Incorrigibles and Innocents

Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics

Lara Saguisag

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813591766
• eBook ISBN: 9780813591780
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated, and alleviated. The proliferation of comic strip children—white and nonwhite, middle-class and lower class, male and female—suggests that childhood was a subject that fascinated and preoccupied Americans at the turn of the century. Many of these strips, including R.F. Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Buster Brown, Rudolph Dirks's The Katzenjammer Kids and Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland were headlined by child characters. Yet no major study has explored the significance of these verbal-visual representations of childhood. Incorrigibles and Innocents addresses this gap in scholarship, examining the ways childhood was depicted and theorized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips. Drawing from and building on histories and theories of childhood, comics, and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood, Lara Saguisag demonstrates that child characters in comic strips expressed and complicated contemporary notions of who had a right to claim membership in a modernizing, expanding nation.

Chapter 1

Foreign yet Familiar

Twenty-first-century readers will likely be appalled by the flagrant racism of John F. Hart’s comic strip series Jap “It” (1904). The strip’s eponymous protagonist bears the traits of the crude “Oriental” stereotype: slit eyes, buck teeth, “broken” English, and traditional clothing—in this case, what appear to be a yukata and geta. “It” is not only a sloppy attempt at conferring the character a Japanese-sounding name; the appellation also announces that the character is less than human, more object than person. In endowing his character with an unusually large head, Hart channels nineteenth-century physician Samuel George Morton, who insisted that cranial volume was correlated to intelligence.1 Jap It’s oversized head expresses and reinforces the pervasive belief that the Oriental is mentally apt and crafty. But the disproportionately large head also infantilizes Jap It: with it, he resembles an outsized toddler. His indeterminate age signals that he is an enigma, impossible to categorize according to “normal” Western conventions; his childlike body further highlights his strangeness as well as implies his arrested mental and moral development. By insisting on Jap It’s childishness, Hart references the theory of recapitulation, which posited that “adults of inferior [nonwhite] groups must be like children of superior groups, for the child represents a primitive adult ancestor.”2

This image of a stunted Japanese character intertwined with contemporary anxieties surrounding the influx of immigrants into America. Confined to a childish body, the figure of Jap It articulates the fantasy of constraining the immigrant (and more specifically, the East Asian immigrant) and suspending him in a state of dependency and immaturity. Yet Jap It’s association with childhood also paradoxically challenges the racial typographies that Hart was reproducing. While the character’s uncanny juvenile appearance makes him seem dubious, it also offers reassurance that he is powerless—and it is precisely this intimation that Jap It is a nonthreat that positions him as an underdog. Thus the liminal body that means to diminish and isolate him also serves as a device for eliciting empathy from readers.

Jap “It” was one of numerous Progressive Era strips headlined by immigrant characters. In many cases, these characters were children (or, as in Jap “It,” childlike figures). The popularity of the immigrant child motif can be understood as a response to European and East Asian immigration; Progressive Era cartoonists, it seems, found the image of the child to be useful shorthand for communicating the perceived inferiority and physical, mental, and emotional underdevelopment of the nation’s new arrivals. But the prevalence of fictional immigrant children in turn-of-the-century newspaper supplements also documented the growing presence of immigrant youth in the country. After all, among the millions who traveled to the United States seeking a new life were children.3 While Jap “It” uses the image of childhood to comment on the nature of immigrant adults, many contemporary strips were keen to explore and fantasize about the essence of young immigrants.

This chapter examines how Progressive Era discourses on immigration, ethnic difference, and childhood played out and intersected in newspaper comics. As demonstrated by Hart’s Jap “It,” cartoonists often bestowed childish features on ethnic Others in order to infantilize them. But as in the case of Clarence Rigby’s Little Ah Sid, the Chinese Kid (1904, 1905–1907) and Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids (1897–1912),4 some strips focused on young arrivals and the anxieties—and exhilaration—that their presence inspired. Melissa Klapper reminds us that many commentators and reformers of the Progressive Era viewed immigrant children as the embodiment of both “hopes for childhood” and “fears about immigration.”5 Many newspaper comics of the period expressed this contradiction, reinforcing uncertainties over the nature of young immigrants while encouraging readers to place faith in these would-be Americans. In their strips, Rigby and Dirks offer ambivalent pictures of immigrant children: the main child characters are simultaneously foreign and familiar, suspect and sympathetic, troublesome aliens and future citizens. On the one hand, Little Ah Sid and Katzenjammer Kids suggest that young immigrants cannot fully assimilate because they are too unruly, too disruptive, too different; these strips pictured immigrant children as, to borrow Klapper’s term, “small strangers.” Their lives, defined by tomfooleries and accidents, appear incongruous with white, middle-class ideals of childhood. On the other hand, as the characters’ misbehaviors occur within the frames of the so-called funnies, they emerge as figures who inspire amusement rather than agitation. Their troublemaking also denotes ingenuity, energy, and autonomy, characteristics that suggest their capacity for effective integration into a modernizing United States. Moreover, the characters’ child status implies malleability: they could be potentially shaped to fit the mold of good American childhood. In both Little Ah Sid and Katzenjammer Kids, children are juxtaposed with calcified immigrant adults to emphasize the former’s pliability and openness to acculturation.

As James Marten notes, the turn of the century was marked by a shift in attitudes toward children of the urban poor, many of whom were from immigrant families.6 Charles Loring Brace, writing The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work among Them in 1872, considered loitering “street Arabs” as symptoms and agents of social disorder and immorality. Brace was deeply troubled by the thought of “thousands [of] children of poor foreigners [who have been] permitted . . . to grow up without school, education, or religion.”7 He asserted that “all the neglect and bad education and evil example of a poor class tend to form others, who, as they mature, swell the ranks of ruffians and criminals. So, at length, a great multitude of ignorant, untrained, passionate, irreligious boys and young men are formed, who become the ‘dangerous class’ of our city.”8 By 1890, however, Jacob Riis conveyed a more sympathetic view toward indigent immigrant children in his photojournalistic book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York.9 He framed children as wretched victims who needed to be salvaged from the slums. For Riis, “the young are naturally neither vicious nor hardened, simply weak and undeveloped, except by the bad influences of the street.”10 By the early twentieth century, Jane Addams approached her targets of reform with less pity and more optimism. While Addams maintained that young people remained vulnerable in the city—a purported playground for elements of vice—she also celebrated what she called the “spirit of youth”: “the spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the desire of the young people to appear finer and better and altogether more lovely than they really are . . . the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more companionable?”11 Like many reformers, Addams sought to “uplift” children of the underclass. Such “child-saving” efforts were undergirded by the belief that children had a right to a prolonged, protected, “innocent” childhood.12 This vision of childhood circulated widely among the white middle class, but reformers also endeavored to naturalize and universalize this vision. Of course, this image of childhood—shielded from labor, from the street—was often incommensurate with the experiences and values of many immigrant, working-class, and poor families. Thus members of the lower classes often responded to reformers’ work with resistance and suspicion. But it is worth noting that four decades after Brace imagined immigrant children as dangerous and destructive, Addams and her contemporaries maintained confidence in young immigrants’ potential to become constructive, productive Americans.

Ethnic Difference and Ethnic Humor

Of course, such hopeful, receptive attitudes toward immigrant children did not mean that new arrivals, whether they were young or old, were met with tolerance and warmth across the board. As the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the founding of the Immigration League in 1894 attest, immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were greeted by native-born whites and “older” immigrant groups with misgivings, resentment, and xenophobia. As John Higham documents, strands of nativism became increasingly entangled with racist thinking, and the resulting “racial nativism” was bolstered by the pseudoscience of eugenics.13 Eugenicists, who viewed the “[admittance of] ‘degenerate breeding stock’ [as] one of the worst sins the nation could commit against itself,” advocated the “rigid selection of the best immigrant stock [that] could improve rather than pollute endless generations to come.”14

Newspaper comics participated in recording, exacerbating, and sometimes alleviating the seething tensions that emerged in the wake of mass immigration by deploying what we may call “ethnic humor.” The definition of the term is a little slippery, as the descriptor “ethnic” can be associated with the creator, the audience, or the target of the jokes. In other words, ethnic humor could refer to the comedic forms that members of a particular ethnic group produce, that appeal to an audience of a particular ethnicity, or that mock racial and ethnic minorities. For John Lowe, the common theme of ethnic humor is denigration, as it could take the form of “jokes directed against out-group by the in-group, or by one out-group against another, or ‘self-deprecating’ jokes told by members of the group itself.”15 As such, forms of ethnic humor have a variety of motivations and functions. Jokes about minority groups that circulate among members of a dominant group are assertions of superiority; jokes that one minority group uses against another express competition and aspirations to assimilate into the dominant culture; self-mocking jokes that members of minority groups share among themselves could be taken as attempts to claim and subvert the stereotypes that dominant groups use to repress them.

In perpetuating immigrant and ethnic caricatures in the supplements, newspaper cartoonists continued the tradition established by late nineteenth-century humor periodicals such as Puck, Judge, and Life. These humor magazines, appealing to a white, middle-class readership, were filled with cartoons and marginalia that featured, among other stereotypes, “the shanty Irish” and “coarsely conniving Jewish Shylocks.”16 As Roger A. Fischer puts it, such visual typographies meant to amplify what was perceived to be the “familiar foibles and character flaws of those alien elements in the population deemed hopelessly beyond the pale of assimilation into an American community of citizens.”17 Martha Banta emphasizes the caricature’s vicious objectives: it means to “[depict] the abnormal,” to “[differentiate] ‘we’ from ‘they.’”18 Ethnic caricatures printed in humor magazines were born of nativism and xenophobia, reflecting and stoking the hysteria about the presence of “aliens.” More broadly, these caricatures extended the project of “federal and state policies and local segregationist practices [that] explicitly intended to isolate those groups deemed ‘undesirable’ and ‘unassimilable’ or even a danger to U.S. society and culture.”19

While series such as Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids focused on the exploits of child immigrants, many other notable newspaper comics were headlined by adult immigrant characters, including Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan (1900–1932), George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (1913–1954), and Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent (1914–1931, 1931–1940). Many “ethnic” adult characters also commonly appeared as secondary and background figures in the comics. The New York City of R. F. Outcault’s Buster Brown, for example, was populated by Irish maids, Irish policemen, and “dago” vendors.20 At first glance, these series appear to do nothing more than belittle immigrants, young and old; they rebuke immigrant characters for their “deficient” racial/ethnic heritage. But as Banta reminds us, caricature and cartoon—modes by which ethnic humor was developed and delivered in humor magazines and that were later utilized in newspaper comic supplements—are “as susceptible to misreadings as other modes by which cultural exchanges are put into practice.”21 Moreover, as I discuss in the introduction, the newspapers’ attempts to appeal to an economically and culturally diverse readership and the comic strips’ multipanel format and seriality allowed for various, and sometimes unexpected, responses. Indeed, immigrant readers sometimes embraced the cutting caricatures that were meant to wound them. Lois Leveen points to how the butt of particular ethnic jokes often willingly participate in keeping derisive gags in circulation. Although some humorous gags were “founded on seemingly derogatory stereotypes,” members of cultural groups targeted by such disparaging jokes would retell them as “an expression of pride in one’s ethnicity.”22 The ethnic humor of the comic strip could thus be both injurious and empowering, divisive and unifying. And as I discuss below, the figure of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Drawing the Lines
• Chapter 1. Foreign yet Familiar
• Chapter 2. Crossing the Color Line
• Chapter 3. Family Amusements
• Chapter 4. The “Secret Tracts” of the Child’s Mind
• Chapter 5. What Would You Do with Girls like These?
• Conclusion: Naughty Boys in a New Millennium
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author