Another take on the magazine's social conscience during the Depression, by San Francisco State's Eric Solomon. In his engaging study with plenty of terrific cartoon captions for evidence, Solomon writes,

My best estimate is that of nearly 8,000 cartoons printed from 1930 to 1940, over 300 were socially meaningful—a small percentage but a significant one. Many were too topical to be included in New Yorker anthologies—either yearly ones or retrospective books. And the magazine itself pretended to be above real political concerns, which it professed to leave to such other magazines as the New Masses, the old Life, or Ballyhoo. But I disagree with most comments on the New Yorker by cartoon historians like Thomas Craven. "The social upheaval," Craven says, "did not interrupt [the magazine’s] established procedure, and its allusions to the questions of the day were faint and far between." As what W. H. Auden called the "dishonest decade" grew grimmer, the New Yorker’s editorial policy shifted from insouciance to concern. White increasingly wrote on world affairs in the Notes & Comments section; there were more frequent appearances of reportage from writers like Edmund Wilson, Martha Gellhorn, Ruth McKenney, Leo Rosten, Hyman Goldberg, and A. J. Liebling; Auden published poems there, as did Stephen Benet and Kenneth Fearing. Stories by Arthur Kober, Albert Maltz, Leone Zugsmith, Jerome Weidman, Daniel Fuchs, and Kay Boyle treated lower class or political interests; and Clifton Fadiman’s book reviews were remarkably sympathetic to proletarian literature. And the quality, if not in each issue the quantity, of the cartoons reflected this 1930s editorial attention to the realities of unrest, poverty, depression, and fascism. For writing parallel to the visual effects of many of the political cartoons, we have Morris Bishop’s 1938 poem ostensibly about Roosevelt, "Him."


"The undistributed corporate profit

Tax," he said, "is suicide!

He never will make a penny off it!"

"I guess you’re right," his wife replied,

"He’s got a collection of Red advisers

Who don’t care what the people need."

He said, "His personal idolizers!"

"I guess you’re right," his wife agreed.

"He thinks he can move us around like chessmen!

What kind of a fellow would take delight

In sounding off to a lot of yes-men?"

His wife remarked, "I guess you’re right."



Interestingly, a few weeks after those lines appeared, the New Yorker, under its "Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse," published a furious telegram from one Caldwell Patton, Chairman, Republican Committee for Public Safety, Yale Club: "I am interested in knowing whether you’re running a comic periodical or an organ for Communist propaganda." He goes on to express outrage at cartoons ridiculing the DAR and Jersey City’s Mayor Hague and concludes, "It would be more honest to sell out your publication and draw cartoons for The Daily Worker. . . . I regret that you have changed a once humorous publication into an instrument for advancement of Bolshevism."