The Editorial Cartoon Collection of
September 2 - October 21, 2011 The Center for Cartoon Studies White River Junction, Vermont
E. Howard Goodwin (1919 - 2010) Edward Howard Goodwin was born May 23, 1919 in Rochester, NY. He attended the University of Virginia, where he played football. After graduating in 1942, he turned down an offer to play professionally for the Detroit Lions, and spent three years in the Army Air Corps as a pilot flying B-24 bombers during World War II. Following the war, in 1946, he joined the sales department of The Bethlehem Steel Corporation. He worked for the company in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York for 36 years, retiring in 1982. For the next 25 years, Mr. Goodwin worked as a consultant and in real estate. Howard Goodwin had a lifelong appreciation of comics and cartoons. He started each day reading the comics in a number of different newspapers. Among his favorite strips were “L’il Abner,” “Brenda Starr,” “Pogo,” “Peanuts,” and “Calvin and Hobbes.” In 1946, he began writing to editorial cartoonists to ask for the originals of cartoons relating to the steel industry that appeared in newspapers across the country. Famous cartoonists, including Pulitzer Prize winners Herb Block, Rube Goldberg, Bruce Shanks, and Edmund Valtman contributed to the collection he acquired between 1949
and 1971. In addition to the cartoons, he collected the letters he received from the artists. Following his death on June 27, 2010, his family donated Howard Goodwin’s collection of steel industry editorial cartoons to The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT, where his grandson, Alec Longstreth, is on the faculty. The family’s hope is that the students at CCS will benefit from studying this unique collection. – Breckinridge Goodwin Longstreth Daughter of E. Howard Goodwin
Above: One of the many letters Mr. Goodwin sent to cartoonists.
November 2, 1949 - Unknown Newspaper
Fredrick Otto Seibel had his first political cartoon published
in 1908. He went on to draw over 16,000 cartoons for various publications, though the majority of his career was spent drawing for The Richmond-Times Dispatch. Seibel was best known for his depictions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
July 6, 1954 - New York Herald Tribune
Dan Dowling created over 10,000 cartoons during his more
than 40-year career as an editorial cartoonist for newspapers such as The Omaha World Herald, The New York Herald Tribune, and The Kansas City Star. He was the founding president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists.
May 8, 1956 - The New York Herald Tribune With little international competition, Bethlehem Steel had its most financially successful period during the 1950s. This prosperity caused many labor strikes, as workers demanded annual wage and benefit increases. These costs, in turn, increased the steel prices.
June 28, 1956 - The New York Herald Tribune
Paul T. Arlt worked as an editorial cartoonist for many years at The New York Herald Tribune, as well as other papers. In addition to his cartooning work, Arlt was also an extremely talented painter. He
July 17, 1956 - The New York Herald Tribune provided many murals for various federal buildings as part of the New Deal, and during World War II he was the recipient of a Purple Heart for his work as a combat artist. Later in life, Arlt painted commissions for The United States Treasury Department and NASA.
Unknown Date, 1959 - The Greensboro Daily News
Bill “Whitey� Sanders came to editorial cartooning via
the military. He drew cartoons for 34 years and was published in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. In 1975, he was the winner of the National Headliner Award.
June 29, 1959 - The Detroit News
Arthur Poinier is most famous for his silent comic strip
“Jitter,” which ran from 1936–1943. He worked at The Detroit News for thirty years as an illustrator and editorial cartoonist.
July 8th, 1959 - The Hartford Times
Edmund Valtman began his career as an illustrator in Estonia, at the age of 15. After fleeing the USSR occupation of his homeland, Valtman emigrated to the United States, where he worked as an
editorial cartoonist at The Hartford Times. He is best known for his caricatures of communist leaders, including a 1961 cartoon of Fidel Castro that won him the Pulitzer Prize.
July 3, 1959 - The New Orleans Times-Picayune
Keith Temple made his way to the United States after serving in World War I for the Australian Army. He settled in New Orleans, where he spent the majority of his career drawing and writing for The New Orleans Item and The New Orleans Times-Picayune. Temple is best know for his peace-centric subject matter. More than half of the cartoons in the E. Howard Goodwin collection are from the summer and autumn of 1959. These cartoons focus on the historic 1959 strike by the United Steelworkers of America, which lasted for 116 days. The strike was finally ended when President Eisenhower initiated the Taft-Hartley Act, which forced the strikers back to work and allowed 80 days for negotiations to be resolved. The strike all but shut down domestic steel production, and because buyers still needed steel for their projects during the strike, they sought imported, international steel. Ironically, international competition was one of the contributing factors that later ruined Bethlehem Steel.
Above: Cartoonist Bruce Shanks playfully hints at the severity of the 1959 steel strike in his correspondence to Mr. Goodwin.
July 15, 1959 - The Buffalo Evening News
Bruce McKinley Shanks began his career at The Buffalo
Evening News as a copy boy and worked his way up to editorial cartoonist. Shanks won eight Freedom Foundation awards, several Page One awards, and in 1958 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his cartoon “The Thinker.�
July 22, 1959 - The Sioux City Journal Tribune
Eldon Pletcher worked as an editorial cartoonist for over 40 years at The Sioux City Journal Tribune and The New Orleans TimesPicayune. He won the Christopher Award in 1955.
July 27, 1959 - The Saturday Evening Post
Paul Peter Porges (aka “PPP”) was evacuated from
his homeland of Vienna at the age of 12, and was sent to a children’s camp in France in 1938. He traveled by himself to Switzerland, where he began studying at The Academy of Art in 1945. A few years later, he followed his parents to New York City. After touring the country for several months with a circus, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he published his first cartoons in various military magazines. When he returned to New York his career took off and he began drawing cartoons for The Saturday Evening Post, MAD Magazine, and The New Yorker.
September 23, 1959 - The Minneapolis Tribune
Scott Long worked as an editorial cartoonist for The Minneapolis Tribune for over 30 years. He often drew cartoons about Hubert Humphrey, the Minneapolis mayor who eventually became a U.S. senator. Long was also a president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.
November 1, 1959 - The Journal American
Rube Goldberg was best known for his “machine” drawings,
which depicted extremely complicated mechanical contraptions that accomplished simple tasks. However, Goldberg was also a celebrated editorial cartoonist. In 1948 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his cartoon “Peace Today,” and in 1959 he received the Banshees’ Silver Lady Award. Goldberg was also a founding member of The National Cartoonist Society.
November 11, 1959 - Unknown Newspaper
Edward R. White had his first cartoons published in his high
school newspaper. After serving in the U.S. Military, White worked for 17 years at The Akron Beacon-Journal, and also had his cartoons printed in The Buffalo Times, The Rochester Democrat, and The New York Times. During his career, White won five Freedom Foundation awards.
Many of the last cartoons collected by Mr. Goodwin highlight the activities of the steel industry in 1962, when steel prices skyrocketed, following another round of negotiations with the Steelworkers Union. At this time, President Kennedy aggressively fought steel industry leaders by taking legal action that required government contracts to be made only by steel companies that did not initiate the hefty price increases. By doing so, Kennedy ultimately suspended the increase. Between 1962 and 1964 Bethlehem Steel also built its largest steel plant, at Burns Harbor, Indiana.
Above: E. Howard Goodwin’s Bethlehem Steel hard hat.
January 26, 1962 - The Dallas Morning News
Bill McClanahan began his career as a sports writer at The Dallas Morning News. In 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps where he attained the rank of captain. After World War II, McClanahan returned to The Dallas Morning News where he started drawing cartoons for the sports section. When the paper’s editorial cartoonist, John Knott, retired in 1957, McClanahan took over the editorial duties. McClanahan’s editorial cartoons often feature some sort of movement or dramatic action–no doubt a lingering habit from his sports cartoons–which make them more exciting than the average editorial cartoon. McClanahan won the Southwest Journalism Award in 1970 and retired in 1973.
February 15, 1962 - The Pittsburgh Press
Arthur Wood is as well known for his own editorial cartooning as for his personal collection of over 16,000 editorial cartoons, which now reside in the Library of Congress. In 1974, Wood was the president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists.
Below: Mr. Goodwin was not always successful in obtaining the original drawings of the editorial cartoons he saw in the newspaper. If the cartoon was not available, some of the papers would print out a glossy proof of the cartoon for the cartoonist to sign, as was the case with a Herbert Block cartoon Mr. Goodwin sought (see right)
March 12, 1962 - The Washington Post
Herbert Lawrence Block worked as an editorial cartoonist from 1929-2001. He is credited with creating the term “McCarthyism� and won multiple Pulitzer Prizes.
February 20, 1962 - The Providence Journal
Paule Stetson Loring was a war correspondent and long-time
staff cartoonist at The Providence Journal. In addition to his editorial cartooning work, Loring was also an illustrator for many magazines, such as Yachting.
The last cartoon in Mr. Goodwin’s collection is from 1971 and features yet another U.S. President, Richard Nixon. At the time, Bethlehem had planned for another 12% price increase, but later settled on a lower rate because the cost of imported foreign steel was beginning to drop extremely close to the cost of domestic steel. In 1982, Bethlehem Steel reported a loss of $1.5
January 9, 1965 - The Providence Bulletin
John J. Fawcett worked as a sports and editorial cartoonist for
The Providence Bulletin for 37 years. He was best known for cartoons that spoke out against prejudice.
billion and shut down many of its operations. Foreign steel firms had developed new steel casting techniques, while many U.S. companies resisted modernization. In 1995, Bethlehem Stell closed its Bethlehem, Pennsylvania plant, which had been used continuously for 140 years. In 2001, the company declared bankruptcy and in 2003, the company remnants were acquired by the International Steel Group.
January 14, 1971 - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Pierre Bellocq is most well-known for the equine cartoons he drew for The Daily Racing Form, starting in 1955. For over a decade, Bellocq also drew political cartoons for The Philadelphia Inquirer, which was owned by Walter Annenberg, who also owned the Racing Form. When the Inquirer was sold in the early ’70s, Bellocq returned to drawing cartoons about horses, which were his main passion in life. Right: Mr. Goodwin requested the above cartoon from the artist, only to find that a younger coworker had beaten him to it.
The Men of Steel and Their Tools Most of the cartoons in this collection were drawn at about 14”x17”. The amazing thing is that when they are printed just a few inches tall, they still look great. Newspaper cartoonists from this era really knew how to draw an image that would still look clean and crisp when reduced down to reproduction size. The samples above have been reproduced at the size they were drawn. By examining them, we can see a few of the techniques these cartoonists used to get a variety of different textures in their cartoons. Some are simple pen and ink techniques, such as cross-hatching combined with stippling, while others make use of special textured papers, such as “coquille board” which is designed to create a smooth grey tone when a soft pencil is rubbed over it. A few of the cartoonists also made creative use of “zip-a-tone,” a mechanically produced sheet of very small dots with a self-adhesive backing (the center example above). Cartoonists would cut this out with an exact-o blade and affix it to certain portions of their drawings to add a secondary gray tone. Besides some of the paper fading, these cartoons have held up remarkably well, and hopefully they’ll continue to do so for a long time. That way future CCS classes can also enjoy this special collection of editorial cartoons. – Alec Branson Longstreth Grandson of E. Howard Goodwin Special Thanks: Adrienne Nunez (CCS ’12) for researching each of the cartoonists and for scanning in all of the cartoons and artifacts! Printed at The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT
“You have a most unique collection. It probably is the only one of its kind in the world.” – Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Edmund Valtman to E. Howard Goodwin. July 8, 1959.