- In December of 1917, Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act shut down The Masses, a left-wing paper that began in 1911. Two months later, in February 1918, The Liberator took its place. That publication merged with the Communist Party's Workers Monthly in 1924 and, in 1925, ex-Masses and -Liberator writers, editors, and artists got together to form The New Masses. Its first issue appeared in 1926. Johnson began contributing cartoons in 1934 and by August of 1936 was one of the paper's editors. He appears to have stopped contributing cartoons after May of 1940. For a bibliography of Johnson's cartoons for the paper, please click here; for a bibliography of his reviews for the New Masses, please click here.
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The New Masses 28 Aug. 1934, p. 7. Reprinted in Robert Forsythe's Redder Than the Rose (1935), p. 232.
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The caption reads, "Aw, be a sport. Tell the newsreel audience you still have faith in the Lawd and good old Franklin D."
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- In "All Hectic on the Potomac," the essay in which the above cartoon appears, Forsythe writes,
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- What baffles the gentlemen of Washington [...] is the fact that the capitalist system, over which they hover so anxiously and which they nurse so tenderly, is rapidly sinking. It is struggling along under an oxygen tent, with Dr. Roosevelt supplying it at intervals with a new tank of artificial life, but it is not improving; it is merely being kept alive until the relatives can arrive. If the officials of Washington speak fatuously of the hopefulness in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, it is not because they feel there is hope in Idaho or elsewhere but because they cannot bear the thought of the end. (225-226)
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- He explains, "The capacity for illusion is endless and there are experts abounding on Pennsylvania Avenue to declare that all would be well if only Herbert Hoover were back, but neither Hoover, Roosevelt, nor the Great God Jehovah will cure the maladies of capitalism" (227), and Johnson's cartoon suggests that newsreels help promote this "illusion" by encouraging audiences to believe that even the most destitute still "have faith in the Lawd and good old Franklin D." Not incidentally, Johnson's portrait of a starving family recalls Walker Evans' photographs of sharecroppers, as well as similar photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange. The essay's conclusion -- which appears on the pages surrounding the illustration -- reads as follows: "Capitalism is dead and there will be no resurrection. Interviews which omit that are not sources of information but exercises in evasion. Speeches which neglect it are speeches made into a rain barrel" (231, 233).
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The New Masses 18 Dec. 1934, p. 7. The caption reads, "But regimentation won't hamper
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your individuality, Eustace; this Fascism racket will give real freedom to our artistic souls."
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- In the above cartoon, Johnson likens Fascism to a "racket," run by a gang of thugs. Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in the United States) helped create a black market profitable for gangsters. On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, ending Prohibition (and creating a need for a new "racket" for "Eustace" and his friends).
- At the same time, Fascism was gaining prominence both abroad and at home. Benito Mussolini became the leader of Italy in 1922, and Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. In America, MGM's film Gabriel Over the White House (1933) explored the appeal of Fascism: Walter Huston played a fictional new U.S. President named Judson Hammond. After a near-death experience, the weak leader received a visit from the Angel Gabriel, and was converted into a decisive dictator. By the time the above cartoon was published, Father Charles E. Coughlin, the popular Catholic priest whose radio programs reached virtually all of the American east and midwest, was turning towards anti-Semitic Fascism and preaching it to his listeners.
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