“VULGARIZING AMERICAN CHILDREN”: NAVIGATING RESPECTABILITY AND COMMERCIAL APPEAL IN EARLY NEWSPAPER COMICS by Ralph D. Suiter III A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of George Mason University in Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy History Committee: ___________________________________________ Director ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ Department Chairperson ___________________________________________ Program Director ___________________________________________ Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences Date: _____________________________________ Spring Semester 2016 George Mason University Fairfax, VA “Vulgarizing American Children”: Navigating Respectability and Commercial Appeal in Early Newspaper Comics A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at George Mason University by Ralph D. Suiter III Master of Arts University of Massachusetts, Boston, 2006 Bachelor of Arts Simon’s Rock College of Bard, 1999 Director: Paula Petrik, Professor Department of History Spring Semester 2016 George Mason University Fairfax, VA This work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noderivs 3.0 unported license. ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated my parents, Ralph and Dianne Suiter, from whose example I learned to love learning, to value the life of the mind above all else, and to never give up on my goals. I love you both so much. I would also like to dedicate it to my nephew, Theo Kuruvilla, because a family’s only ever as good as its next generation. Go do cool things, little man. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people to whom I owe a sincere thank you for helping me get to this point. To my wife, Greta—thank you so much for your love and support, for your encouragement, and for the occasional push when I got lazy. I would also like to thank my parents, Ralph and Dianne Suiter—you’re also two of the best proofreaders I could ever ask for, and your own lifelong dedication to education is what inspired me to be what I am today. Many, many thanks are also due to all the comics and comics studies folks who have helped and encouraged me: Jared Gardner, Allan Holtz, Christina Meyer, Bill Kartalopoulous, and Susan Liberator, Caitlin McGurk and everyone else from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Special thanks to Derf Backderf for his feedback and suggestions about the comics field at midcentury. I’d like to thank all the organizers and participants at the 2013 Billy Ireland Triennial Festival of Cartoon Art, the 2014 International Comics Art Festival, and the Society of Illustrators’ 2014 MoCCA Arts Festival, for providing me with wonderful forums in which I could give my arguments a test-drive, and get amazing feedback. I’d also like to thank my entire dissertation committee, Ellen Todd, Jennifer Ritterhouse, and especially my advisor, Paula Petrik, for seeing me to this point. I know it has been a while coming. I would also like to thank all my classmates, former cohort members, and aca- friends, who’ve kept me sane all these years: Kelly McDonald Weeks, Yuya Kiuchi, Lance Eaton, my classmates at GMU, the old gang from LJ, and special thanks to Katie Chenoweth, whose suggestion of Bourdieu was invaluable. Finally, I’d like to thank the folks at the National Postal Museum, Arlington Public Library’s Center for Local History, and North Shore Community College, both for providing me with employment after my funding ended, and for providing wonderful, encouraging workplaces where I could thrive. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Figures ................................................................................................................. vii Abstract ........................................................................................................................... viii Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Comics and Cultural Capital ....................................................................................... 5 Navigating Respectability and Commercial Appeal in a New Medium .............. 16 Chapter One: “Yellow Journalism” and the Yellow Kid: the Newspaper Business and the Comic Supplement, 1895-1900 ...................................................................... 23 Pulitzer and Outcault ................................................................................................. 24 Hearst Comes to Town ............................................................................................... 33 “Yellow Journalism” and the Yellow Kid ................................................................ 45 Defining Yellow Journalism ...................................................................................... 49 Conclusion: The Comic Supplement as a Stab at Respectability ......................... 63 Chapter Two: “When You Don’t Like a Thing, Say So.” Fomenting a Crusade Against the Comic Supplement, 1907-1912 ................................................................ 69 Comic Characters as Metonym for the Yellow Press ............................................. 72 Competing Newspapers Attack the Comics ............................................................ 80 The Comic Weeklies Take Aim at the Comic Supplement .................................... 88 “Improvement” as an Alternate Model to Suppression ........................................ 95 “A Work for Women of the Most Pressing and Practical Kind” ......................... 102 Chapter Three: “If Not Actually Evil… Vulgarizing.” The Rhetoric of the Crusade Against the Comic Supplement, 1907-1912 .............................................................. 114 “Vulgarity” & “Purity”: Claiming a Place in Cultural Criticism for Middle-Class Women ....................................................................................................................... 114 The Comic Supplement and its Effect on Children ............................................. 118 Anti-Comics Advocates Appeal to Scientific Authority ....................................... 125 The Comic Supplement, the Motion Picture, and Working-Class Leisure ...... 133 Sabbatarianism and the Sunday Comic Supplements ........................................ 140 v The League for the Improvement of the Children’s Comic Supplement .......... 148 The Campaign Ends ................................................................................................. 156 Chapter Four: The Katzenjammer Kids at the Armory Show: Social Capital, Cartoonists, and Modern Art, 1913 ............................................................................ 160 The Armory Show, 1913 ........................................................................................... 163 Kuhn, Dirks, and Mager ....................................................................................... 165 The Robert Henri Node: Organ, Luks and Wortman ...................................... 173 Outliers: Crowley and Powers ............................................................................. 179 Promoting the Armory Show .................................................................................. 181 Cartoonists React to the Armory Show ................................................................. 185 Comics and Fine Art Circa 1913 .............................................................................. 189 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 196 Appendix ....................................................................................................................... 211 References ..................................................................................................................... 220 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page Figure 1: The Comics Field at Midcentury (circa 1964-1965) .................................. 11 Figure 2: W.A. Rogers, “Mr. Hearst’s Boom,” Harper’s Weekly January 9, 1904 74 Figure 3: Edward Windsor Kemble, “Comic Section of the New Yoik Choinal, Sunday September 1906,” Collier’s, October 13, 1906, 11. ....................................... 77 Figure 4: Louis Glackens, “Puck’s Sunday Supplement: The Slapstick Kids and Their Purple Pa,” Puck, January 17, 1906. .................................................................. 93 Figure 5: Louis Glackens, “Our Progressive Sense of Humor,” Puck, November 10, 1909, p.4 .................................................................................................................. 134 Figure 6: Louis Glackens, “The Latest in Easter Eggs: The Cubist Influence Reaches the Barnyard,” Puck, March 1913 ............................................................... 186 Figure 7: “Art Worlds” of Comics, Illustration, and Fine Art, 1913 vs. 1930s .............. 193 vii ABSTRACT “VULGARIZING AMERICAN CHILDREN”: NAVIGATING RESPECTABILITY AND COMMERCIAL APPEAL IN EARLY NEWSPAPER COMICS Ralph D. Suiter III, Ph.D. George Mason University, 2016 Dissertation Director: Dr. Paula Petrik Between the first appearance of the Sunday newspaper comic supplement in 1895 and the early 1920s, the status of the comic supplement in the field of cultural production was being questioned and navigated by publishers, editors, cartoonists, and the reading public. Looking at the