We get an early start today, on our centennial coverage of the April 1912 fourth issue of Cartoons Magazine. Basically because there was so much good stuff in it, that I got carried away and scanned nearly all the pages, with the result that April will see a post from me, every day. Including, by the way, two days’ worth of cartoons on the centennial anniversary of the sinking of a certain James Cameron movi-* er-*, I mean, famous ship!

I’ll have to try to restrain myself, next month.

Above, we start with a couple pages devoted to the struggle between having people’s votes actually count in State Primaries, versus the way it was, where the primary vote was just for show, and party bosses could ignore popular will, choosing whom they wanted, instead. We still have a few states with such whacko systems — i.e., meaningless “straw votes” — but it was far worse one hundred years ago, in 1912.

Click on the above picture, to view the cartoons in detail, and read their captions.

Top left, we’re shown straw Teddy Roosevelt and straw Howard Taft, spearing each other, to zero effect. Amongst the cartoonists addressing this issue — on the right-hand page — are two “W.A.“s — Rogers and Ireland.

Doug Wheeler

ElectionComics Billy Ireland W.A. Ireland