Chris Hedges Report

\The images created by socialist and antiwar political cartoonists during the period around World War I were powerful tools for countering the elite’s propaganda of the time. The Russian Revolution had just occurred, and in response to extreme wealth inequality, a militant working class was on the rise in the United States. The ruling class was afraid and responded to the growing dissent with severe measures – a massive propaganda campaign, laws that limited free expression, deportations, violence and imprisonment. It was an era that echoes the repression – ICE raids, the designation of Leftists as “terrorists” and restrictions of academic freedom – that is occurring today.

In his new graphic novel, “Dissidents, Autocrats, Vigilantes, Communists, and Cartoonists,” political cartoonist and writer Derf Backderf analyzes this period through the untold stories of contemporary cartoonists who were targeted by the Wilson administration. Backderf joins Chris Hedges to discuss his new novel and its lessons for today on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

Hedges and Backderf explore some of the most prominent political cartoonists and writers of the early 20^th century, leftist publications, such as The Masses, and the initially subtle methods of censoring them. Hedges explains, “This is the way totalitarianism always works…it was incremental.” Then came the Red Scare and more overt oppression through the American Protective League and the Palmer raids.

The parallels between the period of the anti-socialist and anti-communist efforts one hundred years ago and the current demonization of socialism and communism today under the Trump administration are stark. Hedges and Backderf describe the impacts of the Red Scare on Leftists of that period and what we have learned, or failed to learn, from that. “That’s why the book is so important because when these ruling capitalist elites feel threatened, they’re vicious,” adds Hedges. At the same time, there are reasons for optimism because the United States avoided a fascist turn in the past. Backderf concludes, “I hope that’s what people take away from this book, that it doesn’t have to be inevitable.”

The blowback of the failed 2024 Biden-and-then-Harris Democratic presidential campaign, which supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, continues as another grassroots candidate runs for Congress. Dr. Karishma Manzur, a scientist who is running for senate in the September New Hampshire Democratic Primary against Chris Pappas, joins Chris Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about her campaign.

Manzur, who is also an activist for peace and climate justice, has had firsthand experiences with elected officials through her non-profit work, revealing to her the corrosive power of money in politics. She witnessed the ways big donors, such as AIPAC, control the politicians and both political parties, and the corruption and deceit, which she says are most pervasive at the federal level. She finally asked herself, “Why am I being forced to pick the lesser of two evils because the lesser of two evils is still evil. We’re having to choose between bad and really bad.”

Both the Democrats and Republicans engage in anti-democratic practices and demonstrate their allegiance to the wealthy. Manzur criticizes the revolving door between Congressmembers and corporations: “The money in politics is not just bribing our lawmakers and bribing our candidates, these lawmakers themselves are part of the big money.” A major focus for Manzur is what it means to be a public servant. She loathes the culture of treating politicians as celebrities rather than people who work for the public.

Manzur’s campaign rejects corporate donations and is running on a popular program of Medicare for All, affordable housing, living wages and stopping wars, all of which are gaining traction with voters. Despite the Democrat’s efforts to marginalize Manzur and the wide disparity in fundraising between her and her opponent, Manzur is optimistic that she can win.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Transcript

Chris Hedges:

The graphic novelist Derf Backderf, in his new book, “Dissidents, Autocrats, Vigilantes, Communists, and Cartoonists,” captures a moment in American history not dissimilar to our own. It is 1916. President Woodrow Wilson, a white supremacist who will resegregate the federal workforce and has open contempt for constitutional rights, is in the White House. There is crippling social inequality. Militant unions, including the anarcho-syndicalist union of the IWW, or Wobblies, led by radicals such as Big Bill Haywood, lead hundreds of thousands of industrial workers on walkouts. Socialist politicians led by the firebrand Eugene Debs, who in 1912 pulled a million votes in the presidential race, terrify Wilson and the ruling business elites. Wilson, who ran for reelection promising to keep the country out of World War I, reverses himself in 1917. The nation’s entry into the war becomes the catalyst to crush the Radical Left.

Congress passes the Espionage Act in 1917, which not only criminalizes espionage, but speech deemed critical of the government. Wilson hopes to include a provision for direct censorship of newspapers, but Congress denies his request. Congress, the next year, however, passes an amendment known as the Sedition Act, which makes it a crime to use disloyal or profane language that could encourage contempt for the Constitution or the flag. The Espionage Act and the Sedition Act become the tools used by the Wilson administration to silence anti-war progressives and the populist forces. The Postmaster General, Albert Burleson, empowered by the Espionage Act, cancels the special mailing privileges of the journals he condemns as unpatriotic, instantly hiking their postal rates, and putting about a hundred, including the socialist journal The Masses, out of business. A few thousand people, including Debs, are arrested for their continued denunciation of the war and calls for draft resistance and strikes.

Vigilante groups such as the American Protective League, roused by the inflamed war propaganda and nationalist call to arms, physically attack and at times lynch, war opponents. The golden era of American journalism and social reform comes to an end. “The Dissidents” tells this story through the experiences of radical political cartoonists, including Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, Maurice Becker, and Cornelia Barnes, and journalists such as Max Eastman and John Reed, as well as socialist luminaries such as Emma Goldman and Debs. The cartoonists he writes about are swiftly caught up in Wilson’s dragnet. They are indicted for sedition and put on trial with 20-year sentences hanging over their heads. Two flee into exile, another is incarcerated by the U.S. Army and scheduled for execution.

Backderf, who began his career as a journalist and political cartoonist, masterfully captures this momentous moment in American history, one that in many ways mirrors what we are experiencing under the presidency of Donald Trump. Joining me to discuss his book, “Dissidence,” is Derf Backderf.

Okay, I’m not going to gush too much, but I love this book and as I said, Derf, before we went on the air, because I’m friends with Joe Sacco, I know how incredibly labor-intensive it is for really great cartoonists like yourself. And so, it’s not just the dialogue, it’s not just the words, but it’s the intricacy of the drawings and the detail which speak almost as much, I think, as the dialogue itself. It’s extremely important just to give a caveat to readers of graphic novels that they spend a lot of time looking at what you drew. So, let’s explain. I did a little bit in the introduction, but let’s explain why this moment in American history is so important. What drew you to it? And then, although I knew about the suppression of The Masses, I did know until I read your book about the individual suffering or persecution that was meted out on cartoonists.

Derf Backderf:

That’s right. And they were at the center of it and is often overlooked for the usual reasons in America, comics don’t count. But in 1917, they very much counted. And the Wilson government was absolutely terrified of these images. So, they moved against them. And these guys were big celebrities, Art Young and Boardman and Minor, especially. Very famous around the country and very influential. So, they had to be silenced. And the government went to extraordinary efforts to do that.

Chris Hedges:

Well, what’s interesting, and this is the way totalitarianism always works, is that it was incremental. They didn’t just show up at their door, eventually they showed up at their door.

Derf Backderf:

No. They did it in the usual ways. It’s a lot like COINTELPRO, a lot of it was behind the scenes. People didn’t realize it was happening or suspected it was happening but didn’t know for sure. And then finally when the government made their move, they had already put in a year’s worth of surveillance and dirty tricks to get to that moment.

Chris Hedges:

Well, they’d also crushed a lot of the outlets that they were able to publish in.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, well, they got banned from newsstands, for example. And that was done very much behind the scenes and through other entities. They went through local entities to get them banished from newsstands or subway stands. And this is the way things were distributed back then. They had to be sold person to person. And then they banned them from the mail, which just crushed a lot of these publications. They all went under when that happened because how are you going to get the thing to your subscribers?

Chris Hedges:

Let’s talk about The Masses. So, it’s a trope, but it works in your book. You have this fictional cartoonist who kind of is the narrator of the story.

Derf Backderf:

He is the narrator, yeah. I needed a narrator. I needed to be to be able to explain what was happening to these cartoonists and able to explain the cartoons themselves because I’m dredging up a 110-year-old cartoons here. And I needed someone to explain the context and why they were so incendiary and why the government was so terrified of them. So, I kicked around a couple of ideas, and this is the one I just came up with. I think it works.

Chris Hedges:

It works. Yeah, it’s like the stage manager in “Our Town.”

Derf Backderf:

Right, exactly.

Chris Hedges:

So, let’s talk about The Masses. And as I told you before, I visited Eugene V. Deb’s house. It’s a museum, not widely visited, in Terre Haute. And they have an archive of The Masses, which I spent a couple of hours going through. And you’re right. Talk a little bit about, and we’ll show some of the ones you mentioned. They’re very powerful, but what’s interesting is they’re often plastered on the front page of The Masses. And once you see them, you realize it’s not just the artistic impact, but the emotional impact that they had.

Derf Backderf:

It was an astonishing magazine. It was only around for six years. But, you know, the roster of people they had writing for this thing and drawing for this thing is just jaw-dropping. And even though it didn’t have a terribly wide distribution, I think they printed about 30,000 copies, its impact was far greater than just those subscription numbers. Everybody knew it. Everybody was talking about it and it’s just beautiful. I mean, the covers, as you mentioned, are just amazing. And they did have a huge impact. It was big too. I mean, The Masses is an enormous periodical, about the size of the old Life magazine. It’s oversized. And so, the impact on the stands just must have been tremendous when you had these really colorful, powerful covers. And then you open it up and inside the content is just incredible, from John Reed to Max Eastman to Floyd Dell to Mary Heaton Vorse. And even though it was only around for six years, its impact, its influence certainly extended well into the future. I mean, you can draw a straight line from The Masses to, say, the Village Voice of the 50’s. It had that kind of reverberation. I first discovered it in college when I was at Ohio State where the cartoon museum is, which is this huge institution now. And one of my profs was the founding curator and she’s the one who really directed me to The Masses. She said, “Take a look at this stuff. I think you would really like it.” And it’s had a big impact on me, and I’ve just carried it around with me ever since.

Chris Hedges:

Just before we talk about some of the images, there’s a wonderful essay by Dwight McDonald called “Mass Cult and Midcult.” When you talk about having a circulation of only 30,000, and I’m sure McDonald was intimately familiar with The Masses, and he cautions great artists, great intellectuals, great writers not to play to the crowd. That the impact comes from your honesty, your clarity, and even your radicalism, and that reaching large numbers, especially when you are producing watered down material, doesn’t mean you necessarily have much of an impact at all. What you said reminded me of but let’s talk about some of the images which you reprint in your book – they’re incredible – but maybe some of the ones that you decide to put in your book and why you think they’re so impressive.

Derf Backderf:

Well, the first one that I immediately went to was by Robert Minor called “The Perfect Soldier,” which is a cartoon that keeps popping up to this day. I mean, every time we get involved in some misadventure in another country, there’s the perfect soldier again. And especially when the saber rattling begins and whatever autocrat in power talks about reviving the draft or beefing up the armed forces, it’s I think one of a handful of political cartoons that stand as the all-time greats. It’s right up there with “Nixon campaigning out of the gutter” by Herb Block or Bill Maldon’s statue of Abraham Lincoln with his face buried in his hands after JFK’s assassination. I mean it’s that good. So, I start the book off with that because that cartoon had a big impact on me. When I was doing bad political cartoons at Ohio State, I had a bad copy of that cartoon pinned over my drawing board just as inspiration.

Chris Hedges:

Describe it.

Derf Backderf:

It is a doctor examining a new inductee in the draft office and rubbing his hands with a big look of glee and saying, “At last, the perfect soldier.” And you see this giant muscular body with no head. So, it’s timeless. And it’s been constantly reworked. I just saw a modern cartoonist redoing that cartoon a couple of weeks ago. So, that’s the one that I started with and then you just move on from there. There’s probably a dozen cartoons published in The Masses that have that kind of power.

Chris Hedges:

Before we get into your book, talk about a couple of the other cartoons that you reprint from The Masses in your book.

Derf Backderf:

Well, there’s a lot by Art Young, who was almost completely forgotten now, but he was the dominant political cartoonist of the day. He was a protege of Thomas Nast, who I’m sure you know back from the 19th century, the guy who was credited with inventing political cartoons. He didn’t, but he certainly popularized them. And then came Art Young right after him, and he dominated the field for the next 25 years until the trials and the government moved to crush him and after that his career was kind of greatly compromised. But his images are just amazing. And what I love best about a lot of these cartoonists, not all of them, but a lot, especially Art, is they weren’t predictable. I mean, yes, Art was a diehard socialist, but he described himself as a non-Bolshevik socialist. So, he was not swallowing the dogma from Moscow that a lot of people did in the American Left, especially in the 20s. He had his own thoughts, and he had his own opinions. And he was just a master. He was indicted for a cartoon that was titled, “Having Their Fling,” which shows, well, let’s see, there was a banker, a financier, a politician, and a clergyman dancing in glee around the floor throwing money in the air while above them on a balcony, the devil was leading a band that was playing artillery cannons and war drums. And that got him an indictment. And they wanted to throw him in jail for 20 years for that cartoon. So that’s very typical Art Young. They’re just amazing, monumental cartoons. He was a brilliant artist and a brilliant writer. And he was funny, which you don’t necessarily associate…

Chris Hedges:

Yeah. Relate that thing about when they put him on trial. Even on trial, he was funny.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, he was a funny guy.

Chris Hedges:

You can tell the story. So, like the guy’s what, is he facing twenty years in prison or something? And then he kept falling asleep.

Derf Backderf:

Right. And he kept falling asleep, yeah, and snoring loudly.

Chris Hedges:

But then, you can say what he said at the trial, some of the things he said, which are very hilarious.

Derf Backderf:

I don’t want to give away the good one, but, yeah, he was, of course, a brilliant man, and when the prosecutor tried to get the best of him, it didn’t work out very well for the prosecutor. I can tell this one, the prosecutor demanded to know if his drawings were made to discourage enlistment in the United States. And Art Young held up his sketchbook and said, “Well, I just drew a caricature of you. Do you think this would discourage people from enlisting?” He shows this brilliant caricature of the prosecutor. So, this was not a guy you trifled with, but he was funny, and that’s not usually what you associate with radicals at the time. They were deadly serious.

Chris Hedges:

Well, you get a little bit into that split. It’s interesting that – how many people go to the Soviet Union? Some of them like Emma Goldman and Berkman are forced to go because they’re deported.

Derf Backderf:

Max Eastman as well. Yeah, Max Eastman went.

Chris Hedges:

And Max Eastman. But they really sour pretty quickly. I mean Emma Goldman became a very fierce critic of Lenin.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, so did Eastman. Well, seeing the Red Terror in action, that would kind of pop your balloon as far as optimism goes. What’s important to remember about this time is that none of this stuff had been tried before. It was just theory bouncing around, anarchism or syndicalism or socialism, whatever. It was just theory being debated in cafes and in universities that had never really been put into practice. So, it was all optimistic and then it’s amazing how fast it gave way to carnage and genocide. Kind of depressing really.

Chris Hedges:

So, you have the Russian Revolution, 1917.

Derf Backderf:

Right in the middle of it.

Chris Hedges:

And, of course, the ruling elites are terrified because they think they’re next. Unfortunately, they were not. Let’s talk a little bit about the moment. Now, I had known about the American Legion. These were veterans who were used to beat up Wobblies, the gun thugs, the Pinkertons. but I didn’t know much, which is a central part of your book, about the American Protective League, which is their version of ICE.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, exactly.

Chris Hedges:

That’s why the book is so important because when these ruling capitalist elites feel threatened, they’re vicious.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, they all respond the same way, don’t they?

Chris Hedges:

They all respond the same way. But let’s talk about the American Protective League.

Derf Backderf:

It was a group of volunteer patriots, established by a businessman in Chicago who came up with the idea for this organization of secret agents who would report directly to the Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation, which is the precursor to the FBI. Because the BOI in 1916 was very small. It was just a couple hundred agents around the country. So, these patriots felt that more was needed. So, they formed this organization and very quickly it grew to astonishing numbers, 100,000 agents by the end of the first year, 250,000 agents at its peak. It had offices in every city and town of significance in the country. And they were muscle. And they went around and intimidated immigrants. They threatened people who were not patriotic enough. They shook people down to join war bomb drives. And they spied on anyone who was suspicious, which was almost everyone, and they answered to no one.

Their activities were mostly secret, so really there’s not a lot out there on them because after the war when they disbanded under some pretty severe political pressure by that point, they destroyed all their records. The reports that they themselves describe are that they trucked them to city incinerators and hand fed them into the fires. So, there’s almost nothing on these guys. We don’t know who were their members. We don’t know who their agents were. We know some of them. I was able to find in news stories back from the time where they were listed. But they just ran rampant over society during that two-year period. And they quickly added muscle. And then they were deployed against union organizing efforts. There were a lot of strikes during this time, especially as the war wound down. And they were sent in to be basically a government sanctioned Pinkertons. I mean, they might as well have been an official offshoot of the federal government because they acted like it. It was a scary, scary group. And a lot of them afterwards, they joined other vigilante groups, including in the South, the Ku Klux Klan.

Chris Hedges:

Not just the south, Derf. Illinois.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, well, Indiana too, sure, in the north. They had a big presence in the revived Ku Klux Klan in the 20s. So, they were not nice guys. It was a scary organization.

Chris Hedges:

Well, Robert Paxton calls the Klan, I think, a quintessential fascist movement, the seeds of fascism, which of course have been with us for a long time. Let’s talk a little bit about the other mechanism, which you chronicle in the book, by which they shut down dissent and free speech. Yes, you have the censorship, but you also have, which you get into under Creel, you can talk about this, heavy counter propaganda.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, sure. It was the first great era of propaganda in the United States. and Creel, George Creel, who was the head propagandist for Wilson, and one of his closest advisors, was a master of it. A former staffer for The Masses. He wrote for The Masses, so he had socialist leanings anyways, but he became a very enthusiastic war supporter and patriot. And he was responsible for turning public opinion into war fever, which he did with remarkable efficiency because the American population was very reluctant to enter the war in Europe. I mean, they wanted nothing to do with it in 1915, for example. And as you mentioned, Woodrow Wilson ran on a platform of keeping America out of the war, which he had no intention of doing. It was a lie. And so there had to be a way for him to turn that public opinion and he employed George Creel to do that. And very different than what would happen now because obviously technology was very different, but it was public speakers, it was posters on every wall, it was patriotic songs and he drafted the mainstream press into playing along, using threats or just, it was kind of similar to what happened during the invasion of Iraq. It just was deemed unprofitable to be seen as unpatriotic, so the press played along. Same thing.

Chris Hedges:

Well, Randolph Bourne, who you mentioned briefly in your book, despairs at how this propaganda is so effective that it even seduces many people on the Left. One of the innovations of Creel was to harness the film industry and he had a massive budget. I mean hundreds and hundreds of people worked for him. He ends up working, by the way, at the end of his career for Richard Nixon, of all people. And any publication in the country that did not support the war could not publish, if I’m correct, you may know Derf, Appeal to Reason, another socialist journal, agreed. And maybe The Liberator, which followed The Masses, but if you did not editorially support the war you could not publish.

Derf Backderf:

With one exception, and that was Hearst. Hearst was a non-interventionist and he did not really oppose the war, but he didn’t support it either. But he was so powerful that Wilson figured he couldn’t take him on. That was the only exception.

Chris Hedges:

So, Wilson harnesses Creel. He harnesses the Sedition Act, the Espionage Act, the goons from the American Patriot League, not just to further the war aims of the United States but to consolidate his own power. And as we see in this current moment, Wilson also was talking about running for a third term.

Derf Backderf:

It was indeed.

Chris Hedges:

And finally, we were saved from Wilson. I live in Princeton, by the way. They haven’t quite figured out who Woodrow Wilson is, I’m afraid.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, Mr. Wilson’s spawning ground.

Chris Hedges:

And he’s felled by a crippling stroke, and then his wife in essence becomes his surrogate. I guess if this happens to Trump, it’ll be Natalie Harp, who runs the country.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, it’s a remarkable period. Seventeen months he was bedridden and essentially incapacitated. And his wife and his personal secretary, who would be akin to the chief of staff now, ran the country secretly in his stead, issuing orders on his behalf, even though he probably didn’t have any say whatsoever. Seventeen months.

Now, Wilson, I think he probably would have been slaughtered in the election because of what he had done to his former allies on the Left. He had crushed the Socialist Party. He had hunted down and imprisoned a lot of his former political allies. So, they abandoned him during the midterm elections, and the Democrats got murdered in the midterm. So, I think he probably would have lost. I think that’s kind of what most people believe. But yeah, he was planning to run again.

Chris Hedges:

I think you are right. And, in my own book, “Death of the Liberal Class,” I spent a lot of time on this period in history as well, for the same reason you did. Why is it so important that we understand what happened then?

Derf Backderf:

Because we’ve been here before.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah.

Derf Backderf:

And apparently, we learned absolutely nothing from the experience because it’s chilling how much we’re repeating it. Trump is not as smart as Wilson. He’s certainly a vulgarian. I mean he’s not as well-spoken as Wilson, but he’s every bit as egotistical and malevolent.

I think that “The Dissidents,” it’s not a hopeful book. I mean it doesn’t have a happy ending, but there is a glimmer of hope because we came through it. And we left our dance with outright fascism. I mean it’s a little before fascism, but we left that behind and returned to the illusion of democracy that we had before. So, there is some hope there. I hope that’s what people take away from this book, that it doesn’t have to be inevitable.

Chris Hedges:

But what it did, Derf, is really cripple those populist movements. We did see a resurgence in the 1920s with the breakdown of capitalism, but then the McCarthy era, and you can talk a little bit about the Palmer raids, but the McCarthy era, and Ellen Shrecker has written some very good books on this, it narrowed the parameters of acceptable political opinion in which socialists, and what was the New Deal? These were socialist policies. I mean, I’m a socialist. I’m not a Leninist.

Derf Backderf:

Right. Me either.

Chris Hedges:

Well, Chomsky calls the Bolshevik Revolution a counter revolution and under Bolshevism, he calls it just state capitalism.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, well it’s a betrayal more than anything. It’s a betrayal of socialism.

Chris Hedges:

That’s what Chomsky’s argument is.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, me too.

Chris Hedges:

But let’s talk a little bit about how even though Wilson is defeated and we get Harding, I’m not sure that’s a great improvement, although he did free Debs after two years in a federal prison. But unions were outlawed. Unions were not resurrected after that, not until the 30s. It was FDR who legalized the Mine Workers Union and others. They were illegal entities.

Derf Backderf:

Yep. Yep.

Chris Hedges:

And in the name of anti-communism, the old CIO, the Wobblies was eviscerated, destroyed. So, there were very negative consequences that I think reverberate even a century later. Can you talk about those?

Derf Backderf:

Sure. Well, it was called the First Red Scare. And it took place in 1919 and then ended in 1920. So, it’s right at the end of my book.

Chris Hedges:

You’re talking about the Palmer raids. And talk about what happened to radicals, as you do in the book, like Emma Goldman.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, A. Mitchell Palmer was the last attorney general under Wilson, and he was a demagogue with presidential aspirations. And his main plank was this anti-immigrant sentiment, which had really grown to great extremes after the golden door at Ellis Island was slammed shut with the Immigration Act. and his goal was especially to get rid of the radicals. And the mainstream press was really behind this. I run some cartoons in there from some mainstream papers that show Uncle Sam booting Bolsheviks out of the country and back across the ocean. It’s very predictable and it’s the same kind of stuff we’re seeing now, except of course the target is different.

And the Palmer raids were a series of raids that Mitchell and the Justice Department unleashed against various radical organizations, and they rounded up quite a few of them, especially in New York City, and marched them onto a ship in the harbor called “The Buford” and shipped them back to Russia. They shipped them in secret under heavy arm guard. And Emma Goldman was among there. It’s kind of this existential moment in the American radical left where people were actually thrown out of the country, stripped of citizenship or stripped of the right to stay here and sent to this place they’d never been before. So, it’s a remarkable chapter in history and it didn’t last long. The Red Scare petered out very quickly, the first Red Scare. But it set the stage for later Red Scares and Trump’s trying to stir one up right now, isn’t he? So, we’re right back there again.

Chris Hedges:

And just to close, let’s draw some of the obvious parallels. I mean Trump’s even resurrected the word ‘communist’. The Radical Left, I don’t know, I wish we had a radical left. I don’t think there is one. Antifa is a terrorist organization. They just declared Palestine Action, which is a UK group, like the UK, a terrorist organization. You have draconian attacks against the opposition. I mean Steve Miller has called the Democratic Party ‘an extremist group’. I’m paraphrasing. But let’s draw the parallels between what you documented in your book and what’s happening now.

Derf Backderf:

They’re terrifying parallels. And I started this book in the middle of the Biden administration. It took me three and a half years to do this book. So, in a perfect world it would have come out perhaps as the presidential election was taking place, but I just couldn’t draw that fast. So, when it finally comes out now, it’s like, well, we’re a little past the warning stage. But I think maybe these chilling parallels will reach some people and it’s remarkable that we apparently are unable to learn the lessons of the past. I don’t know what that says about us. I guess you see the same thing in Europe with the rise of fascism now. It’s like, seriously, really? You’re going to go that route again? So, it seems to just be a rather depressing part of human nature that we fall for the propaganda. We fall for the allure of whatever and just go back to the same spot.

Chris Hedges:

Well, that allure is predicated on economic social inequality, I mean always, which also was very pronounced at that period. Emma Goldman had this whole crusade for child labor. These were children twelve, ten years old, working ten hours a day. They couldn’t even walk straight because they were carrying such heavy burdens on their backs, etcetera. So, the exploitation was pronounced with the age of the Robber Barons in the same way that we have these trillionaires and Silicon Valley. There are many parallels and unfortunately that feeds, as Hannah Arendt says, totalitarian movements, fascist movements are based on magical thinking, like the Christian right, and it has an appeal to people who are desperate. It doesn’t excuse, in the end, what they embrace.

I just want to close by talking about the artists themselves, because in your book, as the repression becomes more severe, you have artists who sell out, and you have artists who don’t. What’s the lesson to take away from that as an artist?

Derf Backderf:

Well, I think that’s a personal decision. And it does affect legacy, I suppose. Some of these guys were just trying to make a living, and they did, but they squandered perhaps their own greatness. That’s the price they paid. Others, I think they were true believers, like a guy like George Bellows, who went on to be a pretty renowned painter. He honestly believed in supporting the war. He had a change of heart. Was he right? Was he wrong? I don’t think it was immoral. I think that was his true feeling. So, okay, others were strongly anti-war right to the end. Art Young never wavered. Boardman Robinson never wavered. Robert Minor became a fanatic. He became a diehard Stalinist later in life.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah, you’re right about that.

Derf Backderf:

And in fact, he was the head of the American Communist Party at one point.

Chris Hedges:

He stopped doing cartoons, didn’t he?

Derf Backderf:

He stopped doing cartoons. As Art Young said, “He gave up being one of our greatest political cartoonists to become a third-rate politician.” So, it went both ways. I think a cartoonist is always best when they’re making cartoons. That’s what we were born to do. And I don’t know, when you have other delusions, it tends to undo your purpose in life. So, it’s a mixed bag. And other of the cartoonists who were certainly great cartoonists, like Cornelia Barnes, who was one of the first women cartoonists, she just kind of faded away, lost opportunities and in failing health and that happens too. So, I mean there’s no one path that lay before all of these cartoonists. Some went on to have a great deal of success, others did not.

Chris Hedges:

I don’t know, I thought the hero of your book was Art Young.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, he is, I think. But he was greatly compromised. He never recovered from the oppression that he suffered in 1917.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah, he didn’t but he didn’t lose his integrity.

Derf Backderf:

No, he never lost his integrity. God bless him.

Chris Hedges:

That’s what kind of a former seminarian and it’s called losing your soul. It’s dangerous.

Derf Backderf:

Well, Max Eastman later wrote a book titled, “Heroes I Have Known” and there was an entire chapter on Art Young. And I think that’s a very apt way to describe him. He was a hero.

Chris Hedges:

Yeah. And I’m so glad you brought him back to us because people like me, until I read your book, I didn’t know who he was.

Derf Backderf:

Yeah, I was hoping that this book will lead people to look a little closer at these guys because they are well worth examining.

Chris Hedges:

All right, well get the book. It’s amazing, Derf. I loved it.

Derf Backderf:

Thank you.

Chris Hedges:

To be completely honest, I read the whole thing in one night. I could not put it down. It was just wonderful, wonderful work. And thank you so much for doing the interview. And I want to thank Malena and Max who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Milena Soci