Teddy Roosevelt: His Career in Cartoons by Albert Shaw with Nat Gertler
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, is a larger-than-life figure. He wasn’t just a politician, he was also a warrior, an explorer, a naturalist, and a power broker. He also thrived during a period when editorial cartooning was a major, often front-page part of the political discussion. Now About Comics has released Teddy Roosevelt: His Career in Cartoons, a biography filled with over 600 relevant political cartoons from the era.
This volume uses as a base the 1910 book A Cartoon History of Roosevelt’s Career by professor-turned-journalist Albert Shaw, and then expands on it, adding over 50 additional cartoons chroncling the period after that original publication and Roosevelt’s 1919 death. The expansion’s cartoons were selected by Nat Gertler (an Eisner Award winner for his writing about comics), who also supplied additional text to tell the story of Roosevelt during this period and to give the cartoons context.
Roosevelt had been in the public eye well before he became President. He’d been a president of the New York City police board, governor of New York, an assistant secretary of the US Narvy, a Rough Rider, and a vice-president. The earliest cartoons in the book are from 1884, when he was a member of the New York State Assembly.
This volume includes cartoons from a wide array of sources, both in the US and abroad, making the book an effective depiction of the range of styles that cartoonists wielded. Perhaps more significantly, it demonstrates the many angles of interpretation; an editorial cartoon is not supposed to be neutral, and so the various artists get to show Roosevelt as a hero, a scoundrel, a madman, a statesman, an impediment, an inspiration, and so forth.