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ARTHUR HENRY YOUNG (1866-1943), known to the world as Art, was arguably the most widely recognized and beloved cartoonist in the history of American radicalism. A working cartoonist for sixty years, Art Young drew thousands of simple black-line drawings with biting captions that appeared in big-city newspapers, liberal magazines, and, most importantly, in the socialist, labor, and radical press of the early twentieth century.
Starting in Wisconsin shortly after the end of the Civil War and ending in the midst of World War II, Art Young's life, art, and activism span the Age of Monopoly and the Great Depression. At the peak of his influence, Art's clear yet stylish cartoons helped give a visual design and humo rous edge to a wave of anti-capitalist social movements-socialist, anarchist, communist, Wobbly, feminist, labor, and Black radical-organized in opposition to the unchecked power of monopoly capitalism, Wall Street finance, government surveillance, and racist nationalism.
For these reasons, after the passage of a century or more, Art Young's cartoons strike us as surprisingly relevant to our current era of inequality, ecological crisis, police violence, and war.
Formally educated in art schools in Chicago and Paris, Young chose graphic and cartoon art from an early age as his "road to recognition." Art recognized that painting was singular and slow, whereas, in his words, "a cartoon could be reproduced by simple mechanical process and easily made accessible to hundreds of thousands. I wanted a large audience." Young published his first cartoon in Judge magazine in 1883 and thereafter learned his craft in the editorial offices of Chicago and New York's biggest papers, working for a time under Thomas Nast, the most important American cartoonist of the nineteenth century.
In both art and activism, Young's career stretched between his jailhouse portraits of the Haymarket Anarchists, drawn days before their execution in 1887, and a Fourth of July picnic in 1918 at the home of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, just a few days before Debs' arrest for an anti-war speech. Somewhere in between, Young converted to socialism and turned against the capitalist system. Art even ran for public office in New York City on the Socialist Party ticket. "I have always felt," he wrote in 1928, "that there is...