The Cartoonist Who Saw the Future
Opper’s cartoons from the late 1800s anticipated the issues of 21st century
Behold two prescient cartoons by Frederick Burr Opper (1857-1937) - one of the pioneers of American newspaper comic strips.
The first was published in Puck magazine in 1881. “A Dangerous American Institution--The Free and Untrammeled Revolver."
The vignette in the upper left references the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, a mentally unstable lawyer who shot him with a revolver on July 2, 1881. Garfield died a few months later, after suffering from infections and medical malpractice. Guiteau was hanged on June 30, 1882.
Opper also warned of the dangers of misinformation and sensationalism in the media in this cartoon. He even used the term: “Fake News.”
This detail is from the upper left of an Opper cartoon published in 1894 that shows a newspaper owner (likely Joseph Pulitzer) sitting in a chair in his office next to an open safe where “Profits” are spilling out onto the floor. Outside this scene are numerous newspaper reporters for the “Daily Splurge” rushing to the office to toss their stories onto the printing press.
If you zoom in you’ll see 19th-century click bait like:
A Week as a Tramp!! Wild and Exciting Experiences of a Daily Splurge Reporter
A Reporter of the Daily Splurge Spends a Thrilling Week in an Asylum!
Life in Sing Sing - a Splurge Reporter in Disguise
A Night Around Town by a woman reporter “in Men’s Attire,”
Life on the streets “As a Flower Girl”
A notice hanging on the wall of the office states, “The Motto of the Daily Splurge - Morality and a High Sense of Duty.”
Frederick Burr Opper was the first great American-born cartoonist. He dropped out of school when he was fourteen to work for the local newspaper. At the age of sixteen he moved to New York City where he worked in a store during the day and made amusing drawings in the evenings. Opper's only formal art training was one term at Cooper Union in New York. His first published cartoon appeared in 1875.
In 1880, the publishers of Puck hired the twenty-three-year-old cartoonist to draw for their magazine. Opper remained on the staff of Puck for nineteen years, drawing everything from spot illustrations to editorial cartoons and chromolithograph covers.
In 1898, Opper went to work for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, for which Opper created several newspaper comic strips with enormous popular appeal. Happy Hooligan, the best-known of his strips, first appeared on March 11, 1900, and the comic strip ran until August 14, 1932. Hooligan was a tramp with a little tin can hat whose gentle simplicity and bumbling good nature made him a national hero. ~ OSU Teaching Institute
And here’s an earlier work by Opper satirizing how small states distort politics
Dakota: Wants to be a state (1888)
The Dakota Territory was split in two and divided into North and South in 1889. Later that year, on November 2, North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted to the Union as the 39th and 40th states. More on the politics of new western states from sparsely populated territories from
In reaching far back in American history to assert “Second Amendment gun rights” do you think our Supreme Court was thinking of Mr. Opper’s cartoons? 😄
It's a weird feeling to pine for those halcyon days when crazy people were only packing six-shooters.