Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels &c

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Another place that still under construction the last time I visited Los Angeles, in 2001: the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake so badly damaged the previous seat, the 1870s Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, that the archdiocese wanted to tear it down and build another cathedral on the site. Preservationists, led by the Los Angeles Conservancy, fought against that, and so eventually a deal was struck allowing the city to take possession of the former cathedral, and the archdiocese to build a new building on downtown land given to it by the city.

These days the former cathedral is an event center — which I didn’t see — and the new cathedral, completed in 2002, looks like this.Not everyone loves the design by Rafael Moneo, which I’ve seen called deconstructivist or postmodern, but which looks pretty brutal to me. I wasn’t all that fond of it myself, though it is interesting.

Does it say sacred space to me? Not particularly. You could argue that most of us have been conditioned by traditional forms to feel that way. Or you could argue that of course sacred space should be beautiful, not brutal. Take your pick. My goal when I’m somewhere is to see what’s there.

Besides, the interior is less brutal somehow.
The light fixtures and the natural light help soften the space, I think. Also note that people use the space. While I lurked around the back of the cathedral, a couple named George and Florence were getting married up front. People probably get married there every Saturday except during lent.

At the back is the Ezcaray Reredos, an intricate work of carved black walnut.
It dates from 17th-century Spain. More information about how it came to be in modern California is here, though I will say it left Spain during an impoverished period in the 20th century. The sign in front of the reredos is incorrect, however, when it says that the chapel attached to Saint Philip Neri at Ezcaray, original home of the work, “was dismantled in 1925 after being damaged in the Spanish Civil War…”

On the cathedral’s lower level is a mausoleum.
Most of the spaces are yet to be occupied. I later read that Gregory Peck is interred there, but I didn’t see him. I did spot California Chief Justice Malcom Millar Lucas (d. 2016), who had the distinction earlier in his judicial career of presiding over the trial of Charles Manson.

The relics of Saint Vibiana are in the mausoleum as well. She was a 3rd-century martyr.
Atlas Obscura: “Her time in the public eye began in 1853 when her tomb was excavated from the catacombs of San Sisto in Rome. Unlike many of the so-called ‘catacomb saints’ who didn’t even have names, the inscription on Vibiana’s tomb gave her name, the day of her death (August 31), the symbolic laurel wreath of martyrdom, and indicated she was ‘innocent and pure.’

“The following year Bl. Pope Pius IX gave her relics — blood, tomb inscription, and body — to Thaddeus Amat, the newly appointed Bishop of Monterrey, California….”

After a time in Santa Barbara, and then many years at the former cathedral in Los Angeles, Vibiana eventually came to where she is now. Interesting that a saint migrated to California like everyone else.

The cathedral isn’t the only church I managed to visit in Los Angeles. Not far away is Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church, an historic parish church.
I rested a while inside. The name really should be rendered as La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, since all of its masses are in Spanish. The historic marker outside, in English and Spanish, says (in English) that the church “was dedicated on December 8, 1822 during California’s Mexican era. Originally known as La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles, the church was the only Catholic church for the pueblo. Today it primarily serves the Hispanic population of Los Angeles.”

On Sunday morning, as I headed through Koreatown, I spotted St. James’ Episcopal Church, or St. James’ in-the-City, on Wilshire Blvd.
I attended part of the service that was going on at the time. The church dates from the 1920s, done in a more traditional Gothic Revival by a San Francisco architect, Benjamin McDougall. Most notable about the design: a lot of fine stained glass.

Immanuel Presbyterian Church isn’t far away on Wilshire Blvd.
Unlike St. James’, it wasn’t open when I came by. Still, I got a good look from the across the street.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Broad

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The last time I was in Los Angeles, the Walt Disney Concert Hall looked like this — still more than two years from its completion in 2003. I paid no attention to it then.

On February 22, 2020, the 2,265-seat hall looked like this from across Hope St.
Whatever else you can say about Frank Gehry, his designs aren’t like their surroundings. They’re going to stand out. Also, they’re interesting to stand under.
I’d read that self-guided tours of the venue were free, and that’s true. You get an MP3 player at a table just inside the Hope St. entrance, and off you go. The audio snippets about the development of the building, along with various design elements, are narrated by John Lithgow, with some additional commentary by those who worked on the project, including Gehry.

I was keen to see the auditorium. It was not to be. Musical careers were hanging in the balance in there.

Still, the rest of the interior was worth a look.

Though it’s invisible from the street, the hall has some outside space at mid-level, including greenery. A pleasant interlude among the twists of metal and vaulting ceilings.

 

At one point, the outdoor space practically becomes a box canyon made of metal.

Later that day, I visited The Broad, which is next door to Disney, though much newer, completed less than five years ago.
Interesting texture for a 120,000-square-foot box. It looks good, but how long will it be until its gleaming exterior begins to turn gray and streaky? Eventually, but I won’t worry about it. That will be on designer Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who did The Broad in collaboration with Gensler.

Even at 6 p.m. — the museum is open till 8 on Saturdays — the standby line was fairly long. But not as long as the more popular rides at Disneyland. It took about 20 minutes to get in.

Once in, you see works by the likes of Christopher Wool, Jean‐Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Kerry James Marshall, Barbara Kruger, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others. Always something interesting to see, even if not everything on the walls is that compelling.

Somehow I managed to miss the Infinity Mirrored Room by Yoyoi Kusama, which I chalk up to being pretty tired after taking more than 20,000 steps that day. So it goes.

One more thing about The Broad, something other museums with sizable endowments could take their cue from: admission is free. Among others, that means you, Met.

Downtown LA Walkabout, Including a Light Brush with Insane Clown Posse

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Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles looks like a pleasant public space, but on the morning of February 22, I only got the barest glimpse. Entry to the park had been blocked all the way around by temporary barricades. This was a concern, since according to the receipt for the walking tour of downtown LA that I’d booked for that morning, the group was supposed to meet at Pershing Square.

Soon I found that we were meeting at the corner of W. 6th St. and S. Olive St., at the edge of the park, with the tour proceeding from there. I wasn’t the only one who asked the guide what was going on at Pershing Square. Turns out the city had rented it for the weekend for a couple of Insane Clown Posse concerts, the second of which would be that evening. Sounded like a must-miss to me.

The tour took us on foot past, and sometimes through, 12 different historic structures in downtown Los Angeles, beginning with the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. This is the central wing of the building.
Originally the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel when completed in 1923, the property has 683 rooms, down from about 1,500 at its opening. People didn’t mind smaller rooms in those days.

The south wing.
Design by Schultze & Weaver, a New York firm best known for the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, though that would come later.

The north wing. Why fly the Singapore flag, I don’t know. Owner Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc is based in London.

Not far away is the CalEdison Building, one of LA’s grand art deco exercises, designed by Allison & Allison and finished in 1931.
The allegory above the entrance holds a torch. Not a torch of fire, but capped with a light bulb, though the electric utility that used to anchor the building left nearly 50 years ago.
The exterior is grand, but the main lobby is the real wow.
More CalEdison pictures are here.

Speaking of wow, the Los Angeles Central Library came a little further on the tour. Along with the U.S. and California flags flying there is the flag of the city of Los Angeles. The library is capped with an ornate pyramid. Originally it was supposed to be a dome, but 1920s Egyptmania had its influence on the building.

Completed in 1926 with a design by Bertram Goodhue and Carlton Winslow, what nearly happened to the library about 50 years later? Demolition. The Los Angeles Conservancy was organized at that time in response, and the building was saved.

Only to nearly burn down in April 1986. The cause remains a mystery. Our guide asked those of us old enough — which was most of the group — whether we remembered the fire. I drew a blank. Even living in Nashville at the time, I must have heard about it, but I couldn’t remember.

“It happened three days after the Chernobyl disaster, so it didn’t get as much coverage as it might have otherwise,” she said. Such is the news cycle.

The citizens of LA insisted that the library be rebuilt, and it was. Such places as the splendid central rotunda were thus saved again.

Looking up in the rotunda.
On the rotunda walls are fine California history murals, finished in 1933 by artist Dean Cornwell.

Across the street from the library are the Bunker Hill Steps, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and completed in 1990.
If I knew downtown Los Angeles had a topographical feature called Bunker Hill, I’d forgotten it. The place has quite a history: a posh neighborhood in the late 19th century, a run-down one by the mid-20th century, and then the victim of urban renewal. These days, office towers and other commercial buildings developed during or after the 1980s occupy most of Bunker Hill.

Once you go up a hill, you have to go back down again, or at least we did to reach the next destinations on the tour. So we took Angels Flight Railway down the side of Bunker Hill. This is the terminal at the top.

The original funicular, which opened in 1901, closed in 1969, lost temporarily to urban renewal. The line was revived in 1996 a block south of the original location, though it has spent much of the last quarter-century closed because of safety problems. With any luck, those are resolved now.

Looking up the track, which is nearly 300 feet long.

The terminal at the bottom.
The last place on the tour: The Bradbury Building. I knew it by reputation. A lot of people know it that way. If it were in, say, Des Moines, that wouldn’t be true. But it’s in Los Angeles.
The exterior is nice, but it’s the striking interior that makes it a favorite of location scouts and tourists. An almost exact contemporary of the 1890s Monadnock Building in Chicago, the Bradbury’s superb ironwork reminded me of that building.
One George Wyman, a draftsman without formal architectural training, designed the building, at least according to most sources. He was inspired by the description of a building in Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy, again according to most sources. I like to believe the stories are true, since they argue against credentialism.

Back to Insane Clown Posse. I didn’t actually have a brush with them or any Juggalos closer than a few blocks away. That evening, as I headed for the Metro station to leave downtown, I heard the concert off in the distance. It was probably one of the opening acts, but no matter. I could hear that it was loud.

Cal-Tex ’20

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The clerk at the rental car desk asked, as they always do, whether I wanted GPS for my car. For a small fee.

“Where’s the adventure in that?” I said.

So my whole time in a mostly unfamiliar part of the country last week, I didn’t have GPS. I had a better trip for it.

Before visiting Texas recently – I got home today – I went slightly out of the way to spend a few days in Southern California, flying from the chill of metro Chicago to the mild warmth of Los Angeles on February 21, though basking in better weather wasn’t the main consideration. I wanted a new sampling of Los Angeles, which I hadn’t visited since 2001, and to take a trip out to Palm Springs, where I’d never been.

Like any vast urban area, Los Angeles is visually rich. Plenty to see at eye level, but also above your head.

Also beneath your feet.

Arriving late that Friday afternoon, and after leaving LAX behind in my rental car, I went Ladera Heights, a little-known but well-to-do neighborhood in Los Angeles where I’d rented a room through a peer-to-peer hospitality platform, as they say in the real estate biz. The room was part of an exceptionally pleasant condo unit: clean, well appointed, quiet at night, and not particularly expensive for short-term renters. Everything you need in an arrangement like that. Also, there was free parking on a side street that actually had available parking even late in the evening.

On Saturday, I drove to a Los Angeles Metro station on the Blue Line, parked – at a reasonable $3 for the day; you start paying close attention to parking right away in LA – rode downtown and took a walking tour offered by the Los Angeles Conservancy. That included a look at many fine downtown structures, but especially the Bradbury Building and the Angel Flight.

After lunch at Grand Central Market, I did a self-guided tour of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and then wandered down to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for a look. A wedding was in progress during my visit, but the place is so large non-guests could easily sit way back. I needed the rest anyway. Downtown LA isn’t that large, but on foot the distance adds up. Still, I had enough energy to visit Union Station after the cathedral, take a walk through Olvera Street, and then return (via subway) to The Broad, LA’s most recent major museum, opening only in 2015.

Sunday was a driving day. By mid-morning, I’d made it to the lush, picturesque Hollywood Forever Cemetery in, of course, Hollywood, spending longer than I’d planned there. Then I drove all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard, famed in song and maybe story, to Santa Monica itself, then up the Pacific Coast Highway a short distance to the Getty Villa, an astonishing place the likes of which I’d never seen before, except in Pompeii — where, as Getty pointed out, everything is old. I returned to Santa Monica in the evening for dinner near the Third Street Promenade.

The next day, February 24, I drove into San Gabriel National Monument a few miles, but the roads were blocked further in – lingering piles of snow at higher elevations, I guess. So I made my way via the Foothill towns to Palm Springs, where I stayed with old friends Steve and Jack for two nights. I spent the first day in town, including a stop at Shields Date Garden. I played no golf.

After leaving Palm Springs on February 26, I drove through and walked around the high and dry Joshua Tree National Park, where you see two kinds of desert for a single entry fee. Which, at $30, I object to. Especially since you pay only $25 to get into Big Bend NP. Sure, the JTNP landscape is remarkable, but that fee just means that Congress is underfunding the National Park Service. Ah, well. If I ever want to see Joshua tree forests again, the Mojave National Preserve is also a good place for it, I’ve read, less crowded and with no admission fee.

The next day I flew to San Antonio, where I had a pleasant visit with family and friends, and even met a few new people, the cherry on the sundae of the trip.

Winterlude ’20

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Though it hasn’t been a harsh winter, it has been winter, so time for a short hiatus. Back posting around March 1.

It turned out to be a good idea to know as little as possible about Parasite before seeing that movie, which we did last weekend, weeks after we’d originally considered going. All that time, I did my best not to read about it. Not knowing the arc of the story helped maintain the suspense, which was as riveting as anything Hitchcock did, especially after the midway twist.

I did know that the movie came highly recommended, and by sources I respect more than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Could it, I wondered, be better than 1917? It was. That’s a remarkable achievement all by itself. One of those rare movies that is as good as people say.

I’ve updated my vanity North American map again.
The key to the colors is here. The color scheme is wholly idiosyncratic, so I do have certain ideas about certain places. For instance, if I spent some time in following places, I’d color the respective states blue: the Northwoods of Minnesota; Norfolk and vicinity in Virginia; Mobile, Alabama; and Tuscon, Arizona. If I spent a night in West Virginia or Delaware or Rhode Island or Manitoba, they’d be orange. Just means I need to get out more.

Though cold today, the sun was out. Time to take my new garden gnome outside.

Gnomish Stalin was a Christmas president from my brother Jay, shipped to me from the UK. Cornwall, specifically. For all I know, Cornwall might be the world hub of eccentric garden gnomes.
This year, I got Jay a Russian nesting doll — a political matryoshka doll, made in Russia. He sent me a picture. Nice set, though you’d think there would be room for Khrushchev at least, whom I’d pick for inclusion over Yeltsin.
Coincidence that we both sent Russian gifts — political Russian-themed gifts, no less? Or synchronicity? Who knows, I’m just glad to have a new conversation piece for my summertime visitors.

The Perfect Man

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Yesterday I visited one of the major drug store chains for reasons unrelated to chocolate, but also took a look at the discounted Valentine’s Day candies. Among the supply, mostly Russell Stover, I found The Perfect Man.

Not something I’d ever seen before. There was one left, so I bought it for the reasonable price of 34 cents. It’s one ounce of milk chocolate made by an outfit called Treat Street.

The About Us page on Treat Street’s web site is one of those long on marketing and short on actual facts, but there seems to be an affiliate (parent company? subsidiary?) called My Favorite Company, which is based in Los Angeles. Anyway, the two entities’ specialty is novelty chocolate and other confections.

The Perfect Man, as you can see from this 9.5-oz. version, is wearing only boxers with hearts on them. (What, no version wearing gold briefs?) The package also says Made in Germany, but I have my suspicions that the real makers are a breakaway faction of Oompa-Loompas tired of working for that slavedriver Wonka.

Presidents Day?

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This came to my attention ahead of “Presidents Day.” It exists in the realm of not just the ignorant, but the proudly ignorant. Not recognizing Warren G. Harding is a fairly minor bit of ignorance, but the subtext is that everyone is, and should be ignorant, of the past.

Arguably today isn’t even really Presidents Day, not if you cite the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, which calls it Washington’s Birthday. Presidents Day seems to be an invention of calendar makers and ad men, who can’t even agree on whether there should be an apostrophe or where it should be (AP says no apostrophe).

So no Presidents Day unless, however, your state uses the term “Presidents Day,” or some variation. There is no agreement among the several states. Or unless you feel like calling it that. At this point, it’s a touch pedantic to deny the name at all.

“…we now have a hodgepodge of state holiday schedules in the USA: some states still observe Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays as separate holidays, some states observe only Washington’s Birthday, some states commemorate both with a single Presidents’ Day (or Lincoln-Washington Day), and some states celebrate neither,” Snopes says.

“And there are odd exceptions such as Alabama, which designated the third Monday in February as a day commemorating both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (even though Jefferson was born in April).”

This state of affairs might rankle those who are fond of dull uniformity, but the more I think about it, the better I like it. Each state honors Washington in its own way, just as the proliferation of Columbus Day alternatives and dope law is according to the states. Keeps things interesting.

You could also argue that today isn’t Washington’s Birthday either, depending on how you feel about the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, though I can appreciate the urge to create three-day weekends. The Father of Our Country was born on February 22 N.S. or February 11 O.S., to complicate things just a little more. Try explaining that to someone who doesn’t know Harding’s face, even with those distinctive eyebrows.

Salado Creek Greenway, February 2015

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Late February’s a good time to visit South Texas. Five years ago, during a trip to San Antonio, I was even able to enjoy some outdoor greenery. Just budding, but there.

I took a walk along part of the Salado Creek Greenway.

Salado Creek Greenway San Antonio

Any day in February when you can wander out in the non-freezing air is a good one. At least for us Northern Hemisphere, Temperate Zone dwellers. Roughly above the 40th parallel, that is. How’s that for overqualifying? Never mind, it was a good walk.

Salado Creek Greenway San AntonioSalado Creek Greenway San Antonio

Salado Creek Greenway San Antonio

Speaking of latitude, the Tobin Trailhead of the Salado Creek Greenway is —

Salado Creek Greenway San Antonio

— at exactly 29.51512 N (and 98.42812 W).

The Bears’ Cookbook

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The pit of winter hasn’t been very deep this year, but on Wednesday night, snow fell and today temps have been sliding all day. As of this evening, it’s about 5 degrees F. above, with subzero expected by dawn tomorrow. That’s the classic harsh winter pattern we’ve mostly avoided so far this year, when temps have actually risen after snowfall, enough to melt most of it each time.

Then again, forecasts call for above-freezing air by Sunday. The pit still seems pretty shallow. Suits me.

One more unusual book around the house: The Bears’ Cookbook. In this case, I didn’t nab it from my mother’s house. Rather the authors, Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau, gave it to Yuriko and me as a gift in 1998. I knew Steve back at VU; in fact, I was a senior staff member at Versus magazine when he was editor in ’82-’83.

The Bears’ Cookbook was a spiral-bound, privately published effort by Steve and Jack, who produced about 100 copies. As they explain in the book:
“What could be a better Christmas gift for our loved ones, our friends and family, than a cookbook of our favorite recipes? Welcome to our table. Sit, eat, enjoy.”

And so we have over the years. Yuriko and I have used the book, especially her, but so have Lilly and Ann, as soon as they’ve gotten old enough. Just a few weeks ago, Ann made chocolate chip cookies using the recipe on p. 97.

Besides cookies, subjects include breakfast, appetizers, soup, salads, breads, pasta, chicken, other meat, seafood, vegetables, condiments, and cakes and pies. Sources — one given for each recipe — are as diverse as “Ivan, a friend from New Brunswick who now lives in Vermont,” Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook, “Mayflower Restaurant in Albany, NY,” “Some men’s magazine Steve read long ago,” Julia Child, and “lost in the mists of time.”

The book actually has three covers. Flip over the first one, and you encounter this amusing, all-text cover.

A note inside the book explains: “We wound up with several covers, each with different titles, and we couldn’t decide which one to use. So we decided to use them all! Well, actually, just a few of them…

“Pick the cover you like best for a cookbook that may very well grace your coffee table, bookshelf or nightstand for years to come. Fold back the other covers (one of the few advantages if spiral binding), so that the excess covers become mere interior pages. Voila! The cover you prefer graces this lovely book.”

The third cover.

The inside cover of each of the covers includes biographical notes about Steve and Jack, such as under a cartoon of them:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau are not cartoon characters by a real flesh-and-blood couple who live high above San Francisco in an 18th-floor apartment they never call the ‘Treehouse of Justice.’ 

They’ve since moved to Palm Springs. Under a photo of them decked out in Western duds:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau — known far & wide as two of the orneriest, grizzliest old hashslingers in the West! — started out as mama’s-boy East Coast fops…

Under another cartoon of them with oversized heads:

Enormous heads like these require plenty of food! So it’s no surprise that Steve and Jack like to cook. Like to eat and like to read — and now, write — cookbooks.

I’m no judge of cookbooks, but I know this one is fun to use and fun to read.

A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I

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Not long ago I looked up the Foreign Policy Association. Turns out the organization has a mission statement.

“The mission of the Foreign Policy Association today, as it has been for over 100 years, is to serve as a catalyst for developing awareness, understanding, and informed opinion on U.S. foreign policy and global issues. Through its balanced, nonpartisan programs and publications, the FPA encourages citizens to participate in the foreign policy process.”

By gar, that’s positively Wilsonian in its optimism that citizens can influence foreign policy, and that in fact U.S. foreign policy can be a force for good in this wicked world. Maybe it can. It’s certainly pretty to think so.

Another of the books I liberated from my mother’s house in recent years is A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I — by the Editors of the Foreign Policy Association, the cover says, published in 1967. In the book’s acknowledgement, one Norman Jacobs is given as the editor of the association, but he thanks half a dozen people who participated. A group effort book, then.

The book includes about 250 editorial cartoons in 19 chapters. Actually, two examples are comic strips that editorialize, but they are exceptions, with most of the content one-panel cartoons. (Remarkably, included is a B.C. strip: two ants are watching two larger animals fight, and one ant says, “If we had ‘the bomb,’ we could intervene.”)

The editors provide a few lines of context for most of the cartoons, usually going out of their way to be nonpartisan and mostly nonjudgmental, at least as far as U.S. policy was concerned. For instance, before the U.S. entry into WWII, there are cartoons for and against intervention in European affairs and then the war itself.

The chapters, and the cartoons, are more-or-less chronological, beginning with the argument about U.S. participation in the League of Nations, continuing through the prewar years and the rise of fascism and then the U.S. in WWII. After that, as you’d expect, comes the Cold War and all its complications and players, which was ongoing as the book was published.

Lots of famous things are touched on — Munich, isolationism, Pearl Harbor, the atomic bomb, the founding of NATO, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, sputnik, the Berlin blockade and wall, and the Cuban missile crisis. Other less-remembered events were the subject of cartoons as well: the Washington disarmament conference, the sinking of the Panay, riots in Poznan, Poland, American marines landing in Lebanon in 1958, and so on.

I probably first read the book in junior high. I learned a great deal from it — maybe as much as in some of my classes — about the history referenced, but also a notion of how things considered settled now were once contentious.

One good example is the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. Few would consider those mistakes now, or even 50 years ago, but in the late ’40s not everyone was on board, as illustrated by a cartoon that shows a man — labeled Our Global Meddlers — happily offering a diving board to a character called U.S. Senate. The board is labeled Atlantic Pact and it’s leading to shark-infested waters (labeled War Dangers).

I read through the book enough times over the years that many of the images are still familiar when I look them now. A Cartoon History of United States Foreign Policy Since World War I was also an introduction to some first-rate, or at least then-famous editorial cartoonists, and the art of such cartoons, which has been slipping away from us in recent decades.

The index is instructive. You can tell which cartoonists appeared the most in the book, such as John Fischetti (1916-80), Herblock (1909-2001), Bill Mauldin (1921-2003), Edmund Valtman (1914-2005) and Ralph Yardley (1878-1961). Other cartoonists rated a few examples, and many more only one. One editorial cartoonist not represented: Theodor Geisel, who had a lot to say.

Looking at it now, I’m interested to see the many ways the cartoonists used Uncle Sam. A quick glace has Uncle Sam as the bridegroom of Foreign Entanglements, surrounded by lions, one of the Wise Men, looking on as Europe burns, someone who’s tied cans to the tail of Hitler’s dog (it makes sense in context), as Gulliver tied down, a robbed man with empty pockets, a soldier in Korea, and many more.

Curiously enough, depictions of Uncle Sam seem to slack off in the late ’50s and early ’60s. More often presidents — Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ — stand in for their administrations in those years, though Wilson, FDR and Truman appeared often enough before then. Yet Uncle Sam isn’t completely gone, even in 1967: the second-to-last cartoon has Uncle Sam as a knight, riding (barely holding on to) a horse called U.S. Power. “Of course I’m in charge — I think,” he says (Bob Bastian, San Francisco Chronicle).

Plenty of non-American characters also appear, such as Hitler and Stalin, many times, but also Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain (but not, oddly, Churchill), Chiang Kai-Shek, Khrushchev (many times, but not Brezhnev — too new, I guess), Nasser, Mao, Charles de Gaulle and Fidel Castro, among others.

A few panels are outstanding examples of the editorial cartoon. One is “High Noon” by Bill Crawford (1913-82), which is exceptionally simple and effective. It depicts a top slice of a globe. Toward the bottom of the panel is an arrow on a rocket launcher, ready to fly; a world away, at the edge of the globe almost out of sight, is another arrow, the exact same one on an exact same launcher. The arrows are pointing at each other. This of course illustrates the height of the Cuban missile crisis.

One by C. D. Batchelor (1888-1977) from 1948 shows two figures heading up a luminous (golden) staircase, into heavenly clouds. They are holding hands. One figure is Czech Liberty. The other is Jan Masaryk.

An August 1945 cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick, “Journey’s End,” is also simple and effective. Small figures, looking much like the flagraisers on Iwo Jima, are on top of a globe raising a banner that says, VICTORY.

Finally, the two I consider the best in the book, and which were by the same cartoonist: Sir David Low (1891-1963), also known as the creator of Colonel Blimp. I believe both of the cartoons are also better known than the others in the book, and for good reason. Interestingly, neither are directly about U.S. foreign policy, just events that concerned the nation very much.

One is 1939’s “Rendezvous,” which has Hitler and Stalin politely bowing to each other over the body of Poland, whom they just murdered.

Hitler: “The scum of the Earth, I believe?”
Stalin: “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”

The next year, after the fall of France, Low drew a tommy on a beach, invading airplanes overhead, waves crashing around. He holds a fist high. “Very well, alone” is the caption.

Both of these Low cartoons are here, along with a lot of other good ones he did.