[In the excerpt below, Dormon surveys the use of ethnic stereotypes in American cartoon periodicals of the Gilded Age. He argues that they express increasing levels of fear and ethnocentrism in response to immigration.]

Images of ethnic minorities in the United States have long been subjects of the popular media and the performing arts, and have provided a rich store of American humor, primarily in the form of caricature presentation. Afro-Americans, for example, began to appear prominently on the stage as early as the 1820s in the phenomenally popular act developed by Thomas Dartmouth (“Jim Crow”) Rice, who sought and found an unlimited fund of high hilarity in “Jumping Jim Crow,” ultimately producing a full-blown stage black caricature that sustained his career for two decades and spawned countless imitators along the way.¹ The minstrel tradition that flowed out of his enormous success continued to perpetuate caricature blacks as staples of the “blackface art,” even as it continued to influence white attitudes toward blacks by way of the developing stereotype.² Similarly, German-American ethnics came to appear in burlesque and vaudeville (usually in the form of the ubiquitous “Dutch” act) precisely with the advent of these popular genres. Jews began appearing in vaudeville “Hebrew” acts as early as 1880, and became a staple item by 1890; so much so that few vaudeville bills for over a decade failed to include “Hebrew” material.³ The stage Irish-American was even older, and though the image was more complex in the particulars of its development than were the stereotypes of American blacks and Jews, stage Irish were to be among the longest-lived of all ethnic stage caricatures.⁴ Other American ethnics would appear later on the stage, and of course on radio and film and in the electronic media, but that is a part of another story.

With the advent of the popular cartoon periodicals of the 1880s, it was likely inevitable that ethnic minorities would come to serve as graphic sources of humor. By this time the ascribed peculiarities and vagaries of at least some of the ethnic population had come to be known qualities; part of the collective consciousness of the period, and the new magazines quickly came to feature ethnic caricature as a staple item. The continued arrival of countless new immigrant/ethnics perpetuated the ethnic as a source of material for the caricature cartoonist, even as the popular concern with the “New Immigration” insured a continuing interest in all matters pertaining to the newcomers. While the older periodical publications that featured illustrations—Frank Leslie's Illustrated Magazine as well as Leslie's Budget of Fun, or even Harper's Weekly, for example—occasionally looked to the ascribed characteristics of ethnics for material, cartoons became the primary feature of several new publications of the 1880s. In 1883, John Ames Mitchell and Edward S. Martin launched Life Magazine, designed to be a sophisticated humorous monthly featuring cartoons; shortly thereafter Puck and Judge began publishing, and each of them offered periodic collections of cartoons under separate cover: Respectively, Puck's Library and Judge's Library. The cartoonists whose work sustained such magazines quickly discovered America's endemic fascination with the ascribed foibles of her ethnics and made caricature the mainstay of their material, even as C. Jay Taylor's “Taylor Made Girl” and Charles Dana Gibson's “Gibson Girl” provided popular versions of ideal Anglo-American femininity (though both Taylor and Gibson turned to ethnic material as well in their work).⁵ Designed to appeal to a large middle-class audience, priced to sell at ten cents an issue, these new serial publications envisioned their purpose as, in the words of the Judge's Library mast-head, “A paper for the family and fireside. Satirical without being malicious, and humorous without being vulgar.”⁶

The best of the artist/cartoonists who provided the material for such publications sold their work to any and all, and the most successful of them—Eugene Zimmerman (who worked under the pen name “Zim”), for example, or Edward Windsor Kemble, or Frederick Burr Opper, or Louis Dalrymple—were represented prominently in the pages of all three of the periodicals featuring cartoons. And the popularity of the publications grew apace. By 1901, Judge's Library claimed a subscription list of 114,000, and newsstand sales far in excess of this number. The editor also claimed his paper to be “the finest and most popular of all the American humorous weeklies” though the continuing competition of Puck and Life argued for the ongoing popularity of all three.⁷ It is notable that Judge also stated as policy the determination to remain “ever scrupulous to keep within the bounds of modesty and good taste.”⁸

The continuing popular fascination and delight with ethnic material, however, had already produced such a flood of ethnic cartoons as to suggest the policy of publishing entire issues devoted almost exclusively to a single ethnic group, usually with a cover illustration featuring the group of the month. The April, 1890, number of Judge's Library, for example, was entitled “Our Friend. The Hebrew.” It consisted of some twenty cartoons depicting Jews as avaricious, grasping petit-bourgeoises, obsessed with material acquisition. Another number of the magazine, “Irish Aristocracy,” was devoted to Irish-American types, uniformly portrayed as stupid, illiterate, feisty, drunken laborers or policemen (or their wives); the most familiar of the Irish-American caricatures that had prevailed for half a century on the stage.⁹Judge's had already published a black-oriented issue in 1888 entitled “Black and Tan”; another one followed in 1892 under the title “All About our Colored Brethren—coons”; a third issue in 1902 appeared as “Melon Time.”¹⁰ Blacks were revealed on all three covers (and in numberless individual cartoons) to be of two basic types: the rural, lazy, ignorant, watermelon-loving, chicken-stealing buffoon, or the dandified urban “Coon,” with his silly pretensions to white middle-class lifestyle, his garish costume, and his outlandish, malapropistic misuse of the English language. He too, however loved watermelon and stole chickens, and was only superficially different from his country cousins. The fact that he carried a straight razor to all social functions suggests another ascribed characteristic of the ethnic culture, one with some potential for threat to bourgeois white society. Uniformly, however, the razor was wielded against other blacks, not whites. These were, after all, humor magazines.¹¹

Caricature versions of American Blacks, Jewish-Americans, German-Americans, and Irish-Americans were, then, the standard fare of the cartoon periodicals of the late nineteenth century. But as the New Immigration continued to provide material for the caricature artists, the use of such augmented material increased accordingly. Having established the popularity of ethnic cartoon caricature, the publishers readily saw the potential in offering entire issues devoted to the full panorama of ethnic America, as in the 1890s issues of Judge's Library entitled respectively “All Sorts” and “Mugs” … ¹² Such images as these were, through prior stereotyping, instantly recognizable as to ethnic type, and conveyed the fundamental features of the caricatures, group by group. The March issue of Judge's was entitled simply “Mixed.” The lead cartoon was headed “A Cosmopolitan Locality”.¹³ The action of the cartoon features one “Jorelman,” identified as “a new arrival from Hoboken,” having come to Harlem “to get into better society,” as the caption suggests. “Jorelman,” the Scandinavian type, is greeted by his neighbors on the morning of his first day in his new locale: “Th’ top o’ th’ mar-rnin’ t’ yez!”—“Gloodee mlorning!”—“Wie gehts'?”—“Mawnin’ boss!”—“Sella banan for br-r-reakfasta?” Here was the full panoply of ghetto immigrant types as popularly perceived. A similar cover theme appeared in a later number of Puck entitled “Mixed Pickles,” the cover illustration for which depicted a pickle jar containing ethnic Irish, Chinese, German (“Dutch”), Hebrew, and Afro-American: All in what was by then standard caricature from.¹⁴ There can be no doubt that these images had come to be pervasive in the popular culture of the period. They were a part of a mentality.

In subtle ways, however, certain of these images were transformed in the decade of the 1890s, taking on a kind of malignancy previously missing (or understated) in what were essentially benign (if assuredly demeaning) stereotypes. The cartoon representations of the Irish constitutes a case in point. While “Paddy” in earlier popular incarnations was feisty, oafish, and surely given to alcoholic overindulgence, he was depicted as fundamentally decent, and while amusing in his foibles he was a good-hearted, hard-working bloke, be it as a laborer, bartender, or (increasingly) a policeman. The 1890s saw the image turn darker, the caricature becoming wholly unappealing, animalistic, even threatening to bourgeois society. Irish laborers became lazy parasites, as in “A Full-Blooded Irish Setter” … ¹⁵ The Irish policeman emerged as a petty criminal, extorting favors from those he is hired to protect (often enough immigrants themselves). In “Sunday Morning in Cincinnati,” … for example, Officer Reagan, selectively enforcing a new Sunday closing ordinance, speaks: “Pass me out a baloony sassage, Dutchy, or, be hivins! Oi’ll infoorce th’ ixcise law.”¹⁶ This is not the Paddy of old: it is a thoroughly disagreeable, predatory figure.

But the Irish were to undergo yet another transformation by way of popular image: They were to become animals, or at least not fully human. “A Sensitive Animal” … is a case in point. Here “Mr. Jayrick” points to the creature in the cage and explains to his companion: “This, my dear, is a Borneo gorilla. He looks nearly as intelligent as an Irish voter, doesn’t he?” The “gorilla” replies: “Yez Yankee Shnake! Oi’ll tek a fall out av yez if Oi lose me job.”¹⁷ This figure too constitutes a threat to white middle-class society: The potentially dangerous animal is free. And there are other threatening forms represented by the Irish beast. In “A Sweeping Count” … the inspector entering the hut of the Irish-American Muldoon inquires “How many have you in your family, Mrs. Muldoon?” To which she replies “Tin, sur; counting ther ould man an’ ther pigs.”¹⁸ Here, of course, people are equated with pigs, and there are only three pigs. Notable as well are the facial characteristics of the “ould mon”: hardly good old Paddy this. Such a family constituted a real threat to American society—at least to the society of those who mattered. This cartoon, incidentally, appears in the very issue of Judge's that assured its readership that it would remain “in good taste.”

If the Gilded Age saw the image of Irish-Americans undergo a pronounced change toward malignant caricature, other immigrant groups made their initial appearances in the popular cartoon literature in essentially malignant forms. The Chinese, for example, began appearing frequently, and in the form of a wholly unappealing caricature—ugly, menacing, malevolent—from the beginning.¹⁹ The familiar “Heathen Chinee,” as Bret Harte had designated him, had appeared in the popular press and in popular literature prior to the 1890s, but he was now to become another stock figure in cartoon graphics. Judge's devoted a full issue to “A Trip to Chinatown” in 1893, opening with a four-part sequence headed “The Cute Celestial and the Hoodwinked Hounds: or How Ah There got There.” … ²⁰ The bone attached to “Ah There’s” pigtail attracts the stray dogs to the family laundry, for dinner as it were, with the group. The ascribed manner of dress and appearance are by 1893 established (and instantly recognizable.) The humorous “switch” in the cartoon lies in the matter of the fate of the dogs. But the message is clear: The subhuman Chinese eat little dogs! They also eat rats, as evidenced by a second Chinese issue of Judge's Library entitled “Rough on Rats”. … ²¹ Again, the facial expression is noteworthy, as are the long fingernails and exotic attire. The point is, of course, that this creature is surely not “American”; not one of us. He eats dogs and rats and birds' nests and even chicken roost straw, as in “A Mongolian Delicacy” … in which “Un Hung” (the name is significant) advises his mistress that the old straw will “Makee belly good sloup.”²² Ultimately he is not really human, and the popular image suggested that the Chinese actually evolved from the catfish, as suggested by the cartoon entitled “From Catfish to Que”. … ²³ Ascriptively, the Chinese resembled catfish, even to teach other. In “The Lost Found” … a typical Zimmerman illustration, “Ah Flue” exclaims upon hooking a river catfish “By th’ gleat whitee dlagon! It is my blother Hop Wink flom Plekin.”²⁴ This identification of the Chinese with river scavengers clearly suggests the dehumanization of the Chinese by way of the popular media.

But not only were the Chinese deemed subhuman in the cartoon images of the day: They were also dangerous. They routinely used and distributed opium, for example, and the Chinese opium den was a common theme of Chinese-American ascription, as in the cartoon entitled “The Paper Terror Must Go!”. … In this richly detailed drawing, “Hunk Wink” demands that “Chung” eject “dlat Melican man” from the premises of the den because “Cigallet spoilly oplyum smell.”²⁵ Or as a more direct threat, less subtly expressed, the Chinese were collectively a deadly disease: “The Asiatic Collar-er”. … ²⁶ Here the iconography of ascribed qualities are communicated directly and with unmistakable intent: The laundry, the que, the animalistic face with the inscrutable, malevolent expression. This creature is to be feared. He is at best an untouchable. Even among the Irish (at least in the cartoon version of reality) he is an anathema, as suggested by “An Episode of the North River”. … Brogan, drowning, is offered a Chinese que (with the Chinese person still attached) as a life-line, but he declines, declaiming “Sorra th’ day thot Oi laves a Choinaman save me loife. Let me sink, Ronan.”²⁷ Once again the intent is clear: The Chinese are not acceptable. They must go. But even following passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (of 1882; strengthened and extended in 1892) they were still feared; distrusted; likely to avoid the exclusion process, as in “Pat's View”. … Pat observes: “Look at th’ hathen comin’ through th’ earth. Begor! I knew, if they passed a law t’ kape thim yeller divils out av th’ counthry, they’d git in some way.”²⁸ The Yellow Peril persisted, despite the law.

There was one other American ethnic group whose appearance in the cartoon periodicals marked a completely new departure in graphic image making. The Native American, whose ascriptive qualities had been part of American mythology and lore (and popular culture as well) since the initial trans-Atlantic contact gave Europeans the opportunity to assess the Amerindians, now in the 1890s began to appear in caricature form. And there can be no doubt as to the nature of the Indian type, as represented by the cartoonists of the day. He was a predatory, violent, evil, creature, given to atrocity and murder at the slightest provocation (though at the same time so ignoble and degraded as to be comic), as, for example, in “Livingston De Peyster's Death-Knell”. … ²⁹ Here “Man-Afraid-of-His-Shadow,” attempting to smoke De Peyster's hiking-stick, speaks to his tomahawk-brandishing squaw: “Big heap poor smoke! No hole—no draw. Plunk him, Wanita!” Another captive paleface is offered “An Unaccepted Reprieve” … from the stake; unaccepted because the song the Indian requests as a condition of reprieve—“White Wings”—is more than the captive is willing to provide.³⁰ (The song was apparently so popular—and so often performed—as to warrant death at the stake before singing it again.) But the Indian image is consistent: He is a creature who routinely burns others at the stake. Similarly, “The Obliging Prospector” … offers a murderous Indian a stick of dynamite in response to the demand for food; then comments after the explosion: “Whoop! That’s better’n quarrelin’ with him.”³¹ The supertitle of the two-part cartoon set “Is this a Foeman Worthy of Our Steel?” is particularly revealing.³² The central Indian figure in the first frame has killed the family dog (lying in the right foreground) and now demands food of a frontier white woman. He is instead chased off by “Little Johnny,” who exclaims “Th’ dago didn’t think ther wuz a man ’round the house, did he, marm?” Finally, in the realistic illustration entitled “Not a Merry Xmas” … artist Edward Kemble provides no suggestion of mirth whatever; rather, he has a frontier farm maiden awaiting an awful fate at the hands of a murderous Indian who has dispatched her lover and entered her home, pretending to be her “Joris.” There can be no question as to the artist's meaning here: Indians are simply murderers, cold-blooded killers without morals or conscience, little if any better than animals.³³

There remains now but to try to answer the difficult questions: Why these images? And why their continuing popularity? In truth there is no acceptable way of documenting the motivation for cartoonists who assigned ascriptive qualities and characteristics to their subjects, nor is there any accounting for the psychic needs of audiences who presumably recognized and found satisfaction and even humor in those images. About all that may be assumed for certain is that the stereotypes were identifiable; that the very basis of their humor usually turned on their instant identifiability through prior ascription. Hence, they represented to the beholder a form of reality. It is in the assumption of at least a grain of truth in the caricatures, in the recognition that these are in fact versions of reality, that the essence of cartoon caricature lies. The stereotype they represent is in effect the caricature, and vice-versa.

But might there not be something more to the popular fascination with such ethnic caricatures; something lying deeper in the social psychology of the phenomenon; something that provides an element of emotional fulfillment, both individually and collectively, of what might be deemed “rationalization needs”? I would like to suggest, at least tentatively, that the answer would have to be yes. Take the case of the Indian stereotype, for example: Might the pervasive image of this murderous, cowardly, ignoble predator not suggest the need to eliminate the threat; to rid the realm of this troublesome nuisance by straight-forward policies calculated to achieve that end? And had the nation not in fact developed such a policy: The combination of Indian wars, tribal manipulation through allotments in severalty, and the economic assault of the railroads crossing Indian territory, relentlessly diminishing both total population and cultural integration? Had the Indian “threat” not been eliminated by the 1890s with the reduction of the total Native American population to under 200,000 widely scattered and thoroughly demoralized individuals?³⁴ Do the cartoon images not provide rationalization and justification for American “Indian” policy in the Gilded Age?

Similarly, the “Heathen Chinese” menace, as reified by the repeated image and fixed indelibly in the popular imagination and popular culture, surely represented a threat that had to be undermined at whatever cost; an end that the national government had now endeavored to accomplish by way of Chinese exclusion. The Golden Door had to be closed to this potential danger, no matter the American promise of hospitality to the wretched of the earth. The Chinese were not human; there was simply no way that these creatures could be accommodated in the American mainstream. And the cartoon images underscored this notion in subliminal ways, again providing fulfillment of collective rationalization needs.

The case of the Irish-Americans appears to be more problematic: Few if any of the American-Anglo bourgeoisie seriously considered eliminating even so undesirable an element as the Irish (as portrayed in the cartoons and other popular media). Yet it is clear that the lot of the average Irish immigrant had not improved greatly since the mid-nineteenth century, and in some respects had grown worse. Poverty was still the condition of the majority of the first-generation Irish-Americans; moreover, they were routinely relegated to the dirty and dangerous forms of work. As the old adage had it, not only was there no street paved with gold for the Irish in America: The street was not even paved, and what was more, the Irish were supposed to pave it—literally so in many cases. Or they were to build railroads (both above and below ground), under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances—the “sandhogs” were mostly Irish-Americans—and if the American dream of status elevation had been denied the Irish, there must be a reason. The system cannot fail; any failure must be charged to the inadequacies of the ethnic population itself; and more surely so in that this was ostensibly a white ethnic population. Hence the need to dehumanize the Irish, to render them loutish, vulgar, ugly, feisty inebriates, precisely as the cartoon artists of the day portrayed them. As George Tindall has observed, “Dominant peoples repeatedly assign ugly traits to those they bring into subjection.”³⁵ Assuredly the Irish immigrants constituted a subjugated population. Continuing negative ascription in the popular media served to justify continuing subjugation; to provide ongoing rationalization for what had been and still was. If we are to assume any credibility for the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, and I would think that we must, the subliminal messages of the ethnic cartoons provided a mechanism whereby discordant realities might be shaped into acceptably harmonious forms of emotional response.

As regards Blacks, Jews, and the other popular cartoon figures, doubtless there were some subtle differences in the case of each, and each would have to be considered at greater length by way of looking at other factors. Ultimately, however, I would argue that the acceptance of the caricature-as-stereotype-as-reality lay in the psychic needs of middle-class white America to believe in the image as real, and to argue thereby for immigration restriction and/or subordination (or elimination) of ethnic minorities. At the very least, the popularity of the cartoon images of ethnics suggests a concern bordering on fascination with such “other” kinds of people as were then coming to be perceived as a national social problem. The cartoon images reveal a state of social tension, even as they find humor in the situations and peoples they represent. In this sense, the ethnic cartoons, like the popular stage and popular literature, argued for the continuing domination of the culture and society by its existing hegemonic structure, and the ultimate need to create images to support them in that determination. They argued for a WASP America at the time that WASP America seemed most threatened by its ethnic blight. …

Notes

1. On Rice and the development of the caricature stage Black, see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up! The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 27-28; James H. Dormon, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Rice (with Apologies to Professor Woodward),” Journal of Social History, 3 (Winter 1969), 111-122.

2. Toll, Blacking Up, passim.

3. On the ethnic comic stage tradition, see Paul A. Distler, “The Rise and Fall of the Racial Comics in American Vaudeville,” Diss. Tulane Univ. 1963, passim; Distler, “Ethnic Comedy in Vaudeville and Burlesque,” in American Popular Entertainment: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment, ed. Myron Matlaw (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 33-42; Robert M. Dell, “The Representation of the Immigrant on the New York Stage, 1881-1916,” Diss. New York Univ. 1960, passim. For a collection of contemporary “Hebrew” stage material, see Thomas Joseph Carey, Hebrew Yarns and Dialect Humor (New York: The Popular Publishing Co., 1900).

4. The complexity of the Irish-American stage characterization is the subject of D. T. Knobel, “Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception: Content Analysis of the American Stage Irishman, 1820-1860,” Journal of American Studies, 15 (April 1981), 45-71.

5. See William Murrell, A History of American Graphic Humor, 1865-1938 (New York: Published for the Whitney Museum of American Art by the Macmillan Co., 1938), pp. 93, 189, passim.

6. Judge's Library, November 1887, n.p. (Hereafter cited as Judge's). I have used this periodical most extensively for purposes of illustration, largely because of the superior quality of reproduction possible from its well-preserved pages. In no sense, however, did the cartoons differ in content from journal to journal.

7. Judge's, February 1901, n.p.

8. Judge's, September 1901, n.p.

9. Judge's, April 1890; February 1890; Knobel, “Stage Irishman,” passim.

10. Judge's, July 1888; June 1892; August 1902 (all unpaginated).

11. The subject of Afro-American stereotyping in popular culture is a large one, and outside the purview of the present paper (in other than this brief summary form). I have undertaken the matter in a larger work now in progress.

12. Judge's, December 1894; May 1897.

13. Judge's, March 1892, n.p.

14. Puck, December 1897, n.p.

15. Judge's, March 1897, n.p.

16. Judge's, January 1896, n.p.

17. Ibid.

18. Judge's, September 1901, n.p.

19. The popular image of the Chinese-American had been wholly negative from the advent of Chinese immigration. See Stuart C. Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969).

20. Judge's, September 1893, n.p.

21. Judge's, April 1901, n.p.

22. Judge's, March 1892, n.p.

23. Judge's, September 1893, n.p. Such “evolution” drawings were enormously popular in the period: Irish policemen, for example, evolve from whiskey bottles; Jews from the three balls of the pawn-shop logo. The phenomenon presumably reflects popular fascination with Darwinian matters. See Life, 25 June 1891, p. 404; Judge's, February 1897, n.p.

24. Ibid.

25. Judge's, September 1893, p. 25.

26. Ibid., p. 11.

27. Judge's, March 1898, n.p.

28. Judge's, March 1897, n.p.

29. Judge's, April 1894, n.p.

30. Ibid.

31. Judge's, July 1897, n.p.

32. Judge's, April 1894, n.p.

33. Life, December 1894, p. 14.

34. On the effects of the Indian wars and allotment acts, see Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Indian in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 202-208, 236-249; Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Patriot Chiefs: A Chronicle of American Indian Resistance (New York: Viking Press, 1969), pp. 341-343. See also Sean D. Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: New York Press, 1984), pp. 274-275. The best single work on the white perception of the “Indian” population is Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978). Berkhofer also treats the policies that flowed out of such image-making. See especially pp. 96-102, 166-175.

35. George B. Tindall, America: A Narrative History (New York: Norton, 1984), I, 100.