NAVIGATING RESPECTABILITY AND COMMERCIAL APPEAL IN EARLY NEWSPAPER COMICS ...

246 Pages·2016·3.27 MB·English

“VULGARIZING AMERICAN CHILDREN”: NAVIGATING RESPECTABILITY
AND COMMERCIAL APPEAL IN EARLY NEWSPAPER COMICS

by

Ralph D. Suiter III
A Dissertation
Submitted to the
Graduate Faculty
of
George Mason University
in Partial Fulfillment of
The Requirements for the Degree
of
Doctor of Philosophy
History

Committee:

___________________________________________ Director

___________________________________________

___________________________________________

___________________________________________ Department Chairperson

___________________________________________ Program Director

___________________________________________ Dean, College of Humanities
and Social Sciences

Date: _____________________________________ Spring Semester 2016
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
“Vulgarizing American Children”: Navigating Respectability and Commercial
Appeal in Early Newspaper Comics
A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy at George Mason University
by
Ralph D. Suiter III
Master of Arts
University of Massachusetts, Boston, 2006
Bachelor of Arts
Simon’s Rock College of Bard, 1999
Director: Paula Petrik, Professor
Department of History
Spring Semester 2016
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
This work is licensed under a creative commons
attribution-noderivs 3.0 unported license.

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DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated my parents, Ralph and Dianne Suiter, from whose
example I learned to love learning, to value the life of the mind above all else, and
to never give up on my goals. I love you both so much.

I would also like to dedicate it to my nephew, Theo Kuruvilla, because a family’s
only ever as good as its next generation. Go do cool things, little man.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people to whom I owe a sincere thank you for helping me get to
this point. To my wife, Greta—thank you so much for your love and support, for
your encouragement, and for the occasional push when I got lazy. I would also
like to thank my parents, Ralph and Dianne Suiter—you’re also two of the best
proofreaders I could ever ask for, and your own lifelong dedication to education
is what inspired me to be what I am today.

Many, many thanks are also due to all the comics and comics studies folks who
have helped and encouraged me: Jared Gardner, Allan Holtz, Christina Meyer,
Bill Kartalopoulous, and Susan Liberator, Caitlin McGurk and everyone else from
the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Special thanks to Derf Backderf
for his feedback and suggestions about the comics field at midcentury. I’d like to
thank all the organizers and participants at the 2013 Billy Ireland Triennial
Festival of Cartoon Art, the 2014 International Comics Art Festival, and the
Society of Illustrators’ 2014 MoCCA Arts Festival, for providing me with
wonderful forums in which I could give my arguments a test-drive, and get
amazing feedback.

I’d also like to thank my entire dissertation committee, Ellen Todd, Jennifer
Ritterhouse, and especially my advisor, Paula Petrik, for seeing me to this point. I
know it has been a while coming.

I would also like to thank all my classmates, former cohort members, and aca-
friends, who’ve kept me sane all these years: Kelly McDonald Weeks, Yuya
Kiuchi, Lance Eaton, my classmates at GMU, the old gang from LJ, and special
thanks to Katie Chenoweth, whose suggestion of Bourdieu was invaluable.

Finally, I’d like to thank the folks at the National Postal Museum, Arlington
Public Library’s Center for Local History, and North Shore Community College,
both for providing me with employment after my funding ended, and for
providing wonderful, encouraging workplaces where I could thrive.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
List of Figures ................................................................................................................. vii
Abstract ........................................................................................................................... viii
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1
Comics and Cultural Capital ....................................................................................... 5
Navigating Respectability and Commercial Appeal in a New Medium .............. 16
Chapter One: “Yellow Journalism” and the Yellow Kid: the Newspaper Business
and the Comic Supplement, 1895-1900 ...................................................................... 23
Pulitzer and Outcault ................................................................................................. 24
Hearst Comes to Town ............................................................................................... 33
“Yellow Journalism” and the Yellow Kid ................................................................ 45
Defining Yellow Journalism ...................................................................................... 49
Conclusion: The Comic Supplement as a Stab at Respectability ......................... 63
Chapter Two: “When You Don’t Like a Thing, Say So.” Fomenting a Crusade
Against the Comic Supplement, 1907-1912 ................................................................ 69
Comic Characters as Metonym for the Yellow Press ............................................. 72
Competing Newspapers Attack the Comics ............................................................ 80
The Comic Weeklies Take Aim at the Comic Supplement .................................... 88
“Improvement” as an Alternate Model to Suppression ........................................ 95
“A Work for Women of the Most Pressing and Practical Kind” ......................... 102
Chapter Three: “If Not Actually Evil… Vulgarizing.” The Rhetoric of the Crusade
Against the Comic Supplement, 1907-1912 .............................................................. 114
“Vulgarity” & “Purity”: Claiming a Place in Cultural Criticism for Middle-Class
Women ....................................................................................................................... 114
The Comic Supplement and its Effect on Children ............................................. 118
Anti-Comics Advocates Appeal to Scientific Authority ....................................... 125
The Comic Supplement, the Motion Picture, and Working-Class Leisure ...... 133
Sabbatarianism and the Sunday Comic Supplements ........................................ 140
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The League for the Improvement of the Children’s Comic Supplement .......... 148
The Campaign Ends ................................................................................................. 156
Chapter Four: The Katzenjammer Kids at the Armory Show: Social Capital,
Cartoonists, and Modern Art, 1913 ............................................................................ 160
The Armory Show, 1913 ........................................................................................... 163
Kuhn, Dirks, and Mager ....................................................................................... 165
The Robert Henri Node: Organ, Luks and Wortman ...................................... 173
Outliers: Crowley and Powers ............................................................................. 179
Promoting the Armory Show .................................................................................. 181
Cartoonists React to the Armory Show ................................................................. 185
Comics and Fine Art Circa 1913 .............................................................................. 189
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 196
Appendix ....................................................................................................................... 211
References ..................................................................................................................... 220

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
Figure 1: The Comics Field at Midcentury (circa 1964-1965) .................................. 11
Figure 2: W.A. Rogers, “Mr. Hearst’s Boom,” Harper’s Weekly January 9, 1904 74
Figure 3: Edward Windsor Kemble, “Comic Section of the New Yoik Choinal,
Sunday September 1906,” Collier’s, October 13, 1906, 11. ....................................... 77
Figure 4: Louis Glackens, “Puck’s Sunday Supplement: The Slapstick Kids and
Their Purple Pa,” Puck, January 17, 1906. .................................................................. 93
Figure 5: Louis Glackens, “Our Progressive Sense of Humor,” Puck, November
10, 1909, p.4 .................................................................................................................. 134
Figure 6: Louis Glackens, “The Latest in Easter Eggs: The Cubist Influence
Reaches the Barnyard,” Puck, March 1913 ............................................................... 186
Figure 7: “Art Worlds” of Comics, Illustration, and Fine Art, 1913 vs. 1930s .............. 193

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ABSTRACT
“VULGARIZING AMERICAN CHILDREN”: NAVIGATING RESPECTABILITY
AND COMMERCIAL APPEAL IN EARLY NEWSPAPER COMICS
Ralph D. Suiter III, Ph.D.
George Mason University, 2016
Dissertation Director: Dr. Paula Petrik

Between the first appearance of the Sunday newspaper comic supplement in
1895 and the early 1920s, the status of the comic supplement in the field of
cultural production was being questioned and navigated by publishers, editors,
cartoonists, and the reading public. Looking at the first years of the comic
supplements, this dissertation argues that the early supplements, as emulations
of comic weekly magazines such as Puck and Life, may have been an attempt to
make the yellow journals more palatable to a middle-class audience. This attempt
became moot after the “second moral war,” a campaign against the yellow
journals undertaken by more “respectable” newspapers in 1897, which made
comics a metonym for yellow journalism.

Turning to the moral panic that surrounded the supplements between 1907 and
1912, this dissertation digs into primary source materials from the women’s
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organizations that advocated the suppression or improvement of the
supplements, looking at the rhetoric that surrounded the movement. This
rhetoric connected a whole host of interrelated Progressive Era concerns,
including immigration, working class leisure, and new scientific attitudes around
child-rearing. It also looks at how the press pushed for this movement, as a
reaction to the circulation that comics brought the papers that ran them.

Investigating the cartoonists who participated in the Armory Show of 1913, this
project explores how cartoonists who had believed themselves illustrators with a
certain degree of social and cultural capital within the world of high are were not
only able to utilize this capital but also began to see its limitations. Finally, at the
end of the 1910s, the emergence of continuity strips, daily comics that took
advantage of conventions of seriality and melodrama, brought further economic
success for cartoonists while simultaneously further ghettoizing the medium as
“low culture.”

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