Before Walt Disney…
A decade before Walt Disney released his first animated short, “Alice’s Day at the Sea” in 1924, illustrator Louis Glackens (1866-1933) created trailblazing animated shorts featuring mermaids, anthropomorphic beasts, and political satire.
His career has often been treated as a footnote to that of his younger brother, Ashcan School artist William J. Glackens.[1] Both Glackens brothers attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which played an important role in the development of the Ashcan School in particular and modernism in general. Like other members of the Ashcan School, William Glackens painted realistic scenes of everyday life: scenes that according to critic Robert Hughes were “as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow that froze on Broadway in the winter.” Their paintings were the visual equivalent of muckraking journalism. By contrast, Louis’s work was cartoonish and often fanciful in style. At the same time, his work shared the critical approach to modern life that was central to the Ashcan School.
Louis Glackens began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist working for newspapers in Philadelphia. In 1890, he moved to New York and took a job as as a staff artist for Puck,[2] a satirical weekly magazine based in New York. For the next twenty years, Glackens created hundreds of cartoons and dozens of covers for the magazine, in a variety of formats, styles and targets. He created a series that ran for three years called "In Colonial Days, "that pictured Puritans and Founding Fathers in comical and undignified scenarios and often drew cartoons in which cavemen stood in for their modern counterparts.[3]
When Puck changed ownership in 1915, and subsequently declined in quality, Glackens found work as an animator at Bray Studios, an early animation pioneer credited by historians of animated cartoons as launching animation as a practical form of entertainment rather than a novelty.[4] (My guess is that Glackens found his way to Bray Studios because the studio’s founder, J.R. Bray, worked for a time as a cartoonist at Puck.) Often billed as “The Famous Cartoonist” in the title, he produced more than twenty films for Bray. He is believed to have also worked for the Barré, Pathe, and Sullivan studios, all major players in the early days of animation, though if he did his work there was uncredited. Some of his films, most notably the "Haaden Baad" caveman series, built on the satirical use of historical themes to satirize modern issues that he used at Puck. Others were fanciful fairy tales—predecessors of Disney’s fairy tale-based features.
After five years at Bray, Glackens returned to Philadelphia. He continued to work as a commercial artist, though his work was always a little too bizarre to fit the commercial mainstream. He produced illustrations for book publishers, general interest magazines, newspapers, and for catalogs for his childhood friend, Samuel Sorenson Adams, creator of novelty items such as the Whoopee Cushion and the Dribble Glass He also had paintings in the 1913 Armory show, possibly because his brother William was in charge of selecting paintings for the American portion of the show.
His work as an innovative early animator is largely forgotten. His Whoopee Cushion illustrations live on.
[1] The Ashcan School has been tracking me down for months now. One of these days I’m going to take a day at the library and sink into their work. . Not with a project in mind. Just because they’ve been calling my name. But not right now. I am currently rushing to finish something by the end of the year. Which is coming real soon.
[2] Puck was the first widely distributed humor magazine published in the United States, with a circulation of 85,000 in 1880. The magazine cost 10¢, making it accessible for working men as well as the upper middle class. (The popular Harper’s Illustrated cost 35¢.) Puck used visual humor to ridicule prominent figures and institutions of all kinds: politicians of both parties, union leaders, high society and ethnic minorities. As the character Puck explained in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue, "People get all fussed up when their own ox is gored, but they do love to have me gore the oxen of their neighbors, and on the whole, I please most of the people most of the time.”
[3] The roots of and problems with the pop culture idea of the caveman is too complicated for me to deal with here, but I’m making a note.
[4] And this is where I went down a rabbit hole about Bray Studios, which led me to more rabbit holes about early animation history. A blog post or three on the subject may arrive in coming weeks.
Hopping for Sufferage
I’m spending some time looking at the women’s suffrage movement—not the big sweeping arc of the movement, the major events or the big names, but the smaller stories within the story.[1]
I’m finding some fascinating stuff. But the most unusual thing I’ve found so far is a fundraising event called the hopperie.
Mrs. Norman Whitehouse, chair of the New York State Women's Suffrage Party, testing the hopperie
Held at Luna Park at Coney Island in June 1915, the hopperie sounds like an extreme version of hopscotch. The game was played on circular staircase with steps representing the various states, which were marked as having suffrage, partial suffrage, or no suffrage.[2] The player started at the bottom on one foot and hopped up the incline, jumping over states where women didn’t have the vote and landing on those that did. (My sources are unclear on whether or not you could land on states with near suffrage.) You weren’t allowed to change which foot you jumped on as you went. Anyone who made it to the top won a box of “suffrage caramels.”
According to the New York Sun, getting to the top “necessitated good wind and fairly muscular calves.” Personally, I think it sounds impossible. But hundreds of New Yorkers paid a nickel for the privilege of “hopping for suffrage.” How many of the "hoppers" believed in the cause and how many just wanted to play the newest game on the midway is uncertain.
Click HERE if you want to see a picture of suffragists in action on the hopperie
[1] I suppose you could consider this a hint about the book proposal I’m working on, but only in the smallest possible way.
[2] A three-dimensional interactive variation on the “suffrage map” that suffragists used as a way to show the spread of suffrage.
1925: A Year in Review
In historical hindsight, the big event in 1925 was Adolf Hitler’s publication of Mein Kampf and re-organization of the National Socialist party[1] to emphasize the the extreme nationalism that is a common element of fascist political philosophy rather than its original socialist leanings.
In fact, in 1925, the Nazis were not yet a significant political power and what Germans call Die goldenen zwanziger Jahre (The Golden Twenties) was at its height. The economy was on its way to recovery from the hyperinflation that had plagued it since 1923 , thanks to the passage of the Dawes Plan in 1924, which put the German economy under foreign supervision and stabilized the mark. The political landscape was relatively calm, on the floor of the Reichstag if not in the streets,[2] under the strong leadership of Gustav Streseman[3]. General Paul von Hindenburg, having reluctantly agreed to run for president, won by a huge margin, giving the illusion of national political unity. The country was enjoying an artistic intellectual blossoming that was dynamic, challenging, and transgressive. In short, Germany seemed to be stable.
Meanwhile, in the United States:
On March 18, the Tri-State Tornado, the deadliest tornado in United States history tore through southeast Missouri, southern Illinois and southwest Indiana, leaving 695 people dead, more than two thousand injured thousands homeless, and $16.5 million in property damage.[4].
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- Clarence Darrow
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- John T. Scopes
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- William Jennings Bryan
In July, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryant squared off over the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. Dubbed the Scopes Monkey Trial by journalist H.L. Mencken, the case began as an effort by the ACLU to test whether the Butler Law which made such teaching illegal in Tennessee, was constitutional. The ACLU ran ads in Tennessee newspapers offering to pay the legal expenses of any teacher willing to challenge the law. Twenty-four year old high school teacher and football coach John T. Scopes stepped up, backed by a group of local residents eager to put their economically depressed town in the news. It worked, for more than a week, Dayton, Tennessee, was the center of the nation’s attention. Reporters came from as far away as London and Hong Kong to report on the trial. More than six hundred spectators crowded into the courtroom each day. Thousands more listened to a live radio broadcast from the courtroom—the first such broadcast to be made. It took the jury nine minutes to find Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. The Supreme Court of Tennessee overturned the verdict on a technicality, but ruled the Butler Law to be constitutional. In 1968, the United States Supreme Court found a similar law in Arkansas to be a violation of the First Amendment. (Change is slow.)
Elsewhere in the world:
On January 3, Benito Mussolini effectively declared himself dictator of Italy in a speech to the Italian parliament, after a nudge from his party members, who felt he was moving too slowly in his efforts to dismantle Italian democracy from within.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished Islam as the state religion in Turkey—the first step in a series of reforms designed to secularize the Turkish state, including the abolition of polygamy, the prohibition of the fez, the modernization of women’s clothing , and adoption of the Latin alphabet.
A fragile alliance had existed between the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party after the 1912 revolution that established the Republic of China. With the death of charismatic revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen on March 12, 1925, and the ascension of Chaing Kai-shek to the head of the Nationalists, ideological differences between the two parties intensified, leading to a brutal civil war between them from 1927 to 1949.
Rubble in the streets of Damascus. From the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society
France occupied Syria and Lebanon in the early 1920s as part of the League of Nations’ mandate system. The mandates were intended to be a temporary arrangement designed to administer former German colonies and Ottoman territories with the goal of eventual independence. Not surprisingly, the mandate quickly looked a great deal like colonialism, including economic extraction that benefited France and not the mandated territories, with no sign of independence in sight. In the summer of 1925, what became known as the Great Syrian Revolt erupted in Syria and Lebanon. The French responded violently. In October, the revolt caught the world’s attention when revolutionaries attacked the French troops in Damascus. The high commander of the French miliary administration decided to take drastic measures against the revolutionaries and ordered troops to bombard the city. After nearly twenty-four hours of heavy fire from French airplanes and tanks, much of the city was in ruins. The violence marked a turning point in discussions about European colonial dominance and humanitarian aid in Syria, with Geneva as the center for the debate. For a time, there were calls to remove the mandate from French control. Those calls ultimately failed. By 1927, the revolt had been brutally quashed.
In a step toward greater democracy, Japan introduced universal male suffrage.[5] On the other hand, Japan also passed the Peace Preservation Law in 1925. This law gave the government the power to limit political dissent, providing the foundation for the militarism of the 1930s.
A few non-political things to end on a high note:
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby
The Grand Ole Opry began broadcasting from Nashville
The first surrealist exhibition opened in Paris
John Logie Baird transmitted the first recognizable black and white television picture on October 2. The following January, he gave the first public demonstration of television.
And, ahem, Sigrid Schultz became the Berlin bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune.
[1] The term Nazis didn’t come into common use until 1931. Prior to that they were referred to as National Socialists, Hitlerites, or small-f fascists.
[2] Violence in the streets was a regular feature of German political life in the period between the two world wars.
[3] A successful businessman before he entered politics, Gustav Streseman was the head of the liberal German People’s Party. After a brief term as chancellor in 1923, he served unchallenged as the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister until his unexpected death at the age of fifty-one in 1929, shortly before the American stock market crashed and took the German economy with it. In my opinion, Germany’s response to the Great Depression might have been very different if Streseman had been there.
[4] $28.6 billion today
[5] Women didn’t get the vote until 1945.