WARNING: The below posting contains racist cartoons.

We’ve shown a few racist cartoons in our chronological presentation of the material that ran in Cartoons Magazine, but this is the largest & worst group of such cartoons thus far. Some people would simply not show them, afraid that giving them wide visibility might perpetuate the attitudes they reflected. My feeling is that these are part of history. Not showing them, would sanitize/hide events and attitudes. One can’t learn from history that has been suppressed. I overall have admiration of Teddy Roosevelt, but this aspect of his 1912 run for the Presidency, is disturbing — and one I had not heard of before finding it in Cartoons Magazine.

When a significant number of delegates walked out in protest at the Republican Convention, to form the Progressive Party (better known as the Bull Moose Party) in support of Teddy Roosevelt, there were a number of black delegates amongst that walkout. In 1912, as the party of Lincoln, blacks overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party. (This would remain the case until the 1960s, when the Democratic Party supported Civil Rights reforms, but the Republican Party — rather than choosing to do the same — saw an opportunity to snatch the support of the racist white South, and so opposed Civil Rights reforms, and to this day try to overturn those laws. This gave Republicans the South, but costs them the support of most non-whites.)

Anyway, these cartoons from Cartoons Magazine‘s September 1912 issue, involve that while T.R. accepted Northern Black delegates into his Bull Moose Convention, he did not want black delegates from the South — afraid that accepting them, would lose him the support of much more openly and aggressively racist white Southern voters.

(P.S., recall that we’re talking purely about the male vote — in 1912, American women were still not permitted to vote!)

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read their captions.

Cartoonists depicting this hypocrisy (while often using racist caricatures themselves), include: Billy DeBeck and Clive Weed, above; Frank Michael Spangler and Charles Henry Sykes, below.

Doug Wheeler

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