Robert
Minor was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1884. His father was unemployed
and so he was forced to leave school at fourteen. For the next few
years he worked as a handyman to help support the family.
In 1904 Minor was hired as an assistant stereotypist and handyman
at the San Antonio Gazette. While
at the newspaper he developed an interest in drawing. He submitted
some unsigned cartoons and these were published in the newspaper.
Minor admired the cartoons in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. He moved to St. Louis and convinced its
editor, Joseph Pulitzer, to employ him
as an artist. While at the newspaper, Minor's doctor, who was treating
him for increasing deafness, converted him to socialism
and in 1907 he joined the Socialist Party
of America.
Joseph
Pulitzer, a campaigning journalist, did not object to the strong
political statements that Minor made in his cartoons. By 1910, Minor
was the chief cartoonist at the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch and was considered by many to be the best
in the country. The following year, the editor of the New
York World offered to make Minor the highest paid cartoonist
in the United States if he moved to his newspaper.
Robert
Minor, St Louis Post-Dispatch (1908)
Minor was one of the first American cartoonists to employ grease crayon
on paper. His work influenced a generation of cartoonists including
Boardman Robinson, Daniel
Fitzpatrick and Rollin Kirby. A socialist
and supporter of woman suffrage, Minor
contributed to feminist journals such as the Woman's
Journal and Woman Voter.
In
January 1916 Alexander
Berkman
launch the radical journal Blast.
Contributors
to the journal included Minor, Emma Goldman
and Mary
Heaton Vorse.
On
22nd July, 1916, employers in San Francisco
organised a march through the streets in favour of an improvement
in national defence. Critics of the march such as William
Jennings Bryan, claimed that the Preparedness March was being
organized by financiers and factory owners who would benefit from
increased spending on munitions.
During
the march a bomb went off in Steuart Street Street killing six people
(four more died later) and 40 were badly wounded. Two witnesses described
two dark-skinned men, probably Mexicans, carrying a heavy suitcase
near to where the bomb exploded. A
friend of Minor's, Tom
Mooney,
was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to death.
A
large number of people believed that Billings and Mooney had been
framed. Those involved in the campaign to get them released included
Minor, Fremont Older, Heywood
Broun, Samuel
Gompers,
Eugene
V. Debs,
Alexander Berkman
and Emma
Goldman.
Over the next few months Minor addressed mass meetings, and wrote
articles for several magazines about the case. Mooney was reprieved
but was not released until 1938.
Minor
was totally opposed to the First World War.
At first his anti-war cartoons caused no problems as the editor, Horatio
Seymour, shared Minor's views on the topic. However, Seymour eventually
changed his mind and became a supporter of the Allies.
Minor was ordered to produce cartoons that reflected this new policy.
Minor refused and instead began contributing cartoons to the radical
journal, The Masses. He also went
to the Western Front where he wrote articles
on the war.
After
the USA declared war on the Central
Powers in 1917, The Masses
came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused
to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges. In July, 1917,
it was claimed by the authorities that cartoons by Art
Young, Boardman Robinson and H.
J. Glintenkamp and articles by Max Eastman
and Floyd Dell had violated the Espionage
Act. Under this act it was an offence to publish material that
undermined the war effort.
Army Medical Examiner: "At last a perfect
soldier!"
Robert
Minor, New Masses (July, 1916)
The legal action that followed forced The
Masses to cease publication. In April, 1918 the jury failed
to agree on the guilt of the defendants. The second trial in January
1919 also ended with a hung jury. As the war was now over, it was
decided not to take them to court for a third time.
After
being released from prison Minor found work with the New
York Call. He was sent to Europe and covered the Russian
Civil War and the Spartakist Rising.
While in Germany Minor was arrested and
charged with spreading treasonous propaganda among British and American
troops.
Minor was at first critical of the lack of democracy in Russia.
He wrote that: "There is no more industrial democracy in Lenin's
highly centralized institutions than in the United States Post Office".
However, when Minor arrived home he published
I Change My Mind a Little, and announced he was going to
join the American Communist Party.
Minor worked as a cartoonist and writer for The
Liberator and the Workers Monthly,
the Communist Party magazine. In 1924 he helped establish the Daily
Worker and
contributed articles and cartoons to the journal for the next twenty-five
years.
On the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War Minor went to Spain and
helped to organize the Abraham Lincoln Battalion,
a unit that volunteered to fight for the Popular
Front government.
He was also the American representative to the Comintern
in Spain.
After the Second World War Minor became southern
editor of the Daily
Worker. He campaigned for
Black Civil Rights and wrote several
articles exposing the involvement of local white politicians in lynching.
Minor suffered a heart attack in 1948 and was bedridden during the
time when fellow leaders of the American
Communist Party were arrested and imprisoned. Robert Minor died
in 1952.
(1)
Robert Minor, New
York Call (1915)
Paris is fall of one-legged, one-armed men. When the hospital train
arrived it looked as though the only part of the human body sure to
be found on the stretcher was the head.
(2)
Robert Minor, speech on the Tom
Mooney case (8th September, 1916)
Only great mobilized strength gets justice. If the sixty thousand
union members of San Francisco had simply done the part of friends
and gone down to visit the men on the morning after the arrest - a
perfectly legal act - the men would have
been freed in twenty minutes. Simply a peaceful visit. Men who have
friends get justice.
(3)
Robert Minor, New
York World (4th February, 1919)
The main fact in the new situation is that the so-called nationalization
of Russian industry has put insurgent industry back into the hands
of the business class, who disguise their activities by giving orders
under the magic title of "People's Commissaries". That is
the only title that commands obedience. There is no more industrial
democracy in Lenin's highly centralized institutions than in the United
States Post Office.
(4)
Max Eastman worked with Robert Minor on
the Masses.
Bob Minor possessed brilliant and original gifts both as a writer
and artist, but he was in one profound sense a misfit on the Masses
and Liberator. He was a natural-born fanatic. I used to feel
that he would string me to a lamppost with the pained gleefulness
of a Torquemada if I diverged by a hair from the fixed path of the
revolution.
(5)
Claude McKay, A Long Way Home (1937)
The Masses was one of the magazines which attracted me when
I came to New York in 1914. I liked its slogans, its make-up, and
above all, its cartoons. There was a difference, a freshness in its
social information. And I felt a special interest in its sympathetic
and iconoclastic items about the Negro.
Some times the magazine repelled me. There was one issue particularly
which carried a powerful bloody brutal drawing by Robert Minor. The
drawing was of Negroes tortured on crosses deep down in Georgia. I
bought the magazine and tore the cover off, but it haunted me for
a long time. There were other drawings of Negroes by an artist named
Stuart Davis. I thought they were the most superbly sympathetic drawings
of Negroes done by an American. And to me they have never been surpassed.
David Lloyd George: "Having made
the world safe for
democracy, we must now settle the Irish Question."
Robert
Minor, The Liberator (December, 1920)
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