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  • The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and their Enduring Power by Victor S. Navasky
  • Lawrence R. Bush (bio)
The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and their Enduring Power.
By Victor S. Navasky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. 231 pp.

In The Art of Controversy, Victor S. Navasky presents evidence that political cartoons are important because individual cartoons and/or their creators have so often been suppressed or attempts have been made to do so. In this book, the author finds fifty-one such instances that occurred between 1831 and 2012, and he expands on thirty-one incidents or artists that have met with significant resistance. What makes this book important, though, is the reputation and history of its author. Navasky is a well-known journalist and long-time editor of The Nation, where he fought his own battles over censorship and published many political cartoons. While Navasky’s book might not be the most academic treatment of the subject—scholars might instead turn to David Wallis’s Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression (2007)—Navasky’s first-hand knowledge of the power of political cartoons makes his history unique, despite its faults.

Researchers and political scientists have long known that political cartoons have an impact on those who read them. Many writers have tried to quantify that impact to some degree or to explain why cartoon messages often slip through the filters in our minds and entice us to accept premises [End Page 308] that may run counter to our best interests. Navasky argues that people in positions of authority are not fooled by the latent messages that may have slipped through the filters of other viewers. They understand the intended meaning of the artist and take steps to suppress it. A complementary thesis of the book, repeated as a refrain throughout, is that most people cannot argue against the suggestion that the cartoonist makes in an illustration. The meaning, though understood by those who read the cartoon, is a nebulous idea that is difficult to pin down and refute. Navasky quotes Steve Bell’s view that “there is no comeback” to a powerful image and adds, “It confirms me in my belief that since most of us lack the capacity to answer a cartoon with a counter-cartoon, the cartoon target’s frustration and sense of impotence may be what leads to implosion” (43). Certainly, in the time since the publication of the book, the question of the comeback to a cartoon has grown deadly serious.

The text of the book begins and ends with a controversy in which the author found himself. In 1984 cartoonist David Levine offered Navasky, as editor of The Nation, a political cartoon he created that was rejected by another publication. Upon choosing to run the cartoon, Navasky received a petition from his staff to remove it that was “signed by twenty-five people in an office that I had thought employed only twenty-three” (xii). Ultimately, the next two hundred pages are a history of the suppression of political cartoons until the author returns to the Levine cartoon and explains why he accepted and published it. His sympathy for stretching the limitations of free speech may be a factor in writing an entire book to explain why he chose to publish one controversial cartoon in one edition of his magazine. At all times a controversy over what passes for acceptable political discourse is, arguably, only one political cartoon away.

Navasky is no objective researcher, but a recent participant in the long history he recounts, and readers may not share his judgments. For instance, the author asks, referring to Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block, “Who will ever forget that gifted American artist’s renditions of the ski-nosed schemer . . . ?” (34). In the following paragraph, Navasky characterizes Doug Marlette as “Newsday’s incomparable cartoonist.” While it may not be necessary for this author to be impartial, it is important for readers to know his biases.

Likewise, Navasky describes the Thomas Nast cartoon “The Tammany Tiger Loose” as “the vicious Tammany tiger, fangs bared, is poised to strike the final fatal blow against Justice, her scales already in the dust...

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