The American Presidency in Political Cartoons, 1776-1976

This book, by Thomas C. Blaisdell, Jr., and Peter Selz, was fascinating to me, when I first came across it at the Little Professor bookstore in Maple Village Plaza in 1976. It was just one of dozens, or hundreds of books coming out that year, having a connection to the American Bicentennial.

I was a sixteen years old browsing books, took one look at it, and bought it.

This book, however, is a drudgery to read. It is thirty-two years later, and I finally read through the entire thing for the first time. The problem is that, until about 1940, most of the "cartoons" (a mis-used word. A "Cartoon" is the name for the first moving pictures of animated characters. "Carte", or "story", or "drawing", plus "toon", or "tune": a story set to music. Drawings that actually move, a la the earliest Disney cartoons that had no dialogue, just music in the background), are extremely difficult to follow. One single drawing might have dozens of lines of dialogue, written very small.

And next, the book is written more as a college textbook, and as such is a dry read. The text accompanying the drawings has more to do with style of the illustrations, than on discussing the history addressed in the drawings.

But by the Twentieth Century, the drawings take on more of an artistic tone. More of the message is contained in the artwork itself, than in the dialogue.

The book is of interest only to people that want to become political editorialists, or on the most serious Presidential history nut. I would not recommend it to anybody else to read.

And, the liberal bent of the authors is so pronounced, as to distract from enjoying the book on its own merits.