Long before it became ingrained in the cultural lexicon as America’s first “escape proof” prison, Alcatraz Island was “White Rock” to the native Ohlone tribe, due the pelican droppings that littered its surface. With the exception of occasional outings to scout for Murre eggs, they largely avoided the rocky 22-acre islet — the belief being that it was a lair of evil spirits and a portal to the next world. Foreshadowing its future use as a penitentiary, especially pernicious violators of tribal law would we be banished to the island, where they would most certainly die of exposure.
The Spanish first reached the island in the 1769, naming it “La Isla de los Alcatraces” or “Island of the Pelicans,” but assigned little importance to it. The Mexican governor eventually sold it to one Julian Workman in 1849, who, within months, had hawked for it $5000 to a new owner. The United States government sued for ownership, realizing its potential as strategic outpost in the Golden Gate strait and began devising plans for a lighthouse, and later, a fort at Alcatraz.
The island’s fort was completed in 1859 and with it came a squadron of 200 men – and Alcatraz’s first four prisoners, military offenders all. Two years later, the Department of the Pacific designated Alcatraz their official disciplinary barracks and, for the whole of the Civil War, a separate wing would be used to keep Confederate prisoners and sympathizers under lock and key – including one group of that had attempted a raid on Alcatraz with stolen schooner in March 1863 before being apprehended.
In 1754, Benjamin Franklin, upset by the inability of the colonies to collaborate during an era marked by escalating conflicts with the French, Indian tribes and the British, decided to run a woodcut in his Pennsylvania Gazette that would underline his message of “Join or Die.” The resulting woodcut of serpent divided into thirteen segments, not only immediately entered the cultural lexicon of the United States, but became its first political cartoon as well.
By the 1870s, the influence of editorial cartoonists had waned little and would continue to affect the democratic process. When William “Boss Tweed,” the commissioner of New York City’s Tammany Hall, declared that newspaper reports of political machine’s corruption were inconsequential, since his constituents couldn’t read, Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly took it as a challenge. His response was four years worth of cartoons that exposed the greed and intimidation behind Tweed’s operation so plainly that even the city’s non-English speaking immigrant population took note. Nast’s likenesses of Tweed were so accurate and widely known that after the disgraced leader fled to Spain to avoid prosecution in 1875, the cartoons were used to identify and apprehend him. Nast later went on to design such instantly recognizable icons as the Republican Party’s elephant, the Democratic Party’s Donkey and the common red-and-white clad, jolly Santa Claus that we know today.
Another important artist in the field was J.N. “Ding” Darling of the Des Moines Register, who, from 1900 to 1949, depicted the impact of humans upon the environment. Darling’s commentaries on the subject were so apt that President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him chief of the agency now known as the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1934. While in the service of the government, he outlined the foundations of the National Wildlife Preserve program, which today has more than 500 locations across the country dedicated to protection of threatened species and their habitats.
But perhaps the 20th century’s most famous political cartoonist is Herbert Block, better known by the signature he left one his work: Herblock. In the major first episode of his seventy-year tenure at the Washington Post, he began a pen-and-ink crusade against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist with hunt of the 1940s and 50s. It was during that time that Block coined the term “McCarthyhism” in one of his pieces. He would eventually win three Pulitzer Prizes for his work and, upon his death in 2001, contributed his sizeable assets towards the establishment of a foundation for civil rights and poverty awareness.
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