Slow Ball Cartoonist: The Extraordinary Life of Indiana Native and Pulitzer Prize Winner John T. McCutcheon of the "Chicago Tribune." by Tony Garel-Frantzen (review)

Tony Garel-Frantzen's biography of John T. McCutcheon traces the truly extraordinary life, as the book's subtitle describes it, of the famed Chicago Tribune cartoonist and reporter. With surprisingly few exceptions, the information in this biography is derived from Drawn from Memory, McCutcheon's own autobiography, published in 1950. The lack of additional supporting sources and perspectives inevitably leads to a thinly researched and superficial analysis of a subject that had great potential. McCutcheon was the author of the widely popular Bird Center cartoon series and of thousands of editorial cartoons. Taken together, his work provides both humorous and insightful commentary on the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The targets of his humor included local, national, and international politics, economic issues, and everyday life.

Born in 1870, McCutcheon studied industrial arts at Purdue, and after graduation moved to Chicago. At a time when photography was not yet sufficiently developed to be used on large presses, he found employment at various newspapers, illustrating local news with his artwork. Throughout his life, McCutcheon had an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. His first big break came during the World's Columbia Exposition, a never-ending source of inspiration for any artist and a great opportunity to meet influential people. A year after covering both the 1896 Republican and Democratic conventions and McKinley's subsequent election, he asked for and was granted what would become his first of many leave of absences to travel the world. The trip lasted three years and took him to Afghanistan, India, China and, right on time, to the Philippines, an arrival that coincided with Commodore George Dewey's attack on the Spanish armada, the Battle of Manila Bay, and the start of the Spanish-American War. He was one of three journalists to witness and report the event firsthand.

Along the way, and following the instructions given by the Chicago Recorder, his employer at the time, he hired foreign correspondents for the newspaper. He also ran into multiple dangerous situations, including, we are told, "half-naked savages" and "vicious kings," the biographer failing to qualify his subject's comments or put them in historical perspective (65). In Africa, McCutcheon interviewed the leader of the Boer resistance, but we are not given any information on what the exchange was like. By 1901, McCutcheon was working for the Chicago Record-Herald and producing Bird Center, one of his most endearing cartoon series, a "good natured" re-creation of small town America and its prototypical characters: the minister and his wife, the doctor, the judge, the town drunkard, the wealthy matron, and so on (82).

In 1903, he moved to the Chicago Tribune, a happy relationship for employer and employee that lasted for over four decades. In exchange for producing a daily cartoon and developing a loyal audience, the paper granted McCutcheon great freedom, which he used to continue his travels whenever possible. A year after he started working there, he asked for a one-month leave to see for himself what the Japanese-Russo War was all about. And again in 1906, with the Tribune's permission, he traveled for six months through Central Asia and visited, among other places, Persia, Russia, and the Caucasus Mountains, where he witnessed riots that killed thousands, though the biographer attempts no explanation as to what they were about. During his five-month trip and leave of absence, he arranged for thirty artists to contribute one cartoon to the Tribune each, to help cover for his absence.

The author attributes McCutcheon's love of travel to his romantic streak. But it would have been useful if Garel-Frantzen had connected McCutcheon's desire to seek relief from his comfortable Chicago life to the turn-of...