12, 1921, was a Saturday, and hence the day that a lot of print magazines hit the magazine stands, and mailboxes. Leslie's feat...

When I did, I also put up the posers and photos on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub reddit, the reddit that features things that occurred exactly 100 years ago on the mark.

At one time Saturdays were the days on which weekly magazines hit the stands.  It made sense as people worked every other day of the week, but Saturdays they normally had off.  It's been interesting in and of itself how that's worked, as labor strove for years for a two day weekend, Saturday and Sunday.  Traditionally laborers got one day off, the same day everyone else got off, Sunday.  Achieving the extra day off was a big deal. We've managed to actually retreat on that enormously as every retail everything on earth is open on Saturday. . . and on Sunday, any more.  The Internet, moreover, has intruded on the weekend off for everyone.

But I digress.

When I put up century old cover illustrations, sometimes I get comments here or there.  I knew that there would be this time.

I put up three, but two of them have items that could spark commentary, and one did.  Interestingly, the one that actually had a bit of a hidden meaning didn't spark any, and the one that didn't, did.

Here's the first one:

Leslie's was a magazine that dated back to 1855 and which started off as Frank Leslie's Illustrated News.  As the name would indicate, it featured illustrations.  Started by journalist Henry Carter, the magazine was carried on by his widow after his death.  She was a suffragist and the magazine reflected that.  Sold in 1902, it continued on as before, very updated, and given its history, it very frequently featured early feminist themes, such as the issue that ran this week, a century ago.

The term "lumberjack" is a Canadian one, and while I don't know its etymology, the "jack" part of that term isn't likely to refer the the name "Jack", which basically means a laborer.  Therefore its unlikely that there was ever a word "lumber jane", but Leslie's depicted a female lumber worker on the cover.

Where there female lumberjacks in 1921?  Probably not many, if any, but Leslie's thought there ought to be, and it was taking a stand of a sort eons ahead of its time.

Leslie's would cease publication in 1922.

Nobody commented on the illustration at all.  Probably didn't register with the modern eye, and if it did, it probably didn't seem to be sending any sort of message.

The illustration that did strike the modern eye as sending a message is one that wasn't intended to.

The Saturday Evening Post a century ago ran an illustration by Frederic Stanley.  When I posted it, I knew that there'd be comments about it, and there was.

Plenty of viewers of this illustration saw an outright homosexual depiction.  Others saw a veiled one, in which the artist must be meaning to send a gender bending message sub silentio.  What else could a depiction of a young man in a dress holding hands with another young man mean?

Well, not much really.

This takes us back to Valentine's Days past.

Even when I was very young there were still Valentine's Day masquerade parties.  I don't know why, but there were.  A person could speculate on the concept and what it tried to encourage, but masquerade parties in general were something that was more common at one time than now. Now, they seem limited to Halloween.  Not always so.

Indeed, the 1920s were oddly big in general on masquerade parties and naturally there'd be some associated with Valentine's Day.  Probably a lot of them actually.  Another example, in fact, from the same year, 1921, can be seen here:

A Wyoming Valentine in Pictures

A person can pretty safely assume that Frederic Stanley wasn't trying to send any secret homosexual messages in his February 12, 1921 Saturday Evening Post cover illustration. And it would be additionally safe to assume that the Saturday Evening Post wouldn't have been interested in sending any either.  No matter what a person's opinion may be now, such a thing would have been overwhelmingly condemned then.

Indeed, it's interesting to note that one commenter on the Reddit sub immediately wondered if the illustration was by J. C. Leyendecker.  It isn't, and it doesn't even look like one.  It looks in fact a lot more like an early Norman Rockwell, who is often very mistakenly assumed to have done every cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post.  Leyendecker in fact did a lot of them and has a very distinct style. Quite a few of his cover illustrations can be found on this site, as there are no many.  Leyendecker actually probably was homosexual, and actually lived for years with his primary male model. That was undoubtedly known to the art community but not to the general public, and it likely would have ruined his career if the implications of that had become too widely known.

There's also an element of assumption in that, as Leyendecker, while he never married, and he lived with his primary male model.  The assumption is probably correct, but it's just an assumption.  None the less, that hasn't stopped a lot of people from claiming to seem outright homosexual undercurrents in his work, which is also probably grossly exaggerated.

Leyendecker was a master at painting male figures in a very rugged, manly and heroic style.  There's an art term for it, and I can't recall what it is, but it goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and it basically involves portraying male figures outside of their actual proportions to some degree. The eye won't catch it, unless way over done, but it registers mentally.  Leyendecker exhibited that in his art. 

And early on, he also often had real trouble depicting women correctly.  Leyendecker's female figures up into World War One were often incredibly tiny and didn't have much in the way of figures.

Be that as it may, by this point in time Leyendecker had gotten over that and was definitely portraying female figures correctly, even lushly, so you can't really read much into that. Indeed, one of his most often reprinted illustrations is his deeply weird Easter 1923 illustration for the Saturday Evening Post that probably really does have all sorts of underlying psychological messages, that illustration being a woman who is very sensually kissing a winged baby on the lips who is in a bird cage.  I don't know what the heck is going on in that illustration, and I'm really surprised that the Saturday Evening Post printed it, but something is up with it.  Leyendecker by that time was taking some liberties with portrays, and those liberties sometimes involved women.  It was the Roaring 20s and even the Saturday Evening Post was willing to run those at the time.

Emmett Watson, who painted the feminist message which was missed by almost everyone was a period illustrator who lived until 1955.  He never achieved the fame that Norman Rockwell did, though he did  have a long career as a commercial and "pulp" illustrator.  He wasn't, however, a James Montgomery Flagg, a Rockwell, or a Leyendecker.  

Frederic Stanley, whose illustration was close enough to Rockwell at this time that his cover could have been easily mistaken for one, went on to a long career as an illustrator as well.  His work, as noted, rivaled Rockwell's at the time.  He was self taught.  After a bought with meningitis in the 1940s he switched to being a portrait artist.  He died in 1967.

Rockwell and Leyendecker we've already discussed.  Leyendecker, we'll note, was somewhat of a tragic figure and Rockwell, who greatly admired his work, eclipsed him in fame and frankly, ultimately in talent.  He lived for some time with his brother, who died of a drug overdose, and who was also an artist with a very similar style, and his sister.  Something in the Leyendecker family had gone wrong somehow in that all three siblings had unusual and tragic lives in varying degrees.  Leyendecker remained a significant artist for decades, however, and produced one of the most famous illustrations of George Patton during World War Two.

What's it all mean?

Well, sometimes an illustration is just an illustration.  Sometimes it isn't.  But considered out of the context of its times, you can't assume too much.