Ruination & Despair

Faced with declining sales, Life struggled to survive the disastrous downturn its cartoonists were so busy chronicling. In December 1931 the magazine switched from a weekly to a monthly format. Although individual issues were thicker, the net result of the change was to cut the annual page output of the magazine by approximately half. As the Depression continued, the publishers also attempted to cut costs by reducing the quality of the magazine’s paper stock (a sacrifice more lamentable today than it probably seemed at the time).  (Continue reading . . .)

Up to now, I have been arranging the posts in this series thematically, but Life published so many interesting and relevant cartoons in 1931 that I cannot bring myself to omit all of those that did not happen to fit somewhere else. (Continue reading . . .)

As the chief designer for a greeting card company, I could not resist giving this cartoon, “Greeting Cards for the Depression,” by Nate Collier (and “W.W.S.”), a post all to itself. Although the cartoon appeared in Life magazine on April 17, 1931, most of its gags could scarcely be more relevant today. (As always, for a larger, more readily legible image, just click on it.)

Don’t overlook the rest of our series on Life’s cartoons from the Great Depression! And there’s much more to come!

One frequent focus of Life’s cartoons during the early years of the Great Depression was the dismal state of American business. Once again, most of these cartoons should be self-explanatory. (Continue reading . . .)

The Great Depression brought forth a number of dismal economic phenomena that people still associate with it today, including bread lines, apple sellers, homelessness, and panhandling. Life published so many cartoons on these iconic topics that we can hardly reproduce more than a representative sampling. Most are fairly self-explanatory. (Continue reading . . .)

Although Life was a humor magazine, its cartoonists did not ignore the unprecedented levels of unemployment and the gut-wrenching misery that accompanied the Great Depression. The Christmas issue for 1930, published on December 5, thus included this stark Madonna and child by Charles Dana Gibson. Presumably the famous Gibson Girl of the turn of the century had never imagined that her daughter and grandchild would be reduced to such a state. (Continue reading . . .)

President Herbert Hoover was a great believer in individualism and self-reliance, and his approach to the economic downturn, especially at the beginning, was therefore light on government intervention and heavy on encouraging voluntary individual action. His administration, joined by many prominent business leaders and opinion-makers, tried bravely to talk up the economy. The cartoons in Life adopted an ironic tone toward such efforts, which were clearly inadequate to the task at hand. (Continue reading . . .)

People are frequently comparing the current economic crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Accordingly, I thought I might begin my promised posts on vintage graphics with a look at that gloomy period. Specifically, I will be showcasing cartoons published in the American humor magazine Life, before it went under in 1936. Archelaus’s card designers — ever in search of suitable illustrations for our fine cards — have spent many hours poring over old issues of Life in the Library of Congress, and we have not been shy about scanning whatever interested us along the way. That research is the source of the illustrations for this series. (Continue reading . . .)