Depression Era Humor in Cartoons and Satire

Presentation copy of Das Capital in lithographs from Hugo Gellert to Earl Browder (1891–1975), general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States from 1930 to 1946. Browder’s library and papers are among the holdings of the Special Collections Research Center.

“Gellert has set himself a great task, the result of which is a brilliant, throbbing, and thrilling translation of some fundamentals of Marxism into the medium of pictures. The portrait of Marx is itself a political document. Every serious Marxist in the world will acknowledge a debt to Hugo Gellert. And more serious reviewers will be writing about it for years to come” (Earl Browder, “Notes on a Review,” New Masses 11, no. 1 [3 April 1934], 35).

“What my young friend was worried about was his art. He was half way through a novel and didn’t know whether or not to finish it. He had a publisher who was enthusiastic about it and was even hurrying him to complete it with bribes of money, but even so the young man was not sure. It was about his life in the steel works and he was not certain people would care to read about such things. He had been thinking all along that he was writing a proletarian novel and now he was up in the air about it. He had been reading the bourgeois critics and had discovered many things. To wit:

1. There is no such thing as a proletarian novel.
2. All proletarian novels are worthless.
3. Proletarian novels can only be written by members of the proletariat.
4. Members of the proletariat cannot write.
5. Ergo, there can be no proletarian novels.
6. The ones that have been written are full of lies and do not please Henry Seidel Canby.
7. Members of the proletariat never read proletarian novels.
8. H. L. Mencken is old and would prefer that proletarian novels be not written” (Kyle Crichton, Redder than the Rose [New York: Covici, Friede, 1935], 190–91).

“See the boss and the worker. What are they doing—dividing up? They are. Is it a fair divide? Never mind, the boss decides that. “Is the sun up? It is. Do vampires like the sun? No, they like the dark. What are the names of the vampires in this picture? The one that is shot full of holes is monarchy—the fat one who is dead from his neck up—is capitalism” (Art Young, The Socialist Primer [Chicago: Socialist Party of America, 1930]).

Selections form Wasn't the Depression Terrible by Soglow,
published by Covici, Friede in New York, c1934.

Selections from The Ruling Clawss by Redfield,
published by the Daily Worker in New York, 1935.