The Funny Pages in Black and Not-Quite-White: Race, Class and Imperialism in

American Comic Strips, 1924-1929

Sylvia Galley Marques

A Thesis

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1*1 Canada ABSTRACT

The Funny Pages in Black and Not-Quite-White: Race, Class and Imperialism in

American Comic Strips, 1924-1929

Sylvia Galley Marques

From 1924-1929, Moon Mullins, The Gumps and Gasoline Alley reinforced the boundaries of dominant whiteness by essentializing poor whiteness. Poor white characters in these comic strips were singled out and marked as inherently different in two ways: first, through comparisons with non-white characters and second, through references to cultural myths associated with imperialism. These comic strips performed important work in conceptualizing whiteness for reasons directly tied to the comic strip form. Comic strips during this period strove to be highly accessible and had an extraordinarily large and broadly-based readership. The medium aimed to create a sense of community among readers and these readers engaged and identified with comic strips to a significant degree. This is evidenced most strikingly in comic strip readers' reactions to affective events within a strip's narrative arc and reader response to direct appeals from the comic strip on a more formal level. In turn, comic strip creators were particularly attentive to their audiences, as 1920s newspapers relied on comic strips to sell papers. For these reasons, comic strips provide a unique perspective on tastes and values of mainstream America. The ways in which Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and

The Gumps articulated and reinforced the racial, behavioural and classed limits of whiteness reflected and reinforced the ways in which mainstream America conceptualized dominant whiteness. TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures v

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 38

Chapter 2 92

Konklusion 142

Bibliography 149

Appendix A 159

IV LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Sidney Smith, "Red Hot Papa." The Gumps 1

Figure 1.2. Martin Branner, "Sunday Supplement," Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, 13

February 1927 5

Figure 1.3. Sidney Smith buried under a mountain of fan mail 11

Figure 2.1 Sidney Smith, The Gumps, 3 January 1926 38

Figure 2.2 Frank O. King, "A night Out Please," Gasoline Alley, 8 September 1927 38

Figure 2.3. Clare Briggs, When a Feller Needs a Friend, Chicago Tribune, 18 February 1924 44 Figure 2.4 Frank O. King, "Q.E.D, Which Means You Tell 'Em," Gasoline Alley, 10

October 1927 45

Figure 2.5 Frank O. King, "Rachel's On the Warpath," Gasoline Alley, 12 June 1924 47

Figure 2.6 Frank Willard, Moon Mullins, 29 July 1924 49

Figure 2.7 Frank Willard, "Higher Education" Moon Mullins, 33 July 1924 49

Figure 2.8 Frank Willard, "Mushmouth Should Do his Shooting with a Gun," Moon

Mullins, 9 March 1927 55

Figure 2.9 Frank Willard, "No Questions Asked," Moon Mullins 4 August 1924 55

Figure 2.10 Frank Willard, "Moon's Not So Particular," The Gumps, 1 July 1924 59

Figure 2.11 Frank Willard, "A Big Cleanup," Moon Mullins, 23 June 1928 59

Figure 2.12 Frank Willard, "Such is Love," Moon Mullins, 5 December 1924 60

Figure 2.13 Frank Willard, "Yes, We—No, We Won't Say it," Moon Mullins 61

Figure 2.14 Frank O. King, "Both in the Same Boat," Gasoline Alley, 28 July 1924 63

Figure 2.15 Frank O. King, Gasoline Alley, 1 May, 1927 65

Figure 2.16 Frank O. King, "Sunday Supplement" The Gumps, 1 May, 1927 66

Figure 2.17 Frank O. King, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 30 January 1927 67 Figure 2.18 Frank O. King, "Sunday Supplement," Gasoline Alley, 27 March 1927 68

Figure 2.19 Martin Branner, "Sunday Supplement," Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner,

Chicago 69

Figure 2.20 Frank Willard, "The Smoke Menace," Moon Mullins, 17 February 1925 72

Figure 2.21 Frank Willard, "An Optical Illusion," Moon Mullins, 21 December 1925 73 Figure 2.22 Frank Willard, "The Old Gent is a Great Little Sympathizer," Moon Mullins, 17 February 1925 73

Figure 2.23 Frank Willard, "The P.D.&Q. Loses Some Business," Moon Mullins, 20 January 1927 75

Figure 2.24 Frank O. King, "All Alone," Gasoline Alley 28 January 1926 78

Figure 2.25 Sidney Smith, "There's Many a Good Tune in an Old Violin," The Gumps, 2 January 1926 78

Figure 2.26 Sidney Smith, "Here Comes the Bride," The Gumps, 14 July 1926 79

Figure 2.27 Sidney Smith, "Dust Hound," The Gumps, 1 April 1926 78

Figure 2.28 Sidney Smith, "The Next Day," The Gumps, 2 February 1924. 80

Figure 2.29 Sidney Smith, "Angels Have Wings," The Gumps, 31 May 1924 80

Figure 2.30 Sidney Smith, "Just a Good Girl," The Gumps, 18 May 1926 81

Figure 2.31 Sidney Smith, "The Perfect Putt," The Gumps, 19 May 1926 81

Figure 2.32 Sidney Smith, "The Crown Prince," The Gumps, 21 July 1927 83

Figure 2.33 Sidney Smith, "A Picture no Artist can Paint," The Gumps, 15 February 1928

86

Figure 2.34 Frank Willard, "The Mind Reader," Moon Mullins, 6 September 1927 86

Figure 2.35 Frank Willard, "There's the Proof in the Pudding," Moon Mullins, 24 February 1926 87 Figure 2.36 Sidney Smith, "Fresh Lemonade, Made Right in the Shade," The Gumps, 7 June 1928 88

Figure 2.37 Sidney Smith, "New Antiques," The Gumps, 20 January 1924 88

VI Figure 2.38 Sidney Smith, "Blue Blood," The Gumps, 28 November 1924 89

Figure 3.1 Sidney Smith, The Gumps, 1 August 1926 92

Figure 3.2 Sidney Smith, "Into the Great Unknown," The Gump, 10 April 1926 93

Figure 3.3 Frank O. King, "Red Men, White Clouds, and Blue Sky," Gasoline Alley, 4

July 1924 99

Figure 3.4 Sidney Smith, "The Hunting Season Opens," The Gumps 2\ May 1926 101

Figure 3.5 Sidney Smith, "Ye Knyghte Gump," The Gumps. 5 June 1926 102

Figure 3.6 Theodore Roosevelt on Safari 1909-1910 102

Figure 3.7 Sidney Smith, "Into the Great Unknown," The Gumpt 10 April 1926 102

Figure 3.8 The President is Resting at his Home in Oyster Bay, 1903 102-3

Figure 3.9 Sidney Smith, "The Simple Life," The Gumps, 22 July 1924 105

Figure 3.10 Sidney Smith, "Apple Blossom Time in Normandie," The Gumps, 13 April

1927 106

Figure 3.11 Sidney Smith, "The Day's Work Done," The Gumps, 18 April 1927 107

Figure 3.12 Sidney Smith, "Raising Chickens," The Gumps, 19 April 1927 107

Figure 3.13 Roosevelt campaigning in Asheville, NC September 1902 109

Figure 3.14 Sidney Smith, The Gumps, 17 September 1924 109

Figure 3.15 Sidney Smith, "Ride 'em Cowboy," The Gumps, 3 October 1924 110

Figure 3.16 "Pearl Harbor," Chicago Tribune, May 10 1925 112

Figure 3.17 Sidney Smith, "Beware of the Dog," The Gumps, 1 September 1926 120

Figure 3.18 Sidney Smith, "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Bums are Marching!" The Gumps,

5 October 1926 122

Figure 3.19 11 September 1927, Chicago Tribune 128

Figure 3.20 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 19 October 1924 131

vn Figure 3.22 "Hurrah for the fourth of July! We're coming in on independence day

celebrations, too," The Verdict, 21 August 1899 133

Figure 3.23 Sidney Smith, The Gumpst September 12 1926 133

Figure 3.24 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," 5 September 1926 134

Figure 3.25 Troubles Which May Follow an Imperial Policy," New York Herald, 3 July

1898 134

Figure 3.26 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 14 June 1925 135

Figure 3.27 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 5 September 1926 136

Figure 3.28 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 19 September 1926 137

vin INTRODUCTION

On 24 October 1925 Minerva Gump, one of the main characters in The Gumps, a popular comic strip distributed by the Chicago Tribune-New York News syndicate, announced to her husband Andy that she wanted to learn the Charleston. In his reply,

Andy made it clear that he had no respect for this new dance:

"I've seen people who were suffering from the Charleston—they think it is a dance but I claim it's only an argument in favor of evolution—go ahead—get yourself a charley horse trying to learn the Charleston—some guy will come along with a cannibal hop that he's christened the Omaha or St. Louis—then you'll have to get out your geography and start all over again."

Figure 1.1 Sidney Smith, "Red Hot Papa," The Gumps, 24 September 1925, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

The Gumps, like many of the other comic strips it ran alongside, was often this topical and culturally relevant in remarking on passing fads and social currents. Figure 1.1 in particular expressed one of the ways in which these comic strips frequently articulated social criticism or cultural anxieties: through racialized and racist references illustrated by Andy's references to cannibalism and Social Darwinism. This frequent deployment of racialized logic begs analysis of the way 1920s comic strips expressed a particular politics of representation.2 This analysis requires that we ask how and why comic strips

1 Sidney Smith, The Gumps, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), 24 September 1925, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. 2 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 1 during this period deployed racialized references and to what end? On one hand, Andy's comments on the Charleston reflected contemporary racist attitudes towards non-whites and in this way, The Gumps fits into a well-documented history of such racism. On the other hand, through Andy's comments in this strip as in others The Gumps also expressed contemporary attitudes towards whiteness, the history of which is relatively less documented. It is with this in mind that I have chosen to approach the above questions by applying theoretical perspectives developed in Whiteness Studies.

Whiteness Studies asks that we particularize whiteness in order to understand how this socially constructed category came to be and has remained, until quite recently, a largely unquestioned, unmarked norm in American culture. In reading the above comic strip in order to analyze its significance vis-a-vis whiteness, it is clear that Andy deployed racialized imagery in order to denigrate what he believed to be a low form of culture.

Through his references to cannibalism and evolution he positioned blackness as primitive and backwards and by extension positioned himself, and the more conservative forms of entertainment he lauded, as civilized, superior and white. Andy made similarly racialized comparisons quite often, and in the strip's larger context it is clear that Andy's racialized assertions were meant to be humorous, in part because the strip repeatedly indicated that

Andy was not quite as white as he assumed.

In this thesis I analyze three of the most popular 1920s comic strips, The Gumps,

Moon Mull ins and Gasoline Alley, and use this analysis to shed new light on the ways in which whiteness was conceptualized in U.S. culture from 1924-1929. During this

(Berkley, University of California Press, 2005), 3. In McAlister's analysis, uncovering the politics of representation requires understanding the way cultural products and practices have shaped "political and moral values." Like the cultural products McAlister engages with, comic strips have "contributed to thinking about values and history" in ways that have reflected and reinforced interests in the organization of race and class in the United States.

2 period—bounded on one side by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which drastically restricted immigration, and by the Depression on the other—white responses to black migration, immigration, scientific racism, and shifting attitudes to class indicate that the stakes in maintaining dominant whiteness were high. As was the case in 1920s film, literature and other forms of visual culture, comic strips did not address the idea of whiteness head on.

Whiteness was inferred in contrast to non-whiteness, which was represented primarily by black characters. However, beyond this obvious opposition, these comic strips indicate that whiteness was also consolidated in opposition to not-quite-whiteness, which was embodied by characters positioned on the boundaries of whiteness.

The term not-quite-white is generally used to describe poor-whites and in reference to a variety of populations designated by terms such as cracker, white trash, redneck and hillbilly. I argue that this term is also applicable to the "white other" who is positioned on the boundaries of whiteness for reasons that are not necessarily economic or geographical but rather stem from a lack of cultural capital. The Gumps, Moon Mullins, and Gasoline

Alley all featured characters whose failure to correctly perform dominant, unmarked whiteness rendered them not-quite-white. Their inability to perform dominant whiteness stemmed from their lack of capital, be it economic, cultural or social. This failure was illustrated through the racialization of their not-quite-whiteness. Through this racialization of cultural capital or, more pointedly, the racialization of a lack thereof, comic strips worked toward consolidating the boundaries of whiteness such that the

3 Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 147. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985); Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste trans, Richard Nice (Cambridgs, MA: Harvard University Press). My analysis of this white other, differentiated from dominant whiteness by a lack of cultural capital, is informed by Bourdieu's work on the way economic, social and cultural capital all work towards securing the social dominance of the elite within capitalist societies.

j socioeconomic parameters of white privilege appeared inherent. The Gumps, Moon

Mullins and Gasoline Alley articulated this particular vision of whiteness in two ways:

first, by relying heavily on black stereotypes these strips created a symbolic language

with which to allude to the not-quite-white status of particular characters; and second, by

mobilizing the language and imagery of imperialism they played off of the associations

between whiteness and imperialism in order to reinforce the inability of not-quite-white

characters to live up to the legacy and responsibilities of dominant whiteness.

In this introduction, I will provide an overview of comics historiography and a

discussion of the historical significance of comic strips during this period. I will then

discuss the way these comic strips fit into 1920s history more generally. Following this, I

will provide an overview of the streams of Whiteness Studies literature that have

informed my analysis and will show how my findings address gaps in the literature. To

date there has been no scholarly examination of representations of whiteness in 1920s

comic strips and there has been little sustained academic work on representations of race

in early American comic strips. My thesis shows that comic strips during this period not

only furthered racist assumptions and stereotypes but made use of these assumptions and

stereotypes in conceptualizing and articulating dominant whiteness. Finally, I will conclude this introduction by elaborating on my source material and providing an overview of the way my argument develops in the subsequent sections of this thesis.

However, before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that my approach to analyzing representations of race and whiteness in the American context takes into account that representations of white others are not and have never been on the same order of the racialized representations, assumption, prejudices and stereotypes that have

4 targeted non-whites. Though I treat race as a socially constructed concept with no basis in

biology, I also acknowledge its very real effects on lived experiences. By no means does

racialization, the process that orders lived experience according to race, produce uniform

effects. Comic strip racialization of white others in the 1920s did not produce the

exploitative or degrading effects depicted in figure 1.2 which claimed, even if in jest, that

difference between whites and blacks existed not just in terms of race, but in terms of

Figure 1.2. Martin Branner, "Sunday Supplement," Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, 13 February 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. humanity. I would also like to acknowledge that one of the pitfalls of exploring the arbitrariness of racial categories, is that this type of analysis risks inadvertently reifying these categories. My use of terms like white and black takes into account their charged meanings and ultimately, my focus on whiteness aims to destabilize the concept by pointing to what whiteness must disavow in order to maintain its supremacy.

COMIC STRIPS: HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Mary Gold died on April 30, 1929....The public outcry when her death became known was gratifying both in its precipitousness and its volume. Switchboards at the major metropolitan newspapers were clogged for hours. Mailrooms quickly overflowed with letters expressing sympathy and outrage. Her doctors would offer no medical explanation for her death. They merely muttered shamefaced speculations about the vagaries of the human mechanism, and many of her friends consequently concluded that the cause of death was a broken heart—the tragic and tattered end of a labyrinthine love story that should have ended happily....Public preoccupation with the affairs of private citizens was scarcely novel in the twenties....But during that decade, the mass media were coming of age, and newspapers learned to play upon the nation's curiosity. Editors seized upon every scandal or sensation that seemed to capture the public fancy and kept it on the front page for

5 weeks....Still, Mary Gold was different....Her sole distinction was in being the first major comic strip character to die. And the overwhelming public reaction to her death testified to the popularity of the comics with an authority difficult (if not impossible) to dispute.

Mary Gold was a character in Sidney Smith's The Gumps, a comic strip that was enormously popular during its time and ran from 12 February 1917 to 17 October 1959.

In the mid-1920s, at the height of its popularity, readers would ask at newsstands for "the

Gump paper" and the combined circulation of Gump papers reached approximately twelve million. When Smith's contract came up for renewal in 1922 he signed a deal with the Chicago Tribune for $100,000 per year for the next decade making him, shockingly, only the second highest paid comic strip artist in the country. While indicators such as these demonstrate the incredible popularity of many 1920s comic strips, neither reader- response studies nor much quantitative data on the readership of American comic strips exists for the 1920s. The first comprehensive surveys of comic strip readers were not undertaken until the mid-1930s. The few general surveys of comic strips and their readers will be discussed below. Ultimately, these surveys corroborate the implications of Smith's extraordinary million-dollar deal. As was the case from the 1890s when comic strips were first introduced into U.S. newspapers, 1920s comic strips were an incredibly popular medium with a significantly large and diverse readership.

Comic strip scholarship is full of anecdotes similar to the above description of

Mary Gold's death and these sensationalistic and often overly nostalgic vignettes characterize many of the histories of American comic strips. Many of the more general

4 Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History, (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 60-61. 5 Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 60-61. At the time, Bud Fisher was earning more writing Mutt and Jeff. In comparison, President Harding's salary was $75 000 and Babe Ruth would not sign his famous $80 000 contract until 1930.

6 popular histories of comic art, most notably Robert C. Harvey's The Art of the Funnies

and Brian Walker's The Comics: Before 1945, provide detailed but sentimental

descriptions of the development of early comics, and little in the way of any critical

engagement. More focused approaches to comic strips tend to narrow in either on the

unique aesthetics of comic art, that is to say, the particular way in which comic strip

audiences "read" the medium, or on the way comics reflect their historical context.

Unfortunately, much of this work treats either comic art in general or comic books in

particular and so tends to neglect the comic strip's unique features and history. Comic

strips are subject to formal constraints that differ significantly from those imposed on the

comic book medium. A comic strip must be more focused and direct than a comic book,

which can take more artistic and stylistic liberties. Reader engagement with these two

media differs significantly in that comic books presuppose purposeful and often informed

consumers whereas comic strips appear to a much large public, seemingly unbidden. The

comic book's particular formal constraints and the distinctive culture created by comic book readers and fans and expressed through particular language, knowledge and practices, further distinguish the comic book from comic strips. Historically, comic book readers have created tightly knit and highly involved communities, but these communities are often isolated according to genre and do not have the comic strip's broadly based

6 Harvey, The Art of the Funnies; Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996); Brian Walker, The Comics Before 1945 (New York: Abrams, 2006); Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). 7 Editorial cartoons are often included in these general discussion of comic art and have an extensive literature of their own. For my purposes I am less interested in the overtly political intentions of editorial cartoons than 1 am with ideological bent of seemingly apolitical comic strips. 8 Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 6-9. 9 Mathew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1999).

7 readership. Despite these differences, scholarship on comic books is useful in its

discussions of comic art in general, especially given the dearth of work on comic strips in

particular. Reflecting this, while reviewing the literature on comic art I will often simply

refer to comics rather than distinguishing between books and strips.

These two forms of comic art are similar in that they rely on a particular language

that combines image and narrative, creating a unique expressive form. The renaissance of the comic book and the birth of the graphic novel in the 1980s and 1990s spawned a body

of literature that aimed at explaining the workings of the medium and the language of

comics, with its unique grammar, syntax and conventions. The combination of image

and narrative creates a complex semiotic process that involves synthesizing the way the two elements of the medium work together to create particular spatial, temporal and aesthetic effects. ' The aesthetics of comic art has inspired several attempts at explaining the medium from the vantage point of other disciplines. David Carrier's The Aesthetics of

Comic treats comic art from the perspective of aesthetic philosophy, and approaches the comic strip on an almost exclusively abstract level.1 Several scholars have attempted to analyze comic art from the perspective of film theory on the assumption comics panels function like a filmstrip. While these analyses are useful in theorizing the formal aesthetics of comic art in terms of frames and sequential images, they fall short in that they do not take the history and development of comics and their readership into

10 These include the Scott McCloud's innovative Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Collins, 1993) and Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology are Revolutionizing an Art Form (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2000), both of which draw on Will Eisner's classic Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1996); Roger Sabine, Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels, (London: Pahidon, 1996) 8. " Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 3-9; Mila Bongco, Reading Comics: Language, Culture and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books, 46-55; Alphons Silberman, Comics and Visual Culture: Research Studies from Ten Countries, (K.G. Saur Verlag Gmbh & co. 1989), 21. 12 David Carrier, the Aesthetics of Comics (University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

8 11

account. These interdisciplinary approaches tend to yield useful analytical tools, but

ultimately are more concerned with applying comics to pre-existing theoretical models

than with content analysis of comics in particular.

The scholarship that is most nuanced in its approach to comics treats their social

and historical context. In Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, Ian Gordon provides a

particularly successful approach to comic strips by attending to the formal qualities of the

medium while demonstrating what comic strips, on their own merit, say about consumer

culture more generally. While Gordon's analysis falls short in several places,

particularly with regards to his discussion of race in the comics, his approach to writing

about comic strips, which merges content analysis with analysis of what the content of

comic strips reveals about the culture of their time, has provided a methodological model

for me in this thesis. Similar approaches to the historical and social significance of comic

strips include Arthur Asa Berger's The Comic Stripped American and Ron Goulart's

Great history of the Comic Books but again, many of the contributions to this genre are

general, sometimes quite dated, and often do not treat early American comic strips in

much critical detail.

Martin Barker's Comics, Ideology, Power and the Critics provides one of the most persuasive theoretical approaches to comics through Marxist and structuralist analysis.

Ij Earl J. Coleman, "The Funnies, the Movies, and Aesthetics," Journal of Popular Culture 18:4 (1985), 341-356. Robert Warshaw, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966). Warshaw's book like many scholarly works that include analysis of comics, focuses in on the more intellectually satisfying Krazy Kat than on more popular comic strips. 14 Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Ian Gordon, '"But Seriously Folks...' Comic Art and History,' American Quarterly 43 (June 1991) 341-356; Ian Gordon "Beyond the Funnies: Comic Books, History and Hegemony," American Quarterly 52:1 (2000) 145-150. 13 Arthur Asa Berger, The Comic Stripped American: What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks, and Charlie Brown Tell us About ourselves, (New York: Walker and Company, 1973); Ron Goulart, Ron Goulart s Great history of Comic Books, (Chicago: Contemporaneous Books, 1986).

9 His close reading of the language, form, distribution, and readership of post-WWII

British comics is particularly insightful in its exploration of the ways in which all of these

aspects of comics are ideologically loaded. Comics, often considered particularly, and

derisively, "popular" reflect social issues in ways that have significant ideological

implications. Frederick Wertham's 1954 The Seduction of the Innocent, which linked

comic books to juvenile delinquency and led to the creation of the repressive Comics

Code Authority, tapped into one stream of concern over the comics' cultural influence.

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's 1971 How to Read Donald Duck used comics to argue against the pervasive influence of American cultural imperialism in Salvador

Allende's Chile. Both of these examples raised different levels of concern over the ideological work comics do, concern that was closely tied to their high levels of

1 7 distribution and wide-ranging popularity.

The popularity of The Gumps and the strips it ran alongside indicates that their reach was national, extensive, and indicative of a unique relationship between the medium and its audience. When Mary Gold died Smith was inundated with mail, much of it from readers who wished to offer their condolences. Some of them sent flowers.

16 Martin Barker. Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). While Barker's approach is useful on a theoretical level, his subject matter is quite removed from early American comic strips; Mathew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell and Ian Gordon, Comics and Ideology (New York: P. Lang, 2001). 17 Mcallister, Sewell, and Gordon, 7. Ronald Schmidt, "Deconstructive Comics," Journal of Popular Culture 25 (Spring 1992), 154. In Barker calls How to Read Donald Duck "one of the most important studies of comics ever undertaken." Bongco claims that the work is "often cited as a paradigm of Marxist cultural analysis."

10 Figure 1.3. Sidney Smith buried under a mountain of mail from readers grieving the death of comic strip character Mary Gold. Source: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/05/08/comic-book-urban- legends-revealed-154/, accessed 5 February 2008.

Comic strip readers played a participatory role in the development of the medium, a medium that in the 1920s was nationally syndicated, widely accessible, nearly ubiquitous and readily consumed by a significant percentage of the population. In 1930 George

Gallup, a former professor of journalism and advertising at Northwestern University published the results of a series of newspaper surveys that found that more adults read

"the best comic strip in a newspaper, on your average day than read the front-page banner story."18 He also claimed to have determined that a majority of both adult men and women, regardless of class, read the comics. Circulation numbers further underscore the popularity of comic strips. When the Memphis Commercial Appeal's Sunday edition began including a comics supplement in 1902 its circulation rose from 29,475 to 35,292.

The Topeka Daily Capital's Sunday circulation jumped from 15,500 to 16,741 when it

Quoted in Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture 1890-1945, 85.

11 did the same in 1903. In 1923, the readership of the Chicago Tribune increased by 65,000 when that paper introduced a Sunday color comics feature.19 A mid-1920s survey by

Harvey Lehman and Paul Witty, scholars researching national leisure patterns, found that

"looking at the Sunday 'funny' paper was the one activity most frequently engaged in by children." They claimed that in 1924 the percentage of children who read the comic strips was at least 84% in urban areas and 55% in rural areas.20 A significant percentage of this readership included immigrants, a point around which opposition to comic strips rallied, claiming that the comics strip's harmful influences would prevent the education and assimilation of immigrant communities. While children favoured the Sunday color comics, adults comprised the majority of the daily strips' readership.

The popularity of comic strips meant that newspapers catered to the demands and sensibilities of their readership when determining which comics or storylines made the cut and which did not. An important exception was George Herriman's Krazy Kat, a strip that ran in the Hearst papers from 1913 to 1944 and was extraordinarily unpopular.

Despite ardent complaints from readers and editors alike, Hearst insisted on publishing

Krazy Kat simply because he enjoyed it. Comics historians agree that, with the exception of Krazy Kat, most other successful comic strips of the period met with popular approval.

National mass interest in most comic strips made the medium responsive to the public, and beholden to mainstream public opinion. In 1924 cultural critic Gilbert Seldes wrote

19 Walker, 118. The statistics cited by comics scholars tend to be quite spotty, though Barker does append a wealth of data on pre-WWl newspaper circulation both before and after the addition of comic strips to the papers in question. 20 Gordon, 86. 21 Sabine, 19-20. Sinclair Lewis provides an indication that comic strips were indeed important to immigrants in his work of journalistic fiction, The Jungle, (New York: The Modern Library, 2006) 231. The novel includes a scene in which Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkis, bedridden due to a workplace injury, reads the Sunday comics with his young, American-born son. "One of these papers was as good as a circus, and nearly as good as a spree" to both father and son. 22 Bongco, xiv.

12 that "the enormous circulation [the comic strip] achieves imposes certain limitations. It cannot be too local, since it is syndicated throughout the country; it must avoid political and social questions because the same strip appears in papers of divergent editorial opinions; there is no room in it for acute racial caricature, although no group is immune from mockery." Editors, publishers and syndicates submitted strips to severe scrutiny to be sure that no parent, political bloc, or advertiser would take offense at comic strip content. The portrait of the American popular imagination provided by syndicated comic strips during this period is thus representative of mainstream values, mores, and socially acceptable prejudices.25

Comic strips were also uniquely engaged in the cultural fabric of the 1920s. In addition to catering to the interests and opinions of readers, comic strips deliberately engaged readers through overt self-referentiality and direct appeals to the audience that emphasized the collective authorship of the medium. When Gasoline Alley's Walt Wallet needed to name the orphaned baby he found on his doorstep, the strip requested in a textual aside that readers write in with suggestions which Walt later perused in the strip.

Though Walt's adopted son continued to be referred to almost exclusively by his original nickname, Skeezix, he was officially named Allison, as suggested by a reader who felt the child's name should reflect the fact that he was the "Alley's Son." Skeezix was the focal point that unified the strip and the community it featured. Gasoline Alley consciously involved its audience in order to create the sense that it was a focal point that engaged and unified a community of readers. Comic strips also fostered a sense of interrelatedness by referencing each other, both visually and thematically, thus consolidating the medium

23 Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1962), 194. 24 Inge, 163 25 Canemaker, 61; Lenthall, 42; Schmitt, 154.

13 as a whole and reinforcing its cultural relevance. The strips actively engaged with popular culture more generally; when boxer Jack Dempsey lost his heavyweight title to

Gene Tunney on 21 September 1926 characters from both Moon Mullins and The Gumps were in attendance. 7 Walt, at home with Skeezix, listened in on the radio. Because of this visual, textual and thematic overlap between the strips, my analysis treats them as a single text unified by their self-conscious interrelatedness and by their tendency to be engaged by readers as a whole, as "the comics."

Comic strips fostered a sense of "knowingness" between the medium and its audience, produced by the shared understanding between comic strips and their readers.

In the process of engaging with the medium, comic strip readers read and synthesized a variety of images, narratives, story arcs and outside cultural references and were thus actively involved in the strips' meaning production. This audience participation is significant in that it indicates that readers were actively engaged with the medium and, even more significantly, that the medium was actively engaged with its readers. By involving the comic strip audience in this meaning-making process, the comic strip hailed and reproduced a particular readership, one that was complicit in perpetuating the mainstream ideologies the comic strips expressed.

Comics historians generally agree that the comics produced by the Chicago

~ Edward A. Shannon, "Wonderful Dream of a New Century: Windsor McCay's America" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for American Studies, Montreal, QC, November 8, 2007). Shannon argued that McCay was the first overtly self-referential comic strip artist. McKay's technically outstanding comic strips highlighted their artistic and narrative constructedness in a way that taught the reader to read the more subtle elements of comic art and attempted to impart the sophistication of medium. 27 Smith, 21 September 1926; Frank O. King, Gasoline Alley, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, 1L), 21 September 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate; Frank Willard, Moon Mullins, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), 21 September 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. 28 Peter Bailey, "Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture," Past and Present 144 (August 1994). Bailey's description of participant engagement at nineteenth-century music halls is helpful in understanding the significance of comic strip readers' engagement with the medium.

14 Tribune—New York Daily News syndicate pioneered many of the major eomic strip

genres that emerged in the post-war WWI period. This is largely the result of the fact

that Tribune strips were midwifed by Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, co-editor of the

Tribune and Daily News, who had a noted knack for conceiving of and overseeing

extraordinarily popular comics. Patterson was so involved with the production of his

strips that he commuted from New York on a monthly basis to participate in

brainstorming meetings with his comics staff.30 He offered varying degrees of creative

input on his strips' storylines and appears to have had an uncanny ability to understand,

anticipate, and cater to the tastes of comic strip readers. He very seldom misread his

readers. When he did, they were quick to correct him, and he was quick to respond. In

1925 Patterson cancelled Little Orphan Annie; Patterson had wanted Annie to remain in

her first home on a farm with Mr. and Mrs. Silo and when she moved in with Daddy

Warbucks and began getting caught up in international intrigue Patterson did not approve.

However, readers wrote in so vehemently upon the strip's cancellation that Patterson

immediately reinstated Annie and issued a personal public apology in a front-page

editorial.

Because of Patterson's involvement in the strips that came out of the "Chicago

school," as Seldes termed it, and because of his strident and successful desire to create

strips that were as relevant to his readership as possible, the comics that appeared in his paper were particularly attuned of the tastes and interests of comic strip readers. The

29 Walker, 120; Harvey The Art of the Funnies, 92. There was a significant shift from the themes and forms of early American comic strips to the more sophisticated comic strips that emerged in the late 1910s. This second generation of strips made much more use of continuity, suspense, and character than did their predecessors, which were markedly caricaturish and simplistic. j0 Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 109. jl Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 110.

15 combination of input from Patterson, from individual comic strip artists and from comic

strip readers indicates that comic strips at this time were indeed the product of collective

authorship. Because this collective authorship is significant to understanding the function

and import of comic strips, my analysis of these strips treats them as an authorless text that reflected and reproduced the views of mainstream American society more than any

one contributor's personal point of view. While comic strip artists were known to insert autobiographical details into their work, and Patterson's input was certainly not free from his conservative politics, these influences were mitigated to a significant degree by the comic strip's need to cater to mainstream readers.

The strips Patterson oversaw were conceived of in order to purposefully appeal to a wide range of readers whom he targeted by producing over a dozen strips in under a decade, many of which ran for over forty years. While my analysis will focus primarily on The Gumps (1917-1959), Gasoline Alley (1919-), and Moon Mullins (1923-1991), strips I will discuss in more detail further on, an overview of the most popular strips during this period is necessary to give a comprehensive sense of comic strip tastes at the time. One of the best examples of Patterson's sensitivity to his readership was Gasoline

Alley. In 1921, Frank King shifted the thematic orientation of Gasoline Alley at

Patterson's behest and overnight the strip ceased to center around the demystification and naturalization of car culture and instead took a more family-oriented turn. Its cast of characters remained the same, but when bachelor Walt Wallet found an abandoned baby on his doorstep on 14 February 1921 the strip quickly became far more intimate, and the

j2 Comic strips creators during this period were also routinely replaced, rendering a discussion of comic strips artist as primary author impossible in many cases.

16 first comic strip to develop in real-time. Sidney Smith's The Gumps was similarly

family-oriented and centered around the trials and tribulations of Andy Gump, his wife

Minerva (Min), and their son Chester. Like Gasoline Alley, The Gumps revolved around

the middle-class aspirations of a Midwestern family and, though at times prone to

exaggeration and heightened suspense, the strip often depicted its characters in the midst

of very everyday foibles.35 The Gump family's deliberate ordinariness was eponymous;

"gumps" was a term Patterson and his sister had used as children to refer to common,

loudmouthed adults. In terms of form, The Gumps was unique in its detail; many of the

strip's characters spoke at an astonishing rate of over eighty words per speech balloon.

Also, while most other comic strips at the time employed some continuity and brief, self-

sustaining arcs, Patterson and Smith revolutionized the continuity strip by making

suspense and consistent continuity a driving mechanism of the strip for the first time.

The innovations The Gumps contributed to the continuing-story strip genre opened the

door to the adventure strips that would become commonplace in the 1930s.

In 1920, Patterson decided he needed a strip that would target metropolitan, working readers and in September, he and Martin Branner developed Winnie Winkle the

Breadwinner (1920-1996).38 Though Winnie was not the first career girl in the comics as she followed to some extent in the footsteps of Somebody's Stenog (1917-1933), she was

" Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 95-96; Herb Galewitz, The Great Comics Syndicated by the Daily News, New York's Picture Newspaper and the Chicago Tribune (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), ix; Jeet Heer, "Introduction," in Walt and Skeezix (Montreal, QC: Drawn and Quarterly), 2007. Heer's work shows that Frank King drew on quite a bit of autobiographic detail when creating Gasoline Alley. ' The Gump family included a daughter early on but she left home for college and was never re-introduced into the strip. ]5 Sabine, 24. j6 Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 60-67. j7 Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 60-67. Until the mid-1910s comic strips were primarily one-liners that featured the same characters but rarely involved storylines jS From 1943 to 1996 the strip was known simply as Winnie Winkle.

17 the first post-WWI "New Woman." Her struggle to support her housebound parents was

central to weekday strips while the antics of her mischievous bother Perry and his gang of

street urchins, the Rinkydinks, provided the subject matter for most Sunday strips. Walter

Berndt's Smitty (1920-1973) was thematically similar to Winnie Winkle in that it involved

white-collar labor. Set in a business office, Smitty followed its title character, a young

office boy, through his daily adventures and was one of the first comic strips to portray a

younger character in any seriousness. Carl Ed's Harold Teen (1919-1959), based on

Booth Tarkington's popular novel Seventeen, also featured a younger character, but unlike

Smitty revolved solely around youth culture. When Little Orphan Annie (1924-) first

appeared, its focus was on Annie's life at the orphanage and later at Mr. and Mrs. Silo's

farm. In many ways, the strip resembled Gasoline Alley in theme and content until Annie

settled in with Daddy Warbucks and eased into her involvement in international intrigue.

Little Orphan Annie would reach the height of its popularity in the 1930s and, in its

celebration of Warbuck's free enterprise ethos over New Deal-style policies, was the first

overtly political comic strip.

On the surface, Frank Willard's Moon Mullins (1923-1991) appears to be an

outlier among the strips described above, but as I will discuss in detail further on, it actually expressed many of the underlying themes that were common to other popular strips of the period. Moonshine "Moon" Mullins "was a pool-room guy, always looking for the easy buck and a beautiful dame." He came to occupy his space on the comics pages when Patterson decided his strips lacked for "any real roughnecks, any genuine denizens of the lower strata of society who made their way with their wits and pure gall,

'9 Gordon, Comics and Consumer Culture; Galewitz, v. Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 07. Galewitz, vii.

18 in totally disregard (or ignorance) of the Puritan work ethic, books of etiquette, and every

other refinement of social intercourse." Moon was an unabashed freeloader, a con man,

and generally immoral. In addition, he was surrounded by "greatest collection of social

pretenders ever assembled," a motley crew of misfits constantly striving to better

themselves through a variety of unorthodox means. Texas Slim (1925-1928), created by

Willard's assistant, Ferd Johnson, had the same sort of rough-and-tumble feel, though set

in the west where Texas Slim, a young ranch hand, worked for the appropriately named

Dirty Dalton. Texas Slim was cut short when Johnson replaced Willard in 1928, but

during its brief run the strip provided a regional slant on many of the themes expressed in

Moon Mullins.

While these strips depicted characters of various ages, from a range of

backgrounds and of both genders, their subject matter departed notably from that of the

previous generation of American comic strips in that they rarely featured ethnic

characters and caricatures. Ian Gordon describes the comic strips of the 1920s as

envisioning "a predominantly white, middle-class, consumer society." This was a

symptom, in part, of national syndication, which precipitated a shift from strips exclusive to local newspapers that reflected the background of their immediate readership to comic

strips that targeted a national market. The first generation of American comic strips included Rudolph Dirks' Katzenjammer Kids (1897-1914) which featured German immigrants, Fred Opper's Irish tramp, Happy Hooligan (1900-1932), and Harry

Htrs\\fe\d's Abbie the Agent (1914-1940) which featured a middle-class Jewish

41 Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 98. " Gordon, Comics and Consumer Culture, 107. Gordon's observation holds for the other comics syndicates as well. Even William Randolph Hearst's strips, which had once featured a number of non-white or lower class characters, had become very homogenous by the 1920s.

19 businessman. The most successful of this genre was George McManus' Bringing up

Father (1913-2000), a strip about an Irish hod-carrier who struck it rich and had to learn

to negotiate high society. While these strips began by playing off of ethnic difference,

these differences had all but vanished by the 1920s. Reflecting anti-German sentiments, the Katzenjammer Kids became the Shenanigan Kids during WWI but were never as

stereotypically Irish as their name suggested. Abbie the Agent lost most of his Jewish

stereotypes when he came back from serving in the WWI, and Happy Hooligan gradually became more generic tramp than Irish. This same transformation was evident in Bringing up Father, which in 1913 relied so heavily on Irish stereotypes that its characters appeared simian, but by the 1920s no longer relied on these heavy-handed markers of difference. Gordon writes that "ethnic humor had a place in American culture but usually as a reference point to some 'other' that lay outside the culture's acceptable norms" and goes on to suggest that the commonplace nature of ethnic caricatures in early comic strips functioned to "expanded the acceptable."44 Gordon, whose focus is on consumer culture, fails to elaborate on the significance of the disappearance of this ethnic other. In this disappearance, comic strips reflected a conceptual shift in the American society more generally, one that effaced the gradations of whiteness that organized many immigrants according to ethnic hierarchies and replaced this sliding-scale of difference with a more black and white perspective.

SCIENTIFIC RACISM AND POOR WHITENESS

The gradual disappearance of the ethnic type in American comic strips coincided with shifting conceptions of race and ethnicity in American society more generally, shifts

4' Harvey. The Art of the Funnies, 7. Gordon, Comics and Consumer Culture, 59.

20 that were, of course, part of a much longer history. Mathew Frye Jacobson argues that

during the period beginning with the 1790 Naturalization Act and ending in the 1840s,

the idea of whiteness was tied to the Act's stipulation that naturalized citizenship be

limited to "free white persons," persons who by virtue of their free and white status

demonstrated "fitness for self-government."46 This qualification applied to most

European immigrants during this period. In the 1840s, increasing numbers German and

Irish immigrants, deemed undesirable primarily on religious grounds, initiated a shift in

attitudes to immigration and by extension whiteness. Parallel to this shift, the mid-

nineteenth century saw the emergence of quasi-scientific genetic theories aimed at

classifying immigrant groups racially inferior. The combination of increased immigration

and the emergence of scientific racism inaugurated a period during which whiteness was

conceived of as one end of a spectrum racial hierarchies. Below the definite whiteness of the Anglo-Saxon "race" was a series of other "races" varying in degree of whiteness followed by the definitively non-white. This racialized hierarchy, which designated certain races as more amenable to citizenship than others, dominated racialized thinking through the 1920s. This thinking was central to anti-immigration activism, which led to the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 stipulating that the United States "would annually admit immigrants to a maximum of three percent of the number of their nationals residing in the United States in 1910." This legislation was formalized with the implementation of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which pegged immigration to a similar quota system, limiting the number of immigrants the country would accept to two

45 Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 46 Jacobson. 7. 47 Goldberg, 50.

21 percent of each immigrant group's population in the United States according to the 1890

census. This limitation on immigration, combined with increased post-war African

American migration from the south, resulted in a shift in racialized thinking in the 1920s from a hierarchicalized to a more black and white perspective.

While the Johnson Act served as a turning point in thinking about race in

America, it marked a gradual turning point, as the Act was firmly rooted in forms of scientific racism that by no means disappeared after 1924. The formula on which the

Johnson Act's quota system was based drew on a report from the Eugenics Committee of the United States Committee on Selective Immigration, which was headed by prominent eugenicist, Madison Grant.50 Grant's contribution to scientific racism, The Passing of the

Great Race, was published in 1916 and became increasingly popular throughout the

1920s alongside rising anxieties over threats to the national stock that were allegedly embodied in non-white and degenerate populations. Madison was not alone in offering scientific justifications for nativism and racial discrimination. Princeton psychology professor Dr. Carl C. Birmingham's 1922 A Study of American Intelligence used 1917 and 1918 army intelligence in order to allegedly prove the superiority of Nordic races over Alpine or Mediterranean races. Dr. Lothrop Stoddard popularized "scientific humanism," which held that "white races" were in danger of being inundated by

"inferior" races, in numerous articles he wrote for popular magazines such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

Demonstrating the cultural prominence of views such as Stoddard's, F. Scott

4S Jacobson, 83; MaeNgai, "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924," Journal of American History 86 (June 1999). 49 Jacobson; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s, (New York: Routledge, 1996). "° Jacobson, 83.

22 Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, set in 1922, published in 1925 and adapted for the screen

in 1926, voiced concern over popular understanding of scientific racism. One of the

novel's most unsympathetic characters, Tom Buchanan, parrots theories meant to

reference Stoddard's work. As Tom explains, functioning as a mouthpiece for Fitzgerald's

limited critique of these ideas:

Civilization's going to pieces....Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?...Well it's a fine book, and everyone ought to read it. The idea is that if we don't look out the white race will be - will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved.. ..It's up to us who are the dominant race, to watch out for these other races will have control of things....This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are... .And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization - oh, science, art, and all that. Do you see?

Grant and Stoddard were among many professionals to embrace similar ideas and to popularize these ideas with a wider audience: Harvard psychology professor William

McDougal published Is It Safe For Democracy in 1921 in which he warned of the perils of inter-racial mixing; Clinton Stoddard Burr's American Race Heritage (1922) warned against the inherent degeneracy of certain immigrant groups; Dr. Charles Conant Josey's

Race and National Solidarity (1923) raised concerned over the menace of "colored" immigrants; and Kenneth L. Roberts, who had worked for Army Intelligence during the war published a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post which, collected in 1922 as Why Europe Leaves Home, argued that "any promiscuous crossing of breeds invariably produces mongrels."51 This body of literature had a direct effect on anti-immigration sentiment and influenced much of the thinking that led up to the implementation of the

Johnson Act. Indirectly, though, this explosion of interest in scientific racism was symptomatic of broader social anxieties troubling post-war America. Concerns over the

Dl Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The history of an Idea in America (New York: Shocken Books, 1963), 339- 408.

23 wellbeing of the white male body and the potentially transgressive behaviour of the post­

war New Woman contributed to fears of national degeneration and other threats to the

nation's body politic. Betsy Nies demonstrates that the understated and pervasive nature

of these anxieties was evident in the way authors such as Fitzgerald and Ernest

Hemingway openly criticized the crude scientific racism espoused by the likes of

Stoddard while simultaneously evincing nostalgia for a homogenous and heteronormative

white society uncomplicated by shifting attitudes to religion, ethnicity, race or gender.

The 1920s were key years not only in re-conceptualizing race and whiteness but

in the re-configuration of post-war American society and values as well. Following the

end of the scandal-plagued Harding administration (1921-1923), the more laissez fair

Coolidge administration (1923-1925) presided over a period of intense domestic

productivity spurred by the fact that, following a brief post-war recession, from 1922 to

1929 the United States maintained record levels of national prosperity and a high

standard living, which spurred industrialization and urbanization. Though rural populations generally did not share in the prosperity that pervaded in urban centers, workers saw some measure of improvement in their standard of living. Despite the defeat of organized labor in the early 1920s, by 1925 capital seemed conciliatory; U.S.

Steel voluntarily moved to an eight-hour day, American industry was outpacing its international competitors, and workers were pouring into new industrial cities full of movie palaces, department stores, skyscrapers and factories. Employers held firm to the open shop, blacklisted workers suspected of union activity, and those who were not

'" Betsy L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s (New York: Routledge, 2002). 5j William E. Leuchtenburgh, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1953), 178-179, 98-99; Goldberg, 58-59 34 Leuchtenburg, 107.

24 satisfied with working conditions found other jobs, becoming consumers and consumable

in this new capitalist culture.

The popularization of this new urban culture created its own set of tensions.

William E. Leuchtenburg argues that "1924 marked the point in the urbanization of

America when an unfortunate equilibrium was struck between the urban North East and

the rural South and West" resulting in political and social tensions that played themselves

out along rural and urban lines.3 The Mechanic Age, the New American Tempo, Big

Business, Big Government: all of these characteristics of the modernizing tendencies of

the 1920s were contrasted with debates over prohibition, religion and attempts to

resurrect Populism and Progressivism. Anti-immigration restrictions and red-baiting were

symptomatic of the same attempts at re-entrenching nativism that led the Ku Klux Klan to the height of its popularity in 1924.57 The Scopes Monkey Trial captured many of these domestic tensions. In John Scopes' textbook, Hunter's Civic Biology, there appeared, of course, the infamous paragraph on evolution and Darwin's Origins of the Species. Two paragraphs later there appeared a paragraph on "The Races of Man" in which the author described the "five races of varieties of man, each very different from the others," with

"the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of

CO

Europe and America." While the trial itself manifested significant contradictions at the heart of the 1920s, H.L. Mencken's recounting of it added an additional layer of significance by ridiculing the rural values and religiosity at stake in Tennessee and 35 David Joseph Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 87. 56 Leuchtenburg, 133; Paul A. Carter, The Twenties in America (New York: Crowell, 1975), 50-52; Jason Scott Smith. "The Strange History of the Decade: Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Perils of Periodization," Journal of Social History 32 (Winter 1998), 267; Jaber F. Gubrium, "Urban Ethnography of the 1920s Working Girl," Gender, Work and Organization 14 (April 2007), 233-236. 57 Leuchtenburg, 127. 58 Quoted in Carter, 88-89.

25 casting these beliefs as foreign to the urban values he felt he represented. As a result of

Mencken's journalism and of defence attorney Clarence Darrow's highly publicized

humiliation of the prosecution's William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes trial became

emblematic of the purported triumph of a new national discourse that privileged urban

over rural, modern over backwards and science over religion.

This clash of values played out in attempts to stabilize a new middle-class, urban

identity at the expense not just of rural values but of poor populations both rural and

urban. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century middle-class

reformers and professionals in the burgeoning social sciences began targeting immigrant,

rural and poor-white populations they perceived as falling short of modern physical,

psychological or moral standards. By identifying and attempting to treat these allegedly

deficient populations through public health initiatives and campaigns against vice and

immorality, reformers simultaneously worked at defining normative, white, urban,

middle-class identity. Poor whites in particular were the subject of concern over the

potential degeneration of the American stock. Social scientists targeted poor white populations in order to determine whether they, like immigrant groups, suffered from genetic inferiority. Studies on the Jukes family of New York, for instance, argued for the influence both of heredity and of environmental factors on "the inheritance of criminality, pauperism, or harlotry." The existence of poor whites challenged the American ideal of a classless society wherein citizens "attribute their failures to personal rather than class

Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) ; John Hartigan Jr., Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Arthur H. Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915, http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/hb/docs/759.htm

26 inequities, their successes to individual achievements rather than class privilege."61

Reformers' willingness to view poor whites not as having failed to succeed within a

capitalist economy but as suffering from the consequences of environmental determinism

or genetic inferiority signalled a desire on the part of dominant whites to explain away

the association between whiteness and poverty in a way that denied the existence of

structural economic inequality.

Matt Wray's research on poor-whiteness, or white trash, is part of a body of recent

literature that explores how poor-whiteness has been conceptualized in the United States

and what that says about American assumptions regarding race, class, gender, and the

body.' This scholarship treats a variety of manifestations of poor whiteness that requires

some terminological clarification. While Wray and Annalee Newitz, for instance,

generally refer to "white trash" in reference to poor whiteness more generally, several

scholars have noted that terms like "white trash," "redneck," "cracker, " "hick" and

"hillbilly" ultimately designate the same type of person: white and poor. However, the poverty invoked by some of these terms does not necessarily designate material poverty.

Rather, these terms also designate whites who are poor in terms of cultural capital. But regardless, whether poor in terms of material or cultural capital, white trash, hillbillies, rednecks, lubber and cracker all share the fact of being "not-quite-white," marked by a

61 Lizabeth Cohen, "The Class Experience of Mass Consumption: Workers as Consumers in the Interwar Years," in ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 136. 62 Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (NewYork: Routledge, 1997); Hartigan; Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 63 Examples of the interchangability of these terms can be found in: Carol Mason, "The Hillbilly Defence: Culturally Mediating U.S. Terror at Home and Abroad," NWSA Journal 17 (Fall 2005), 41; Mason acknowledges that she is talking about Hillbillies and Appalachia, but that "hillbillies" also reside in the Ozarks, Detroit, and other places. Annalee Newitz, "White Savagery and Humiliation, or a New Racial Consciousness in the Media," in Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (NewYork: Routledge, 1997), 133.

27 deficiency in the forms of capital privileged by the dominant majority. Signifiers of not-

quite-whiteness serve to subtly bound whiteness in ways non-whiteness does not, by reinforcing its classed qualities.

Scholarship on cultural representations of poor whiteness is slim and often not particularly historically engaged. J.W. Williamson's Hillbillyland, for instance, assesses representations of the hillbilly type in popular film and that medium's role in constructing the hillbilly as symbolic cultural other. His discussion of the cinematic popularization of the hillbilly or mountaineer stereotype in over 300 films from 1910 to 1916, and representations of the same in 1920s country music demonstrates the creation of this stereotype as culturally distinct from the norm. Like Williamson's work, Anthony

Harkins' Hillbilly explores the way cultural representations of hillbillies speak to dominant American attitudes with regards to progress, national identity, opposition to dominant middle-class culture and resistance to identity politics. While both of these works focus on hillbillies in particular, they acknowledge that many of the stereotypes and character traits they describe are equally applicable to poor and rural whites differentiated from true hillbillies only in that they lack some of the regionalism associated with the hillbilly stereotype. While Harkins' Hillbilly takes into account the historical emergence and social relevance of the hillbilly type by discussing the impact of iconic models such as Sut Lovingood, Davy Crocket and Jesse James, neither Harkins nor Williamson place the development of the hillbilly type in much socio-economic context.64 John Hartigan Jr.'s Odd Tribes provides a persuasive analysis of certain

64 J.W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies did to the Mountains and What the Mountains did to the Movies (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural history if an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Duane Carr's A Questions of Class: The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green

28 depictions of poor whites in popular culture, and his discussion of the racialization of poor whiteness in Victorian Britain is particularly useful. However, like many scholars who treat the subject, he focuses largely on post-World War Two depictions of poor whites. Given the limited scholarship on representations of poor-whiteness specifically, I have turned to Whiteness Studies more generally.

WHITENESS STUDIES

Whiteness Studies, like Critical Race Theory, which preceded it, holds that race is socially and culturally constructed and that attention to processes through which race has been constructed can expose and challenge racialized thinking.65 While Critical Race

University Popular Press, 1996) addresses literary constructions of stereotypes similar to those described by Williamson and Harkins, but his analysis touches only on small sampling of Southern fiction from the antebellum period to the present and is thus too generalizing. Scott Can Doviak's Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005) points to some useful examples of stereotyping poor whites but unfortunately focuses primarily on cinematic representations from the 1970s. Several of the pieces collected in Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray's White Trash are instructive to thinking through poor whiteness, but deal largely with more contemporary representations. Among these Constance Penley's "Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn," Annalee Newitz's "White Trash Savagery and Humiliation, or a New Racial Consciousness in the Media," Mike Hill's "Can Whiteness Speak? Industrial Ontological Disasters, and Three Hollywood Films," Doug Henwood's "Trash-o-nomics," Jullian Sandell's "Telling Stories of 'Queer White Trash': Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Work of Dorthy Allison" and Gael Sweeney's "The King of White Trash Culture: Elvis Presley and the Aesthetics of Excess" were particularly useful for their theoretical approaches to white trash. Finally, Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats, (New York: Touchstone, 1997), while controversial and purposefully inflammatory, provides a persuasive argument against treating hillbillies, hicks, rednecks etc., as independent subject groups. Whiteness Studies is rooted in the works of early twentieth century black intellectuals such as C.L.R. James, Cyril Briggs, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, but is particularly indebted to W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America, (New York: Russel and Russel, 1963); Thomas F. Gossett's Race and Winthrop D. Jordan's The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1974) provide early analysis of the construction of race but only just begin to explore the idea of whiteness. Interest in exploring whiteness increased dramatically in the 1990s. Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990) provides a class-based analysis of whiteness' emergence through the politics of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jacksonian era, during which whiteness "came to symbolize the solidarity of producers against those who prospered at the producers' expense by conniving with and manipulating racially subordinated populations," 298. David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991) takes up similar themes by arguing that white workers in antebellum America came to think of themselves as white though a differentiation between slave labor and 'free' labor, the later supplemented by a 'psychological wage,' a term Roediger borrows from Du Bois. Similarly Theodor Allen's The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994) argues that whiteness was invented by

29 Theory asks these questions of the construction of race in general, Whiteness Studies

applies them to whiteness in particular, examining the construction, performance, and

maintenance of whiteness, as well as the implications of the ways in which whiteness is

and has been deployed. Academic work on whiteness focuses to a large degree on the

way whiteness is constituted in opposition to non-whiteness and more recently, in

opposition to not-quite-whiteness. Whiteness Studies comprises several schools which

explore the construction of whiteness through perspectives such as labor history,

immigration history and popular culture. The literature is generally in agreement that in

large part whiteness has been secured, defined, and redefined through differentiation

between idealized values associated with whiteness and articulated in opposition to

disdained traits, values and ideals projected onto non-whites.66 Evidence of this process is traceable in the contradiction and tension left in its wake, the analysis of which exposes the ways in which the social construction of whiteness has been rooted in questions of power, authority, privilege, and exclusion. While this type of analysis ultimately aims at exposing discrimination and oppression, its first target is the de-naturalization of

Virginian planter elite in order to facilitate their exploitation of both black and white labor. Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), Karen Brodkin's How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) and Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color explore the instability and politically contingent nature of whiteness by demonstrating how various immigrant groups "became" white as a result of social and political contingencies. Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) explores whiteness as a "strategy," a "location" that often hinges of performativity. While Frankenberg focuses on race and whiteness as lived experience constructed through important social contingencies, she argues that on a cultural level the naturalization of "unmarked and unnamed" whiteness hinges on its iteration through various forms of popular culture. In Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998) Valerie Babb suggests that we should refer to non-whites and non- nonwhites, terminology that is extremely fitting, especially given the historic malleability of whiteness; As Ignatiev, Brodkin, and Jacobson have demonstrated, various ethnic groups have at times been considered non-white, only to eventually become non-nonwhite when this shift became politically and socially expedient for the dominant majority. Unfortunately non-nonwhiteness is not a particularly workable term, but it is to this idea that 1 refer when using the term not-quite-white.

30 whiteness. Whiteness must be critically engaged and made "particular" in order to

explore the way white privilege and power have been normalized and expose the

construction of whiteness. This particularization must take place on a variety of levels,

taking into account the various ways in which the white subjects, like all racialized

subjects, come into being.

In the first part of my thesis I draw on scholarship that explores the ways

whiteness has been conceptualized through cultural production. Toni Morrison's

foundational Playing in the Dark argues that American literary history illustrates the

American literary imaginary's long-standing dependence on an Africanist or African

American presence. The major markers of whiteness, such as autonomy, authority, newness, power, progress and civilization are ultimately enabled by non-whiteness which, deployed as rawness, savagery and primitiveness "provided that staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity." Dyer elaborates on similar themes in film where he sees the non-white body as site on which to project failings and fallibilities so that the white body can be portrayed as transcending both race and impurity. Both Morrison and Dyer argue that because whiteness has for so long relied on non-whiteness for its expressive potential, whiteness is most often represented through comparisons to what it is not and through the opposition that emerges between

"black" and "white" themes. Thus, Dyer argues that one of the best ways of seeing "the structures, tropes, and perceptual habits of whiteness, to see past the illusion of infinite variety, to recognize white qua white, is when non-whites, (and above all blacks) are also

57 The themes Morrison first articulated have been followed up on in: Babb; Richard Dyer's White, (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Richard Bernardi's The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of United Stales Cinema, (New Brunswick, NJ: 1996). 68 Morrison, 44. 69 Dyer 14-30,67.

31 represented." Overall, the literature on cultural representations of whiteness maintains

that it is in examining representative strategies that the tensions produced by the need for

whiteness to express itself through non-whiteness come to the fore. The fundamental

contradictions inherent in whiteness, between its corporeality and its transcendent nature,

are themselves reproduced in cultural representations of whiteness and in white cultural

production. My analysis demonstrates the way comic strip whiteness was indeed enabled

by blackness, but goes on to demonstrate that this same process enabled whiteness

through representations of not-quite-whiteness.

My analysis departs from these theorists in that their work focuses primarily on

close textual analysis and less on exploring audience engagement with literary or filmic

whiteness. In this sense, Ruth Frankenberg's argument for the particularization not just of whiteness but also of the way white culture is experienced more generally is helpful.

While the cultures of non-white others are often of particular interest to dominant white majorities, white culture is not. In fact, the body of cultural production produced by the dominant white majority is rarely treated as culture at all. Granted, the idea of white culture is problematic as it risks reifying categories of whiteness and non-whiteness instead of critiquing the logic of these categories. But ultimately, unpacking white culture is necessary to understanding how whiteness is positioned as a normative category and how this position denies the non-white subject claim to the privileges of white subjecthood.71 Margaret M. Russell describes the articulation of this process in white cultural production as creating a "dominant gaze" which establishes a natural, universal, and specifically white viewpoint which is reinforced through narrative and visual

70 Dyer, 13. 71 Frankenberg, 202-203.

32 media. This gaze normalizes the white narrative viewpoint while spectacularizing

outside viewpoints, diverting attention from the construction and maintenance of

normativity to expressions of difference.73 In this way, 1920s comic strips, with their

notable circulation numbers and easy accessibility worked towards normalizing a

particular, and white, mode of perception.

But while this culturalist approach is useful, the kind of symbolic violence

perpetrated by the differentiation of whiteness from non-whiteness is of course rooted in

material violence. David Roediger and Eric Lott, for example, argue that working-class

whiteness was secured at the expense of, and often through violent differentiation from

non-white workers. Like Roediger and Lott, Alexander Saxton reads the development of

white racial superiority against nineteenth-century American culture in ways that expose

the way mass culture functioned to mobilize whiteness in aid of political restructuring.

Noel Ignatiev and Karen Broadkin Sacks demonstrate how the social constructedness of race is placed in sharp relief through analysis of how Irish and Jewish immigrants came to be considered white. While race, immigration, nativism and class were all implicated in the conceptualization of whiteness, recent scholarship has also turned to postcolonial perspectives in order to further theorize the ways whiteness has been conceptualized through a long history of material violence, both at home and abroad.

The second part of my thesis draws on this recent perspective on the material violence imbricated in the conceptualization of American whiteness. Alfred J. Lopez's

Postcolonial Whiteness, Malini Johar Shueller and Edward Watts' Messy Beginnings:

12 Margaret M. Russel, "Race and the Dominant Gaze: Narratives of Law and Inequality in Popular Film," in ed. Richard Delgado. Critical Race Theory: The Culling Edge, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995)57-59. 73 Dyer, 39.

33 Postcoloniality and American Studies, and Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt's

Postcolonial Theory and the United State have all attempt to grapple with the ways in which U.S. whiteness has been conceptualized through violent differentiation from non- white, colonized populations either domestically or in imperial projects abroad. While this literature is theoretically useful, much of it focuses on colonial and antebellum

America and does not engage with post-colonial whiteness in the twentieth century.

However, this scholarship is complemented by recent work on imperialism, particularly

Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire, Kaplan and Donald E. Pease's Cultures of United

States Imperialism and Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler's The Tensions of Empire, which seek to disrupt traditional perspectives on American Imperialism and to challenge the traditional binary of colony and metropole. This scholarship engages with the variety of forms of U.S. imperialism and their consequences and supports the argument that U.S. whiteness is intrinsically tied to forms of territorial, economic and cultural imperialism.

NOTE ON SOURCES

In the analysis that follows I have taken up two of Whiteness Studies' most recent offshoots, not-quite-whiteness and postcolonial whiteness, and in the two chapters that make up the body of my thesis I have explored the way Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps expressed and reinforced particular views on whiteness. In my analysis of these strips I have read every Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps strip from 1924-1929. In doing so, I also read the comic strips that appeared alongside these

Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham : Duke University Press, 1993); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire : Foucault 's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham : Duke University Press, 1995); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997); Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies," Journal of American History (December 2001).

34 three, but because Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps were the most popular and innovative strips of the period, they were my primary focus. My analysis involved close-readings of the strips in question and has incorporated both the form and the content of the strips.

Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps featured a range of characters and settings that were similar in that they feature poor whites and whites who had recently risen from poverty to the middle class. Moon Mullins featured a cast of misfits and con artists and centered around the antics of the title character who was perpetually in debt to his boarding house and spent most of his time chasing women while trying, and failing, to ingratiate himself to a variety of upper-class characters. While Moon's misadventures formed the basis of much of this strip's humor, Moon's antics were often offset by

Mushmouth, a black character who served a very stereotypical function in the strip; he performed a variety of menial jobs for a variety of characters, he was fiercely loyal to

Moon, and he often functioned as a foil, mitigating Moon's bad behavior.

Gasoline Alley acquired a similarly stereotypical character when Walt Wallet, a bachelor who, on 14 February 1921 found orphaned baby Skeezix on his doorstep, hired

Rachel, a stereotypical mammy figure to help take care of little Skeezix. While Rachel's naive good-heartedness and devotion to Skeezix was an integral element of the strip, one of her primary functions was to help further the strip's representation of Walt's unconventional domestic life. Walt and Skeezix were eventually joined by Phyllis

Blossom, who married Walt in 1926, and a number of supporting characters who made up the Alley's community. These included a number of African American characters including Plato, the alley's chauffer, Mandy, Mrs. Blossom's maid, and Anthacite,

35 Skeezix's playmate. Like Rachel, these characters played supporting roles that enabled

the strip's representation of whiteness in a variety of ways.

As in Gasoline Alley and Moon Mullins, The Gumps' domestic help was central to

the strip's narrative. The Gump family, Andy, Minerva, and little Chester, were joined in

1924 by Tilda, their poor white domestic servant. She was crude, uncouth, unattractive

and functioned largely to demonstrate the extent to which Andy Gump had been unable to

shake the markers of his own poor-white roots. Indeed, when they made their newspaper

debut, The Gump family had only recently risen to the middle-class thanks to the

benevolence of Andy's wealthy Uncle Bim. Bim's continuous generosity was necessary to keep the family afloat, largely because Andy's harebrained schemes so often resulted in disaster and potential financial ruin.

In chapter one of what follows I analyze the work of African American

stereotypes in Moon Mullins, and Gasoline Alley and demonstrate that these stereotypes functioned to restrict and limit the potential of black characters in ways that reflected the desires and prejudices of dominant white society. I then demonstrate how in all three strips the meanings conveyed by these stereotypes were used to mark the boundaries of whiteness, to alert readers to instances where white characters transgressed these boundaries and to racialize these transgressors, rendering them not-quite-white. In chapter two I analyze the way The Gumps in particular relied on invocations of imperialism and the symbolism associated with American imperialism to signal Andy's failure to properly perform whiteness. In reinforcing Andy's not-quite-whiteness The

Gumps mobilized a variety of cultural myths associated with American imperialism, demonstrating the ways in which imperial logic was intertwined with domestic

36 understanding of race, gender, and class difference. These two chapters work together to argue that that 1920s comic strips relied heavily on both a grammar of race and the language of imperialism to define the boundaries of whiteness. The result, in both cases, was that these strips identified not-quite-white characters, characters positioned on or perilously close to the boundaries of whiteness, in racialized terms.

37 Smith, The Gumps, 3 January 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

CHAPTER I

On returning from her vacation on 8 September 1927 Rachel, Gasoline Alley's mammy figure, commented: "I had a wondaful time down in Alabam. Only I was ready to come back. ...Yes I got too much rest. It don't 'gree with me. I is nachelly industerus an' they takes life too easy. I positive I got lonesome for work." Then, immediately contradicting herself, she went on to tell Walt that she would like to go out for the evening, explaining: "a gent'man friend invited me to a carnival tonight an' if they is anything I jes loves it is carnivorous amusements."

York News Syndicate.

In this strip, Rachel embodied several stereotypes that were commonly used to portray

1 Frank O. King, Gasoline Alley, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), 8 September 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

38 African Americans at the time. She was at once depicted, somewhat contradictorily, as loyal, subservient, unlettered, lazy, and fun loving. Non-white characters in 1920s comic strips were, with few exceptions, generally depicted according to such stereotypes. These characters included the occasional Native American in Gasoline Alley and Texas Slim, the occasional Asian character in The Gumps and Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, and

African American characters in most of the strips at the time. These stereotyped characters illustrated racist assumptions and prejudices of their perpetuators. In this chapter, I will begin by focusing on the work that black stereotypes accomplished in

1920s comic strips by analyzing representations the African American characters in

Gasoline Alley and Moon Mullins, strips in which these characters figured quite prominently. From this analysis I will extrapolate out to analyze the work of racial stereotypes more generally, exploring the way these stereotypes were mobilized to illustrate forms of non-racial difference in Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps from 1924-1929.

Black stereotypes in these comic strips functioned much as many contemporary representations of African Americans did. These stereotypes projected dominant white attitudes on race relations and dominant white opinions regarding the roles African

Americans should occupy in American society. In addition, stereotypes functioned to frame white subjectivity vis-a-vis non-whiteness. Stuart Hall argues that cultural representations of black characters have historically been filtered through the "base images of a grammar of race." This grammar enables the conceptualization of race through the equivalent of grammatical units. This chapter analyzes comic strip

2 Quoted in Jennifer Bailey Woodard and Teresa Mastin, "Black Womanhood: Essence and Its Treatment of Stereotypical Images of Black Women," Journal of Black Studies 36 (November 2005), 265-266.

39 representations of black characters in order to demonstrate the ways in which they contributed to these "base images." Toni Morrison argues that beyond contributing to this limiting grammar of race, black stereotypes were also "used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness." With this in mind, this chapter also analyzes the way the grammar of race depicted in 1920s comic strips functioned to articulate particular perceptions of whiteness.

In their use of black stereotypes, Gasoline Alley and Moon Mullins in particular worked alongside other contemporary cultural products to symbolically limit the place of

African Americans within American society. These stereotypes were mobilized in ways that revealed and policed the boundaries of whiteness by marking characters who transgressed those boundaries in a racialized ways, thus depicting them as not-quite- white. Ultimately certain characters in Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps were marked as not-quite-white in part because their socio-economic status prevented their incorporation within the boundaries of whiteness. In these comic strips, characters who lacked capital, be it economic, social, or cultural capital, were rendered not-quite- white through references to a grammar of race developed through the comic strips' use of black stereotypes.

UNPACKING STEREOTYPES

The 1920s were a heady period for racial tensions that manifested themselves in part through contestation over dominant cultural representations of African Americans.

Comic strip treatments of black characters such as Gasoline Alley'?, Rachel and Moon

Mullins' Mushmouth Jackson were part of a much broader tendency to represent African

Americans stereotypically. In December of 1924, an article appeared in Vanity Fair titled:

3 Morrison, 51-52.

40 "Enter the New Negro a Distinctive Type Recently Created by the Coloured Cabaret Belt

in New York: Exit to Colored Crooner of Lullabys, the Cotton-Picker, the Mammy Singer

and the Darky Banjo-Player."4 Though the title erroneously identified the origins of the

figure of the New Negro, it nonetheless acknowledged opposition to the stereotypes and

caricatures through which white culture had long depicted African Americans.5 In a

similar vein, Alain Locke's The New Negro, published in 1925, collected black art and

literature that challenged and critiqued black stereotypes. Locke's compilation was

published amid the surge of African American cultural production that was the Harlem

Renaissance. This artistic and literary explosion aimed in part at dispelling common

caricatures, stereotypes and prejudices.6 As the Vanity Fair article and The New Negro

both indicated, the ways in which popular culture uncritically perpetuated race relations

by trafficking in racial stereotypes was palpable.

But while the Harlem Renaissance and progressive literary publications engaged

with and attempted to diffuse the negative impact of racial stereotyping, 1920s comic

strips reproduced and circulated these same racialized images. Comic strips depicted

black characters such that they were immediately marked by their physical appearance,

by their dialect, by their faithfulness to whites, by their lack of the "finer sensibilities,"

and by their depiction via a number of stereotypical black character types. These types

included the dignified yet savage native, the faithful slave figure, the clown or entertainer

4 Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negros: Images of Race in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7. 5 Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image in the Black," Representations 24 (Autumn 1988), 129-155. Gates argues that the impulse behind the figure of the New Negro manifested itself mid-nineteenth-century slave-narratives in ways that suggest that a discussion of this figure must expand beyond the period from 1895-1925. 6 In terms of literary production, The Plantations School and tradition of the Reconstruction novel were at the forefront of criticism for their role in developing and repeating racist caricatures and stereotypes of black Americans that perpetuated antebellum social order.

41 who existed solely to amuse white audiences, the Coon, the Uncle Tom, the Uncle

Remus, the black brute, the pickanniny, and the mammy.7 More generally, comic strips depicted black characters as infantile, lazy, subservient, or immoral and rarely in a way that suggested complex individuality. This was certainly the case for Moon Mullins''

Mushmouth Jackson, a character the strip consistently depicted as one-dimensional and whose simple-minded blunders often foiled Moon's perpetual scheming. Though the strip indicated that Mushmouth was technically employed by Moon, he performed a range of menial labour for almost all of the characters in Moon Mullins and was thus rendered abstractly menial: an archetypal black servant. Similar characters appeared in Gasoline

Alley, most notably Rachel, Mandy, Mrs. Blossom's servant and Plato, the Alley's chauffer. These characters were all rendered similarly abstract, existing solely to serve particularly functional roles both literally, in that they were relegated to perpetual servitude, and symbolically, in that they provided easy means by which the strip could reference non-white themes. These characters also served functional roles on a more formal level in that they were never central to narrative arcs but instead served to complicate, facilitate, or comment on the arcs of others. By limiting Mushmouth, Rachel,

Plato and Mandy to distinctly functional roles, Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley demonstrated their reliance on black characters as imaginative tropes, crutches and pillars

7 Sterling A. Brown, "Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors," Journal of Negro Education 22 (April 1933), 179-203; Woodard and Mastin, 265-266; Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and their Influences on Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 115; Jamie Barlowe, '"You Must Never Be a Misrepresented People': Spike Lee's Bamboozled," Canadian Review of American Studies 33 (2003), 4-6. 8 The one exception to this statement is Bungelton Green, a comic strip that ran in the Chicago Defender which was the first comic strip drawn by and produced for an African American readership. It was also the only African American comic strip in circulation during this period. John D. Stevens, "Reflections in a Dark Mirror: Comic Strips in Black Newspapers," Journal of Popular Culture 10 (Summer 1976).

42 of narrative construction.9

The use of black stereotypes in Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley reflected the

social function of stereotypes more generally. In 1922 social critic Walter Lippmann

explained that stereotypes are not neutral but rather "a way of substituting order for the

great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality," a way of projecting "upon the world our

own sense of our own nature, our own position and our own rights. The stereotypes are

therefore highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress

or our tradition, and behind its defence we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the

positions we occupy." Stereotypes thus expose the ways in which a dominant culture

chooses to frame social realities. The resultant images, distilled and reproduced so as to

be easily comprehensible, are representative of the dominant social order from which

they emerged. Stereotypes perform their intended function only when they are able to

maintain a semblance of accuracy. This semblance is made to seem uniform through a

process that subsumes heterogeneity and complexity to a seemingly simplified,

uncomplicated vision of reality. Though the particular visions that stereotypes aim to produce may be simplistic and simplifying, their implications are not. Aimed at denying heterogeneity, stereotypes are charged with the meanings they mean to obfuscate. By unpacking stereotypes, the underlying intent of the culture that perpetrates them and the complex ways in which they are deployed become apparent. Nineteen twenties black stereotypes were trafficked most often in visual or literary imagery and they formed part of a process of reinforcing white supremacy that was far more extensive and was

9 This reading of the role of black and other non-white characters in literature and film is made most notably by Morrison, Babb and Dyer. 10 Walter Lipmann, Public Opinion (New York: Dover Publications, 2002). 52. "Nadell, 24-25.

43 productive of greater social meaning.

One of the ways in which common black stereotypes reinforced white dominance

was by implying the limitations to African American participation in white society. In

1926, Alain Locke argued that the state of U.S. race relations resulted in part from the

fact that "the North, having been fed only on stereotypes, came to ignore the Negro in

any intimate or critical way through the deceptive influences.. .of stereotypes."12 Locke's

observation, illustrated critically in figure 2.3, played out on a regular basis in Gasoline

Figure 2.3. The caption of this editorial cartoon reads: "Two Northerners have just arrived at a popular southern resort. The native caddy is weary the hackneyed personalities he has heard hundreds of times." Clare Briggs, When a Feller Needs a Friend, Chicago Tribune, 18 February 1924 Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Alley, arguably the most intimate 1920s comic strip, in which Rachel embodied not only the stereotypes associated with the mammy figure—dark-skinned, plump, asexual, gruff l2Nadell, 24.

44 but big-hearted, sassy, opinionated and fiercely loyal—but a wealth of more general

stereotypes as well. Like Mushmouth, who was frequently depicted as naive and quick to

believe in the supernatural, Rachel was depicted as extremely superstitious. Belief in

omens and portentous events filtered her reading of everyday life, marked her as

somewhat simple and, as figure 2.4 indicates, functioned to reinforce stereotypical

associations with blackness. The nature of the superstition in figure 2.4, in which Rachel

associated blackness with negativity and then with a black character, reinforced the

symbolic logic at the root of black stereotypes. Gasoline Alley also used Rachel's

GASOLINE ALLEY—Q. E. D., WHICH MEANS YOU TELL 'EM

Figure 2.4 Frank O. King, "Q.E.D, Which Means You Tell 'Em," Gasoline Alley, 10 October 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

simplicity and superstitious nature to indicate that she was best suited to rural, pre-

modern environments and attitudes. Illustrating the disconnect between Rachel's pre-

modern sensibilities and the industrialized world in which she worked, the strip had

Rachel explain to her mother back in Alabama that it was the urban norm to use electric

washing machines because: "we got so many folks. What'd all the 'lectricians do if they

couldn't fix washin' machines an run the dominoes in the big 'lectric plants? In the cities we gotta have labor-makin' machinery." Through Rachel's ironic and unwittingly astute observations, the strip insinuated that beyond her designated roles in Gasoline Alley,

Rachel did not really belong. Or rather, Rachel belonged so long as she performed her

45 very functional role, a role that harkened back to an earlier time, one that was characterized by "sentimental evocations of plantation abundance and benign slavery.. .to a time when black workers 'knew their place.'"13

In the 1920s the mammy figure of which Rachel was representative functioned to ease contemporary social concerns regarding the place of African Americans in white society and to deny black demands for political and civil rights. While prominent black women strove to address the "crisis of black womanhood," examples of the racial and sexual discrimination they protested were being perpetuated and celebrated in newspapers across the nation by fictional black women from Aunt Jemima to Gasoline

Alley's Rachel. Gasoline Alley positioned Rachel as, by her very nature, so "nachelly industerus" that when Walt and Skeezix left town periodically she felt at loose ends, much to her chagrin. Significantly, the strip's insistence on Rachel's natural industriousness was qualified. Rachel was industrious enough, but Mrs. Blossom could always find fault with her housekeeping and, recalling figure 2.2, Rachel could easily be distracted by "carnivorous amusements." While Rachel's industriousness was qualified, the extent to which it was in her nature was not. The strip emphasized that Rachel's work and personal life both revolved entirely around her employers. Being labor-less left her bored, and being without Skeezix and Walt left her "terrible lonesome." Patricia Turner argues that this romantic envisioning of the mammy stereotype and her personal

lj Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 11. 14 Margo Natalie Crawford, '"Perhaps Buddha is a Woman': Women's Poetry in the Harlem Renaissance," in George Hutchinson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 126-137. Novelists such as Zora Neal Hurston and Jessie Fauset and poets such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helen Johnson, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Bennet, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelia Weld Grimke were particularly prominent in working towards addressing racial and sexual discrimination on the part of whites and at addressing sexism within black communities as well.

46 fulfillment in servitude was perpetuated in order to allow the white public to indulge in

"wishful thinking," in the idea that a selfless, sexless, black woman would good- naturedly enter into domestic servitude.15 Rachel embodied the stereotypical Mammy

figure who wanted nothing more than to tend her white family and was fiercely loyal and protective of them, an image that was widely popularized in contemporary literature and

Figure 2.5 Frank 0. King, "Rachel's On the Warpath," Gasoline Alley, 12 June 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. film, most notably in Birth of a Nation.1 Further illustrating the symbolic currency of mammy imagery, while Gasoline Alley was sentimentalizing the mammy's stereotypical loyalty and willing subservience, Congress was debating the importance of the mammy to the national imaginary as well. While Rachel, wielding a rolling pin, was chasing down threats to her white charges, the United Daughters of the Confederacy were petitioning Washington for the land and funds to build a monument dedicated "to the faithful Mammy."17

Turner, 61. 16 King, 3 May 1924; Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 29. The scene in which the Mammy figure in Birth of a Nation defends her white masters against Union troops is just one of many examples of similar scenes that repeat well into the twentieth century. Cripps argues that D.W. Griffiths was central to resurrecting and reinserting nineteenth-century stereotypes of Southern fiction into twentieth-century film. 17 Both McElya's "Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy of the 1920s,'" in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville, TN: 2003), and Clinging to Mammy detail the history of the role of the Mammy in the American imagination and the history of the UDC's Mammy

47 The Mammy was a powerful figure in the context of 1920s race relations. The

late-1910s had seen increased black migration northward, labor unrest, and twenty-five

race riots in the summer of 1919 alone. White Americans blamed blacks and radicals for

the social unrest, and "some found solace in a retreat to an imagined history of beneficent

antebellum slavery and southern gentility, a time when hierarchies were clear, whites

l O

were good stewards of their land and their laborers, and black people loved them." This

retreat was expressed not only in the celebration of mammies, but in representations of

stock characters such as the Uncle Remus, the faithful slave, and the tragic mullato: all

characters who either knew their naturally subservient "place" in white-dominant society,

or who, through tragic circumstances, were warned against defying the social logic that

assigned them to these "places."1 Gasoline Alley's contribution to the mammy myth was

significant in that Rachel's abstract, limited, and unchanging character occupied a central

role in the strip, providing a regularly occurring and immediately identifiable model of

willing black servitude that was both easily accessible and readily consumed by a

national readership.

The importance of racial stereotypes to reinforcing a white-dominant social order

in the 1920s was further elaborated on in Moon Mullins where Mushmouth's role as all-

purpose servant to most of the strip's characters demonstrated that, like Rachel, he was meant to be perceived as naturally subservient in a universal kind of way. When Moon and his entourage left town, as they often did, Mushmouth would find ways of following them, indicating that he, like Rachel, was lost without his employers. On one such trip

Monument in particular. 18 McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 117-138; Cripps, 25-27. 19 Eve Allegra Raimon, The 'Tragic Mulatto Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

48 Moon got a job working for the circus. Shortly thereafter Mushmouth appeared and

Moon put him to work as a lion tamer. When Moon requested that Mushmouth "lay offa" the lion taming for a few days because his life insurance policy on Mushmouth has expired, Mushmouth shrugged him off, to which Moon declared: "I'll stick around and carry you home when them lions get through workin' on you." "Fat chance, Mistah

Moon-" Mushmouth replied, "Besides, yo' all knows ah aint got no home."

Figure 2.6 Frank Willard, Moon Mullins, 29 July 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

While the strip regularly demonstrated that Moon mistreated and abused Mushmouth to the point that he was depicted as downright "beastly," ultimately the strip's criticism of

MOON MVLUNS-HIGHER EDUCATION

Figure 2.7 The last panel of this strip reads: "An dey calls you de king of wild beasts—whooee—you oughta stuck aroun' an you'd got some pointahs on bein' wild." Frank Willard, "Higher Education" Moon Mullins, 33 July 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Willard, Moon Mullins, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, 1L), 29 July 1924 , Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

49 Moon was that he was not sufficiently mindful of his "property."21 Mushmouth had no

"home" within the context of the strip and was thus more in need of paternalism than of emancipation. Through its representation of the relationship between Moon and

Mushmouth, the strip reinforced a particular social order in which both Mushmouth's and

Moon's roles were reinforced, Mushmouth's through repeated indication that he had no purpose outside of abstract servitude and Moon's through the strip's criticism of his neglect of the racial order.

Stereotypes of the kind Mushmouth and Rachel were representative of contributed to a way of representing race relations many contemporary black critics termed affectionate segregation. Affectionate segregation deployed stereotypes such as the mammy and faithful slave not merely as icons of white supremacy but as tools of its reproduction. The perpetuation of these stereotypes aimed to delimit the boundaries of acceptable black behaviour. Light-hearted manifestations of these stereotypes such as the celebration and popularization of the mammy figure, attempted to restore order at a time of racial tension through the "reinstitution of slavery, this time by way of cultural memory and representation." African American activists and journalists argued that these types of "faithful slave narratives were particularly insidious mechanisms of exclusion, coercion, and terror," and that "honeyed testaments of love for mammy swelled from the same bloodlust and white supremacist sentiment that fuelled race riots, lynching, rapes, and other abuses of black people." Comic strip depictions of

Mushmouth and Rachel, not to mention the even more abstractly servile Mandy and

Plato, claimed that these characters were not only ideally suited to their limited,

21 Willard, 30 July 1924. 2~ McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 143. 2j McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 160-161.

50 functional roles in society, but that they were suited to little else. Through these strips

slavery, or slavery re-envisioned, was ultimately cast as natural. By virtue of the nature of

the medium, comic strip assertions of this kind identified and reinforced widespread

public acceptance of the implications of these stereotypes.

Manifestations of these stereotypes appeared in a variety of forms, many of which

took root in the nineteenth century and persisted into the twentieth; comic strip

manifestations of these stereotypes resembled these other forms while differing

significantly their reproduction and dissemination. The literature of Plantation Fiction,

Anti-Tom novels, local color writers, and Reconstruction novels first popularized and reproduced many black stereotypes in print media. Similar imagery was reproduced through blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, motion pictures, and radio as well as through a variety of material culture including packaging, advertisements, postcards, buttons, sheet music, dolls, ashtrays, kitchenware and other household items. The variety of media that expressed these stereotypes is significant; in multiple ways these stereotypes

"infiltrated the intimate spaces of people's daily lives and reinforced ideas of white supremacy and black servility." The combination of visual images supplemented by textual illustration as manifested in advertisements, postcards, magazines, novel illustrations, sheet music, and lithography was crucial to codifying images of race. The combination of text and image strengthened the stereotype's authoritative claim,

24 The manifestations of racist stereotypes, the manner in which they saturated white life, and the role they played in cementing racist ideology is explored by Woodard and Mastin, 265-266; Turner, 115; Barlowe, 4-6; Nadell, 17; Foster, Performing Whiteness, 26; Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White ed. David Roediger, (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 299-304; Bridget T. Heneghan, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 46; McElya, "Commemorating the Color Line,'7 208-209; McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 26-27; Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Temple University Press, 1993), 12. 25 McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 26-27'.

51 entrenching it in a particular language that involved both textual and visual cues. The

racial stereotypes that appeared in 1920s comic strips are unique to this discussion in that

they made use of visual imagery while simultaneously using textual references to

reinforce stereotypes, and cemented these in daily, affective narratives in ways that other

cultural production at the time did not.27 The comic strip's repeated use of these images

and high levels of national syndicated circulation rendered these depictions common fare throughout the country. The popularity of comic strip merchandise, which circulated widely beginning in the 1920s, further disseminated these loaded images.

Contemporary opposition, both on literal and symbolic levels, to these stereotypes and the means by which they were dispersed, further illustrated the importance of visual culture in conveying stereotypes and the meanings behind them. One current within black opposition to these stereotypes included purposeful challenges not only to stereotypical images of black characters but also to the forms in which these images appeared. The

1920s magazines that challenged derogatory representations of blacks, such as the

NAACP's Crisis, Opportunity, and Vanity Fair, all employed combinations of text and image to explore and counteract racist representations of black Americans. More notably,

The New Negro and a 1925 edition of Survey Graphic, subtitled Harlem, Mecca of the

New Negro were explicit in their aim to deploy a fusion of image and narrative in order to challenge contemporary racial aesthetics, interrogate prejudiced assumptions about racial identity, and explore the ability of artistic production to challenge dominant racialized thinking. This purposeful deployment of a combination of image and narrative spoke to

25 Nadell, 17. 27 Richard Moss, "Racial Anxiety on the Comics Page: Harry Hershfield's 'Abbie the Agent,"' Journal of Popular Culture 40 (Summer 2007), 92. 28 Nadell, 67. Full text and a digital copy of Survey Graphic: Harlem, the New Mecca of the Negro is

52 the importance of visual culture to racial representation. The confluence of image and

narrative in this context, and to combat racist aesthetics no less, begs further analysis of

the workings of racist stereotypes in the comic strip, a medium that, at the time, relied

most heavily on a combination of the visual the textual.

STEREOTYPE AND THE WHITE OTHER

As demonstrated above, stereotyped representations of African Americans

accomplished specific work by projecting white assumptions regarding the ideal place of

black citizens in American society. In addition, these representations performed another

kind of boundary work by drawing attention to the limits of whiteness. In this section I

will demonstrate the ways in which 1920s comic strips deployed a limited and limiting

grammar of race in their depictions of black characters and used units of this same

grammar to racialize behavior and character traits that did not conform to the ideals of

dominant whiteness. By strategically acknowledging specific similarities and differences between white and black characters, these comic strips policed the boundaries of whiteness. Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps all featured characters who were marked as not-quite-white by the humorous or abnormal behaviour they exhibited.

Whether they succeeded in successfully correcting this behavior or not, these characters nonetheless performed a cautionary or corrective function by symbolically marking the moral, behavioral, and classed limits of whiteness.

The reduction of representations of black Americans to a grammar of race articulated through simplified and easily identifiable stereotypes rendered the component

available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/. 29 Gates Jr. suggests that the "New Negro" belongs in a long tradition of blacks attempting "to 'reconstruct' their image to whites... .almost as soon as blacks could write, it seems, they set out to redefine - against already received racist stereotypes - who and what a black person was, and how unlike the racist stereotype the black original indeed actually could be." Gates Jr., "The Trope of a New Negro," 131.

53 parts of stereotype—the character traits or visual markers that rendered a given character

stereotypical—deployable in other contexts. Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and The

Gumps all made strategic use of a grammar of race to identify white characters that

transgressed, or were perilously close to transgressing the boundaries of whiteness by

identifying their behavior with stereotypically non-white traits. In isolation, Moon

Mullins appeared rude, conniving, lecherous, dishonest and uncaring. However, the strip

rendered Moon's actions and character traits more nuanced by depicting them as

remarkably similar to Mushmouth's own failings and fallibilities. The line between Moon

and Mushmouth was a fine one, mitigated by a few key differences. The most obvious difference was that the strip regularly depicted Moon physically asserting his superiority

over Mushmouth, a re-occurring theme that functioned as the strip's most common punch-line. In addition, while Moon was no genius, Mushmouth's ignorance was more often than not to blame for foiling Moon's many schemes. Moon was portrayed as an irredeemable con artist, perpetually striving to make a buck in a variety of shady ways, and was almost always in debt. Mushmouth was also bad with money, a point the strip used to signal his similarity to Moon. Both characters were often charged with running errands by their social betters, and when they involved cash, they regularly succumbed to their temptations and gambled it away or were somehow cheated of it in ridiculously simple ways. This similarity in Moon and Mushmouth's behavior was visually reinforced in figures 2.8 and 2.9 in which the way in which the strip depicted both characters while gambling was almost identical (panels five and three respectively). And yet, a notable difference was also evident in these same strips. While Moon was constantly broke, spent his money unwisely and gambled, this was never at the behest of the devil that frequently

54 visited Mushmouth, suggesting that his was an inherent tendency to immorality that was

Figure 2.8 Frank Willard, "Mushmouth Should Do his Shooting with a Gun," Moon Mullins, 9 March 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

of a different order altogether. Similarly, in figure 2.9 Mushmouth's immoral behavior

was again associated with innateness when Moon, playing on a common black

stereotype, asked Mushmouth to procure a chicken "in his natural way." But while

Mushmouth was busy stealing a chicken, Moon was engaged in behavior that the strips

MOON MULLINS—NO QUESTIONS ASKEIT

Figure 2.9 Frank Willard, "No Questions Asked," Moon Mullins, 4 August 1924. suggested was almost as "natural" to him. By referencing these two "proverbial" black stereotypes, crap shooting and chicken stealing, the strip emphasized the similarities between Moon and Mushmouth in order to emphasize that Moon's character flaws were

30 Willard, 4 August 1924.

55 of a particularly transgressive order.31

Through the strip's strategic references to similarities and differences between

Moon and Mushmouth, Moon Mullins signalled that on a number of levels Moon had

more in common with Mushmouth than with the white characters in the strip. These

commonalities—slow-wittedness and immorality, to mention just a few—when embodied

in Mushmouth were a given; while the ways in which these traits manifested themselves

were often rendered in ways that were meant to be humorous, they were nonetheless

expected. However, when these same traits were embodied by Moon they formed the

brunt of the joke by virtue of being notably abnormal. Moon Mullins relied on

Mushmouth and the stereotypes he embodied in order to convey the full force of Moon's

character. Ralph Ellison argued that "since the beginning of the nation, white Americans

have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways

that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black

Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the 'outsider.'"

Whiteness as a transcendent, unmarked ideal relies on blackness, both visual and

symbolic, as a reference point to indicate what whiteness is not. This reference point

functions to mark the limits of whiteness, to reinforce not only what whiteness looks like,

but how it is understood, imaged, and envisioned. Moon Mullins relied on a base

grammar of race supplied by Mushmouth in order to illustrate and elaborate on Moon's

many failures to live up to ideal whiteness. But by extension, Moon performed a very

'' Cripps, 13. Cripps demonstrates that these were two of the first stereotypes to be reproduced in twentieth-century film when heavy-handed race humor replaced the more nuance depictions of race that had predominated in the early years of moving pictures. '2 Foster, 31. Ralph Ellison, "What America Would Be Without Blacks," in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White ed. David Roediger, (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 160-171. " Patricia McKee, Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner,Toni Morrison, New Americanists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 28.

56 similar function, embodying, by virtue of the similarities he shared with Mushmouth, a symbol of limits. Much as Mushmouth's blackness was deployed to mark the boundaries of whiteness, Moon's not-quite-whiteness similarly marked these same boundaries, if in a slightly different way.

While Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps all drew on fhematics and imagery that relied heavily on black and white binaries, they also drew on a "white other" that existed between those binaries. This white other is an under-explored figure who appears regularly in popular culture and is generally either ethnically marked, sexually deviant, morally depraved, or otherwise singled-out as non-normative. This figure "skirts the edges of the falsely constructed visual fantasies of whiteness," and reflects the bounding-off of whiteness much as black stereotypes do. The nature of whiteness requires that it constantly re-negotiate its parameters in order to re-define a social category that must attempt to perpetually homogenize difference." As a result, whiteness would not be able to exist were it not for "fears of race mixing, gender bending, class passing, and other forms of hybridity" that spur re-articulations of whiteness. The need to police the boundaries of whiteness not only against non-whiteness but also against not- quite-whiteness was expressed in Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps through these reflections of racialized, gendered, and classed anxieties. In their articulations of whiteness, these comic strips demonstrated that anxieties over race mixing, gender bending and class passing were regularly depicted as inherent failings.

j4 Foster, Performing Whiteness, 137. Wheeler Winston Dixon, "Archetypes of the Heavy in Classical Hollywood Cinema," in Beyond the Stars: Studies in American Popular Film, Volume 1, Stock Characters in American Popular Film ed. Paul Loukids and Linda K. Fuller (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1990), 201-211. j5 Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 12-14. j5 Foster, Performing Whiteness, 33.

57 CROSSING BOUNDARIES

In the 1920s the boundaries of whiteness were guarded against race-mixing by formal and informal forms of segregation, Jim Crow laws and various state-instituted anti-miscegenation laws. In 1924 Virginia's anti-miscegenation law was re-articulated in the Racial Integrity Act, passed in conjunction with an Act that allowed for forced sterilization of the "feeble minded." These measures fortified the boundaries of whiteness primarily against race-mixing but also against the threat posed by degenerate, unfit whites by policing sexual activity and the white body. In Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps white otherness was similarly policed through references to threats to the white body and to the improper maintenance of gender roles. Moon Mullins repeatedly emphasized Moon's not-quite-whiteness by lampooning Moon's inability to properly perform gender; he was neither able to secure a heteronormative relationship, nor was he able to successfully perform the playboy type. Again, the strip relied on comparison to and differentiation from Mushmouth's behaviour in order to illustrate the nuances of

Moon's failings. Even at moments when the relationship between Moon and his main squeeze, Little Egypt, seemed promising, Moon often blundered in a way that signalled his basic inability to secure a heteronormative relationship, as in figure 2.10 where

Moon's suggestions that if they were to marry he would gladly live off of her income puts a temporary end to their irregular courtship/7 But while Moon was often depicted as

37Willard, 1 July 1924.

58 il MOON MULUNS—MOON'S NOT SO PARTICULAR

MOON MULUNS—A BIG CLEANUP

Figure 2.11 Frank Willard, "A Big Cleanup," Moon Mullins, 23 June 1928, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. not descend.38 Moreover, Moon Mullins acknowledged that there was a degree of difference between the nature of Mushmouth's relationship with women and Moon's. In figure 2.12 Mushmouth came in from a blizzard to ask Moon if he could borrow his flivver to take his girlfriend. Cycloney, out on a date. On his way out the door he dropped

Willard, 23 June 1928.

59 j[ MOON MVLUNS—SUCH IS LOVE

Figure 2.12 Frank Willard, "Such is Love," Moon Mullins, 5 December 1924. Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. his coat. "Say stupid, ain't you gonna take your overcoat?'" Moon asked. "No suh!"

Mushmouth replied. "Wot ah'm gonna need is a fan."39 While on one hand this strip indicated that Mushmouth's relations with women were "hotter" than Moon's, it also pointed to a more subtle allusion to Moon's not-quite-whiteness. While Moon never went so far with a woman as to require "a fan," his marked appetite, a symbol of heightened sexual appetite signified Moon's lascivious nature where the comic strip could, in good taste, not. The connection between food and non-normative sexuality was reinforced in figure 2.12 by Mushmouth's comment: "Ef deys anything ah loves more'n pork chops it's dat gal Cycloney, yas suh."40 However, while Moon was regularly depicted as gluttonous, his consumption was offset by Mushmouth's tendency to compulsively consume until he made himself ill. Though perhaps not of the same order as Mushmouth's, Moon's

^ Willard, 5 December 1924. IU McF.lya. "Trashing the Presidency: Race, Class, and the Clinton/Lewinsky Affair,'' in Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York: New York University Press), 16; 6 December 1925.

60 MdpN KOim^^$^;y^E^^.WE^0^r-SAY.,fT': :.

News Syndicate. The strip's title referenced the popular song "Yes, We Have No Bananas" (1923). The Gumps referenced the song as well, for reasons that will be elaborated on in chapter two.

excessive sexuality and appetite, the latter arguably a projection of the former,

nonetheless signified traits that were incompatible with normative whiteness. By

demonstrating Moon's inability to realize white heteronormativity and by doing so in ways that re-emphasized Moon's similarity to Mushmouth, the strip reinforced Moon's not-quite-whiteness.

Racial boundaries were also a central theme in Gasoline Alley, a strip that, in its first few years, hinged on playing off of the ways in which the world of Walt and Skeezix defied normative family life, albeit in a very playful and understated way. From the day

Walt found Skeezix on his doorstep. Gasoline Alley focused on his awkward parenting and his struggles to provide a "proper" family environment. Walt often described his parenting techniques with the vocabulary he would otherwise use to describe car maintenance. Though he officially adopted Skeezix in 1925, Walt's ability to parent the boy was repeatedly contested in several story arcs, both by the mother who had abandoned Skeezix and by the father who for many years had been unaware of his existence. Though Walt and Skeezix were clearly inseparable, almost from the outset there was something about their relationship that was not quite right. Both before and

61 after Skeezix's arrival. Walt regularly maintained that he was and would continue to be a

confirmed bachelor, a point the strip reinforced regularly in Walt's repeated assertion,

upon observing the other Alley men's interaction with their wives: "I know when I'm

well off." Gasoline Alley's readership, however, knew this to be a lie soon after Phyllis

Blossom moved in next door, and for years readers waited through Walt's bumbling

courtship for the day he and Mrs. Blossom were finally married. The strip's repeated

suggestions, along the way, that Walt's family unit was incomplete suggested that

normativity eluded Walt and Skeezix but was eventually achieved through marriage, a tactic, much like marrying up, that is one of the classic ways a character who inhabits the

fringes of whiteness is able to class pass, or to better perform whiteness.41 While Walt's

self-identification as a confirmed bachelor certainly did not have the effect of marking his social status in the same way that Moon's imprudent behavior did, Walt's marriage did finally signal that he had crossed a border that policed the boundaries, in the world of

Gasoline Alley at least, of white heteronormativity. The strip reinforced the significance of this boundary crossing by casting it in racial overtones; in figure 2.14, one of the last instances of the "I know when I'm well off trope, Plato, the Alley's black chauffeur, uttered the phrase, much to Walt's surprise.4 The strip positioned the very notion that both Plato and Walt could be "in the same boat," as the title of figure 2.14 suggested, as ridiculous and used Plato's appropriation of Walt's phrase as indicative of Walt's situation on the boundary of normative whiteness.

Foster. Performing Whiteness. 86. ,: King, 28 July 1924.

62 t'-'\ TT ^^ -~2~-y-— ~ . i 1.1mi.my..nil i TTBf-'T; ssajj^gB" .

I ICiUWt MTITT vtVe IT Figure 2.14 Frank O. King, "Both in the Same Boat," Gasoline Alley, 28 July 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Anxiety over miscegenation and inter-racial intimacies in the 1920s was most

notable in the rise of the Klan, the debate over the Dyer anti-lynching law, the rise of the

"black brute" type, popularized in Birth of a Nation and a variety of state anti-

miscegenation laws that spoke to fears of sexual race-mixing. The careful control of race-

mixing of a different kind was also at stake in a number of highly publicized cases during the late-nineteenth century and early twentieth century that saw black women fight to keep the white children they had. through various circumstances, all but adopted. The

American imagination could conceive of the mammy's nurturing care, but the line between mammy and mother was one that had to be policed. J Rachel's role in Gasoline

Alley reflected and elaborated on the need to police similar boundaries. For years the strip mentioned nothing about whether Rachel had any children of her own and suggested that all her maternal energy was devoted entirely to Skeezix. But while the strip indicated that her relationship with Skeezix was as maternal as could be, it also made it abundantly clear that Rachel could never be a mother to Skeezix. The strip reinforced this distinction

'J McElya, Clinging to Mammy. '''' McElya argues that mammies generally have no children of their own, or if they do, they are never discussed or described. This can be read either as a denial of their right to participate in the lives of their own children or as a refusal to acknowledge the sexual life of black women, and by extension a refusal to acknowledge the violent ways in which white men have figured therein.

63 when Skeezix's father attempted to gain custody of the boy in 1926. The ensuing court case saw testimony from a variety of characters who were meant to convince the judge that Skeezix should remain with Walt.43 Unwittingly, Rachel provided testimony that contributed to the judge' decision not to grant Walt custody of Skeezix by asserting that her role in raising the boy equalled Walt's, thus situating herself as Skeezix's de facto mother. Rachel's claim to have taken on this transgressive role endangered the perilous microcosm of Gasoline Alley, a microcosm that was ultimately righted by Walt's marriage. Laura Doyle argues that patriarchal societies rely heavily on the "controlled circulation of women in marriage" to reproduce class and racial boundaries.4 In this light, the careful delimiting of Rachel's position in the Wallet household and Mrs.

Blossom's carefully orchestrated movement into it both played important roles in controlling the racialized and gendered world of Gasoline Alley, one that fits it into a long history of the contrasting images "of the angel in the house and the black mammy," ideologies that again deployed a black presence in a way that served a very functional narrative purpose by marking the boundaries of whiteness.

Gasoline Alley also projected anxieties over race-mixing onto Skeezix, whose childish antics repeatedly culminated in his "blackening up." More often than not,

Skeezix's inadvertent blackface was the result of misbehavior, and as the banner below illustrates. Gasoline Alley functioned as a corrective to this behavior—showing him the way to back to proper whiteness. Skeezix was perfectly positioned to articulate the

45 This arc continued from 14 July 1926 to 7 November 1926 and made much of the differences between blood kinship and the kind of kinship Walt and Skeezix share. 46 Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture, Race and American culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6. 47 Doyle, 7.

64 boundaries of whiteness in part because childish gaffs lend themselves so well to

didacticism, and in part because Skeezix's illegitimate birth and inauspicious heritage

provided an ideal platform from which the strip could demonstrate the importance of

correcting transgression and reinforcing proper behavior. Skeezix's role in articulating

anxieties regarding race-mixing took two forms: on one hand his blackening up was often the resulted of misbehaviour and was meant to reinforce the importance of maintaining proper "white" behavior; on the other hand, Skeezix repeatedly wound up positioned so that he participated in policing the boundaries of whiteness more literally. Consider, for instance Skeezix's friend Anthacite, named for a type of coal, whose desire to play fireman to Skeezix's locomotive engineer was quashed in figure 2.16 by Skeezix's bossiness and insistence that Anthacite "keep to his place'* and play the Pullman Porter.

Skeezix's racial policing was given added nuance by the strip's persistent invocation

65 News Syndicate, of the need to keep the performative qualities of race in check. In figure 2.17 Skeezix and

Anthacite engaged in blackface and whiteface respectively. That Anthacite was the only one of the two to receive a scolding differentiated between the fearful potential of

"passing" and the allowable transgression that was an element of blackface minstrelsy.

The patter reproduced in the same strip's banner underscored the strip's allusion to blackface. In a vignette referencing minstrel performances, the figure on the left asked:

"Who was that gentleman I seen yo' wife with las' night?" to which the figure on the right replied. "That wasn't no gentleman that was me."

King. 30 January 1927.

66 Figure 2.17 Frank O. King, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 30 January 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

67 The thematic correlation between blackness, misbehavior and dirtiness on one

hand and the opposition of these concepts with cleanliness, obedience, and whiteness on

the other was repeatedly hammered home in Gasoline Alley. The racial cross-dressing of

figure 2.17 resulted from the fact that Skeezix wished to impersonate Anthacite so as to

be able to play with his guinea pig and pet rats, pets less wholesome but more exciting

than Skeezix's terrier, Pal. In figure 2.18 Skeezix's wish to avoid bathing leads him to

day-dream the Tussle-Tops, stereotypical representations of non-white "savages."

Through this quite literal invocation of Morrison's "Africanist presence," the strip both

literally and symbolically represented what whiteness should ideally strive not to

Figure 2.18 Frank O. King, "Sunday Supplement," Gasoline Alley, 27 March 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. reproduce, demonstrating the way comic strip representations of non-whiteness, and of blackness in particular, served a particularly functional role, reinforcing the boundaries of whiteness by manifesting ideal whiteness. Figure 2.19, part of a Winnie Winkle the

Breadwinner Sunday supplement, reinforced the themes explored in Gasoline Alley.

68 Against his sister Winnie's express instructions to behave like "a gentleman," Perry went and got into trouble, resulting in his transformation into a "tar baby." The moral of

Perry's story, as expressed in the last panel, was: "it's better to be a lil' gentleman" that to

"get th' tar knocked outta me." The strip's association of whiteness with propriety and blackness with badness performed a function similar to that of Skeezix's blackening up.

The fact that both Perry and Skeezix's antics took place primarily on the Sunday pages,

Figure 2.19 Martin Branner, "Sunday Supplement," Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. and thus targeted a younger audience, reinforces their instructive qualities.

While Skeezix and Perry's hijinx may have seemed childish and superficial, the fact that they inadvertently performed blackface, with its long history as a site of exploring and reinforcing the boundaries of race and class, suggests that their childish antics were about much more than behavioral modification. Moreover, their performances point to the performance of a type of narrative blackface that was at play in

Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley, more broadly.50 Mushmouth, Anthacite, Rachel, Plato,

Mandy and Esmerelda were all part of a performance that transcended the panels of the comic strip and operated as part of white culture's large-scale blackface performance, enacted at traditional sites of blackface minstrelsy as well as in advertisement, literature,

Martin Branner, Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, Chicago Tribune (Chicago, 1L), 21 March 1927 , Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. 50 Here I am drawing from McElya's description of what she calls "epistolary blackface," a genre of writing by white women posing as Mammies. Though McElya does not point explicitly to other kinds of narrative blackface, extrapolating out to other forms of narrative blackface seems an obvious extension of her term and its significance. McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 59.

69 and in other white-authored cultural production more generally. Skeezix and Perry's

blackface performances coincided with the first quite partial and somewhat nostalgic

scholarship on blackface.21 But while these uncritical works cast blackface as a thing of

the past, Al Jolson's much publicized blackface performance in The Jazz Singer (1927)

demonstrated not only the persistence and popularity of blackface, but its continued

relevance to questions of whiteness and ethnicity as well.

The histories of blackface written in the 1920s were superseded beginning in the

1950s by scholars who engaged extensively, and heatedly, with the implications of

blackface minstrelsy for working class participants, ethnic minorities, black performers,

and black audiences. From the early nineteenth century white actors using burnt cork to

darken their skin performed as African American characters that were generally depicted

as lazy, child-like, and comedic. These characters were often incorporated into, or were

fashioned after, Vaudeville-style performances wherein blackface actors would sing,

dance, and provide comic relief. Beginning in the 1840s black actors also began applying

blackface in order to perform roles similar to those set out previously by white performers. While much recent scholarship deals extensively with the implication of

black participation in minstrelsy, the work blackface did in perpetuating black stereotypes

" Mikko Tuhkanen, "Of Blackface and Paranoid Knowledge: Richard Wright, Jacques Lacan, and the Ambivalence of Black Minstresy," Diacritics 31 (Summer 2001). Daily Paskman and Sigmund Spaeth's "Gentlemen, Be Seated, " Carl Wiltke's Tambo and the Bones, and Constance Rourke's "That Long- Tail'd Blue" in her American Humor inaugurated the study of minstrelsy but provided uncritical histories of the practice as simple cultural borrowing. A second wave of work on minstrelsy begining with Ralph Ellison's "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," was far more attendant to the sociopolitical tensions at the heart of minstrelsy representations. Subsequent authors engaged with the significance of blackface to the articulation of class and race lines 52 The Jazz Singer was one of the first full-length films produced with synchronised sound. Al Jolson's character, Jackie Rabinowitz pursues a career in entertainment despite the wishes of his father, a Jewish Cantor. Jackie changes his name to Jack Robin and becomes hugely successful performing in blackface and on the Vaudeville circuit. Through these performances he whitens his traditional Jewish roots and earn the acclamation of mainstream American society. In the final scene Robins, in blackface, performs "My Mammy" to his mother, sitting in the front row of a packed house. This appeal to the Mammy figure provides another example of the Mammy's symbolic usefulness in white cultural production.

70 and policing racial boundaries is of most interest to me here. The extent to which these

black performances were able to challenge or disrupt the racialized assumptions inherent

in the stereotypes they embodied is one of the points of contestations in blackface

scholarship.33

While there is some disagreement regarding the effects blackface had on performers situated on the peripheries of whiteness, there is sufficient evidence to point to the fact that blackface functioned to "whiten" ethnic and working class performers. In

1920 Constance Rourke observed that following the Civil War, Irish, German, and Jewish performers stepped onto the minstrel stage and that eventually these "Ameri- can [sic] types seemed to be joining in a single semblance." Minstrelsy also allowed white audiences revel in note-quite-white behaviour by projecting this behaviour onto black characters." Morrison describes minstrelsy as a "method by which whites disavow— acknowledge and at the same time deny—difference at the level of the body; as a process of fetishism, it seeks...to restore the wholeness and unity threatened by the sight of difference.'"56 While Morisson's description is applicable both to Gasoline Alley's depiction of Skeezix's blackening and the strip's more general blackface performance, it

"' Cockrell, for instance, argues that minstrelsy allowed for "engagement at the edges," a forum for collaboration and boundary-crossing between classes and ethnicities. Lott also argues that minstrelsy allowed white performers to borrow from black culture in ways that 54 Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959) accessed online at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hypertex.html 55 Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (University of California Press, 1998) 56. Rogin argues that minstrelsy functioned to some extent as a melting-pot for immigrant entertainers; minstrel performances played on stereotype such that ethnic difference was subsumed and replaced with distinct racial divisions. Thus, Rogin suggests that immigrants Americanized themselves by crossing and re-crossing the racial lines; Robert Nowatzki, "Paddy Jumps Jim Crow: Irish-Americans and Blackface Minstrelsy," Eire-Ireland 41, no. 3&4 (Fall/Win 2006) Nowaltzki argues that "Irish-American performers became more 'American' by participating in minstrelsy and by using minstrelsy to transform their image from ludicrous stage Irishmen to white Irish-Americans....Irish-America minstrel performers gradually became more 'white' and 'American' as a result of denigrating (or at least differentiating themselves from ), African-Americans." Roediger and others 36 Morrison. 119.

71 is not as applicable to Moon's blackening up, which was not so much about

acknowledging difference and restoring unity as it was about identifying difference that

were irreconcilable with whiteness.

Whereas in Gasoline Alley fears of race mixing were relatively muted in their cautionary objectives. Moon Mullins deployed fears of race mixing much more purposefully in order to identify and critique Moon's not-quite-whiteness. On several occasions, the strip depicted Moon in blackface, not to emphasize the difference between his whiteness and Mushmouth's blackness, but rather to reinforce their similarities. In figure 2.20, the strip referenced blackface in order to indicate that the only performative element of Moon's blackface was his literal blackening up)—his behaviour required no

York News Syndicate. modification. Similarly, the suggestion in figure 2.21 that Moon and Mushmouth could potentially pass as brothers is presented as less ridiculous than the idea that Moon might not be reticent to admit it.3 Moon's plan to stage his own hanging—an image with

57 Willard, 21 December 1925.

72 > |__ MOON MULLINS—AN OPTICAL ILLUSION

Figure 2.21 Frank Willard,. "An Optical Illusion," Moon Mullins, 21 December 1925, Chicago Tribune- New York News Syndicate. striking similarities to many contemporaneous images of lynching—in order to fool Little

Egypt's father into regretting having impeded their relationship suggested that Moon's blackface was not blackface at all but rather was revelatory of his true nature. In these ways Moon Mullins further cast Moon's behavior and social status in racialized

MOON MULLINS-THE OLD GENT IS A GREAT LITTLE SYMPATHIZER

Figure 2.22 Frank Willard, "The Old Gent is a Great Little Sympathizer," Moon Mullins, 23 October 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. terms.38 That Little Egypt's father, while at first chagrined, ultimately did not change his opinion regarding whether Moon should date his daughter further affirmed that this relationship was one that crossed certain unseemly and boundaries. Through references to miscegenation and race mixing Moon Mullins signalled to readers that Moon's defiance of the boundaries of whiteness had gone too far. The strip reinforced

38 Willard, 23 October 1924. 59 Willard, 24 October 1924.

73 contemporary fears of race-mixing while at the same time positioning Moon's not-quite- whiteness as indicative of transgressions so dire as to render him irreconcilably different: an irredeemable white other who should be prevented from "mixing."

These transgressions, or near-transgressions were necessary to emphasize and reinforce the boundaries of whiteness. By calling attention to and critiquing black and not-quite-white behavior these strips reinforced the racialized and gendered limits of whiteness. However, Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps also illustrated how these limits could be broached in acceptable ways through the performance of whiteface.

Generally, through successful whiteness performance, signs of ethnicity, class, or failure to conform to gender norms can be homogenized and largely erased. By erasing or subsuming markers of particularity, whiteface reinforces the normativity of whiteness.

Occasional transgressive behavior was easily remedied in Gasoline Alley by Walt's assimilation to his appropriate role as father and husband. But while Moon's attempts at bettering his social status often yielded him opportunities to expunge the characteristics that prevented him from successfully performing whiteface, he was fundamentally unable to take advantage of these. In figure 2.23, for instance, Moon received coaching on proper behavior, coaching that did him little good, as Moon quickly returned to his characteristically irreverent ways. Moon repeatedly failed to capitalize on these opportunities to whiten his behavior or attitudes, often because his exaggerated character

74 Tribune-New York News Syndicate, failings would get the best of him. Moon's failure to pursue these paths to normative forms of success—marriage or proper employment, for instance—were at the crux of the strip's entertainment value. Where Gasoline Alley policed the boundaries of whiteness by resolving potential transgressive behavior, Moon Midlins demonstrated the perils of not addressing behavioural faults that could in theory be remedied through studied whiteface performance. Moon's failed attempts at performing whiteface indicated that successful whiteface performances entailed an element of class passing that Moon was unable to successfully reproduce.

Moon Mullins repeatedly indicated that what Moon lacked in order to successfully class pass was the appropriate cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural capital, like social capital, is the unacknowledged coeval of economic capital. It is the ability to read particular types of cultural codes and to be able to parse the secondary meaning of cultural production. Cultural capital is generally assumed to be inherent, as in the ability to appreciate classical music or to recognize a work of fine art, but Bourdieu demonstrates that cultural capital is the product of upbringing and, to some extent, education. These abilities, and the recognition thereof, function to euphemize power, naturalizing the connections between certain kinds of exclusive knowledge and

75 socioeconomic privilege. Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and, as will be discussed shortly,

The Gumps all valuated cultural capital. Moreover, they drew attention to a given

character's lack of lack of cultural capital by essentializing these failings, thereby

rendering class markers seemingly inherent. What hindered the performance of whiteface

and the class passing it entailed in these strips was cast as inherent difference and

opposed to socioeconomic inequality.

Moon's lack of cultural capital is what repeatedly prevented him from capitalizing

on many of the opportunities he was offered to class pass by rendering him unable to pick

up on the necessary social cues. Out on a drive with some elite friends, one of them mentioned: "the ancestral mansion on our left...is simply full of curios," to which Moon replied, "can't you do nothing to get rid of them?"60 The strip depicted Moon as so bereft of cultural capital that he could not recognize a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, nor did he know who Shakespeare was, mistaking him for "th' bird which writes th' patter for

Egypt" in her vaudeville acts. ' In Moon's case, class passing, and the whiteface performance class passing would have enabled, was unavailable to him by virtue, not necessarily of his lack of economic capital or social capital, but because of his lack of cultural capital. But because so many of Moon's failings were likened to Mushmouth's and made to seem beyond correction, Moon Mullins positioned the kinds of failings characteristic of a lack of cultural capital as inherent. These seemingly inherent failings were in large part what hindered Moon's ability to perform whiteness and thus relegated him to not-quite-whiteness.

60 Willard, 7 April 1928. 1,1 Willard, 9 April 1928; Willard, 12 December 1925.

76 CULTURAL CAPITAL AND NOT-QUITE-WHITENESS

The association between cultural capital and whiteness was made most forcefully

in The Gumps and by Andy Gump in particular. Unlike Moon, whose lack of cultural

capital was only one impediment to whiteness, Andy's lack of cultural capital was his

only impediment to whiteness. The Gumps enters into this chapter's larger argument

unique in that it was the only comic strip of the three that did not include in its cast of

characters any regularly appearing non-white characters. It thus serves as an ideal

example of the way not-quite-whiteness functioned in the same symbolic, limning way

blackness functioned in the other strips. The Gumps 'most obviously not-quite-white

character was Tilda, the maid the Gump family hired in 1924. Tilda's "white otherness"

was most evident in the fact that she inhabited a space between white and black

dichotomies and, more specifically between the figures of black servant and angel of the

house. The strip immediately played on these contrasting images when, in the days that

led up to Tilda's official employment, Andy Gump warned his wife Minerva not to over-

idealize the woman she intended to hire: "Did you ever stop to think that the angel you

have in mind might soil her nice white wings doing house-work—if you get the kind of

servant you're describing we'll get rich charging people a dime a piece to look at her."

Andy's sarcasm appealed to naturalized associations of whiteness with goodness,

cleanliness, the angel of the home, and alluded to the impossibility of finding such an angel in domestic labor. J Indeed, the strip repeatedly asserted that Tilda was neither an angel nor entirely white. The racialized elements of Tilda's character were particularly obvious in comparison to non-white characters in other strips, demonstrating the

62 Smith, 10 February 1924. 6j Minerva's repeated use, in this strip and others, of "slave" to refer to domestic activities she she feels are beneath her speaks again to the deployment of blackness to narrative purposes.

77 symbolic proximity between non-whiteness and not-quite-whiteness. For instance, both

Tilda and Rachel were represented as naive, ignorant, and physically awkward. Tilda's

role in The Gumps was similar to Rachel's in that she, too, was particularly functional,

engaging in domestic labor on a literal level and serving as a narrator and interpreter on a

formal level. In addition, visual references such as those in figures 2.24 and 2.25 (panels

4 and 3 respectively) signal clear connections between the two characters.

GASOLINE ALLEY-ALL ALONE . . ..— , * „

Figure 2.24 Frank O. King, "All Alone," Gasoline Alley 28 January' 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Figure 2.25 Sidney Smith, "There's Many a Good Tune in an Old Violin," The Gumps, 2 January 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Tilda's tendency to consume gross quantities of food also likened her to Moon and

Mushmouth. In addition, Tilda's monologue on the evils of marriage in figure 2.26, with its concluding statement, "cage me and I die." expressed a sentiment similar to Walt and

78 Figure 2.26 Sidney Smith, "Here Comes the Bride," The Gumps, 14 July 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Plato's "I know when I'm well off.''1

Like Mushmouth and Rachel, Tilda's function in The Gumps was to "limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness."65 She did this by supplementing the narrative arcs of other characters and by functioning as Andy's foil. Tilda and Andy were constantly at each others' throats and this behavior reinforced the strip's implication that they were more similar that they realized. On 1 April 1926 Andy went up into the attic to do some spring cleaning bemoaning what he perceived to be Tilda's laziness all the while. "I suppose that maid don't want to soil her lily white hands with dusty cobwebs— maybe she thinks they are pieces of imported Irish lace which we are keeping for family

Figure 2.27Sindey Smith, "Dust Hound," The Gamps, 1 April 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

'" Smith, 14 July 1926. Morrison, 51-52.

79 heirlooms" he mused, clearly mocking both Tilda's not-quite-whiteness and her lack of cultural capital.66 When Andy found himself stuck in these cobwebs and in need of his

wife's assistance, the strip reinforced to his blatant hypocrisy and repeated the strip's

allusions to Andy's own not-quite-whiteness.

Through repeated visual cues the strip drew additional attention to the similarities

between Andy and Tilda. The last panels in figures 2.28 and 2.29 illustrated a coping

mechanism both characters shared while figures 2.30 and 2.31 (panels 3 and 2 in

particular) clearly pointed to a physical likeness and general kinship. Other visual cues

Figure 2.28 Sidney Smith, "The Next Day," The Gumps, 2 February 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Figure 2.29 Sidney Smith, "Angels Have Wings," The Gumps, 31 May 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Smith, 1 April 1926.

80 THE GUMPS —JUST A GOOD GIRL , ^ladP^^^**^

Figure 2.30 Sidney Smith, "Just a Good Girl," 7%e Gumps, 18 May 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

THE GUMPS—THE PERFECT PUTT

Figure 2.31 Sidney Smith, "The Perfect Putt," The Gumps,15 May 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. drew similarities between Tilda and other poor white characters in The Gumps, most notably to "Old Timer- and "Old Timer's Wife," (see figure 2.32) characters with whom

Andy stayed while on annual fishing trips to a village called Shady Rest. All three of these characters were depicted in the same crude drawing style, all similarly lacked

sophistication, and all function to diffuse Andy's pretentions to superiority. Old Timer,

and Andy's fishing trip arcs more generally, provided classic instances of the strip's

critique of Andy's pretentiousness. Writing to Old Timer shortly before his 1924 trip,

Andy explained that "instead of riding on the local anaesthetic you call a railroad I will

use a modern invention that you or your friends never saw - it is known as an automobile

or horseless carriage.. .tell your friends not to be frightened as an automobile is harmless

81 if you don't tease it - it will be a big day for the natives." When Andy's over-packed ear

broke down outside of Shady Rest and had to be towed into town by one of the "natives"

and his team of horses Andy's condescending attitude formed the object of the strip's

humor. At Shady Rest Andy regularly noted substantial difference between what he

perceived to be the simplicity and gaucheness of those around him and what he believed

to be his own refined sensibilities. Meanwhile, as the above example illustrates, the strip

regularly cut him down a notch in order to call the lie to his pretentions to superiority. In

fact, the Shady Rest arcs regularly indicated that Andy and his hosts were actually of a

kind.

In one such arc Andy arrived at Shady Rest in July 1927 and proceeded to provide

a series of comments on his hosts' new baby that reproduced a variety of contemporary

beliefs regarding race, inherent racial traits, and links between race, character and

genetics. Suggesting that the child was genetically destined to grow up rough and

uncouth, Andy commented: "It kills me when I hear them trying to decide what kind of a

flower their little weed is going to be -judging by his voice the only job waiting for him

when he graduates from the reform school will be radio announcer or auctioneer."

Invoking contemporary thinking on the varying levels of "development" of different

"races" Andy wondered at his host's careful attention to his child: "The way he's

watching that kid you would think he was guarding the U.S. mint - maybe he's afraid

some evolutionist will come along and grab the clown prince for the museum of natural

history."69 Pointing to theories of hereditary degeneracy, Andy mused: "It's hard to keep a straight face when they tell me how their little liability is a valuable asset - what a tough

"Smith, 31 July 1924. 68 Smith, 27 July 1927. 69 Smith, 5 August 1927.

82 break the kid is getting - he's found guilty before his trial starts - the qualities that he will

inherit from his parents will help him as much as a couple of anvils would help a channel

swimmer." Tellingly, though, one of the last strips in this arc found Andy saying, "Well,

if that kid is beautiful I'm going to buy myself a tin cup and a dog to lead me - he's just a

red faced-toofhless-hairless-expressionless bunch of noise surrounded by appetite,"71 a

description that was ultimately as applicable to Andy as it was to the child, a point that

was visual reinforced in figure 2.32. This arc's humor did not lie in suggesting that Andy

THE QV M P S-T HE CROWN PRINCE

Figure 2.32 Sidney Smith, "The Crown Prince," The Gumps, 21 July 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

was wrong in his assertions that the child was of genetically inferior stock but rather in

demonstrating that despite Andy's delusions, he would never succeed in convincing

anyone that he was not of similar stock. Through repeated references to scientific racism

and eugenics theories, the strip alerted the reader to Andy's own not-quite-whiteness.

The above arc played on themes of innateness and that were repeatedly invoked

throughout The Gumps. Andy often asserted that he was the embodiment of a "Gump nature," one that he claimed made him "red-blooded," a "natural leader," and a specimen

of the "finer nature." These claims flew in the face of repeated proof of his poor constitution, his limited understanding of the "finer things," and lack of leadership or

70 Smith. I 8 August 1927. '' Smith. 27 Auaust 1927.

83 self-reliance. As the strip's stock "Oh Min!" gag indicated, Andy repeatedly relied on his wife to help him out of a variety of predicaments. Andy was also entirely reliant on the paternalism and benevolence of his billionaire Uncle Bim, whose financial hand-outs sustained the family. And yet Andy was oblivious to his incredible fortune, so much so that he preached to a beggar: "Instead of waiting for opportunity to knock at my door I unscrewed the door and went hunting for opportunity - climbing the ladder of success is harder than rolling down the hill of misfortune - but any time you want to wipe out hard luck just use hard work for your eraser and you'll soon have the world at your feet."

Andy had, of course, done none of these things, but remained oblivious to the fact that he had benefited entirely from Bim's patronage and owed him his socioeconomic status.

In addition to poking fun at Andy's failure to acknowledge to whom he owed his wealth, the strip lampooned his inability to live up to the expectations of the status his wealth ought to have conferred. Expressing his deluded perception of his social status,

Andy commented: "if there is such a thing as an aristocracy of dollars it's up to me to show a lot of the guys that from now on they're talking to a bird with royal blood in his veins." Andy's conflation of wealth with inherent worth—with an innate essence—points again to the crux of the strip's humor: Andy's persistent demonstrations not that money does not make the man, but that no amount of money can conceal an unworthy man's true nature. The Gumps insisted that Andy did indeed have an inherent nature, that it was uncouth, grotesque and common, like Tilda's, and that this nature prevented Andy's class passing. This theme was given racial nuance. In 1924 Andy ran for president and campaigned largely by attempting to appeal to "the common man." Though he clearly did not consider himself common, he positioned himself as such in his speeches and dress,

72 Smith, 25 January 1924.

84 stating "I know clothes don't make the man, but you can't dress like Little Eva when

you're playing Uncle Tom." Here Andy clearly racialized class lines, aligning the

common man with Uncle Tom, and himself with Little Eva.73 Andy believed he was

figuratively blackening up in order to perform class difference. However, the humor of

the strip relied on the fact that Andy did not realize that he had in fact been attempting to

"play" Little Eva all along in his unsuccessful attempts at performing whiteface.

Andy's attempt at class-passing, a performance that was unsuccessful and

transparent to readers, spoke to contemporary anxieties regarding undesirable passing at

various levels of society. From anxieties over immigrants imperilling the race to concerns

over miscegenation and the need to sterilize the "feeble-minded," anxieties over

maintaining the boundaries of whiteness were manifested in concerns that deficient or

degenerate persons might be able to blend seamlessly into American society. Mary

Chapman argues that "as long as the myth of self-making has existed in America, there

have been grave suspicions of theatricality in American culture." One paradox deeply

structured in American culture is that at the same time that the transformative potential of

self-fashioning is celebrated, "those who hide their origins or disguise what is considered their gender, race, class, or sexuality are often distrusted." Demonstrating this, American popular culture has provided numerous examples of confidence men, cross-dressers, swindlers, and individuals who race-pass, characters who self-fashion with varying degrees of success and various nefarious ends. In such cases, self-performance is

"associated [with]...hypocrisy, deceptions, and challenges to existing ordering principles of class, race, and sexuality" rather than "with the positive values of social mobility and

'' 13 September 1924.

85 self-determination."

Suspicions of theatrical duplicity manifested themselves in the comic strips both

in the more commonplace forms of mistaken identity as well as in instances of class

passing. 1920s comic strips were rife with stories of individuals pretending to be people

they were not, disguising themselves, as in figure 2.33, for personal gain.73

with which she hopes to win Uncle Bim's love, and fortune. Sidney Smith. "A Picture no Artist can Paint," The Gumps, 15 February 1928, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

In figure 2.34 Moon Mullins indicated his awareness of elements of upper class living

that he could attempt to mimic, telling his barber: "Spill a lot of that rose water on my

hair. I'm startin' on a long trip with a wealthy old guy and his daughter today and I want

MOON MULLINS—THE MIND READER '. |fl

News Syndicate.

Mary Chapman, "Performing Culture," American Literary Hisioiy, 14 (Spring 2002), 1 50-151. 75 Smith, 15 February 1928.

86 to smell like I had a lot of class." Similarly, in an arc in which Moon was temporarily successful at convincing the Florida elite that he is a duke, it was the fact that he was able to inadvertently perform certain mannerisms considered "royal" that fooled those around him in the short-run.77 Con artists abounded in Moon Mullins, The Gumps and Gasoline

II MOON MULLINS—THERE'S PROOF IN THE PUDDING \l

Figure 2.35 Drawing attention to the performative elements of class, the last panel reads; "He's fallen off— what better proof could you ask for that he is royalty?" Frank Willard, "There's the Proof in the Pudding," Moon Mullins, 24 February 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Alley and all of them, like Moon and Andy, were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to pass. In this sense the strips reassured readers by demonstrating that characters whose self-transformation was disingenuous or dangerous would be revealed and that in the case of those attempting to class pass, they would be exposed by their inherent classlessness.

But where, in the case of Moon for example, much of this theatricality involved a measure of deception, Andy Gump's did not. Andy, having legitimately come into money through his uncle, was simply trying to occupy what he perceived to be his appropriate class. But his attempts at putting on a "touch of class," as in figure 2.35, regularly exposed his classlessness.78 While Andy may have been the beneficiary of Uncle Bim's

76 Willard. 6 September 1927. 77 Willard, 24 February 1926. 7S Smith, 7 June 1928.'

87 Figure 2.36 Andy's ridiculous getup adds "just a touch of class." Sidney Smith, "Fresh Lemonade. Made Right in the Shade," The Gumps, 7 June 1928, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. money, he was not the beneficiary of his cultural capital, and this deficiency prevented him from occupying the rung on the social ladder that he perceived to be rightly his.

But cultural capital while at once a crucial mode of distinguishing between social class, is at the same time generally perceived to be inherent and thus does not register as an artificial barrier to social advancement.80 Andy just seemed like a culturally inept buffoon

• ^-~—-^___^ " •"••'-*•! ~.-——.»«.»***«.:.<••** ^, tjf^p . ••-

WEPN35St>AY. JABTUKY Za~l^~~ ——— • ~ — ^.' ' ~ • • ~—~±-.:.. ";.,,-.•;. —• -J.':-. • ' ~^I1 "~ ^^— „„ ^ , • & Tfc:Z&L\ - - , ,'•-•' THE CvlwJT^N.Ew' A?JT3f}!tr'i ~ ———i ZI^ZZl

whose bumbling lack of social skills rendered him naturally unfit for admission into the class he should by all economic rights have been accepted into. Andy's attempt to class- pass was rendered laughable in The Gumps precisely because his attempts at self-

Bourdieu argues that cultural capital can rarely be assimilated second-hand. Pierre Bourdieu. "The Forms of Capital," in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook oftheoiy and Research for the Sociology; of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985), 242-243.

88 transformation were not the product of self-determination or hard-earned social mobility.

Andy's claim to belong to an "aristocracy of dollars" was represented as ridiculous

because he so brazenly "challenged the existing ordering principles of class." Minerva,

in her eponymous wisdom, recognized this barrier to Andy's social advancement. On

their return home from dinner with friends she scolded Andy: "All you talked about was

Figure 2.38 Sidney Smith, "Blue Blood," The Gumps, 28 November 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

what a fine turkey we had, how much you ate and how cheap turkeys used to be when

you were a boy—F1I bet the Nesbits had a good laugh after we left their party.. ..What

and how much you ate is not considered a nice topic for conversation among refined

people. You know how cultured the Nesbits are." Andy replied that "when it comes to

splashing culture around the Gumps don't take a back seat from anybody—it takes a full

blooded Indian chief to out rank me in American society—don't ever forget that my

ancestors came over on the Mayflower." "On the Mayflower?" replied Min. "1 didn't

know there were any steerage passengers on the Mayflower."82 Andy's claim to "blue

blood" is significant, as it hinged on a claim to being an original settler of the nation in a

way that relied on invoking imperialism, a trope that will be explored in the following

81 Chapman. 150-151. 82 Smith, 28 November 1924.

89 chapter. Min's denial of Andy's claim to cultured lineage is equally significant, largely

because it hinged on her critique of Andy's attitude to food, a key marker of cultural

capital. The distinction of quality over quantity, a distinction that relies on the luxury of

being able to privilege the aesthetic qualities of consumption over purely nutritional

no

needs, is a distinction that marks elite taste. Andy's obliviousness to the fact that "what

and how much you ate is not considered a nice topic for conversation among refined

people," a sign of his lack of cultural capital, was also a sign of his likeness to characters

such as Tilda, Moon, and Mushmouth, all characters for whom excessive appetites were

signs of non- or not-quite-whiteness.

Gross consumption, like other activities that involve bodily functions, were

deployed in the strips as markers of tastelessness and by extension classlessness. As

Bourdieu put it, "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." Bourdieu writes that

"the denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—enjoyment,

which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of

those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous,

distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane." As a result, cultural consumption

is "predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function or

legitimating social difference." 5 In Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps the

profane, vulgar, and coarse was often expressed and elaborated on through recourse to a

grammar of race. Social inequality was essentialized by rendering those who lacked

cultural capital not-quite-white and mystifying the power and privilege maintained by

h' Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste trans, Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 5-6. Bourdieu, Distinction, 6. *° Bourdieu. Distinction 7.

90 those who did.

In Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps, the essentialization of cultural capital drew on a common grammar of race. The work that stereotypes performed in these strips simplified and abstracted out markers of difference and rendered these markers widely applicable to other forms of differentiation. Moon Mullins, Gasoline

Alley and The Gumps deployed this grammar in order to mark the boundaries of acceptable white behavior. Failure to remain within the boundaries of dominant whiteness, or failure to successfully and genuinely perform whiteness resulted in characterization, via this grammar of race, that rendered those who failed at the above not-quite-white. The fact that this process was levied against characters who lacked cultural capital served to mystify key workings of white dominance. Andy, Moon and

Walt all aspired to class pass in various ways and with varying degrees of success. Each of these characters went through periods during which they acquired or attempted to acquire various types of capital, be it economic, social or cultural. These strips reinforced the classed boundaries of whiteness by demonstrating that undesirable instances of class passing would be called out by an inherent inability to efface class-markers, class markers that rendered Moon, Andy and at times Walt, not-quite-white.

91 Figure 3.1 ''There's a Gump for you—if that kid was alive in 1492 he would have discovered America." Sidney Smith, 77?^Gumps, 1 August 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

CHAPTER II

In the spring of 1926, Andy Gump took up golf. Specially outfitted in a ridiculous tartan golfing outfit, he set out in figure 3.2 to "play the royal game in the royal way."

He failed, of course, and spent a lot of his time driving balls into ponds and trying to chip out of sand traps. On 10 April, Andy found himself searching for a ball in the rough, this time outfitted in a safari outfit complete with pith helmet. "Oh what a slice," he proclaimed. "Here I am lost in the forest primeval—1 should have brought a couple of gun bearers along—there may be tigers lurking in this jungle—I'll bet I'm the first white man that ever penetrated this trackless wilderness. Stanley in the darkest Africa. That's me," he continued, "I'll write a book and call it Ten Nights in the Jungle—next time I plav this course 1 won't bother about a caddie. I'll just hire a guide so I can find my way

Smith, 4 April 1926. 92 back to the clubhouse."2 From 1924 to 1929 Andy's invocations of imperialism and of

York News Syndicate, imagery associated with colonialism, conquest, exploration and appropriation appeared with notable frequency in The Gumps as a way of re-enforcing the strip's critique of

Andy's attempts to class pass. In figure 3.2 Andy claimed to be "lost in the forest primeval" both to suggest that the landscaping of the golf course was to blame for his lost golf ball and to allude, delusionally, to his own bravery, fearlessness, and intrepidness, characteristics readers knew he lacked.

The Africanist references in figure 3.2 deployed symbolic non-whiteness in order to describe the primitive, the chaotic, and the un-civilized, but this imagery also signalled an additional layer of meaning in its association with imperialism and colonial projects.

In the Americas, early articulations of whiteness occurred in the context of colonial conquest, a process through which the colonizer's whiteness came into being in reaction to encounters with non-white, colonized others. Western imperialism, colonialism and the articulation of racial difference were inextricably linked in that the need to justify imperial practices informed the racialization of the colonized. Conversely, conceptualizations of race in the colonies informed the articulations of other non-racial

2 Smith. 10 April 1926. 93 forms of difference—class and gender difference for instance—in the metropole. The

idea of whiteness, then, was tied not only to imperial practices but to more general

processes of articulating difference that evolved in concert with Western imperialism. The

allusion in figure 3.2 to exploration and conquest, combined with the fact that these

allusions served to illustrate Andy's inherent indisposition to exploration and conquest,

provide an example of the way language and symbolism associated with imperialism

were used to signal the boundaries of whiteness, and in Andy's case, not-quite-whiteness,

to comic strip readers. Analysis of The Gumps from 1924-1929 reveals that the

conceptualization of whiteness they articulated referenced episodes from a long history of

American imperialism and that the abstracted and simplified imperialism these strips

invoked informed the way readers perceived race, class, and gender difference.

This chapter takes up recent debates on the ways in which colonial and

postcolonial theory can bring a new perspective to bear on U.S. whiteness studies and

combines this discussion with scholarship on U.S. imperialism. Recent approaches to

U.S. imperialism have emphasized the varying forms of American imperial practices and

have foregrounded the ways these different imperialisms have informed each other. This

work contributes to a larger body of colonial and postcolonial scholarship that

complicates the traditional dichotomy between metropole and colony, arguing that the

goings-on in each have significantly informed the other. In this chapter I draw on this

' Alfred J. Lopez, ed. Postcolonial Whiteness (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005); Malini Johar Shueller and Edward Watts eds., Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the United State: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2000). "' Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham : Duke University Press, 1993); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire : Foucault 's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham : Duke University Press, 1995); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkley: University of 94 recent scholarship as well as on Frantz Fanon's theorization of colonialism and on the work of Scott Nearing, a strident anti-imperialist and communist active throughout the

1920s whom the New York Times referred to in 1919 as a "leading revolutionist and sociologist."1'

Nearing rose to prominence after his widely publicized and controversial dismissal in 1915 from the University of Pennsylvania for advocating free speech in defiance of faculty policy. He was a prominent public figure whose lecture circuit during the early 1920s was part of a national debate on the virtues of U.S. imperialism more generally. Nearing's public debates with the likes of Clarence Darrow were widely publicized and treated topics as varying as the progress of the human race, the role of capitalism in modern society, the state of western democracy and the League of Nations.

His public speaking engagements, often at universities, drew attention to his views in part because they were often interrupted and dispersed by university and civic authorities.

1 lis opposition to American imperialism echoed, albeit in a more ideological way, the more mainstream anti-imperialist movement that had been particularly prominent from

1898 to 1920. Nearing's belief that American imperialism was a fundamental part of the

American social fabric, and not just a series of isolated and clearly demarcated events, provides a useful point from which to explore invocations of imperialism during the

1920s: a period during which the United States took a somewhat disingenuously

California Press, 1997); Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies." Journal of American History (December 2001). 5 New York Times, 28 April 1919. 6 "Colleagues Rally to Nearing's Cause," New York Times 19 June 1915. ' "Police Interrupt Nearing in Boston," New York Times 22 February 1927. See: "Nearing and Holt Debate," New York Times 3 January 1921; "Defends Capitalism Against Socialism," New York Times 24 January 1921: "Hays and Nearing to Debate," New York Times 29 May 1927. " The Anti-Imperialist League was active from 1899 to 1920 and waged opposition first to American involvement in the Philippines and then to American imperialist ambitions more generally. 95 isolationist stance. 1920s comic strips demonstrate that imperialist ideals were still very much a part of mainstream discourse.

This chapter begins with an overview of the ways in which Gasoline Alley, Moon

Mullins, and The Gamps evoked imperialism and shows how these representations were indicative of the larger symbolic significance of these references. I will then go on to look more closely at The Gumps' references to imperialism in particular and will argue that these spoke to the relationship between imperialism, whiteness and domestic anxieties.

Finally, I will look at the way The Gumps resolved many of the anxieties Andy's failed imperialism projected through Chester Gump's more successful imperial endeavours.

Analysis of this,process of projection and resolution demonstrates how particularizing comic strip whiteness contributes to a better understanding of the way whiteness was conceptualized in the 1920s and shows that comic strips invoked imperialism so as to shape perceptions of domestic difference in ways that reinforced white supremacy.

THE A M ERI CAN EM P « R E

In a 1926 article for the New York World, social critic Walter Lippmann observed:

'"We continue to think of ourselves as a kind of great, peaceful Switzerland, whereas we are in fact a great, expanding world power...Our imperialism is more or less unconscious."10 Only five years previously, Scott Nearing's The American Empire suggested one approach to better comprehending this unconscious imperialism. Nearing argued that U.S. history demonstrates, almost from the founding of the republic, the influence of economic determinism which had slowly but continuously bred an

9 Economic imperialism. 10 Quoted in Niall Ferguson. Colossus: The Rise and all of the American Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 62. 96 imperialism "old in its principles yet ever new in its manifestations." He argued, somewhat deterministically, that in the American context, the riches of natural resources promised by territorial expansion led to the subjugation of Native Americans. Territorial expansions led to an increased need for labor, which drove the slave system. Economic growth bred a class of capitalists that quickly developed a stranglehold on the engines of public opinion so as to push their economic interests in the direction of foreign markets guaranteed by overseas colonies. While the ideological bent of Nearing's analysis resulted in a sometimes overly simplistic view of four hundred years of history, his then- radical view that American imperialism must be conceived of as stretching from colonization of the Americas to American colonization of foreign territories is echoed in current scholarship on American empire.

Recent re-thinking of American imperialism situates it within larger discussions on the variety of forms of imperial practices. My working definition of imperialism includes forms characterized by any of the following: a sovereignty-granting imperial framework; the extermination or expulsion of original inhabitants; the subjugation of original inhabitants; the submersion of pre-existing nations into empire; the exercise of informal economic control; and internal colonialism—the subjection of marginalized populations by domestic elites.!j In the U.S. context, several of these different forms of imperial practices have overlapped and informed each other. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. colonial discourses drew on the legacy of early European

1' Scott Nearing, The American Empire (New York: The Rand School of Social Sciences, 1921) 25. 12 In "Tense and Tender Ties," Ann Stoler demonstrates that the historiography articulates four episodes of American history—colonial America, plantations societies, internal colonialism, and the age of American imperialism—that mirror Nearing's almost exactly. Kaplan and others similarly repeat this framework. Possessive investment in Whiteness '"' Fernando Coronil, "After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism in the Americas" in Imperial Formations, ed. Carole McGranahan and Ann Stoler (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 242-243, 260. 97 colonization of the Americas combined with debates regarding the governance of Native

Americans, African Americans, immigrants, the inhabitants of territories occupied following the Spanish-American war and the "mongrel races" inhabiting the south and southwest. The overlap and interrelation of these influences on American imperial discourse produced an overarching imperial logic—a common and transferable approach to exploitation and domination—that functioned alongside the particulars of each colonial project.

From 1924-1929 The Gumps, Moon Mullins, and Gasoline Alley invoked imperialism in ways that were abstract, simplified, and freighted with symbolism. While each strip participated in this thematic trend to some extent, The Gumps' Chester was the only character to do so in any explicitly colonial settings. On several occasions, Chester found himself lost in exotic lands where he had to brave the wilderness, conquer

"savages," and perform the role of the colonizer in order to get himself back to civilization. In contrast, imperialism was invoked in Gasoline Alley and Moon Mullins much more obliquely. In Gasoline Alley Walt and Skeezix had several symbolic run-ins with Native Americans and adventures in the wilds of the Southwest that served to reinforce Walt's masculinity, to highlight the strip's patriotism, and to reiterate the

M David Spun", The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philipine-American Wars (New Haven, CN: Yaie University Press, 1998); Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Julian Go, American Empire and die politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during US Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Ann Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire: The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

98 least put up a flag and fix the car so it will backfire and make a lot of noise. There! Now that's not so bad for a painted desert celebration. Look at the Navahos come out Skeezix. I think they think it's Custer's last stand or something. They'd better look out or 1 might make a speech!" This dialogue, combined with the title of the strip: "Red Men, White Clouds, and Blue Sky" speaks to the strip's claim that Native Americans are integral to the nation, so long as they are clearly subjugated. Frank O. King, "Red Men, White Clouds, and Blue Sky," Gasoline Alley, 4 July 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. symbolic contrasts between white civility and non-white primitiveness. - Moon Mullins invoked imperialism by depicting the internally colonized. As I argued in the previous chapter, the commodification and consumption of images of African Americans specifically rendered so as to conceptually relegate African Americans to limited social spheres of marked subservience attempted to perpetuate a form of race relations which was bent on reproducing the conditions of slavery. Gasoline Alley's celebration of the faithful mammy and Moon Mullins' endorsement of benevolent paternalism had the effect of condoning a fundamentally exploitative system characterized by black subjugation and marginalization at the hands of the dominant white population, one of the hallmarks of imperialism. By reinforcing racialized difference, these comic strips reproduced a variant of forms of domination inaugurated in the Americas through colonialism. Combined,

Chester's colonial exploits and the ways in which the other strips invoked imperial themes demonstrates that comic strips represented the malleability and transferability of the cultural meanings associated with United States imperialism. This malleability

15 King. 4 July 1924. 99 demonstrates the importance of imperial tropes to a more general cultural logic, a logic that relied on invocations of imperialism to explain other types of domination.

Nearing argued that a peculiarity of U.S. imperialism lies in the fact that the republic was founded in reaction to imperial tyranny. The denial of the right to self- determination that characterizes U.S. imperial practices would seem to be a "desertion of the dearest principles of America's early promise."' Frantz Fanon argued that this contradiction is evident in many post-colonial societies because colonial societies create colonized subjects whose subjugation within the colonial system renders them alienated to such an extent that, even after independence, they reproduce the colonizer's ideology.

Dependent on reproducing unequal social structures, colonial systems fabricate colonized subjects in order to maintain supremacy. ' This creates situations in which instances of colonialism are not contingent on overt conquest and domination. Rather, colonialism becomes "a metaphor for a wide range of dominations" that imply inequity and exclusion, but not necessarily territorial acquisition or formal occupation. Following this logic, many instances of colonialism "may have little to do with colonialism at all." 8 In the U.S. context, the existence of inequalities and exclusions that followed from the colonial model is apparent in the exercise of dominance over a variety of colonized subjects that sometimes fit and sometimes departed from the traditional colonial mould.

Conversely, because colonialism encompasses a range of dominations, the colonizer also assumes a number of different forms. The Gumps illustrates the symbolic centrality of colonialism and of imperialism more generally to a common language used to describe a

"' Nearing, 75. 1' Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, While Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press. 1967) and The Wretched of the Earth trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press. 2004). 1S Stolen Race, 199. 100 variety of domination including domination along class lines.

By virtue of the nature of the medium, comic strips could not afford to rely on obscure or oblique cultural reference. When The Gumps referenced a wide variety of imperial imagery in order to demonstrate the many different ways Andy Gump failed to live up to particular character traits associated with imperialism, the strip demonstrated the cultural currency of these references. Through Andy's adventures in the forest primeval, The Gumps signalled the extent to which he was out of place in a colonial setting, a colonial setting that was heavily associated with whiteness. Colonialism situated the white man as a "spectacle embodying human progress." In this heroic narrative, the white man was naturally positioned to courageously explore, conquer, and civilize.19 The extent to which Andy Gump was unlikely to do any of these things was demonstrated in figure 3.4. Observing Andy after a housefly, an ongoing obsession of his,

York News Syndicate.

Tilda remarked sarcastically: "There he goes—St. George after another dragon—look at the daredevil fearlessly pursuing the ferocious creatures to their lair without a thought of danger—let them snarl and show their cruel fangs—what does old Bwana Tumbo care—

Christopher Kelen, "Hymn for and from White Australia/' in Postcolonial Whiteness, Alfred J. Lopez, ed. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). 47. 101 I've seen him attack a moth single-handed." As was her habit, Tilda drew attention to

Andy's over-blown sense of self-importance. Though he may have fancied himself a

great white knight in pursuit of worthy causes, he was clearly deluded in this respect, as

3.5 illustrates. In addition to this traditional reference to courage and bravery, Tilda

News Syndicate,

invoked a more specific reference to colonial exploits in this same strip, in that she

emphasized Andy"s pretentiousness by comparing him to Theodor Roosevelt whose 1909

African Safari and big game hunting expedition popularized his nickname, Bwana

Tumbo. The similarities between Andy and Roosevelt were few. Though Andy clearly

modeled himself at Roosevelt, he certainly embodied none of his trademark charisma or

Smith. 21 Mav 1926. hardy masculinity, nor was he positioned to achieve the kind of imperialist work

Roosevelt accomplished on safari by killing nearly twelve thousand animals, many of which were brought back to the United States to various museums of natural history.21

The only, perhaps unintentional, similarity in this reference lies the in the fact that

Bwana, meaning "sir," and Tumbo, meaning "big belly," could be read as describing

Andy's preoccupation with food.

Andy gloried in the kind of "easy peace" Roosevelt decried in his 1899 speech,

"The Strenuous Life," and shrank from the danger, hardship and bitter toil Roosevelt extolled as character-building, both for the individual and for the nation. '

Tie firvt i skfW'is Then has a Utile outer After which be w'ket a hrisi a few ticcs.

11 Amy J. Staples, "Safari Adventure: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in Africa/' Film History 1 8 (2006) 392-394. Staples argues that Roosevelt's safari in East Africa caused a sensation in the press and was widely publicized, not least of all in Cherry Kearton's official film of the expedition, Roosevelt in Africa (1910). Though the film lacked dramatic scenes of Roosevelt actually shooting game, popular audiences were delighted with a fictitious version of the Safari, Hunting Big Game in Africa (1909) that featured a Roosevelt impersonator shooting a lion in a Chicago studio. [2 Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life," in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, New York: The Century Company, 1900. Accessed at http://www.bartleby.com/br/58.html, 5 May 2008. 103 Mcujiwr or two. f°r breakfast. Figure 3.8 The President is Resting at his Home in Oyster Bay, 1903. Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt Political Cartoons, http://ww\v. theodore-roosevelt.com/trcartoonsprompt.html

Andy, of course, would have denied these observations, as he only shrank from the

strenuous life in practice. In theory he considered himself a perfect example of this ethos

and of its character-building potential. In this respect, The Gumps' humor relied on the

way Andy continuously referenced American ideals and cultural myths but then failed to

live up to them. For instance, he eagerly positioned himself as a hard-working and

fearless frontiersman, modelling himself after Roosevelt, Daniel Boone or Davy

Crockett. Andy claimed an affinity with the kind of pioneering spirit embodied by Old

Timer and extolled the character building "great open spaces where men are men—and

mosquitoes are tigers." Andy located this idyllic wellspring of adventure and

masculinity by idealizing and objectifying Shady Rest, rendering it a primitive, timeless

idyll. On a tour of the village's newly constructed city hall Andy chided Old Timer: "I

can see your city is growing by leaps and bounds—it's only a question of a few million years when a cow won't be able to pick up a hearty meal off your main street."25 Andy

~J Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Significance of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992). 31 Smith, 19 July 1927. 25 Smith, 7Julv 1925. associated Shady rest and its inhabitants with an irredeemable but nonetheless noble type

of primitiveness. He assumed that the "natives" would be frightened of motor cars and

suggested that they maintained a simple-minded purity and self-sufficiency that served as

an anodyne to the necessary stress and strain of urban modernity. Andy claimed to revel in this environment, at least until he tired of the company, food, and mosquitoes.

Figure 3.9 Andy idealizes the simple life and has no idea what it really entails. Sidney Smith, "The Simply Life," The Gumps, 22 July 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

Andy's sojourns at Shady Rest indicated that he was ultimately a fish out of water in the great outdoors and that he lacked not only the frontiersman spirit, but even a basic understanding of the vigorous work required of such a lifestyle. Given the contemporaneous popularity of pioneering and adventure themes in motion pictures, pulp fiction, and literature, The Gumps situated Andy's laughable attempts at proving his manhood in the great open spaces within the context of a variety of easily accessible representations of these themes.

The importance of staking out and cultivating the land has, of course, been a prominent characteristic of imperial logic from the Enlightenment and persisting through the twentieth century.26 Colonial discourse in the 1920s continued to maintain that

26 In his treatise on government Locke argued: ''God gave the world to Men in common; but since he gave it to them for their benefit, and the greatest convenience of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use 105 occupying land was not a precondition to possessing it outright. Rather, the drive and ability to develop land, utilize its resources, and capitalize on it constituted a legitimate right to land ownership.27 Andy was incapable even of the simplest manifestation of this logic. Determined to reproduce the kind of self-sufficiency he lauded at Shady Rest,

Andy set out to plant himself a garden in order not only to produce his own vegetables but to lay claim to the land by exercising his ability to cultivate it. The strip quickly demonstrated that Andy lacked the industriousness to realize any great productivity on his

Figure 3.10 Sidney Smith, "Apple Blossom Time in Normandie," The Gumps, 13 April 1927, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. own. Not to be discouraged, he hired help and attempted to stake a claim to the land by overseeing the labor of others while being overbearingly bossy and maintaining that his participation was integral to the success of the project. "Well, that was a struggle,'" he proclaimed when his garden had been planted. "It was a hard job, but anytime this old kid starts up a mountain—he don't stop until he reaches the peak—Hard work and brains will make a success out of anything from a garden to a gymnasium—Well, the exercise will do me good—and plenty of nice fresh vegetables will improve my health and my

of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to he his title to it;) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarelsom and Contentious." Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, (New York: The New Press, 2007), 5. 106 bankroll." Andy's garden was, of course, indicative of none of these things.

York News Syndicate.

He was very rarely hardworking, relying instead on luck and Uncle Bim's constant handouts, and was often described as having vocal chords where his brain should have been. Moreover, if Andy's lofty goals and aspirations were mountains, he more often than not quit before he reached their peaks. The chickens that destroyed his garden in figure

3.12 signalled that this particular mountain was like all the others. Defeated, Andy- announced: "I'll start another garden where chickens wear muzzles—I'm cured!

- —- — -«-»«^ Jt-'ia-trajL^jL^v^^'.ia. ||

News Syndicate.

I'm not going to spend a fortune buying seeds for the pleasure of acting as steward in a

28 Smith, 18 April 1927. 107 rooster cafeteria." Andy's failure in this instance illustrated his inability to successfully follow in the footsteps of the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, or even plantation overseer in his attempt to capitalize on natural resources.

On several other occasions Andy attempted to purchase and develop much larger swaths of land, positioning himself as a beneficent colonizer conquering, developing and bringing civilization to the wilderness. In April 1925 Andy briefly entertained the idea of

'indulging in Florida's latest outdoor sport, real estate hunting." His aim was not only to make a profit off of investing in land, but to bring the "better element" to "Coucahochee."

"All a town like that needs is a distinguished citizen—a good live wire—a progressive fellow—a man the people have confidence in," he explained. "Now I could take a town like that and make it the Paris of America—you know it takes a champion to make a town...even America never amounted to much till Columbus arrived.""1 While Andy"s plans fell through, the property he was interested in having been a scam, Andy was undeterred and continued to compare himself to Columbus directly and to extol his expansionist potential through other allusions and ambitions. In illustrating Andy's failure to live up to the ideals of the frontiersman, the yeoman farmer, and the land speculator

The Gumps invoked a wealth of common cultural myths, myths that were associated with the construction of whiteness and the consolidation of Americaness through associations between whiteness, exploration, pioneering, settlement, property ownership, and fitness for government. Through these common myths, and Andy's failure to live up to them, the strip mobilized an implicit understanding of already ideologically loaded cultural

29 Smith, 19 April 1927. "'Smith. 16 April 1925. '" David Jacobson . Place and belonging in America (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002).

108 touchstones, using them to alert the reader to Andy's failure to live up to the ideals of

dominant whiteness.

PROJECTING IMPERIAL ANXIETIES

Andy's claims to be a "progressive fellow" in this last strip begs a supplementary

reading of Andy's expansionist aims; Andy's statement could easily have been a claim to

being a "Progressive fellow." Andy's laughable 1924 presidential campaign supports this

reading as his platform referenced Progressivism in his commitment to "good

government" and outspoken opposition to "political machines" and similar forms of

corruption. His failure to successfully combat these scourges served as another critique of

Andy's pretensions, and hinted again at his inability to live up to the legacy of Theodore

Roosevelt. While Andy's politics failed to win him the presidency, this was not

http://vvvvw.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/biopictures.htm Figure 3.14 Sidney Smith, The Gumps, 17 September 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

because his Progressive values failed to win him support. In fact, in the run-up to the

election it seemed Andy had quite a bit of popular support, largely because of his highly theatrical appeal to the "common man" and his promise to take on corrupt government.

Significantly, Andy appealed to the common man by building a cultural mythology all his

109 own, claiming to have had a family connection to every city he stopped in. Often these

imagined connections involve references to common cultural touchstones that again

invoked conquest and imperialism. In Ft. Worth Andy claimed: "My grand-daddy Go-

Getum Gump, was a fighting cowpuncher from Texas and if I get a vote for every red­

skin he made bite the dust they'll have to print a million ballots....Our ancestors fought at

the Alamo for the right to be free—I am making this fight to protect the liberty our heroes

died for."J In New Orleans Andy claimed that his grandfather, Louis Le Gump fought

1-'HJI>AY. OC.JOIiER :!. 1'J'Ji. c = * * ** 2[

Figure 3.15 Sidney Smilh, "Ride 'em Cowboy," The Gumps, 3 October 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. to defend the city alongside Andrew Jackson/3 In Salt Lake City he claimed that his

Mormon grandfather A. Brigham Gump settled in the city as a young man, "married eight or nine fair maidens, and started Salt Lake's first salt factory." Unbeknownst to his larger public, Andy had been snowing the "common man" while making deals with big business on the side/3 In the end his presidential bid was thwarted, deus ex machina.

Ultimately this arc was not critical of Progressive politics per se, but rather was critical of

Andy's use of them and by extension of Andy's failure to live up to many of the ideals of

"Smith, 3 October 1924. " Smith, 2 October 1924. -A Smith, 10 October 1924. ''Smith, 17 September 1924. 110 whiteness that he, ironically, so regularly invoked.

Andy's claim to be able to uplift Coucahochee by introducing the town to the

"better element" also echoed Progressive approaches to colonialism and "tutelary rule."

Julian Go argues that Progressive politics were front and center in the administration of

Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Though Progressivism on the whole was nuanced and had a diverse membership, many civil administrators in Puerto Rico and the Philippines came from Progressive backgrounds and were of similar ideological mindsets. In both countries officials implemented programs which, through the institution of particular administrative and educational systems, were meant to improve and uplift the colonized. ' The Gumps invoked Progressive approaches to colonialism not to dismiss them but to dismiss Andy's heedless and insincere deployment of them, thereby signalling to the reader another failing on Andy's part.

By 1924 the United States had formally taken an isolationist stance, while maintaining a limited presence and continuing interest in its formal and informal imperial projects. However, between 1898 and 1920 U.S. forces had led military interventions in

'6 Julian Go, American Empire and the politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during US Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Ill Figure 3.16 "Pearl Harbor," Chicago Tribune, May 10 1925, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, the Caribbean twenty times and had occupied Cuba (1906-09, 1917-22), Nicaragua

(1912-25, 1926-33), Haiti (1915-34), Santo Domingo (1916-24), Mexico (1918-19), and

Panama (1918-20). Following a devastating war (1899 - 1903), the U.S. established colonial rule in the Philippines, formally granting the colony independence in 1946/

Though U.S. imperialism in the 1920s was dominated more by dollar diplomacy than aggressive military incursions, The Gumps demonstrated that the memory of more aggressive imperial projects was still very much alive in the national imaginary and that, more importantly, the imagery and symbolism associated with turn-of-the century U.S. imperialism remained bound up in the conceptualization of gender, race and class, both in colonies and domestically.

When, in July 1926, Minerva Gump invested the fifteen thousand dollars she had recently received from Uncle Bim in a little land of her own, her actions initiated an arc that played off of the gendered, racialized, and classed tensions that, through their

Coronil. 248-249. 12 articulation in an imperialist language, demonstrated the complexity of this grammar.

Upon hearing of her purchase, Andy berated her: "Hadn't you the sense enough to see if

it was any good I would have bought it myself?" he asked. "He showed you some pretty

pictures of a dream city and you bought twenty-one acres of nightmares...if you wanted a

wilderness why didn't you go to Africa? I could have bought you an entire jungle for two

cents an acre—it might not be as wild as the hay-fever incubator you bought—but it

would have been a lot nearer to civilization."38 Here, Andy deployed both Africanist and

colonialist tropes in an effort to belittle Min's purchase by decrying her property's

potential to yield dividends, all the while positioning himself the authority on such

ventures. Shortly thereafter Andy enquired elsewhere about investing in land so as not to

be outdone by his wife. The real estate agent assured him that "the only chance to make

big money is in virgin territory—you'll find the next big boom takes place in Mexico,"

and proceeded to convince him to purchase land he promises is plentiful in "mahogany,

rosewood, ebony and rubber trees above ground—gold silver and oil below. "J Once he

had returned home, Andy tried to convince Min to abandon her original investment plans

and invest alongside him. "You paid $15,000 for twenty acres—I could get you 5,000 acres for that—but you'd rather keep your little germs nest than become a land-owner— can you pick bananas off your real estate? Can you raise rubber tires, heels and hot water bottles on it?...While you're buying a cow-pasture I'll buy a continent."40 Again he asserted his authority on all things related to foreign investment, development, appropriation of foreign territory through private colonial expansion. The joke, however, was on Andy as he returned to the real estate agent shortly thereafter to find the office

38 Smith, 10 July 1926. 39 Smith, 20 July 1926. '"Smith. 21 July 1926. 113 occupied by police officers who explained to him that the agent was in jail "for pulling

the old Mexican land fraud—selling imaginary rubber plantations to saps."41

Undeterred, Andy again attempted to make good on what he perceived to be his

naturally productive potential, purchasing eighty acres for eighty thousand dollars on a

twenty thousand dollar down payment with the intention to make a fortune by developing

it into a subdivision. "1 expected to plant a whole lot of happy home builders on the

property and raise a banner crop of bungalows," Andy explained to Min, who warned him

against subdividing property he did not yet own outright. Andy ignored her and began to

visualize the ways in which his development would benefit from his enterprising nature.

"I'll sell the lots only to the best kind of people—it will be just a little city of class,

culture and contentment...the only thing we'll need policemen for is to keep the

undesirable element from encroaching on our little paradise." Deluded Andy soldiered

on, selling bonds to buy his property outright in order to begin development. "I'm going to subdivide my acreage into home-sites and give some lucky people a chance to move out into the great open spaces where men are contented," and explained to his banker who promptly advised him to embark on his project slowly. Andy shrugged off this advice, comparing himself to a "hardy pioneer" who "blazes his way through the wilderness" despite cynical naysayers. J "I picked the right spot for a subdivision and right now is the right time to start it—if Christopher Columbus had listened to a lot of human anchors some Chinaman would have discovered America," he maintained.

Though Andy's subdivision plans involved limited expansion in the Midwest, his vision of it as a haven for the cultured in the "great open spaces" far from the "undesirable

'" Smith. 24 July 1926. -l2 Smith, 18 August 1926. ,|3 Smith. 21 August 1926. 114 element" clearly indicated that his intentions were far more grandiose.

By again referencing Columbus, Andy framed his domestic territorial

development in the terms of imperial expansionism, a conflation that was not uncommon

in early twentieth century popular culture, but that The Gumps exhibited in a singular

way. Post-Reconstruction imperialism was often conceived of in ways that conflated the

objects of imperialism. In some ways this conflation was achieved through a flattening

out of non-whiteness that made it easier to position any abstract, non-white other in ways

that suited the symbolic needs of imperialist ambitions.44 To this end the Spanish-

American War and America's other imperial exploits at the end of the nineteenth century

were depicted in ways meant to recuperate the sense of national unity and vitality lost

during the Civil War by projecting these anxieties onto concerns over the particulars of

colonial dominance.45 For instance, at the turn-of-the-century black Americans were

subject to the same pejorative racial designations that were applied to immigrant groups

and colonial subjects. This generalizing discourse on race was so pervasive that the

"civilizing rhetoric" worked out in the occupation of the Philippines was deployed by

conservative black reformers as an "evolutionary axiom" with which to measure the

"development" of the black race.46 Similarly, Buffalo Bill's Wild West was known to cast

its cowboys and Indians as Rough Riders and Cubans, or Allies and Boxers, presenting

"the struggle between Red Men and White on the American frontier as the archetype and

precedent for the worldwide struggle between 'progressive' and 'savage' or 'regressive'

'*' Walter Benn Michaels. "Race into culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity," in ed, Anthony Kwame Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1995) 32- 62. 4:1 Amy Kaplan, "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill," in ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) 220-221. 46 Kevin Gaines, "Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission: Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism,'" in Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 439-441. 115 races that shaped the modern world." These examples demonstrated a clear tendency in

other cultural milieux to conflate and abstract out colonized others in ways that reinforce

white dominance. What made similar conflation in The Gumps unique was that it took

place almost simultaneously; by the very nature of the medium The Gumps was able to

serially reference the national myths associated with American imperialism with a

frequency and variety impossible in most other media. In its deployment of the language

of imperialism, The Gumps created an imperial shorthand that the strip was then free to

deploy to various other ends.

American imperialisms were not only conflated with each other, they were also

conflated with domestic issues. The Spanish-American War in particular provided the

staging grounds for the articulation of domestic tensions brewing over the legacy of the

Civil War, post-emancipation race-relation, Reconstruction, and anxieties over the closing

of the frontier. Part of the rationale behind this conflation involved contestations over the

constituent elements of the nation and over what the implications of American

imperialism were vis-a-vis citizenship and subjecthood. Figured often in terms of a

corporeal body, debates over the pollution or degeneration of the national body were

prominent in discussions regarding not only the potential incorporation of colonized peoples, but the place of Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrant populations in the body politic as well. Andy's concern over who should be incorporated into his subdivision, which he intended to sell only to "the best kinds of people" bespoke similar anxieties. As he began building on his land his thoughts turned

'' Richard Slotkin, Gvnfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century Histoiy (New York: Antheneum, 1992), 84. 18 Saidiya V. Hartman . Scenes of subjection; Terror, Slavery, and Self making in Nineteenth-century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire. 116 to a suitable name for his development venture, a process which revealed the links between Andy's expansionist ambitions and his attitudes to race. "How do you like

Gumpville?" he asked Min. "That name is neither descriptive nor poetical," she replied.

"Is that so—look at Washington, Lincoln, Columbus—those towns are getting along without poetical names," Andy retorted, again illustrating his delusions of grandeur.

"Why don't you call it Kishwauketoe? That's a quaint Indian name," Min suggested. "I could pick a better suggestion than that out of an empty barrel," Andy replied. "I'm not starting an Indian reservation—this is a high class subdivision for white people—I'm going to build bungalows, not wigwams—why don't you tell me to call it Sing Hi Lo and sell the land to retired Chinese laundry men?" While Andy's racist assumptions were not surprising for the time, his concerns over naming were more telling of what the strip projected as constituting whiteness.

There were several implications to the Gumpville arc. Andy's actions were often meant to be taken ironically; while Andy was fretting over what to name his subdivision, the strip poked fun yet again at the fact that Andy believed himself to be among the great figures of history, men who were integral to the development of the nation. But while the strip was critical of Andy's delusions of grandeur, it was not so critical of Andy's thinking; Andy articulated assumptions about race and whiteness that the strip ultimately supported. Through Andy, the strip illustrated contemporaneous assumptions about whiteness and about the limits to whiteness, limits that Andy, in his delusional way, illustrated as well. Andy's concern over giving his subdivision an explicitly non-white name, and the ramifications he foresaw resulting from this decision spoke to his concern with bounding and clearly demarcating whiteness. This bounding was integral to w Smith, 30 August 1926. 117 maintaining a whiteness that was necessarily 'high class." Andy's conceptualization of

high class whiteness was enabled in this strip by his "strategic demarcation from and

limited identification with racialized Others," a process that Malini Johar Schueller and

Edward Watts argue is central to articulating dominant whiteness.30 However, what is

significant about his articulation of whiteness is its specifically classed description.

The dominant whiteness Andy articulated evoked a particular kind of imperial

logic, a logic that subsumes everything to structures of difference based on inequality and

exploitation. Fernando Coronil argues that "whatever their particular form, empires

involve hierarchical relations that do not just rank but differentiate subjects, making

differences of degree into differences in kind." Imperial formations by their very nature

invoke systems of difference in order to organize dominant and subordinate subjects. The

nature of these historically produced differences establishes a frame of reference for all

perceived differences which is used to organize the "structures of domination" whatever

their form, "that bring different populations under one encompassing formation as

different and unequal subjects." Coronil argues that "whether subjects are exploited

economically, exterminated or segregated racially or ethnically, granted partial autonomy,

offered equality of rights, or assimilated, they are subjected and turned into 'Others' by

making the different unequal, the unequal different." The links between exploitation,

subjugation, and colonial forms of domination demonstrate the importance of

interrogating the construction of difference in order to uncover the logic at work behind

neo-colonial forms of subject-formation. Andy's merging of differences of degree with

differences of kind worked towards naturalizing a colonial logic that differentiates along

50 Shueller and Watts, 12. 51 Coronil, 254-255. 118 very fine domestic lines. The strip positioned Andy as willing to act as colonizer to an internally colonized population, peoples that he differentiated himself from on the order of race as well as class, a position the strip supported, at least in theory.

As it became increasingly apparent that his subdivision was not selling, Andy began to entertain the idea of renting lots in order to see at least some return on his investment. Out interviewing potential renters, Andy was propositioned by a fellow who offered to rent one of Andy's lots in order to set up a canteen selling hot dogs, ice cold drinks, and peanuts. Andy was adamant: "This is a high class residential subdivision and your proposition does not interest me at all" he proclaimed. Later, to Min, he expanded:

"It only takes a fly to ruin a big bowl of soup—a hot dog stand on this place would be a thirty cent picture in a million dollar frame—I didn't spend $80, 000 of my hard earned money to create a home for boiled Pomeranians."3 This episode illustrated, once again, classed assumptions about dominant whiteness. The fellow in question was clearly positioned as not-quite-white. As is evident in figure 3.17, his face was drawn in the style used to depict Tilda, Old Timer, and Old Timer's wife, with unrefined features and wrinkles that suggest time spent in the sun. Moreover, the way this man approached

Andy, as a supplicant, with a towel over his arm suggesting a position of servitude and addressing him as "boss" further signalled the character's lower-class status. That Andy conceived of him as a "fly" threatening to spoil his bowl of white, high-class soup spoke not only to Andy's carefully hierarchicalized development plans, but also suggested fears

s2 Smith, 1 September 1926. 119 York News Syndicate,

of miscegenation, fears that once the "undesirable element" was introduced, Andy's

ability to ensure that only the "best kind of people" populated his subdivision would be

impeded. This seemingly innocuous allusion combined Andy's need to police the

boundaries of his territory with an obvious conflation of race with class. The strip

functioned to reinforce a vision of whiteness that was carefully bounded both from non-

whites and not-quite-whites.

This differentiation of whiteness from not-quite-whiteness expressed in this strip

was in keeping scholarship on the relationship between colonialism and the

conceptualization of class. Ann Stoler argues that the relationship between race and class

was almost symbiotic in many instances of European colonialism, in part because the

formation of middle-class identity relied so heavily on discourse of race to organize class-

based difference.^ This was also true to some extent of organization of early U.S. social

structures. While there is disagreement among historians regarding the moment certain

American colonists clearly began to self-identify as white, many agree that this moment

came about in response to a need to clearly demarcate and justify the dominant position

53 Stoler, Race. 124. of a specific colonist population. White American self-description laid claim to dominance by asserting the primacy of Anglo-Saxon lineage and through differentiation from a range of others—Native Americans, African Americans, various "mongrel races,"—considered inferior and thus exploitable. Whiteness came to stand in for economic and political superiority and fitness for government over visually and "racially" inferior peoples, at once subjugating certain populations while buttressing a specifically white polity." Though class and race may indeed have been conceptualized in tandem, the persistent deployment of race as a barrier to class solidarity, as demonstrated by

Roediger and others, speaks to the primacy of race as a marker of difference.

Nonetheless, given the close relationship between the racial and economic dimensions of imperialism, it is no wonder Andy Gump conflates the two. It is in reference to both prongs of imperial dominance that the strip indicated that Andy was not equipped to perform the role of a colonizer. Andy strove to police the boundaries of his high-class

4 Reginald Horsman, "Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," American Quarterly 21 (May 1975): 52-168. The literature on white self-identification disagrees on many of the particulars of white-self identification. Nonetheless, the variety of explanations indicates that whiteness has historically been articulated in a variety of ways that speak both to its persistent conceptual usefulness. For more detailed analysis: Thomas F. Gossett's Race: The History if an Idea in America, New York: Shocken Books, 1963 and Winthrop D. Jordan's The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in (he United States, Oxford University Press, 1974 provide early analysis of the construction of race but only just begin to explore the idea of whiteness. Interest in exploring whiteness increased dramatically in the 1990s, often in conjunction with Labor Studies. Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth- Century America, London: Verso, 1990 provides a class-based analysis of whiteness' emergence through the politics of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jacksonian era, during which whiteness "came to symbolize the solidarity of producers against those who prospered at the producers' expense by conniving with and manipulating racially subordinated populations" 298. David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso, 1991, takes up similar themes by arguing that white workers in antebellum America came to think of themselves as white though a differentiation between slave labor and 'free' labor, the later supplemented by a 'psychological wage,' a term Roediger owes to Du Bois (though Kaplan argues he mis-reads him in ways that ignore Dubois' emphasis on empire). Similarly Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race, London: Verso, 1994 argues that whiteness was invented by Virginian planter elite in order to facilitate their exploitation of both black and white labor. x" Melissa Steyn, "White Talk: South Africans and the Management of Diasporic Whiteness." in Postcolonial Whiteness, 121; Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, 8; Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny; Horseman, "Article."; Frankenberg, "Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness," in Displacing Whiteness, 8-9. 121 white subdivision because he felt well-positioned to do so. The strip indicated that his

goal would never come to pass because Andy was not as well-positioned to police the

boundaries of race and class as he assumed.

Eventually Andy's delusional assumption that he would ever be able to attract

high-class residents to "Gump's Paradise Vista" was resoundingly ridiculed when Andy,

in a final attempt to attract renters for his lots, resorted to the method of advertising

illustrated in figure 3.18. Observing his parade of tramps, whose placards all read

Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

"Don't be a Tramp! Own your own home at Gumps' Paradise Vista," Andy proudly proclaimed: "After that parade reaches the rooming house district every window will frame a couple of prospects—they can choose between a hall room on poverty row and a happy home on easy street," thus announcing his intention to abandon his high-class subdivision in order to become a slum landlord instead. Andy's inability to capitalize on his investment demonstrated his inability to develop the land successfully. His failure to attract the right class of investor illustrated his failure to succeed in colonial-style entrepreneurship. But the ultimate sign of his failure in proving his imperialist mettle was that he was rescued from economic ruin by Minerva, who had in the meantime been receiving ever-increasing offers on her far more desirable property. Proving herself to be

122 the far wiser entrepreneur, Minerva agreed to sell her land at a substantial profit so long

as the purchasers bought her husband's at cost. After holding out briefly, Andy

capitulated, accepting the cheque while refusing to relinquish his imperialist dreams,

explaining to the purchaser: "Columbus was a shoemaker. If he had stuck to his last he

would never have discovered America."

In detailing Andy's failure to colonize in the manner of early explorers, failure to

follow in the footsteps of the nation's original settlers, failure to cultivate his own land

and failure to pursue territorial expansion, The Gumps provided its readers with a surplus

of ways in which to recognize Andy's failure to properly exercise imperial ambitions,

ambitions closely tied to whiteness. Min's success at capitalizing on her land and the fact

that, as was often the case, she rescued her husband in a thoroughly emasculating way

reinforced the gendered markers of Andy's failure to successfully achieve ideals that were

clearly marked as white and male. Alongside these more obvious markers of whiteness,

Andy's inability to maintain a classed space provided another sign of his inability to

police the boundaries of whiteness. Importantly, the strip did not imply that Andy's

ambitions themselves were laughable, but the fact that he had these ambitions to begin

with was. Not only was Andy unable to cultivate class, culture, and contentment, but his

readiness to abandon these ideals indicated a lack of discernment and responsibility, marking him as poorly situated to preside over national interests. Andy's imperial failures performed two functions: first, by repeatedly lampooning Andy's failure to successfully effect imperial projects, the strip elevated these goals and their associations with whiteness; and second, by asserting that Andy was incapable of holding fast even to the ideals of American imperialism the strip showed that Andy lacked the very basic

56 Smith, ] 2 November 1926. 123 prerequisites of whiteness. Andy's failed attempts at imperialism were evinced through

reference to a variety of widely shared cultural reference points that The Gumps'

readership would have recognized as indications of Andy's failure to achieve the ideals of

dominant whiteness. By invoking imperialism thus the strip presented a very particular

conceptualization of dominant whiteness that excluded the not-quite-whiteness embodied

both by the hot dog vendor and by Andy himself.

In Andy's inability to hold firm to the ideals of American imperialism, The Gumps

demonstrated that he was not capable of exercising imperial responsibilities. In this sense,

Andy occupied a position that, in keeping with imperial themes, resembled more that of

the colonized than the colonizer—unsuited to self-government. But in relation to what

colonizer? Here, similarities between the treatment of the colonized in the Philippines

and Puerto Rico, for instance, and not-quite-white populations in the United States are

instructive. Similar colonial projects meant to uplift these populations to the "civilized"

levels embodied by dominant whiteness were implemented in all three cases. In the

Philippines and Puerto Rico the process of "benevolent assimilation," or "benevolent

tutelage" was viewed as a transitional stage on the road to self-rule which could only be

achieved through the mastery of the standards and practices of the colonizer. This was part of a series of interlocking mechanisms designed to civilize the colonized by instructing them to follow colonial models both of collective self-government and of individual self-government and self-restraint.3 Simultaneously, these colonial projects served to gather and reinforce colonial knowledge. Vicente Rafael argues that colonial

57 Vincente L. Rafael, "White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the US Colonization of the Philippines," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 186-187. 58 Go, 30-43. 124 surveillance in the Philippines served to document both the lives of the colonized and of

colonial officials, the latter "through the bureaucratization of surveillance." Julian Go

similarly argues that the colonies served as test cases for Progressive policies regarding

governance and the reformist potentials of certain models of administration.

Similar models of knowledge-formation occurred in the U.S. context in conjunction with concern over the fitness of certain not-quite-white populations for self- government. These populations were deemed either in need of uplifting or of containment. The attention they received from reformers had the effect of creating poor white or not-quite-white subjects and of simultaneously entrenching the civilizing discourse of reformers. From the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s reformers and later middle-class professionals descended on poor white populations, targeting what they perceived to be inherent degeneracy, identifying hereditary behavioural and moral failings, forcibly sterilizing the "feeble-minded" and diagnosing failures to meet white, middle-class, "civilized" norms as somehow deficient. ' Under the auspices of the 1909

Rockefeller Sanitary Commission to Eradicate Hookworm Disease, for instance, public health officials inspected homes, educated, built outhouses and tried to limit soil pollution but largely ignored the basic issues the disease thrived on: poverty, unemployment, and fundamental social disparities. As a result, these professionals legitimized the "view that the habits and customs of poor whites caused infection and disease and that diseases were the cause of poverty." As was the case with initiatives to Americanize immigrants, some reformers made concerted efforts to uplift poor white populations. These initiatives

59 Rafael, 187, 190-191. 60 Go, 30-33. 61 Wray, 65-68. 62 Wray, 101-104. 125 resulted in the particularization of poor whiteness such that poor whites were perceived

not as victims of a structural socioeconomic inequality but as subjects outside of

dominant socioeconomic systems. This particularization of populations deemed not-

quite-white simultaneously functioned to reinforce the boundaries of dominant whiteness,

distancing whiteness from poor whiteness, and dominant whiteness from class.

As was the case in more typical colonial contexts, where colonial control of

sexuality, race, class, and gender functions to "define moral superiority and maintain

cultural difference that in turn justified different intensities of violence," the treatment of poor whites functioned to shore up the dominant whiteness, to cast poverty as cultural

difference, and to reinforce the superiority of dominant whites.63 Though not subject to the same extent of institutionalized violence levied against colonial subjects or domestic non-white subjects, poor-whites were nonetheless cast as inherently different, slotted into civilizational hierarchies, and othered in ways that maintained the dominant white norm.

Similarly, Andy's failure to emulate the colonizer, which left him in a position much like that of the colonized, served as a sign of his not-quite-whiteness while simultaneously reinforcing dominant whiteness.

Andy's not-quite-whiteness and its elaboration in reference to imperialism projected domestic anxieties over race relations, immigration, and shifting gender norms through an imperial lens. Andy's attempt to create a haven for class, culture and contentment and his subsequent willingness to, when in a pinch, open this haven up to the local riffraff, paralleled domestic anxieties regarding the presence of "undesirable elements" in the nation more generally. In her analysis of "fictional fantasies" depicting the Spanish-American War, Amy Kaplan found that invocations of empire functioned

6> Stoler and Cooper, 4. 126 both to highlight and intensify domestic tensions and as a medium for their resolution.

These fictional fantasies projected domestic conflicts onto the backdrop of the Spanish-

American war and in this projection attempted to imaginatively negotiate resolutions to racial, regional, and sectional differences.64 The myth built up around Roosevelt's Rough

Riders, a volunteer regiment consisting of an unlikely cross-section of American men and joined by the 10' Negro Cavalry, projected a sense of national unity, seemingly resolving sectional, class, and racial divisions. But in fact this purported unity, rooted in imperial domination of a supposedly savage other, also had the effect of reinvigorating American racial nationalism; to this end the participation of African American cavalrymen at the

Battle of San Juan Hill was denigrated in order to highlight the unity and cohesiveness of white American participants. 5 The success of the 1927 film version of Roosevelt's The

Rough Riders suggested that the popularity of this unifying cultural symbol had not waned in the thirty years since its inception and that its cultural significance continued to deny the complexity behind this invocation of imperialism. The ways in which imperial fantasies figured in The Gumps also attempted to project and resolve domestic anxieties through recourse to imperial fantasies. The comic strip versions of these fantasies were particular in that they could so easily evoke a variety of simplified imperial myths and project a variety of anxieties onto these. In The Gumps anxieties regarding shifting gender norms, racial degeneration and reverse colonization at the hands of undesirable

Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 123-125. Gary Gerstle, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism," The Journal of American History 86 (Dec 1999) 1282. Kaplan, 141. 127 Figure 3.19 11 Septembervl927, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate,

elements were brought to the fore by Andy, but were resolved by Chester, the true heir to

the ideals of American imperialism, who was able to overcome and resolve the tensions

his father's story arcs project.

RESOLVING IMPERIALANXIETIES

In July 1924, Chester left on his first trip to Australia, the first of many that would teach him to be every bit the imperialist his father was not. In 1921 Scott Nearing described American imperialism thus:

the plain people are taught to regard themselves and their civilization as superior to anything else on earth. Those who have a different language or a different color are referred to as 'inferior peoples.' The people of Panama cannot dig a canal, the people of Cuba cannot drive out Yellow Fever, the people of the Philippines cannot run a successful education system, but the people of the United States can do all these things—therefore they are justified in interfering in the internal affairs of Panama, Cuba, and the Philippines. When there is a threat of trouble with Mexico, the papers refer to 'cleaning up Mexico' very much as a mother might refer to cleaning up a dirty child.

Nearina. 170. 128 Nearing's association of colonialism and cleanliness with childhood was paralleled in

Chester's imperial adventures. Before he left for Australia, his mother warned him: "Hold

still like a good boy and when you get to Australia remember what I told you—wash your

face nice and clean—be sure to brush your teeth—and don't forget your table manners—

be a good, well-behaved little boy so that your Uncle Bim will be proud of you." Min's

insistence that Chester maintain particular levels of corporeal self-government and

cleanliness especially in the presence of Uncle Bim, reinforced important links between

cleanliness, comportment and civility in colonial discourse. Chester quickly learned the

importance of these interconnections and embodied them such that he became a

successful little imperialist, all the while teaching the "plain people" the importance of

these interconnections through the medium of the comic strip.

Chester's success where Andy failed had everything to do with capital. Whereas

cultural capital is the product of knowledge inculcated in the family or, at a baser level,

the product of pedantic knowledge, social capital is inherited in a more material sense, in

70

investments handed down through families, for instance. As his Uncle Bim's only heir,

Chester Gump was positioned to inherit his economic and social capital. However, The

Gumps indicated that through his close relationship with Uncle Bim, Chester was primed to inherit cultural capital as well, capital that took the form of an appreciation for finer things and a facility for imperial dominance. In many ways, Chester was more Bim's son than he was Andy's. Bim, the billionaire industrialist who had made his fortune developing Australian infrastructure, was every bit the savvy colonialist Andy was not.

68 Smith, July 20 1924. 69 Mitchell expands on the importance of the body, both in terms of the physical functioning of the body and of self-government, to the whitening of not-quite-vvhite populations in Arizona. /0 Pierre Bourdieu. "The Forms of Capital," in John G. Richardson, ed. Handbook oj'Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985). 129 But Andy, deluded as he was, maintained faith in a Gump essence which he felt both he

and Chester embodied. On the eve of Chester's first trip to Australia, one of many, Andy

tried to comfort Min's anxiety over sending her son halfway around the world by saying:

"Remember, he's a true Gump—A Gump worries less about a trip around the world than

most people would about buying a geography—I envy the people of Australia—Chester's

visit will be the biggest thing that's happened to them since kangaroos were

discovered." To Andy's mind, it was in the Gump nature to dominate the globe and to

be revered by the "natives," be they in rural America or in Australia. What transpired over

the course of Chester's trips abroad reinforced The Gumps'' assertion that while Andy

possessed none of the characteristics he lauded, Chester did, or rather, would eventually.

Through proper breeding in the company of Uncle Bim, Chester would develop the

characteristics Andy idealized but was unable to emulate.

Breeding, as opposed to inherited knowledge or pedantic education, was key to

Chester's character development. Breeding is a process that assimilates social distinctions

and is acquired through immersion in "good company" and an awareness of the markers

of "civility" that underlie such company. Breeding inculcates discretionary views, refined

taste, and powers of distinction that are enmeshed in hierarchies of exclusive social

dominance.72 While visiting Bim, Chester was taught to appreciate great works of western culture and to mimic refined behaviour in ways that reinforced good breeding.

Bim introduced Chester to his vast empire, taking him on a tour of his mansion, the

71 Smith, 26 July 1924. 72 Uday S. Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," Politics Society 19 (1990), 437. Mehta argues that breeding is a fundamental component of western liberalism which, despite its claims to inclusionism in fact manages to be extremely exclusionary by naturalizing concepts such as breeding, civility, taste, and reason and setting them up as social markers. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997), 10. 130 hallways lined with rare art, the library full of precious manuscripts, the music room with

music teachers at Chester's disposal, and the swimming pool with instructors always at

the ready. Finally, Bim took Chester out on one of his yachts. "This yacht," he explained,

"will be at your service at all times to take you wherever you desire to go—you will

enjoy watching the natives in their quaint dug-out canoes—in spite of the sharks that

infest these waters the little native boys dive to the bottom of the sea after pennies—I

know you'll enjoy watching them—and they'll enjoy the pennies you cast overboard."

"They have all dived for pennies except the king," noted Chester. "What's the matter—

can't he swim?" "Yes, the king is the champion swimmer and diver but being a king he

has too much royal dignity to dive for pennies," Bim explained, "but I'll try him with a

Figure 3.20 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 19 October 1924, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

dollar." J Chester's stay with Uncle Bim was a learning experience. He came to

appreciate the finer things, to improve his ability to read various forms of cultural capital, to experience the imperial mindset to which Bim owed his billions and to understand the interrelatedness of breeding, "civility," and imperialism. Through Chester's education, the strip offered a corrective to Andy's behaviour, demonstrating to the reader that through a combination of worthiness and careful tutelage it was possible to be assimilated

" Smith. 19 October 1924.

131 to dominant whiteness.

The extent to which Chester had internalized the lessons he learned while in

Australia became clear the following summer when he again left his parents for a visit

with Uncle Bim. However, while en route to Australia Uncle Bim's dirigible was caught

in a storm and destroyed over the Pacific Ocean. Chester was saved by one of Bim's

servants, Ching Chow, who managed to get Chester and himself to a make-shift raft

which carried them to a tropical island. Over the next six months, the extent to which

Chester took after Uncle Bim more than he did Andy became increasingly clear. Chester

regularly proved his bravery, industriousness and intrepidness by engaging in conflicts

with the island's "savage" inhabitants, by killing various wild and exotic animals, and by

fearlessly taking to the adventurer's lifestyle, thrilling at being the first to "discover"

various parts of the island. Moreover, he was more than eager to follow in Uncle Bim's

colonial footsteps. "Gee, wouldn't it be great if we discovered a great big country like

Christopher Columbus did?" he asked Ching Chow. "The Pacific Ocean is so big there

may be some place that remains undiscovered—if we find a new country we'll call it

Bimland."74 Unlike Andy's Gumpville, Bimland, with Chester as its founder, seemed a

far more viable proposition and in naming his hypothetical country Bimland, Chester

signalled the wellspring of his enthusiasm for conquest. Chester's exploits were given

added nuance by his repeated references to Robinson Crusoe, a foundational model for

intrepid little boys. Crusoe's indebtedness to the touchstones of western civilization

further reinforced the links between imperial conquest and proper breeding.

As was the case with Andy's invocations of imperialism Chester's imperial

74 Smith, 3 May 1925. 75 Most notably, it is when Crusoe begins keeping track of days on a calendar and observing Sundays that his fortunes begin to improve. Chester similarly devises a makeshift calendar system. 132 exploits were rendered abstractly and were thus available for a variety of uses. Similarly, contemporaneous cultural representations of Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans or

Hawaiians generally depicted these groups as "generically 'black' and primitive."76 While figure 3.22 reflects the desire of the American public to cast Cubans as white victims

Figure 3.22 "Hurrah for the fourth of July! We're coming in on independence day celebrations, too," The Verdict, 21 August 1899, source: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~simpson/Hist725 Figure 3.23 Sidney Smith, The Gumps, 12 September 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

77 of savage Spanish tyranny, the figures representing Hawaii and the Philippines were modeled after typical representations of African American "Sambo" figures. This abstraction was also at play in The Gumps in which all non-western others were portrayed similarly. The above comparison between typical caricaturing of colonial subjects and

The Gumps' depiction of the "savage" known as Blackie and the comparison below between The Gumps' generic savages and a depiction of a Philippine "native" both

no indicate that The Gumps' use of this kind of abstraction was part of a broader trend.

Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 160. Gerstle, 1295. Smith, 31 May 1925. 133 Figure 3.24 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," 5 September 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate; Figure 3.25 "Troubles Which May Follow an Imperial Policy," New York Herald, 3 July 1898, King Features Syndicate.

Chester's faithful island companion Ching Chow, a character who was every bit a

racial stereotype, provided additional indications of the extensiveness of this tendency to

abstraction. Ching Chow regularly performed what were meant to be rites of eastern mysticism, beseeched the "lords of the upper air" and constantly referred to himself, self- deprecatingly, in the third person as "this worthless one," "this contemptible one," "this ill-informed one" and the like. This pronounced demurring to Chester's superiority rendered the boy the more heroic and authoritative of the pair. While Ching Chow was on one hand typical of contemporaneous "Oriental" stereotypes, he was also rendered as oddly abstract primarily through his unexplained ability to understand and speak the languages of the various "savages" who appeared in the strip. This ability was also possessed by Salty Sam, another sidekick Chester picked up over the course of his adventures. This old sailor's linguistic skills, poor manners, almost incomprehensible dialect and demurring to Chester all contributed to the strip's insinuation that Salty Sam's many years of exploring uncharted waters and exotic lands had, in a nod to

134 contemporaneous theories of environmental determinism, led him to "go savage."

Finally, the banner reproduced below, in which one of the "savage" chiefs accompanied

News Syndicate.

Chester in a rousing rendition of the popular song "Yes, We Have No Bananas," (1923) which presented a subtly derogatory view of Greek immigrants, further conflated racial others while simultaneously demonstrating interrelatedness of the comic strip medium with other contemporaneous manifestations of popular culture.

The Gumps' creation of an abstract exotic other conflated the colonized other with the immigrant and poor-white other in a way that situated Chester as superior to all of them. This level of abstraction was further explored in one of Chester's subsequent adventure in the heart of the Australian outback where Chester, Ching Chow, and Salty

Sam got lost while searching of an ancient city of gold and yet again had to battle generic

"savages" in order to fight their way back to civilization. The following montage, featuring bizarre selection of exotic imagery, adorned the walls of the underground city,

o i apparently constructed in ancient times by native inhabitants. This collage of non- western imagery further reinforced the sense of abstract non-westernness that rendered

Chester's imperial exploits ideally symbolic. His superiority was reinforced through

79 Stephen Frenkel, "Geographical Representations of the 'Other' in the Panama Canal Zone," Journal of Historical Geography 28 (January 2002) 85-99. 80 Smith, 14 June 1925. For the lyrics to "Yes We Have No Bananas'' see Appendix A. 81 Smith. 5 September 1926. 135 York News Syndicate, his subjugation of a generalized non-western other, through violence in the case of

"savages" and through his exercise of "civilized" knowledge and reason in the case of

Ching Chow and Salty Sam. Chester's superiority is even more broadly sweeping by the strip's extension of this abstract non-western otherness to African American characters.

Upon Chester's rescue from the island, Uncle Bim doled out million dollar reward packages to a variety of characters who had helped in the rescue effort. When it came to rewarding "Blackie" Bim was at a loss: "I only wish I could reward him properly," he lamented, "but I suppose he regards those cheap toys and glass beads as priceless treasures." What exactly Blackie received from Bim is unclear, though his reward seems to have included a necklace and child's doll. Observing this, Bim's African American cook noted, seemingly in an envious tone: "You sure was lucky to have Santa Claus bring you all that nice stuff from the five and ten cent store." 2 Through its references to

19 September 1926. 136 imperialism the strip thus positioned Chester as superior to colonized others both abroad

IWM?—__ _—c

*«B»j:WS> VU. FCtO SOU V\«.E TUt

Figure 3.28 Sidney Smith, "Sunday Supplement," The Gumps, 19 September 1926, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate.

and at home.

In 1920 W.E.B. Du Bois addressed the links between foreign and domestic

imperialisms in Darkwater Voices from Within the Veil in which he explored the

connection between racial conflicts in the United States and "transnational networks of

imperial power." In his analysis, Du Bois situated U.S. imperialism not as an isolated

phenomenon but as a part of a larger global system in which the United States acted both

as a product of imperial relations and as a perpetuator of those same relations at home

and abroad. Imperialism was not just a foreign policy but also a psychological position

that "struck at the heart of the domestic nation." Illustrating the interconnection

between imperial interventions and domestic race relations Du Bois explained: "the

anarchy in Haiti is no worse than the anarchy in the United States at the time of the Civil

War, and not as great as the anarchy today in Europe. The lynching and murder in Port-

au-Prince is no worse than, if as bad as, the lynching in Georgia. Haiti can and will work

Sj Quoted in Kaplan. Anarchy of Empire, 174-175. 137 out her own destiny, and is more civilized today than is Texas." Du Bois' comparison of

American attitudes to black and white violence functioned to demonstrate the hypocrisy

and fundamental incivility of the logic underlying colonial interventions and domestic

anxieties. Imperialism both struck at the heart of the domestic nation and blinded it to the

fundamental injustices perpetuated by colonial intervention. The Gumps showed that the

language and logic of imperialism, imperialism abstracted from historical context, had

wormed its way into the heart of the domestic nation and become a shorthand with which

to allude to power, progress and whiteness in contrast to abstract non-whiteness.

Chester's ability to assimilate Bim's imperialist lifestyle positioned him in a dominant

role in relation to a variety of non-white others. Chester's ability to master that which

Andy had failed at positioned him in a dominant role vis-a-vis his father's not-quite-

whiteness, allowing him to perform whiteness in ways Andy so wished he could.

Dubois' belief that imperialism had struck at the heart of American society is

echoed by Fanon's assertion that the dependence on an imperial grammar of difference is

deeply ingrained in the American social imaginary. He argues that "two centuries ago, a

former European colony took it into its head to catch up to Europe. It has been so

successful that the United States of America has become a monster where the flaws,

sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions." As in most

post-colonial bourgeois societies, the elite reproduced the same forms of oppression perpetrated under the colonial regime. Neo-colonial modes of exploitation replicated

colonial dominance and were incorporated into the social infrastructure, substituting

8-1 Du Bois, "Hayti," The Crisis 10 (September 1915); 291, quoted in Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 172. 85 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 236-7.

138 "discrimination for lynching." For Fanon, this transition is characteristic of colonial

practices in capitalist societies, where the contrast between colonized and colonizer is

couched in what appear to be benign institutions, represented by educators, "sermonizers,

counsellors and 'confusion-mongers'" who "intervene between the exploited and the

authorities."87 While Fanon was quite literal in his identification of these institutions, the

ideology they replicate is of course replicated through cultural production. Through

Chester, The Gumps glorified exploitative imperialist practices by presenting them as

heroic and redemptive thus encouraging the emulation of the exploitative assumptions at

their core.

Like Fanon, Nearing held that American imperialism reproduced colonial social

structures domestically but tied this more explicitly to capitalist systems. Nearing argued

the need to consider the relationship between imperialism and capitalism in that he feared

that in the 1920s they had become one and the same, that "organized, imperial business"

had replaced traditional forms of imperialism with economic imperialism driven by a

quest for markets and resources.89 He maintained that the United States had developed a

property holding class, imperial class that manipulated public policy in order to exploit

the continental United States and its dependencies.90 Moreover, the American worker, by

greasing the wheels of the capitalist economy, maintains this imperial class, and "in return for these sacrifices, must be prepared to accept the poverty of a subsistence wage; to give the best of their energies in war and in peace, and to stand aside while the imperial

Fanon, BSWM, 53,221. Fanon, WE, 4. Fanon, WE, 110. Nearing, 175. Nearing, 167. 139 class enjoys the fat of the land." In Nearing's analysis, neo-colonialism creates alienated

workers who reproduce the conditions of economic imperialism. In Fanon's analysis,

neo-colonialism creates "alienated (duped) blacks, and...no less alienated (duping and

duped) whites." Alienated by the promise of white privilege, privilege rooted in

colonialism, poor and working-class whites secure elite white dominance by reproducing

the conditions that ensure economic exploitation and racial discrimination.

In Nearing's analysis the working-class individuals who continuously contribute

to their own exploitation at the hands of economic imperialists are poor in terms of

economic capital. In The Gumps the alienated and duped whites are poor in terms of

cultural capital. It is the well-bred that represent the plutocratic class. Moreover, it is

Chester's ability to successfully embody the character traits necessary to succeed in his

imperialist endeavours that puts him in a dominant position vis-a-vis the colonized, non-

white and not-quite-white others around him. They lack his breeding and civility.

Significantly, so does his father. On one level the strips suggests that Chester's imperialist

adventures are simply a way for him to prove his mettle. But on another level the strip

seems to present a cautionary tale in addition to the heroic adventure narrative. Chester's

achievements mirror Andy's failures and in this way function as correctives or resolutions to the anxieties Andy's narratives project. The primary anxiety The Gumps articulates involves the need to police the boundaries of domestic dominance. Having properly assimilated imperialist logic, Chester has developed powers of distinction such that he can be trusted to police the boundaries of dominant whiteness. Andy, lacking as he is in

91 Nearing, 265. 92 Fanon, BSWM, 29 93 Weis et. al., 131; Sandoval., 98-99; Howard Winant, "Behind Blue Eyes," in ed. Michelle Fine et al., Off White: Readings on Power, Privilege, and Resistance, (New York: Routledge 2004), 4. 140 breeding and civility, cannot. Through the strip's juxtaposition of Andy's failures with

Chester's successes Andy is positioned as not-quite-white while Chester is not. In this way, the strip thus shows that successful assimilation and replication of imperialist logic, that is to say, of fundamentally exploitative logic provides a sure route to white dominance.

141 KONKLUSION

During the period from 1924-1929, Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps used a grammar of race and a language of imperialism to single out white characters who lacked economic, social, or cultural capital and thereby reinforce the boundaries of dominant whiteness. These not-quite-white characters were singled in two ways: first, through comparisons with non-white characters and second, through references to imperialism. In these comic strips black characters that played important, if purely supporting roles, were represented in a variety of stereotypical ways. Elements of these stereotypes were clearly applied to white characters who had transgressed the boundaries of whiteness and who therefore exhibited behaviour the strips indicated was not-quite- white. Through references to imperialism, the comic strips further reinforced the differences between whiteness and not-quite-whiteness. The Gumps in particular invoked a variety of cultural myths associated with imperialism and reinforced associations between imperialism and whiteness. By elaborating on Andy Gump's failure to realize a variety of imperial projects the strip reinforced his failure to embody dominant whiteness.

Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps performed important work in conceptualizing whiteness for reasons that had everything to do with the comic strip form. Comic strips during this period strove to be highly accessible and had an extraordinarily large and broadly based readership. Moreover, because the medium strove to create a sense of community among readers, these readers engaged and identified with comic strips to a significant degree. This is evidenced most strikingly in comic strip readers" responses to affective events within a strip's narrative arc and reader response to direct appeals from the comic strip on a more formal level. In turn, comic strip creators

142 were particularly attentive to their audiences, and necessarily so as they relied on comic strip popularity to sell papers. For these reasons, comic strips reflected the views of mainstream America in a singular way. The ways in which Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley and The Gumps conceptualized dominant whiteness thus reflected and reinforced the ways in which mainstream America conceived of dominant whiteness. The ideological work comic strips did was contrasted by a notable counterpoint: George Herriman's markedly unpopular comic strip Krazy Kat.

On 1 August 1910 George Herriman's The Family Upstairs, which had debuted on 20 June 1910 as The Dingbat Family, introduced, in an unused corner of one of the comic strip's panels, the Dingbat's cat. Over the next few weeks, the cat moved into a curious, self-enclosed sub-strip that appeared in an inch-high panel below The Family

Upstairs. Soon, a bizarre cat-and-mouse game appeared in this space, featuring a small black cat who, on a daily basis, was beaned with a brick by a small white mouse.1 In

1913, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse graduated to their own comic strip, Krazy Kat, where they were joined by a collection of odd, anthropomorphized characters who acted out repetitive, surrealist skits against an a backdrop of constantly changing South-western landscapes. Krazy Kat would never be a popular comic strip and yet would run for thirty- one years. It was disparaged by the public at large but loved by elite artists and intellectuals. Its meaning was inscrutable; its themes were abstract and balked at contemporary conceptualizations of gender and race. Krazy Kat articulated what many contemporary popular comic strips did not and as a result, provides an important contrast to popular comic strips and their content.

The unpopularity of Krazy Kat is significant in that it suggests Herriman's strip

1 Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 174.

143 expressed themes that ran counter to mainstream tastes. And yet Krazy Kat was published in more than forty-eight newspapers. Most of these newspapers were published by

William Randolph Hearst, lover and sole patron of the strip who swore that regardless of its unpopularity he would continue publishing the strip as long as Herriman wanted to produce it. Readers wrote newspaper editors on a regular basis to complain that they could not understand the strip, were bored by its repetitive structure, did not find it funny and were not engaged by its characters. Hearst's editors begged for permission to drop

Krazy citing endless complaints from readers whose opposition to the strip they could not counter as they too found it mystifying. Nonetheless, Hearst's will prevailed and Krazy

Kat continued to appear in newspapers across the country. Cultural critic Gilbert Seldes was the first to publically sing Krazy's praises in The Seven Lively Arts and he was not alone. Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, H.L. Mencken, and T. S. Eliot were among the artists and intellectuals who either read Krazy avidly or, as expatriates, had the strip clipped from American newspapers and sent to them abroad. Krazy's following produced a number of innovative readings of the strip's rich significance but because contemporary Krazy Kat readers were so rarefied, these readings cannot be taken as necessarily representative of any broader reactions to the strip.

Though not necessarily representative of the tastes of a national readership,

Krazy''s subject matter was significant in that it alluded precisely to what mainstream comic strips did not articulate. Krazy's subject matter was at once strictly limited and boundless. Structured such that it mimicked a theme and variations, Krazy's main players were Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pup. Krazy was in love with Ignatz. Offissa

" Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 179. "' Blackbeard, "Introduction," in George Herriman, Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1926: "There is a Heppy Land, Fur, Fur Awa-a-ay; " ed. Bill Blackbeard, (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphic Books, 2002), unpagenated.

144 Pup was in love with Krazy. In every strip Ignatz Mouse "beaned the kat's brain with a brick," an act Krazy always took to be a sign of Ignatz's affection, and Offissa Pup tried to imprison Ignatz Mouse for assaulting Krazy, who believed this last piece of the puzzle was a good-natured "game" played between Ignatz and Offissa Pupp.4 Almost every strip included the above components—the fixed grammar of Krazy Kat. Joseph Witek put it best when he observed that the strip "thwarts and mocks the reader's expectations."5

There was no closure. There was no teleology. There were only variations on the theme.

Seldes argued that the qualities of Krazy Kat were irony, fantasy and the triumph of love, ee cummings viewed Krazy as a mediation on anarchy and democracy. Others viewed the strip as a surrealist experiment, a satire on heaven and hell, a reflection of the importance of illusion and self-making to the American Dream, and a work of cutting- edge existentialism.8 Comics historian Robert C. Harvey argues that Krazy Kat was an allegory on race relations embodied by a black cat and a white mouse. In a reading that was very speculative Harvey goes on to postulate about Krazy Kat was a reflection of

Herriman's self-hatred brought on by race prejudice, and though Harvey draws on some bold assumptions here, his is nonetheless a reading that points most clearly, albeit sometimes problematically, to Krazy's critique of socially constructed categories such as race.

The secondary literature on Krazy Kat often makes much of the brick part. In reality, in the majority of Krazy Kat strips Krazy doesn't actually get hit with Ignatz's brick. Sometimes Krazy will get hit with something else accidentally and will mistake this chance missive for Ignatz's. Other times the strip ends with Krazy disappointed, having not been hit at all. In 1925 Ignatz's brick hit Krazy on less than a third of the time. There's far more to Krazy Kat than the brick. ^ Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History, 9. 6 Seldes, 231. 7 ee cummings, 102-106. 8 Arthur Asa Berger, The Comic Stripped American: What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks, and Charlie Brown EM us about Ourselve, (New York: Walker and Company: 1972), 68-71. 9 Harvey. The Art of the Funnies, 179.

145 Harvey's reading of Krazy draws on the fact that Herriman's racial background remains unclear. Bill Blackbeard alleges that Herriman claimed to be "Creole but of mixed blood" but that in other instances he claimed to have been born in Louisiana to

Greek immigrants. Blackbeard also asserts that Herriman was sensitive about his racial origins, that he had "kinky black hair" and wore a hat whether indoors or out, "probably to conceal the fact."" The likelihood that Herriman's was in part of African American descent leads several scholars to commentary on race and race relation into the relationship between Krazy, a black cat and Ignatz, a white mouse. This analysis is encouraged by the fact that Krazy referenced his blackness on several occasion in notable ways. He celebrated his blackness and commented on feeling empty when on a couple of occasions he was, through various bizarre circumstances, turned white. "'Tan,' that's wot I love," he explained. "Ooy—if only 'Ignatz' had a tan—instead of being a pal, pink, pellid I'll 'mice.' Becomes a 'dusky dahlink.'" Krazy's occasional, unintentional whitening-up played on the social construction of race in a way that countered the way representations of blackface consolidated whiteness in contemporaneous comic strips.

Featuring characters like Don Kiyote and Kolin Kelly, the strip demonstrated that Krazy's

Coconino County was not a black and white local, but rather full of characters who created a sense of multi-ethnic plurality. Beneath certain very superficial markers of difference, Krazy Kat's characters were neither caricatures nor stereotypes, and though their character development was limited by the strip's thematic idiosyncrasies, they did

10 Bill Blackbeard, "Introduction," in George Herriman, Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1926: "There is a Heppy Land, Fur, Fur Awa-a-ay, " ed. Bill Blackbeard, (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphic Books, 2002), unpagenated. Blackbeard's editorial contributions to these volumes are often inconsistent or inaccurate. His claims, therefore, must be taken with a grain of salt. " Harvey, The Art of the Funnies, 179. 12 Once in an accident involving white paint and on another occasion in a strip in which the characters comment on the cartoonist having run out of ink, an example that speaks also to Krazy Kafs absurdist qualities and frequent self-referential strips.

146 not perform the same kind of ideological work that Mushmouth and Rachel did.

Krazy Kafs representation of race and ethnicity was just one of the ways that the strip challenged socially constructed boundaries. Krazy's gender was indeterminate, a point Krazy repeatedly articulated and mused on. Herriman also regularly challenged the formal boundaries of the comic strip form. His panels were often unconventionally constructed in ways that complimented their surrealistic subject matter. The background in one panel would often be completely different from the next and would sometimes self-consciously reference the artistry of the strip. His characters spoke in a variety of changing dialects that were reminiscent of everything from Shakespearean dialogue to regional patois. They also often discussed the meaning of language, challenging its claim to fixity as in the following dialogue:

Krazy Kat: Ahh—et lest, efta 'winta,' comes 'summa,' a heppy-heppy sissin Ignatz Mouse: you're a bit wrong, when you say that summer comes after winter KK: well, dunt it? IM: Of course not— KK: No? IM: Summer comes before winter—silly— KK: Shux, dunt this summa come efta last winta? IM:NO!! KK: NO? IM: No, because summer comes before next winter. KK: hmmmmm IM: And what's more, last summer came before last winter—also. And now, this 'brick' will go after a 'kat' if you insist on being different. KK: if this comes before that, wot comes efta those if these come befors them, or wot goes before, if any— Offissa Pupp: And this 'cop' will go after a mouse.

Krazy Kelt's challenges to the conventions of the medium and to conceptual constructs departed from the comic strip norm in ways that, were it not for Hearst's stubbornness,

26 April 1928.

147 would not have been tolerated on the pages of 1920s newspapers.

While Krazy is fascinating for the ways in which it implicitly critiqued the work contemporary strips did to reinforce dominant norms, its noted lack of readership shows that comic strip fans had little time for the strip's surrealistic social commentary and reinforces the importance of reading strips such as Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and

The Gumps. The overwhelming popularity of these comic strips, and the ways in which the comic strip genre was shaped by its readership in significant ways, means that they serve as indications of mainstream attitudes and prejudices that were accepted and acceptable in 1920s popular culture. Moreover, their popularity shows that the latent or implicit meaning inherent in comic strip themes and narratives, meanings that are clearer to us in retrospect than they were at time, were uncritically consumed by a significant percentage of the population. Though Whiteness Studies has in some ways run its course and has been integrated into less specialized forms of analysis, particularizing whiteness remains a productive analytical tool. Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps show the way now-challenged social constructs—gender and race—were normalized through symbolic reinforcement. They also show that attitudes to class, a material category and not a social construct, was represented in similar ways. These strips reinforced the parameters of dominant whiteness by defining it in opposition to non- whiteness, casting class differences in the same terms, essentializing class difference, and then re-defining whiteness in opposition to this form of not-quite-whiteness.

" More recently commercial comic strip artists such as Bill Watterson and Berk Breathed have credited Heiriman, along with Windsor McKay, for paving the way for artistic and thematically innovative strips.

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"Yes, We Have No Bananas" (1923)

Frank Silver and Irving Cohn

There's a fruit store on our street It's run by a Greek. And he keeps good things to eat But you should hear him speak!

When you ask him anything, he never answers "no". He just "yes"es you to death, And as he takes your dough, he tells you...

"Yes! We have no bananas We have no bananas today!! We have string beans and onions, cabbages and scallions And all kinds of fruit and say We have an old fashioned tomato A Long Island potato, but

Yes! We have no bananas We have no bananas today!"

Business got so good for him that he wrote home today, "Send me Pete and Nick and Jim; I need help right away." When he got them in the store, there was fun, you bet. Someone asked for "sparrow grass" and then the whole quartet All answered:

"Yes, we have no bananas We have-a no bananas today. Just try those coconuts Those wall-nuts and doughnuts There ain't many nuts like they. We'll sell you two kinds of red herring, Dark brown, and ball-bearing. But yes, we have no bananas We have no bananas today."