The 21st Century Matriarch

There are two books of Louis Raemaekers’ World War I cartoons available on Internet Archive. He was a Dutch editorial cartoonist noted for his anti-German stance that moved to London in 1915. His collected cartoons published in Raemaekers Cartoons (1917) were quickly translated into 18 languages and distributed worldwide in neutral countries – the US being one of those neutral countries. Themes that appear often in the cartoon are the death of culture/civilization, widows, and controlling Germans (represented by the Kaiser and bulky men with German helmets).

Raemaekers Cartoons

According to the Wikipedia entry for him:He toured the US in 1917 shortly after the US declared war on Germany, giving lectures and interviews….by October 1917, more than 2,000 American newspapers had published his cartoons. The popularization of his work is regarded as the largest propaganda effort of the First World War.

America in the War

America in the War was published in 1918. The cartoons often depict Uncle Sam riding to the rescue and troops fresh to the battle…but there is often a hint that the war was more challenging than they anticipated.

Palmer Cox (1840-1924) was a Canadian illustrator and author who created a series of Brownie books (humous verse books with comic drawings of mischievous but kind-hearted small creatures). His creations were so popular that one of the first hand-held cameras was named after them (the Eastman Kodak Brownie camera). His unique house in Quebec was named Brownie Castle. The characters are in individual costumes, sometimes very stereotypical…but they work together on their endeavors. The books depict positive interactions of very diverse individuals! The plaque on his tombstone reads: In creating the Brownies he bestowed a priceless heritage on childhood.

I browsed 6 Brownie books over the past couple of months – freely available on Internet Archive/Project Gutenberg.

The Brownies: their Book (1887)