This Cock-Eyed World
- Title:
- This Cock-Eyed World
- Alternate Title:
- This Cock-Eyed World
- Collection:
- Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection
- Creator:
- Gropper, William
- Date:
- 1926
- Posted Date:
- 2024-04-25
- ID Number:
- 2407.01
- File Name:
- PJM_2407_01.jpg
- Style/Period:
- 1920 - 1939
- Subject:
- Politics & Government
Poverty/Prostitution/Crime
Pictorial
Satirical
Slavery/Race - Measurement:
- 31 x 48 (centimeters, height x width)
- Notes:
- As a "nation of immigrants," Americans have produced persuasive maps addressing the issues of immigration and nationality over most of the country's lifetime. The collection includes a number of these maps published since the 1840s. Some are welcoming, encouraging, and provide advice to immigrants. Some assert that the diversity of our nationalities is a source of strength for the country. And yet others attack immigrants in general, or specific ethnic or religious immigrant groups, particularly Asians, Catholics, and Jews. For the range of these maps, Search > "immigration.”
This satirical map reflects the political and cultural views of the leftist New Masses magazine in 1926, its first year of publication.
Multiple Ku Klux Klan lynchings dominate the southeastern U.S. Washington is a giant moneybag of greed, Chicago is ridden with robbery and shootouts, and New York’s bent Statue of Liberty turns away immigrants with a billboard: “Quota Filled - Keep Out.”
In England, plutocrats proclaim “We are Liberal” while crushing miners. Russian news is “manufactured” in Rumania as a man attacks “God Damn Jew Bolsheviks.” Americans abroad are buying souvenirs and castles and insulting the “Frogs.” Bankers are driven out of France as J.P. Morgan wields the Franc as a weapon. “Americans eating like hell” while “Europeans starving.”
Autocratic rulers are given special attention. The Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera - predecessor to Franco - stands on his own pedestal, proclaiming “I am Ruler.” It is “9 hrs work a day for Italians” as Mussolini takes a whip to nine workers on their knees.
The New Masses began in 1926 as a radical left publication focused on politics, literature, and art. Although the magazine was formally independent at the outset, at least two of its founding editors were members of the Worker’s (Communist) Party, and by 1928 it adopted an avowedly Marxist posture. One author has referred to it as “the principal organ of the American cultural left from 1926 onwards.” Foley 1993, 65.
William Gropper was an artist and illustrator and frequent contributor to radical publications. Following World War II, he received a citation and the personal thanks of President Roosevelt for a number of posters and other materials he produced as a volunteer for the Treasury Department and the White House Office of War Information. His 1946 “Folklore Map of America” (ID #1332) was widely used in schools and libraries throughout the country and distributed around the world by the U.S. Department of State's Overseas Library Program. Wyatt 2017. When it published the Folklore Map in September 1946, Holiday Magazine characterized Gropper as a "first-class, hard-working, fight-picking" crusader.
Alas, this “cartographic darling fell from grace” in 1953, when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn labeled him one of the “fringe supporters and sympathizers” of Communism whose works had infected the State Department. Wyatt 2017. Gropper was pilloried in televised congressional testimony, forced to take the Fifth Amendment, and earned the dubious distinction of being one of the first artists or the era to be blacklisted.
Cornell University Library is pleased to present this digital collection of Persuasive Maps, the originals of which have been collected and described by the private collector PJ Mode. The descriptive information in the “Collector’s Notes” has been supplied by Mr. Mode and does not necessarily reflect the views of Cornell University. - Source:
- New Masses, Vol. 1, No. 5, September 1926.
- Format:
- Image
- Rights:
- For important information about copyright and use, see http://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/copyright.