Abstract

In the twentieth century editorial cartoons were an integral part of American daily newspapers. Readers looked to these images for pithy commentary on news events. Yet, following the Second World War, economic changes in the newspaper industry threatened to make the job of the newspaper editorial cartoonist redundant. As editors became increasingly reliant on national syndication to fill their content needs, cartoonists who supported the Cold War consensus were better positioned to maintain their staff positions. At the same time, media critics argued that editorial cartoonists had abdicated their traditional adversarial role. Responding to these challenges, editorial cartoonists in the 1950s organized to promote American cartooning as an essential vehicle for maintaining a democratic print culture and print diversity. But because they struggled to imagine their art form apart from the commercial press, mainstream cartoonists were largely unaware of their radical counterparts in the alternative press who had to contend with the twin pressures of anticommunism and economic precarity.

This dissertation is both a cultural and labour history of a niche profession that became a site where hegemony was forged and contested. By situating the medium within a changing mediascape and the volatility of print capitalism, this study draws on Marxist cultural theory and archival research of two influential groups — the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) — to highlight how cartoonists responded to industry change as media workers. In the early Cold War, cartooning’s professional societies were fiercely anti-communist and anti-union. Many of their most prominent members also voiced broad support for US foreign policy while venerating the role of markets in shaping public policy. Departing from dominant portrayals that depict cartoonists as cultural rebels removed from the world of work, this study analyzes cartoonists’ working lives in the context of their profession’s racial, gender, and class dynamics. Examining both the ideological and material conditions that prompted this professional organizing, I argue that American cartoonists’ support for Cold War liberalism, combined with their romanticized ideals of a “free press,” strengthened a postwar status quo by failing to ask who gets to speak and why.