The Ronald Reagan Song

Before Ron the Con took office

I never saw people standing on offramps

With little cardboard signs

Ku Klux Klan - Ancestor of the Tea Baggers?

Dear readers:

My jaw dropped when I ran across this incredible front page article in the Oct. 27, 1922 issue of The Walla Walla Valley Spectator, where the Ku Klux Klan is treated as if they were like the local garden club. And we're not talking about the Deep South here, this is in Prescott, Washington. Yes, good ol' Blue State progressive Washington that has legalized pot and Gay marriage and has never voted for a Bush for President.

What really struck me as I read through this was how much the Klan spokesman sounded like one of today's Tea Party proponents.

I love Eastern Washington. I was born there. My most prolific period as a cartoonist took place there in the 1980s. It sickens me that it also has a strong element of fear-based people willing to swallow the nonsense of the Klan, "Neo" Nazis, and Tea Baggers, all birds of a feather in my thinking.

Perhaps that good, patriotic, pious Christian, that man who spreads the word of God, the Rev. Burger, was really from the Church of the Nazirene.

Yours,
A Member of the "Adverse Element."

The Business of Guns

View The Business of Guns, click here

Minute MBA has a very nice and nonpartisan short video on the gun industry in the United States.

My own interpretation is that U.S. gun ownership is a measure of our own paranoia as a nation. Maybe in the past pioneer era having a deadly weapon was useful, but in Century 21 private gun ownership is not about freedom, it is about fear.

As for hunters, they can use crossbows, that way it'll be a real sport.


Two links to clarify:

Watercolor series: Since I originally posted this, I have moved more solidly into the gun control camp. The more I read about Americans shooting each other, the more I welcome the day when the NRA is considered the terrorist organization it is and gets shut down. What they are promoting is destroying our country.

Cold Dead Hand: The Jim Carrey video that riled up Fox and the NRA. Go Jim!

The George W. Bush Song

George W. Bush is a moron
He helped Dick Cheney's friends get richer yet
If you were poor he just piled more on
And took away the social safety net.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

He was in way over his head.
And Americans wound up dead
Looking for weapons of mass destruction
that didn't exist.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

He stole the Gore election
The stocks went tank-o-rama
And after seven years
He never caught Osama.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

And although I am not trying
To sound any meaner
He did a heck of job
With Hurricane Katrina.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

George W. Bush wrecked our country
I hope he's happy painting dogs and cats
And if his brother Jeb wins the White House
Ladies and gentlemen, hang on to your hats!

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Hoquiam Loggers Playday 2013

Nice to see the Hoquiam Loggers' Playday annual poster got away from a divisive political theme this year and just stuck to their consistent homoerotic image of loggers. Freud would've had a field day with these images.

WARNING! HELL IS WAITING FOR YOU!

And they'll be NO BUTTER IN HELL!!

A newspaper ad from the early 1980s, during the rise of Ron the Con.

I love the "Christians Who Love You" counterbalance after a message of despair and fear.

Personally, I prefer Shakespeare: "Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in."

Thank You, Jim Carrey!

Cold Dead Hand

Beautiful work. Earning the displeasure of Fox News is like winning a Medal of Honor.  In just a few minutes you accomplished more than Bowling For Columbine took too long to get across in a smarmy manner. I live deep in gun crazy country and am a product of it, and your bit here was 100% accurate in all respects.

In terms of short, irreverent, and comedic bits that insult great swaths of people, you have joined us old underground and Newave cartoonists. God bless you. And welcome to the fight. Now I know our side will win.  Right wingers exist on a foundation of fear, and in their world they fear humor more than anger in my political experience. They really really hate being laughed at.

SPAM Phished Hacked-- Whatever

 

This morning some enterprising squirmybrain hacked into my email and sent out a bunch of junk to many of you out there in MortyLand. Yahoo tells me it originated in Brazil. Yahoo also gave me their IP address which I will be happy to provide if you wish to "thank" them.

Spam reviewed

Brazil reviewed

The Blue & Gold

Before middle schools we had junior high schools, grades 7-9. In Olympia there were two junior high schools, Washington and Jefferson. I started out in Washington but partway through my academic journey there they built a new junior high to absorb us Boomers. It was called Reeves Junior High. It was named in honor of Mr. Reeves, my grade school principal at Roosevelt Elementary. He was a nice man who lived a block away from me.

Reeves was the school for the tough, working class kids. It was not an easy place to learn from the classroom due to the anarchy. All of our lessons came from elsewhere.

The school newspaper was called The Blue & Gold (school colors) and was run off on a mimeograph. I have a scattered few issues from the first year. Many of my cartoons failed to reproduce to the point where they could not be read, but I found a few I could post here.

It was at Reeves that I first learned the power of cartooning in politics. The Olympia Mayor, Tom Allen, wanted to turn the downtown Sylvester Park into a parking garage. Even though I was a teenager, I met with him to state why this was wrong, and he treated me like a teenager. That is to say, I was brushed off and ridiculed by him as an "environmentalist." (The term "treehugger" had not been invented yet and The Evergreen State College had not surfaced in Oly at this time, so we were still living in an extension of the 1950s in Olympia). So I drew a bunch of cartoons about "Tommy Treecut" for the Blue and Gold. The principal, Ted Wynstra, called my parents to complain, saying Tom Allen was a friend of his, and my Mother responded by saying, so what? The kid has a right to free expression.

Yes! As I have stated before in this blog, I was very fortunate in the parental department.

And Tom Allen was later nailed in some scandal involving self-interest in the construction of the public library and left office under a deserved dark cloud. 

Anyway, part of digging into that mimeo gel to produce those cartoons meant I had to sit in the school office area. I quickly noticed that the central microphone for the school announcements was in the same room, as well as the stack of notices waiting to be read. So I started writing bogus notices and slipping them into the stack. I wonder how many people showed up for fake meetings?

Ain't I a stinker?

So, here are some of the cartoons I drew during that era, 1969-1970:

Norman, the Wonder Prune was regular character I used

Remember, the Moon landing was new thing in 1969!

 This cover was drawn by our art teacher, "Snuffy" Jenkins.

He died fairly young, only a few years after he drew this.

He was a squat, square, straight-talking guy who loved teaching.

This was the kind of Cold War paranoia nonsense we Boomers could not get away from, even in a junior high newspaper!

Mini-Comics Day in McCleary, pt. 12

When I went to the Post Office to take down the poster now that the event is over, I see my poster-ripper-upper friend was back at work.

Apparently a "Free speech for me but not for thee" Puritan type. Or just someone with a lot of unresolved anger.

Weird.

Mini-Comics Day!: Someone Does Not Want You to See This Poster

Here in McCleary the Post Office bulletin board is the central form of text communication. I have been putting up posters daily heralding the coming of Mini-Comics Day, and daily someone has been taking them them down, ripping them up, and throwing them in the garbage. It seems aimed pretty much at just this event as compared to other posters on the bulletin board.

And here I thought I was pretty much washed up as a cartoonist and self-publishing advocate, but apparently I still have the power to offend, so that feels good. I cannot even begin to guess why anyone would do this with such discipline. It is nice to know I can still get under the skin of some intolerant person. Most artists want to inspire people, but we cartoonists were born to step on toes in this ungentlemanly art, so this very targeted vandalism makes me feel like I'm doing my job.

Strike a blow for fun and creativity and come to the McCleary Community Center on May 26! If you don't feel like drawing anything, come and cheer on those who are willing to risk expressing themselves on paper. An event like this has never taken place in the entire history of McCleary, so come be a part of history.

Phone photo 1329

A creative place to situate the hole in this LP of Nixon's speeches.

Favorite Movie Quotes: The Falcon and the Snowman

Christopher Boyce, a good Republican son of a FBI man as he was watching the 1974 House impeachment hearings on President Richard Milhous Nixon:

"I don't care what these people say, this man is innocent!"

Boyce was later convicted of selling classified information to the Soviets.

[Reviewed in Cheaper by the Dozen 24]

50 Years Ago -- December 1941

I used to write for our local museum newsletter here in McCleary, Washington. I'll be posting a bunch of these for a bit.

Unfortunately, my favorite article, "Henry McCleary and the Land of the Rising Sun" does not seem to be in my files, which is too bad since it is one of the more visual pieces I assembled for this periodical. However, the text can be found on OlyBlog, and it does relate somewhat to this scanned essay. Also, I'll includes the actual text from OlyBlog here:

Henry McCleary & the Land of the Rising Sun

Fri, 11/11/2005 - 10:58pm — stevenl [The following article was originally published in the McCleary Museum Newsletter v. 11 issue 3 (Sept. 2001). OlyBlog seemed like a good venue for introducing this local history to the online world. For those who don't know, the town of McCleary is about 20 miles west of Olympia].

According to conventional wisdom, Henry McCleary sold his entire operation to Simpson in the last hours of Dec. 1941 due to several factors: his age, the fact that his timber was played out, the unions were closing in, and the start of another war economy. Sam Lanning quoted Henry in Jan. 1942, "Sam, I am old and I have had enough. The whole world business has gone to war and production for war needs. I have closed out and bought 22,000 acres of grazing land stocked with cattle, quite a distance from town and prefer raising beef to making bombs."

But there was another, more subtle, reason for Henry's departure. One of his chief business clients, Japan, was now our enemy. Since Henry was a man of action, leaving very little in the way of written thoughts, we can only guess what was going through his mind in Dec. 1941. Pearl Harbor has never been mentioned as one of the reasons for his selling out, but one cannot look at the McCleary-Japan relationship without concluding Henry must have felt some sense of betrayal.

Japanese Railroad Workers
We have no photographs of them. They never figure in written or oral recollections of our area. Newspaper accounts of them are few and far between. Yet the McCleary region was home to over two dozen Japanese railroad workers for the better part of two decades. It is believed they lived in an encampment northwest of town, on the far western end of Mohney's Prairie.

McCleary's preference for foreign labor was well known. They were inexpensive and not likely to unionize. The early community was multinational, with a considerable number of Scandinavians, Greeks, and Italians. It was a melting pot-- almost.

How the Japanese came to be hired by Henry is not known, but we do have an account of their arrival. The July 23, 1904 Elma Chronicle made a note that McCleary had hired Japanese workers, "as men are very scarce." And the Elma newspaper also noted, "On the 2:13 train, Friday, there were several Japanese workmen, brought here by the Henry McCleary Lumber Co. They were met at the depot here, compelled to re-board the train, and to go on to the next station. It is reported that arrests are to be made on the charge of intimidation."

There was no shortage of work for these workers. Henry McCleary's empire would rapidly expand during the next 25 years, and his logging railroad would grow with it. It would seem almost impossible that anyone living in McCleary during this period would not see them. But trying to uncover information about this group is very difficult.

The Japanese somehow managed to avoid being listed in the 1910 McCleary census. Fortunately, some dutiful listmaker must have taken great pains to phonetically sound out the names of the workers recorded in the 1920 McCleary census. There are 28 workers, plus the wife of the section boss, and their 4 month old daughter, apparently born in McCleary in the fall of 1919. This was in a year when Grays Harbor County had only 155 Japanese total. As low as this number seems, it was actually the high-water mark for Japanese here in the first half of the 20th century. The 1930 census counted only 29 Japanese. This was partly due to the Johnson Immigration Act. More on that later.

Business Partners
Henry's employment of workers from Japan was apparently highly unpopular among some elements of Grays Harbor County. But Henry kept them on. Of Ada McCleary, John Anderson wrote, "Mrs. McCleary didn't care what nationality anyone was, be they Greek, Italian, Irish or Swede. As far as she was concerned one could learn from every culture. Indeed all these cultures made McCleary the great place it was to live." Unlike Ada, her husband was not known as a social activist. He had a business to run, and business being business, he followed the money. If that meant taking the risk of hiring Japanese railroad workers, so be it. It also meant trading with that strange and frightening land on the other side of the Pacific, Japan itself.

Mr. McCleary, always the economic risk-taker, was rewarded for his willingness to do business with a country most others feared and misunderstood. Here's a sample: according to McCleary's car sales book, if I'm reading it right, he grossed over $2 million between Sept. 1925-Jan. 1926 from loading up Japanese ships at his Westside Olympia mill. The ships were the Clyde Maru, Milan Maru, Malta Maru, and Tasmania Maru. The Milan Maru visited twice during that slice of time. They were bound for Osaka and Kobe. As a side note, all four ships became casualties of World War II in the Pacific.

The Apr. 4, 1929 Elma Chronicle told the readers, "Henry McCleary, president of the McCleary Timber Co., left last Saturday for Japan accompanied by his son Charles of Olympia and his nephew Jack, of McCleary, sailing from Victoria on the Empress of Russia. They plan to be gone about thirty days. Most of the time in Japan will be spent at Kobi with visits to other parts of the country also included." As another side note, the Empress of Russia was noted in future McCleary businessman Al Fleming's diary when he was stationed in Vladivostok, May 18, 1919: "... The largest ship that had ever been in this port. She is a beauty. Couldn't dock as the water wasn't deep enough." The Empress was used by the Allies in the Atlantic, survived the war, but burned in drydock, Sept. 8, 1945.

A photograph of the McCleary entourage in Japan, taken by a Tokyo photographer probably during his 1929 trip, shows each man accompanied by a geisha girl. All the businessmen look very happy, except for Henry, who appears somewhat perplexed.

Even in hard times Henry kept up his ties to Japan. The very same railroad that had been laid by Japanese workers was, during the Depression, torn out. According to Kramer Adams, "Like many another operator, Henry McCleary sold his rails to Japan for conversion into steel."

The Sept. 28, 1934 McCleary Observer reported, "The next few weeks will see the end of the McCleary railroad. A crew is taking up the rails and loading them on cars for shipment to Olympia where they will be transferred to a boat destined for Japan."

By this time, of course, militarists had gained control of Japan's political system. The steel no doubt went into their imperialistic expansion. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, McClearyite Lauren Bruner would survive being burned and shot while in the crow's nest of the Arizona. One has to ponder how much the McCleary rails contributed to that attack. Henry McCleary probably wondered too. And he probably felt betrayed.

In yet another of the growing ironies in this case, after Simpson acquired McCleary's operations, they dismantled the mill where the present Beerbower Park now sits. As the Elma Chronicle for Apr. 30, 1942 reported, "Now that the Simpson Company is dismantling the long idle mill its metal salvage is going into war production. Already some carloads have been shipped to the smelters at Cleveland ..."

Madison Grant and Albert Johnson, the Aristocrat and the Redneck
The weirdest part of this story is yet to come. Madison Grant (1865-1937), a Yale-educated lawyer and promoter of Eugenics, wrote The Passing of the Great White Race in 1916, a book the Holocaust Study Center considers, "A major text of the American racist movement from 1916 until 1925." Hitler himself personally wrote Grant and thanked him for writing this work, probably due to passages like this: "[Sterilization could] be applied to an ever widening group of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types."

Substitute Grant's use of "Nordic" with Hitler's "Aryan," and it is indeed difficult to tell the two philosophies apart. Grant had Nazi ties, including Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief scientific advisor and leading German Eugenicist. Grant's later work, Conquest of a Continent, earned this preface in the 1937 German edition: "No one has as much reason to note the work of this man [Grant] with the keenest of attention as does a German of today in a time when the racial idea has become one of the chief foundations of National Socialist States population policies."

Grant found a kindred spirit in the person of U.S. Congressman Albert Johnson (1869-1957), a Republican who served in Congress from 1913-1933. Johnson was a midwest transplant who was publisher of Hoquiam's Grays Harbor Washingtonian. He was elected as a crusader against "radicalism" and he favored immigration restriction. In his first campaign, Johnson stated, "The greatest menace to the Republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose lawlessness flourishes and civilization is ebbing into barbarism." In 1913, Johnson proposed a "Panaryan Association" to unite the "white race." As Johnson was making pronouncements of this kind, Henry McCleary was offering employment and home for the very people the congressman despised, right in Johnson's district.

Johnson became the Chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. In 1923, through his connection with Grant, he was elected the President of the Eugenics Research Association, based at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. This was, as one writer put it, "An incident that deserves at least one chapter in any full length biography of Johnson. Its title would probably be something like 'New York Aristocrat Courts Pacific Northwest Redneck,' as the 'chemistry' that brought together the patrician Madison Grant and the backwoods Congressman needs considerable explanation."

Johnson made his big move in 1924 as co-sponsor of the Johnson-Reed Act (with Sen. David Aiken Reed, R-PA), also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act. This placed quotas on immigration, rolling them back to 1890. This placed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and eliminated Japanese immigration entirely. Said Johnson, "Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed ... The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended." He was especially applauded by the KKK.

The long-range effect of the Johnson-Reed Act is that tens of thousands of Europeans attempting to escape Nazi or Stalinist oppression were denied entry to the U.S., leaving a large percentage of them to perish. That is the legacy of Albert Johnson.

Henry McCleary's Kingdom
We must wonder what Henry McCleary thought about Albert Johnson and his "Panaryan" concepts. Surely Henry knew Johnson. They were both Republicans in the same district. Henry was a delegate for Coolidge at the 1924 GOP National Convention.

But in those days, as now, East County and Aberdeen/Hoquiam were worlds apart. McCleary's camp was his own kingdom, and the antics of politicians probably didn't concern him as long as they left him alone. Henry seemed content to let fellow executive Mark Reed be the political voice for the timber industry. We don't know the circumstances of the Japanese departure from McCleary, but if it was due to the Johnson-Reed Act, Henry must have had some conflicts concerning political party loyalty.

McCleary's Japanese workers, having arrived in 1904, predate the coming of the Italians and the Greeks. By McCleary standards, they are pioneers. Being here as early as they were, it is safe to say they were part of the foundation upon which McCleary built his empire. They deserve to be recognized for their contribution to the history of our town.

--Steve Willis

[2011 note: In the interests of revealing my personal bias, I should mention that Johnson's Democratic Party opponent in the 1918 congressional election was my great-grandfather, Theodore J. Hoss of Centralia. Theodore supported President Wilson's League of Nations and advocated the radical idea of equal wages for equal work for men and women. Johnson's people used Theodore's German surname against him in the campaign. Too bad Theodore didn't win]

Bezango: Driving

Olympia Power & Light, May 5-19, 2010

As it turned out I was never unemployed. I was indeed "bumped" by someone with more seniority but I had a part-time job the next day. And in a weird twist of fate, I was hired back to my old employer within a month.

The drawing of Morty dates back to 1981, in Cranium Frenzy # 1. Notice I cropped out the "Outta my way, ya peckerheads!" word balloon from the original. They trained us to curse like that when I drove a taxicab in Burlington, Vermont.

Jack's Shoe Repair still exists in the same storefront in Olympia. I often wonder where that little girl is today and if she has any inkling of how she scarred me for life.

No one has taken me up on investing in the thermotropic mood car idea yet. But you'll see. You'll see.

And now, for the literary portion of this blog

This broadside was found last Thursday in a toilet stall of a men's restroom of a certain office building filled with serious white collar professionals in Tumwater, Washington.

I'd like to say that when I saw it I laughed so hard I lost my aim and urinated all over the floor. But that would be such a cheap laugh and I'm above such things. So I won't say it. So please forget you just read the previous three sentences. Or, actually, the previous four sentences plus this very one you are reading telling you to forget reading the previous four sentences. But you can still read the first sentence. OK, now here's the deal. Forget you read this whole paragraph and just read the first sentence over again (now revised) that says:

This broadside was found last Thursday in a toilet stall of a men's restroom of a certain office building filled with serious white collar professionals in Tumwater, Washington. I found this slightly amusing.

Phone photo 59

This little stand was built by a guy who was the previous resident of a house I owned here in McCleary from 1986 to 1994. He was a World War I veteran and had lived here many years.

By the early 1980s he was a long time widower and had apparently been included in a circle of old fellows who had been befriended by a white supremacist nutjob. This young fellow must've thought McCleary was a nice place to hide out and do whatever sort of illegal thing he was doing. They say he made himself useful to several oldtimers by doing carpentry oddjobs.

The story goes that this young racist left town in order to stay at some compound filled with others of his ilk out in Missouri or Arkansas. But before he left he asked if our old guy would let him use his upstairs as a storage unit. So the elderly vet agreed.

Shortly after this junior Nazi departed town, the old fellow went to the Post Office and fell dead as the result of a heart attack. His nephew inherited the house and found some interesting things upstairs, chiefly explosives, firearms, napalm detonators, etc. The FBI and Fort Lewis came and cleaned the place out. The neighbors told me Feds told them that if that house had caught fire half of McCleary would've turned into a crater. I assume the guilty party was apprehended.

Anyway, the explosives storage area later became the same place where I conducted all my comix business, including editing City Limits Gazette, from mid 1986 to mid 1994.

So as a token of that local lore, I still have the old fellow's little homemade stand and his homemade fishing pole.

Morty the Dog # nothing

This odd little minicomic was another entry in the subgenre of repackaging stories from digest sized comix into the mini format.

In 1987 Starhead Comix took two old stories of mine and created this mini, 7 x 13 cm. The spine was on the top, and most of the pages faced each other in a way that required the reader to keep flipping the book around. Unlike most other minicomix, this one had color covers and was printed on newsprint.

"A Day in the Life of Morty the Dog" was from Cranium Frenzy #2 (1982), "God's Little Joke" from Cranium Frenzy #1 (1981). I'll supply the backstories once we arrive at posting the Cranium Frenzy series.

I have no idea how obscure or common this minicomic is. I thought Michael Dowers did a great job on composing the cover. I can't place the source for the drawing of Morty he used. Color has never really been my thing, but Michael and his brother Patrick have really given my work more flair when they apply their talents in this area.