Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/343

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

a picture of the newspaper offices on Park Row: it showed The Tribune building transformed into a military school which advertised itself as having "no connection with the shop [New York Times] over the way." Unusually popular at the time was one which, entitled, "Assault by the Press Gang," featured Bryant, of The Evening Post, and Greeley, of The Tribune, attacking Secretary Stanton and General McClellan: in the cartoon Greeley was holding under McClellan's nose a copy of his editorial, "On to Richmond." This advice by Greeley, "On to Richmond," kept standing so long at the top of his editorial columns, appealed to the pen of cartoonists especially after the failure of the attack, doubtless hastened by Greeley's command. A careful survey of the cartoons published during the Civil War Period disclosed the interesting fact that Greeley was caricatured more often than any other man, not excluding Abraham Lincoln.


ABSENCE OF CARTOONS

For some reason the daily papers of the Civil War Period published no cartoons. They did circulate, however, through such media as envelopes, broadsides, colored lithographs, etc. And the artists connected with Vanity Fair, a comic weekly published in New York in the early sixties, drew most of their inspiration from the stirring events of the period. The chief cartoonist of Vanity Fair was H. L. Stephens: it was he who pictured New York editors as he saw them in their paper military campaign. In the absence of cartoons, however, the press lacked a great weapon to supplement the power of its editorials. Possibly the absence of cartoons in daily papers may be explained by the fact that when Hoe put the type on the cylinder, he made illustrations extremely difficult and costly. But, it must be confessed, the leading metropolitan dailies had, even in the early days of the war, begun to stereotype their pages and to use war maps extensively. The explanation, therefore, may be the one most often given: there was no one connected with the newspapers of sufficient artistic ability to do the work. Until The World revived cartoons in the eighties the illustrated weeklies had the field of wordless journalism to themselves.