A Luther Bradley Cartoon Editorial

Over at the CHOLibrary today, I'm spotlighting a 1917 book on the life and work of Luther Bradley (1853-1917), the famous cartoonist of the Chicago Daily News. The editorial content, a remembrance of Bradley after his death, was provided by none other than his boss, Henry Justin Smith.

Some Background on Luther Bradley from Cartoons Magazine edited by Henry Havens Windsor (1915):

"Luther D. Bradley has been doing newspaper cartoon work continuously for near upon twenty-five years, and doing it well," says the Scoop. "But while he was recognized as a man of ideas and a master draughtsman in his own way, his public was local until Europe exploded in war. That stupendous outbreak gave him a new key, and he sprang into national prominence at a single stroke. He was moved not so much to indignation as to sorrow, to profound sympathy for whole peoples desolated and left helpless; and to a sense of failure in a civilization so laboriously built up, so suddenly disrupted.

"He was able to see the core of things, and show it to others. The war was not a month old when his first great cartoon, 'Education for the Heathen,' startled the country to attention. The certainty that sweeping sacrifice of virile men will leave to future generations a fatherhood of weaklings, brought out another one showing Europe sending out her strong men to kill each other, and assuring them that those left behind would take their places in continuing the race. It was a thing of sharp significance—its contrast of perfect manhood on the way to death, with the shriveled old and shrimpish young who were to stay at home.

"Bradley is a man, long experienced but newly famed, a genius who responded when occasion called, and who has come into his own. He is an agreeable personality, mature in thought and feeling, full of human kindness. It was this last that roused him when the guns began to roar.

"Bradley has had a curious career. After a few years of business in Chicago he found himself in Melbourne, Australia, in the course of a trip around the world, in the early eighties. He intended to stay a few days there waiting for the steamer to San Francisco, but he staid eleven years. Let him tell the rest in his own words:

" 'The delay,' he says, 'was caused by an impulse to send a cartoon to a little local paper. I never had drawn a cartoon or thought of doing so. The editor wrote me that the paper had just died from other causes—so my skirts were clear. But he said he was going to start another, and would use my efforts. Thus I became entangled with Life, a weekly publication. Later I edited the paper, and after a few years went to Melbourne Punch, where during five years I worked at cartooning and editing. Returning to Chicago in 1893 I drew cartoons for the Journal and afterward for the Inter-Ocean, and then, beginning in 1899, for The Daily News; and am still at it.'

"At a moderate estimate, he has in his time drawn at least six thousand cartoons. The fact is its own comment upon his fecund originality and his gift of industry."

While admiring Bradley's cartoons (there are dozens in the book), I came across the one below:



The caption below the cartoon states that it was inspired by the death of Marshall Field in January, 1906. Are "Chicago" and "Young America" mourning Field's death or is this a sarcastic comment on the manner in which Field earned his fortune?

One thing is certain - it is an editorial statement appropriate for today's newspapers. I think I've said it before...Funny thing about history; it is so contemporary.