#1598 A Conversation with Political Cartoonist Phil Hands

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay Jenkinson interviews political cartoonist Phil Hands about the importance of cartoons in American history. Hands is the house cartoonist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisconsin, syndicated for a range of newspapers around the United States. We gave much of our attention to political cartoons about Thomas Jefferson, including one that depicts him as a prairie dog vomiting money in his quest to buy the Floridas, and another that depicts Sally Hemings as Jefferson’s consort. We also talked about the most cartooned political figure in American history, Theodore Roosevelt, including Clifford Berryman’s famous Teddy Bear cartoon of TR, as well as the difficulty of being a political cartoonist today with the aggressions of cancel culture.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone this is my podcast introduction to this week's program with
0:04.6	Phil Hans of the Wisconsin State Journal he's a political cartoonist he says
0:10.0	that he is a fierce political moderate. He's drawn national figures and state and
0:15.9	local figures. He's syndicated. He's one of about 50 political cartoonists left in
0:21.3	the United States. I greatly admire him and was so glad to be
0:26.8	able to interview him. I had some doubts. How do you interview somebody on an audio only forum about something as visual as the political
0:37.4	cartoon but he was terrific and I did my own research on this I'm I know a great deal about Theodore Roosevelt
0:45.2	cartoons I've given lectures about that and we've had a symposium that focused
0:49.4	in part on that at Dickinson State University in Western North
0:53.6	Coon. By the way you should all come to our annual Theodor Roosevelt
0:56.6	Center symposia. This one will be in September. And the subject this year is
1:02.1	conservation. You can find out more about that by going to
1:04.8	Theater Roosevelt Center.org.
1:08.3	But we did one on political cartoons with Rick Marshall, who is a great historian of cartoons, and has a book called Bully on some of the greatest of all the
1:16.3	Theodore Roosevelt cartoons.
1:18.1	Roosevelt was probably the most cartooned person in American history with the possible exception of Richard Nixon.
1:25.0	So it's fascinating all of this.
1:28.0	And so I had this chance to talk with Phil and it was an amazing conversation and you'll see on our
1:36.1	website L.T America.org some of the cartoons that he has drawn and a couple of
1:40.8	them that I've discovered about Thomas Jefferson.
1:44.2	So I've known these existed for a long time,
1:47.2	but I've recently began to look more closely at them.
	...

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