Art
Young
was born in Monroe, Wisconsin, in 1866. His family ran a general store
and a twenty-acre farm. When he was a boy Young borrowed a book from
the local library that had been illustrated by Gustave
Dore. Young was so impressed with these drawings that he decided
to become an illustrator. He sent his drawings to journals in Chicago
and at the age of seventeen had his first work accepted by the Judge
magazine.
Soon after the publication of his first drawing, Young moved to Chicago
where he studied at its Academy of Design.
He paid for the course by illustrating news stories in the Chicago
Evening Mail. Young soon developed a reputation as a talented
artist and was offered work with the Chicago
Daily News and the Chicago Inter-Ocean.
In 1895 Young moved to New York where he studied at the Arts
Students League. He also had his cartoons published
in Life
and Puck
and
provided drawings
to illustrate news stories for the Evening
Journal. One of these assignments included a speech given
by Keir Hardie, the British trade
union leader and the first socialist
member of the House of Commons. Later,
Young recalled how listening to Hardie encouraged him to start questioning
his previously held, conservative views.
In March 1902 Young was commissioned to draw an anti-immigration picture
for Life. After it was published
he sent back the $100 cheque and vowed that in future he would only
draw pictures that reflected his own political beliefs. By this time
Young's work was so highly valued that newspapers and magazines were
willing to accept his drawings attacking inequality and supporting
causes he believed in such as women's rights.
Art Young,
Freedom of the Press (1912)
When Piet
Vlag decided to start
a new socialist magazine,
The Masses, in 1910, he asked Young
to join him. Organised like
a co-operative, artists and writers who contributed to the
journal shared in its management. Others radical writers and artists
who joined the team included Max Eastman,
John Reed, Sherwood
Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Upton
Sinclair, Amy Lowell, Louise
Bryant, John Sloan, Boardman
Robinson, Robert Minor, K.
R. Chamberlain, Stuart Davis,
George Bellows and Maurice
Becker.
One of Young's cartoons, Poisoned
at the Source,
that appeared in the July 1913 edition of The
Masses, upset the Associated
Press
company and he was indicted for criminal libel. However, after a year,
the company decided to drop the law suit.
At The Masses Young sometimes clashed
with its art editor, John Sloan. Young
believed that Sloan was more interested in art than socialism.
When Sloan left in 1916 after a dispute with the more politically
committed members of the co-operative, Young commented: "To me
this magazine exists for socialism. That's why I give my drawings
to it, anybody who doesn't believe in a socialist policy, as far as
I go, can get out."
Although Young was his cartoons always had a political objective,
they were often difficult to interpret. The dominant theme in his
cartoons was to attack hypocrisy and show the real truth behind the
official image. One cartoon for example, Respectability,
published in August 1915, shows a well-dressed man, closing some curtains
in his house. The critic, Richard
Fitzgerald, in his
book, Art
and Politics
(1973), argues that the man "who could be a railroad magnate,
a pillar of society, is shown in a private moment of desperate anxiety
and fear symbolically concealing objects that no doubt represent the
various deviant tendencies behind the facade of respectability."
Young, like
most of the people working for The Masses,
believed that the First World War had been caused
by the imperialist competitive system and that the USA should remain
neutral. This was reflected in Young's cartoons that attacked the
behaviour of both sides in the conflict.
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 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. The cartoon by Young that the government objected
to was one in which he suggested that American capitalists were in
favour of the First World War as it increased
their profits.
The legal action that followed forced The
Masses
to cease publication. In April, 1918 the jury failed to agree on the
guilt of Young and his fellow 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.
Over the next few years Young had cartoons published in two radical
journals he had helped to establish, The
Liberator (1918-24)
and Good
Morning
(1919-21). He also provided material for the Saturday
Evening Post,
the Nation,
New Masses and the
New Leader.
His autobiography, Art
Young: His Life and Times,
appeared in 1939. Art
Young
continued to produce politically committed cartoons until his death
in 1943.
Art
Young, The
Masses
(November, 1914)
(1)
In his autobiography, Art Young explained how his political views
changed in 1910.
It was no thunderbolt revelation that
hit me like the one that struck Paul of Tarsus. For years the truth
about the underlying cause of the exploitation and misery of the world's
multitudes had been knocking at the door of my consciousness, but
not until that year did it begin to sound clearly. Now, I was past
forty years of age and I knew definitely where I was going.
(2)
In November 1934, Art Young was in poor health and close to bankruptcy
and so a group of friends organised a testimonial benefit in New York.
Young was too ill to attend but he sent a message to the event.
I'm a little worse for wear. But I will
try to express myself hereafter with bigger and better bitterness.
I don't know the meaning of dialectical materialism. All I know is
that the cause of the workers is right and the rule of capitalism
is wrong, and right will win.
(3)
Art Young was interviewed by Gil Wilson in May, 1940.
