MONDAY MORNING MIRTH

 

When it comes to politics, not much has changed over the years, including how people feel about the subject. This cartoon by O'Dell Dean from the Dayton Ohio Daily News was published in 1925! The title is "The 'Applesauce Season'" -- applesauce in this context meaning "baloney".

HAPPY PRESIDENT'S DAY!

A tradition that never dies -- it just keeps rotting away in the swamp.

A POP CULTURE MOMENT (DAY 4)

The past few days we've had a look at hippies and the counterculture through the pages of 1960's era underground newspapers. Yet another current that ran strong through these times was the political movement called Black Power. Proponents of this civil rights-fueled political force were considerably more militant than the predominantly middle and upper class white hippy "flower children".

Huey Newton, Malcom X, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and others were all voices that cut sharply through the political turmoil of the decade. One group that became notorious was The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Founded in Oakland in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers have been alternately called criminals and champions of social justice. In any event, notwithstanding the white militant group, The Weathermen, the Students For a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Yippies, the Black Panther Party was one the most notorious revolutionary political movements of the 1960's, adopting black berets and leather as emblematic clothing. It was not uncommon to see Black Panthers walking the streets armed with rifles slung over their shoulders in a defiant statement of their legal rights until then President Reagan passed a law disallowing the ownership of guns to Black Panther party members, as well as prohibiting the public carrying of firearms. 

The Black Panthers began publishing their own, eponymous, "Black Community News Service" in the form of a 4-page newsletter in 1967 that soon evolved into a full-sized newspaper. It was largely a forum to express the Panthers' ideology and rail against the "pigs".

By 1969, over half the membership of the Black Panthers were women. Judy Juanita was the editor of the paper in the late 1960's. In her autobiographical novel she talks much about the influential woman that worked behind the scenes under the shadow of Newton and Seale.

The Black Panthers were often involved in violent confrontations with police. Newton was accused of killing a police officer in 1967, and Eldridge Cleaver was the leader behind the ambush of Oakland police in 1968, in which member/treasurer Bobby Hutton was killed by police. The Black Power movement also suffered fatal casualties when Malcom X was assassinated in 1965 and Huey Newton was murdered 20 years later. Both were killed by black men.

NOTE: Scans are from the Daniel D. Teoli Archival Collection.

LBJ: GRIM REAPER

With civil rights and social service programs among his most noted accomplishments, Lyndon "LBJ" Johnson had another side -- he was a heavy smoker, a heavy drinker, an overeater, a womanizer who barely concealed his numerous affairs which publicly humiliated his wife, Lady Bird, was prone to explosive bouts of anger and rude and demeaning to the secret service agents sworn to protect him, treating them as "hired help." In short, despite his attitude towards the poor and downtrodden ("underprivileged" is the term used now), he would today be vilified as being on the extreme wrong side of political correctness.

In recent years, LBJ has even been linked as a co-conspirator in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The reasons and motives are numerous (read Roger Stone's book, for example) and, although the evidence is circumstantial, it is nevertheless compelling..

Perhaps Johnson's greatest misfortune was being POTUS while the Vietnam War was raging. Not surprisingly, the anti-war movement saw him as the figurehead of the "Establishment" that was responsible for the woes of the world.

The poster pictured here was used by war protesters and political activists to demonstrate their view of the state of things. This and the rest of the counter-culture movement was well represented by the media who used these images against the backdrop of a war that couldn't -- or wouldn't -- be won, thus making a visual statement stronger than any words could convey.

The "LBJ Grim Reaper" poster is 21" X 29" and was published by the International Poster Corp. in 1968. It is a parody of a famous engraving by French artist, Gustave Dore.

History has been shown time and again that U.S. Presidents all had their foibles and failures, some more than others. But, with the Shadow of Death looming over Southeast Asia and the threat of a larger Cold War, some it seems, had it tougher than others.