Yellow Cartoons

     Of course backward newspapers are quite ready to denounce what they call yellow journalism, because that form of newspaper has cut into their circulation. Why the cartoonist of the Chicago American, the New York Journal and other papers of that description should be criticised, denounced and mobbed or burned in effigy any more than those who caricatured Bryan, it is hard to understand. That William J. Bryan was many times more severely cartooned than Mr. McKinley is very evident. That every effort of the dependent and subsidised press, which now holds its hands in horror because of disrespectful references made by the opposition to their successful candidate, was to slur, slander, abuse, misrepresent and villify [sic] Mr. Bryan is a matter of history. Yellow journalism was not responsible for that. Mr. Hearst was not responsible for that. The snobs that met in San Francisco the other day and sought to exclude W. E. Hearst from their membership because of the cartoons in the San Francisco Examiner showed about as much sense as a flock of geese.
     The cartoons in the newspapers did not show Mr. Hanna up in the best light. That is certain. Neither did he show up in the best light when he obtained an entrance to the United States senate by methods which some of his own party abominated. Then Mr. Hanna was represented as an old woman, wife of the brute who represented the idea of corporate greed. Mr. McKinley and Mr. Roosevelt were shown as very diminutive and pliant tools of papa trust and mamma Hanna. However much the characters of these two admirable men may be worthy of respect, it is unfortunate that the cartoons were very suggestive of facts as they are. The fact that we hate the assassin and deplore the act which deprived us of the man we elected president, should not and does not blind us to the truth about the trusts. We still reflect, even as we sorrow, that Senator Hanna is a trust magnate and represents an oppressive system. We reflect that Gage represents the idea of trust ownership of money, that Knox, attorney general, came from a state where the people are trust blind, and he can not see a violation of the law by such an institution. The cartoon can teach these things to the people and does so better than any other device. Probably the worst feature of the cartoons in the Hearst publications was the brutal[,] greedy, soulless faces and corpulent forms of the personified trusts. Men interested in trusts might not care to have these realistic pictures of their iniquity widely published. Such people always take occasion of some great sorrow like the present to screen and purify their own reputations. This, in fact, explains the foolish assumption of indignation which some papers and some men have sickened on during the last week or two.