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Mark Twain at the Drawingboard
H.T. Webster, A Timid Soul for the Ages
Harold Tucker Webster was born
September 21, 1885 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the son of James Clarence
Webster, a druggist, and Fannie Marsh Tucker, housewife. Harold started drawing
at about the age of seven, and he was “a cartoonist from the start” (Time): he made pictures of Weary Willie
tramps with baggy clothes, a choice of costuming, Webster said later, that
concealed his lack of knowledge of anatomy. Before he turned 13, the family
moved to Tomahawk, Wisconsin, population, about 2,500. It was a typical
midwestern small town, “a grand place to grow up,” Webster remembered in 1924 (American Magazine). “It was one of those
towns about which George Ade said, ‘People approaching it from the south could
not see it because of a clump of willow trees.’” The town was close to three
rivers, Webster said; “the woods were filled with game, and the lakes swarmed
with black bass. I was crazy about hunting and fishing.” He used to carry a
loaded .38-caliber revolver to school in his hip pocket, and during recess,
he’d shoot at targets in the woods near the school. He was just an average
student, he said. “Mathematics still worries me. I know the multiplication table
and I can add, but I wouldn’t attack an income tax blank single-handed.” His
academic talent, he divulged, lay chiefly in playing hooky. “Only once was I
caught and trounced for the edification of the entire school.”
Webster very early learned the value
of his art. He made an elaborate drawing for a church social and was thrilled
when a vestryman asked for the original. “The next day,” Webster recalled, “I
happened to go through his house with his son, and there, in the kitchen,
underneath the washtub, to keep the water from dripping on the floor, was my
drawing. It was a painful blow, I can tell you.”
When he was about fifteen, Webster
saw a copy of the Chicago Daily News with
pictorial reportage of a fire by artist Frank Holmes, and the youth immediately
decided that he wanted to be a newspaper assignment artist like Holmes. “I
imagined myself out at night in the pouring rain, with a pad and pencil,
sketching a great fire. I saw myself in a courtroom, drawing a murderer at a
famous trial.” Then he read about how Holmes, finding himself at a newsworthy
event without any paper to draw on, had made sketches on his shirt cuffs “and
sent the cuffs off to the Daily News.”
It was a revelation: “Up to this time,” Webster continued, “I had seen no
particular charm in cuffs, but I realized then and there that a pair of cuffs
would be indispensable to my career.” When he learned that Holmes operated a
correspondence school in illustration, Webster signed up. “His course got me on
the right track. It lasted for two years, and I think I am the only one who
ever finished it.” Unfortunately for Webster’s career plan, halftoning of
photographs would soon make newspaper assignment artists obsolete. “I was
preparing myself for a lost art,” he said. But he didn’t know it at the time,
and his plans galloped on ahead.
He planned to go to Chicago to study
art, and he worked a variety of jobs to earn the money for the expedition. One
summer, he loaded bricks in a brickyard; the following winter, he worked at the
Tomahawk railway station, sweeping the platform and keeping the stove going.
The next year, he drove a delivery wagon for a local general store. Evenings,
he worked on his correspondence course assignments and drew cartoons for the
village weekly newspaper. “One of them was a girl lying in a hammock,” Webster
said, “and the editor used this regularly as the heading for the society
column.” The young artist had just learned the “spatter” technique—dipping a
toothbrush into ink, then, holding it over the drawing, running a toothpick
across the bristles so ink spattered across the sketch, “giving it an elegant
tone,” Webster reported. “This form of art created a mild sensation in the
village.”
His first published sketch, however,
was for an outdoor magazine, Recreation.
Webster joined the editor’s crusade against game hogs with a cartoon endorsing
the campaign. Said Webster: “I nearly fell a victim to spontaneous combustion
when I received a letter from the editor enclosing a check for five dollars. I
kept the news to myself so well that it was several hours before the last
person in Tomahawk knew what had happened.” Webster followed up his success
with a spate of cartoons ferociously opposing the slaughter of game critters,
and Recreation published them, one
every issue, and paid five bucks each.
By the end of his junior year in
high school, Webster had saved $150, which, he thought, would be enough to get
him through three months of art school in Chicago, after which he thought he’d
find work on one of the numerous Chicago newspapers. He took the night train to
the Windy City and the next day reported to Holmes’ School of Illustration. One
of his classmates was Harry Hershfield, who would later create the comic strip Abie the Agent. Webster tried the life
class, “drawing from the nude, but deserted it for the courtrooms and the
streets, where I could make sketches.” Alas, his matriculation was short: “In
just twenty days, the school died on its feet,” Webster remembered.
He took a portfolio of his work
around to Chicago newspapers, but none hired him. He’d sent some sketches to an
aunt in Denver, Colorado, who, encouraged by the applause of her friends, took
them around to a newspaper, the Republican,
whose managing editor agreed to take on the young artist but without paying
him. Webster went to Denver, but the art department at the Republican was already overstaffed with an assignment artist and a
cartoonist, and Webster’s work was confined to advertising illustrations and
comic drawings. When he heard of a vacancy at the Denver Post, he applied and was hired at $15 a week to do sports
cartoons. He soon quit, though, because a well-known artist, Paul Gregg, was
joining the staff, and Webster, displaying a diffidence he would later make
famous in his most celebrated creation, felt certain he’d be fired to make room
for the more experienced talent.
Webster returned to Chicago thinking
that his experience on the Denver papers would qualify him for employment at
any newspaper in town. He made the rounds; no luck. He went to Milwaukee on the
same errand; same result. Back in Chicago, he turned to gag cartooning, writing
jokes and illustrating them and peddling them to the Chicago Daily News and Hearst’s Chicago
American. “Strange to say,” Webster remembered, “both papers bought them;
and I began to sell them regularly. They paid a dollar apiece for illustrated
jokes, and I was able to make as much as twenty-five dollars in a single week.
I was getting along nicely when the Chicago
American was ordered by its owners to run New York work exclusively and to
reject outside contributions.”
Just as his budding career seemed on
the cusp of collapse, Webster was offered a job at the Chicago Daily News at $7 a week, and for the next two years, until
1905, he produced “an armful of sketches” every day. “The more work they piled
on me, the better I liked it,” Webster said, “because I needed both the
practice and the experience.” His salary increased steadily, and he was making
$20 a week when he heard another Chicago newspaper, the Inter-Ocean, was looking for a editorial cartoonist. He applied and
was hired at “the phenomenal salary of thirty dollars a week.”
In those days, most papers published
their political cartoons on their front pages, and Webster’s daily turn in the
spotlight earned him a reputation that any editoonist would envy. So pointed
were some of his cartoons (well, one, at least) that a member of the state
legislature once rose before that distinguished assembly and, waving one of
Webster’s cartoons over his head, introduced a bill that would make it a crime
for cartoonists to ridicule that solemn and August body. The effectiveness of
Webster’s cartoons was attested to in yet another equally dramatic way. As the
cartoonist recalled: “A reporter came in one day and told the editor that a man
had laughed so hard at one of my cartoons while riding on the Elgin Electric
that he had suffered a stroke and had to be carried off the train in a
dangerous condition.”
Webster stayed at the Inter-Ocean until 1908 when he was
offered the “outlandish salary” of $70 a week to cartoon at the Cincinnati Post. “So off I went to
Cincinnati,” Webster said, “a city so a-buzz with politics [that] there were no
end of political cartoons to draw.” But in Cincinnati, he began to stray from
the purely political into the hazier albeit homeyier arena of “human interest”
with a periodic series under the title Little
Tragedies of Childhood, which later became Life’s Darkest Moment. This species of cartoon had been pioneered
by the legendary editorial cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune, John T. McCutcheon, who was, Webster avowed, “my
hero” in his Daily News days.
McCutcheon’s first overt foray into this new field of endeavor had been while
he was cartooning at the Record-Herald in Chicago. Some years before, McCutcheon had casually put a nonessential
little dog in the corner of several political cartoons and was surprised at the
quite unexpected interest the dog stimulated among readers. One spring day in
1902, seeking to revive that interest with something of similar appealing
innocence, he drew a front-page cartoon about the kind of boy he and thousands
of others had been in the midwest—a kid in a straw hat and patched pants, with
a fishing pole over his shoulder and his faithful dog (McCutcheon’s canine of no
comment) tucked under his arm, bound for the nearest creek. McCutcheon
captioned this opus “A Boy in Springtime.” Briggs was another Wisconsin native.
Born in Reedsburg in 1875, he grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, to which his family
had moved in 1889. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, he moved,
successively, to St. Louis and New York, where he eventually found a position
in the art department of Hearst’s New
York Journal. After a time, he left for a better job at another Hearst
paper, the American and Examiner in
Chicago. While there, Briggs produced,
at
the instigation of his editor, Moses Koenigsberg, what is arguably the first
daily cartoon in strip form, A. Piker
Clerk, about a race track tout. Launched in late 1903, the strip was
short-lived and, in its last manifestations, only sporadic rather than daily,
so the establishment of the
comic
strip form in a daily incarnation was left to Bud Fisher, a displaced Chicagoan
who managed it successfully from San Francisco in November 1907 when he started A. Mutt, which, by suspicious
coincidence, was also about a compulsive betting man at the race track. After
seven years at the American and Examiner,
Briggs joined the Chicago Tribune staff
in 1907, where he stayed until he left for another try at New York. By 1917 at
the New York Tribune, Briggs was
producing a daily panel cartoon which ran under a series of recurring titles— The Days of Real Sport, When a Feller Needs
a Friend, Ain’t It a Grand and Glorious Feelin’? and others that recalled
the simpler times of childhood and youth in small town America. Another of Webster’s inventions at
the Cincinnati Post was the notorious
M. Huc du Boisdieu, a hoax perpetrated by the cartoonist and his editor, Henry
Brown. They had watched with amused scorn tinged by a soupcon of envy as the Chicago Tribune ballyhooed its importing
of a celebrated English artist from Punch,
Tom Brown, who would, for a time, grace the pages of the Tribune with his superior artistry. Webster and his editor decided
to mock the behemoth up north by importing their own talent from abroad, a
French artist, whom they christened Huc du Boisdieu (pronounced, Webster later
explained, “hoodoobidoo”), who would draw for the Post during Webster’s two-week vacation. As Webster tells the tale:
“The Post published powerful accounts of the arrival of the great
foreign artist on American soil, with colorful descriptions of his pink spats,
his high hat, his white poodle dog, and his valet. But the photograph of the
alleged French caricaturist that was printed in the Post was simply one of myself in [false] whiskers. We took the
manager of one of the large hostels into our confidence so that M. Huc du
Boisdieu was duly registered—but somehow he always happened to be out to
callers. I made a number of weird, wild drawings, and they were presented to
the public with deep reverence. Those who knew nothing about art thought they
were a bit queer, and the artists thought they were so bad they must be truly
great.
“Anyhow,” he continued, “they set
the whole town talking. Several artists openly claimed to be familiar with the
work of M. Huc du Boisdieu. Any number of people swore that they had seen him
on the street. Waiters announced that they had served him that very day. A
barber divulged the fact that he had shaved him. M. Huc du Boisdieu was invited
to address the Art and Drama Leagues. After two weeks, we exposed the swindle,
to the great amusement of some and to the mortification of many.”
By 1911, Webster had saved enough
money to gratify a desire he’d held since childhood—to make a trip around the
world. He arranged with the Post to
send back weekly reports of his travels, suitably illustrated, and set off from
New York for Italy, from whence, he journeyed to Egypt, Ceylon, India, China,
and Japan, returning to the United States at San Francisco. When he arrived
back in Cincinnati, he discovered that “terrible things” had happened to his
reports: his pictures of Egypt had been published with his letter from Italy,
and China and India had been likewise conflated. By then, Webster had decided
to assault the bastions of big time, so he left the Post and set off for New York. Although he sold a cartoon to the New York World immediately after
arriving, he was unable to find a berth at any of the city’s newspapers. He was
not unknown, however, and while visiting the offices of the New York Globe, he was
offered
a year’s contract with its syndicate, Associated Newspapers, which had just
been founded at the behest of Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News. “I was back at the
old stand again,” Webster said, “doing political cartoons.”
But he also returned to the folksy
humor of nostalgic recollection with Life’s
Darkest Moment. “After making a number of this series,” Webster said, “I
became fascinated with the idea and lost interest in political cartoons.” He
continued to mine this vein of homely hilarity for the next several years,
re-living incidents of his youth in Tomahawk. He expanded his repertoire with
other departmental titles—which eventually included The Thrill That Comes Once a Lifetime, The Boy Who Made Good, Boyhood
Ambitions, and others in the same spirit. One of Life’s Darkest Moments depicts a young woman seated at her dressing
table staring despondently at her reflection; the caption reads: “The girl, who
for two weeks has used all the creams, lotions, soaps, and powders recommended
by the Hollywood stars, concludes that she is no more glamorous than usual.” Or
an elderly man, hat in hand standing before a younger man at a desk, who says:
“We took on an old man of forty last year, and we lost money on him. Our policy
now is to consider applications from young men only.” The caption:
“Fifty-eight.” Among the Thrills, here’s
a boy standing in the doorway of the parlor, his hands bandaged but a broad grin
on his face as his mother in the next room says into the telephone: “Miss
Peterson? This is Mrs. Hoskins. Albert won’t be able to take his piano lesson
today. He burned all his fingers shooting off fire crackers on the Fourth.
Maybe they’ll be well by next week. Yes, I hope so too. Well, I’m glad it’s
over for another year ...” Or the young husband holding a screw-driver
triumphantly aloft as his wife, opening a closet door, says: “Why, it works!
How wonderful!” The caption: “Portrait of a man with no mechanical ability who
has tightened a screw on a doorknob.” In 1915, many of these cartoons were
collected in the book Our Boyhood Thrills
and Other Cartoons; two years later, another collection appeared, Boys and Folks. When the United States
plunged into the hostilities in Europe, Webster plunged, too, heading up the
cartoonists’ section of the Division of Pictorial Publicity which was
responsible, chiefly, for promoting the sale of Liberty Bonds.
Webster participated
enthusiastically in the social life of his professional milieu, joining other
cartoonists (including Briggs, once the latter arrived in the city) and
writers, actors, and illustrators in the after-hours convivialities that
commenced near the offices of the New
York World and continued at the Players or Dutch Treat clubs. He went
angling whenever he could get away and never passed up an annual invitation to
join a banker friend fly fishing in his private Canadian stream. And on
weekends, he regularly convened with friends in a hotel room at the old
Waldorf-Astoria for a ferociously dedicated poker game that began on Friday
evening and didn’t end until Sunday morning. The concentration at these
contests was so intense that on one occasion when Webster chomped on broken
glass in the lettuce on the food tray that had been
sent
up, he spit out the shards without comment rather than disrupt the game. Like
his youth, his card playing found its way into his cartoons in a series
entitled Poker Portraits, one of
which shows a gigantic fellow puffing on a cigar with a huge stack of chips in
front of him as he announces, “I’m betting two berries.” Next to him, Webster
has drawn a minuscule man, who mutters: “I’ll drop.” The caption: “The
psychological effect of a big stack.” Another in the series depicts a poker
table laden with bottles of whiskey at which are seated a clean-cut young man
and several unsavory-looking mustachioed hoodlums, one of whom arises, and
points a pistol at another, saying, “You lie! I saw you steal that ace!” On the
floor are a couple dead players. Pointing to the young man is an arrow that
says: “Her darling boy.” The caption reads: “How our mother used to picture a
friendly game of penny ante.” Then in the summer of 1916, Webster’s life
changed forever.
On August 2, Webster married Ethel
Worts, a pretty girl from Toledo, driving her to the Little Church Around the
Corner on Manhattan’s 29th Street, after a brief courtship that the
cartoonist described with characteristic understatement: “On one important
evening in 1916, [cartoonist] R.M. Brinkerhoff introduced me to a young lady
who was then studying at Columbia University. We went to dinner, and from
there, by easy stages, up to the altar. I was very deliberate and cautious
about it. It was all of two weeks before I married her.” Webster soon gave up
poker in favor of bridge. The idea of life without poker seemed utterly
fantastic to him, but, he said, “when I gave it up, it was like recovering from
leprosy.” And while he was recuperating, cartoons about playing bridge replaced
those about playing poker in his repertoire.
The comedy in the bridge cartoons
springs from the compulsive dedication of bridge players. They are obsessed
with the game, and to dramatize the fixation, Webster arranged in his cartoons
for everything else in life to pale into insignificance. Here are two women in
an art museum contemplating Rodin’s “The Thinker,” which inspires this comment
by one of them: “The Thinker? Hmm! I don’t see what on earth he can be thinking
about. He has no cards in his hand.” Or a butler standing, impervious, before
his irate master, who, seated at a table with three empty chairs, roars:
“What’s that, Meadows? Christmas! Do you mean to tell me they all stayed away
from the bridge club for such a puerile reason? Bosh!” And finally, in the
middle of the bay, a submarine surfaces next to a solitary fisherman in a
rowboat; from the sub’s conning tower, a sailor yells at the fisherman: “Say,
buddy—what’s four doubled an vulern’ble?” In Webster’s cartoons, everything in
life became a metaphor for bridge or vice versa. There were also jokes about
couples’ bidding mistakes and their quarrels after the game that revealed both
the obsessiveness of bridge players and the pettiness of marital discord.
In his marriage, Webster found the
harmony of partnership. “My wife is my severest critic,” he said. “I’m really
not the World’s Worst Bridge Player, but she tries to make out that I am. And
how she rubs it into me since I got out a book on bridge. As a matter of fact,
I play bridge mostly for the material I get out of it for pictures.” But Ethel
was a partner in other, perhaps more meaningful, ways, too. Soon after he
married, Webster was able to realize yet another youthful dream: he became a
clown at the circus. He and his wife and Briggs toured several times with
Ringling Brothers circus—the cartoonists as clowns, Mrs. Webster as a bareback
rider.
In 1919, Webster joined the New York Tribune and its syndicate, and
gave up political cartoons altogether in favor of his steadily expanding roster
of human interest titles, Events Leading
Up To the Tragedy, And Nothing Can Be Done about It among them. When he
left for the New York World in 1923,
he added a Sunday comic strip to his line-up. Beginning October 14, The Man in the Brown Derby provided
weekly glimpses of the ups and downs in the life of Egbert Smear, an Everyman
happily married to an Everywoman but exasperated and challenged by modern life.
It was in his daily panel cartoons, however, that Webster invented one day in
1924 his most memorable series, The Timid
Soul, starring Caspar Milquetoast, who, the cartoonist remembered, “slipped
into the world almost unnoticed, apologetically you might say, hatched for the
sole purpose of filling a three-column space in the paper” (Literary Digest). With the arrival of
Milquetoast, observed comics historian Coulton Waugh in The Comics, “a new era in timidity dawned over comic art.”
Mild-mannered and cringingly
unassuming, Caspar looked the part: tall and slender with a sadly drooping
moustache and thinning hair and no chin at all, he peered hesitantly out at the
world through dainty pince-nez spectacles and was always prudently attired in
coat and tie. In one frequently reprinted cartoon, Caspar, holding his wee hat
firmly perched on his head, strides briskly by a sign that says, “No
Loitering”; the caption reads: “Mr. Milquetoast shifts from first to high.” In
another appearance, Caspar inherits a farm and when he goes to inspect it, he
finds the gate barred and a sign displayed: “No Trespassing.” Says he: “Well, I
guess there’s nothing I can do about it,” and he wanders off, going home.
Webster’s favorite in the series shows Caspar standing in a downpour, water
running off the brim of his hat, hands plunged deep into his pockets, shoulders
hunched against the wet and the cold, muttering: “Well, I’ll wait one more hour
for him, and if he doesn’t come then he can go and borrow that $100 from
someone else.”
Once Caspar’s personality was
established, the jokes were foregone conclusions. Webster’s ingenuity lay in
selecting situations that challenged Caspar’s anxious angst, revealing the
ludicrousness of his tiny terror while, at the same time, implicating us all by
suggesting that we are likewise intimidated by the lowering circumstances of
ordinary daily living.
Caspar is so mealy mouthed that he’s
almost sickening, Waugh said, but he is redeemed by a signal fact: “Most of us
have a Milquetoast streak. We are too lazy to face difficult, biting issues; we
excuse ourselves by thinking we are good-natured.” But we enjoy Caspar, Waugh
continued, because “he acts with a timidity far in excess of that of the
average man. We would not be as puling as that, we think, and we are quite
right. In this realization, we glow with a happy, suddenly inflated ego.”
Webster insisted that Caspar was sheerly autobiographical although the
creator’s appearance belied his assertion: the cartoonist was a towering
six-foot-three-inches tall, broad of shoulder, ruddy of complexion, and lofty
of mein, with a rampant coxcomb of gray hair, the very picture of robust
manliness and self-confidence.
But beneath that radiant exterior,
cringed a Webster we can all recognize. Said Robert E. Sherwood: “In
identifying himself with Mr. Milquetoast, Webby was aligning himself on the
side of the Angels, he was standing up as one of the Pushed as opposed to the
Pushers. He was our champion.” Frank Sullivan agreed: “Caspar the Meek stands
at the other end of the hierarchy from the mighty Paul Bunyan. I am always
dreaming of the day when the worm will turn and Caspar will give Paul a clout
on the jaw that will send the big oaf flying. That is because, along with my
fellow-Websterians, and the master himself, I am part Caspar.”
Caspar’s immediate and enduring
success arises from his readers’ ready recognition of themselves in him. And
Webster, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, identified so completely
with his creation that he could, on occasion, speak for him. When the newspaper
columnist Franklin P. Adams (the famed “FPA”) misspelled the character’s name
as “Casper,” Webster wrote to correct his friend: “Mr. Milquetoast has spoken
to me about your spelling of his name. He says that his family has always
spelled it with an ‘a,’ but that they are notoriously bad spellers, and you are
probably right.”
In 1927, Webster prepared for a
three-month trip to Europe by producing in one month enough cartoons for the
syndicate to distribute in his absence. His marathon at the drawing board
aggravated incipient arthritis in his right hand, the use of which he lost
within a few years, forcing him, with great patience and dedication, to learn
to draw with his left hand.
Webster returned to the Tribune (now the Herald Tribune) in 1931, just before the famed World came to an end; and Caspar displaced Egbert Smear in a comic
strip on Sundays and also appeared in one of Webster’s regular panel cartoon
rotation on Mondays. In the next several years, Webster retired some of his
older series titles and inaugurated new ones more in tune with the times: They Don’t Speak Our Language about
slang (and Webster produced an essay on the subject for The Forum in December 1933); Trailer
Tintypes about the growing population preoccupied with recreational travel
in houses on wheels; How to Torture Your
Wife (the husband with his plump wife next to him comments on gown worn by
the svelte manikin in the store window: “Why don’t you get something like
that?”) paired with How to Torture Your
Husband (for instance, in a picture of a couple standing in front of Ye
Itty Bitty Tea Shoppe, as she says to him: “Why, you said we could lunch any
place I wanted”; or, the wife saying, “Did you say something, dear?” while
standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing her husband’s pipes), and The Unseen Audience, a comment on radio,
for which, in 1948, the cartoonist received the Peabody Award for distinguished
service to the medium. A fairly typical example shows a couple sitting on the
rear deck of a dilapidated barge while the radio says: “Take a look around your
house today, and see if you can find any unused diamonds and gold jewelry.”
Although The Timid Soul receives most of the notice in histories of the
medium, Webster produced many individually memorable cartoons. One of them,
which ran in December 1944 in the series entitled simply Dogs, took what Newsweek called
“a devastating poke at the hysteria” of World War II as manifest in the way
French “collaborators” were treated by their countrymen. Frenchmen who, for one
reason or another (self-preservation? providing for one’s children?), cooperated
with the German occupation, were verbally branded as “collaborators” and
subjected to the humiliation of having their heads shaved so they could not go
out in public without displaying the badge of their shame. To take his poke,
Webster risked the wrath of dog lovers everywhere who doted on this series. The
cartoonist drew a “pathetic picture of a shaved French poodle leading her brood
of low-slung obviously dachshund-sired pups across a street to avoid the canine
jeers of two sister-poodles. The title: Collaborationist.” [This cartoon
appears in the Gallery at the end of this effusion.] After distributing the
cartoon to the 80 papers that published Webster’s cartoons, the syndicate and
the cartoonist awaited a storm of protest from either “hypersenstive fanciers
of dachshunds—[which were] stoned during the last war [as everything Germanic
was disdained] but used to sniff out mines in this one—and French poodles
alike.” But no such thing transpired. Those who spoke about the cartoon
extolled it as one of the best examples of Webster’s work. Still, Webster
admitted that “I have kept the cartoon from the eyes of Petunia and Delphinium,
my wife’s French poodles. Both have liberal views, but with a war on, they
might be silly enough to feel insulted.” Among the most fondly recalled of
Webster’s cartoons were two he drew in honor of Lincoln’s birthday, in 1919
(“Hardin County, 1809") and 1941; both of which appear in the Gallery
below.
Webby (or “Web,” as he preferred)
arose early every day, but didn’t go to work until afternoon, when, at about
two o’clock, he repaired to a room at the rear of their spacious house near the
shore in Stamford, Connecticut, where the Websters lived since the late 1920s.
By six o’clock, he’d finished with his cartoon and with whatever correspondence
has required of him. He got about a dozen letters a day, he once reported.
“People like to write in when they discover a slip in one of my drawings,” he
said. “For instance, a woman once wrote to me that I didn’t know anything about
knitting a sock. I had drawn the sock with the foot completed—in order to show
that it was a sock. She maintained that you started knitting a sock from the
top and not from the bottom.” He always answered letters from kids: “I remember
that I once wrote to a newspaper artist when I was a kid myself. I enclosed a
stamped self-addressed envelope, but he never replied. I was acutely
disappointed.”
Getting ideas was, as it is for most
cartoonists, the hardest part of the job. And like most cartoonists, Webster
got his ideas from Schenectady. No—of course, I’m kidding. Webster got a lot of
his ideas from his own boyhood. But many came from contemporary life around
him, and he picked up ideas by listening to the radio or reading the newspaper
or talking with his friends. Said he: “I used to worry about having to produce
a cartoon every day. But I’ve learned that an idea always comes along at the
last minute. Just when I’ve decided that the last idea in the world has been
drawn, up turns another. Nowadays, if one doesn’t come, I’ll stay up til it
does, all night if necessary. It’s a case of sitting on the nest until
something is hatched.”
The Websters regularly wintered in
Palm Beach, and Web made annual trips to Maine where he fly-fished for Atlantic
salmon. Wherever he was, he convened friends for regular games of bridge. On
September 22, 1952, the day after his sixty-seventh birthday, Webster died of a
heart attack, stricken on the platform of the Stamford railroad station as he
was returning from a fishing trip. It was the way he would have chosen, said
Phil Calhoun, one of Web’s oldest card-playing friends: “It was sudden, at the
end of a happy weekend with his old friends. It was at a time when age had not
dimmed his view of life or his talent for expressing it.” Calhoun eulogized his
friend by quoting what someone had written about Joseph Addison: “His tone is
never that of a clown or of a cynic. It is that of a gentleman, in whom the
quickest sense of the ridiculous is constantly tempered by good nature and good
breeding.”
Robert Sherwood, another friend,
took umbrage at the notion that Web’s humor was “gentle.” The distinguishing
quality of American humor, he wrote, “is its bite, its capacity to inflict
wounds, to wield the meat axe or the whip.” Webster did that, Sherwood
maintained, but he did it, I say, not by slashing left and right but by showing
us the truth about ourselves, and the truth sometimes has a cutting edge.
Webster blunted the edge a little because he was fond of people. Even Sherwood
admitted that: “Webby had a huge heart as well as a sharp bite. When you have
known someone like him you want to remember him and the contributions that he
made to the art of living.”
Webster was a member of a small elite brotherhood of cartoonists —Clare Briggs, Thomas A. Dorgan (TAD), J. R. Williams, and Gluyas Williams—who found a gentle-seeming comedy and the accompanying truth of humanity in the humdrum homeyness of ordinary life with its everyday drama of modest hopes and minor frustrations. Webster laced American culture with the phrases of his series titles and enriched the lexicon with the name of his principal creation: “milquetoast” is found in most standard dictionaries as a noun denominating “any person with a meek, timid and retiring nature.”
Sources. Webster’s career and his
place in cartooning history are noted in the standard references: Cartoon Cavalcade (1943) by Thomas
Craven, The Comics (1945) by Coulton
Waugh, Comic Art in America (1959) by
Stephen Becker, The Comics: An
Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (1974) by Jerry Robinson. A short
autobiographical note appears in Literary
Digest (November 25, 1933, 9). The most detailed biographical information,
albeit only through 1924, can be found in “This Cartoonist Gives Us a Look at
Ourselves,” an interview by John Monk Saunders in The American Magazine (September 1924, 50-51, 186-186) and in Current Biography (1945). Webster wrote
an essay elaborating on the slang of his series and titled the same, “They
Don’t Speak Our Language,” in The Forum (December
1933, 367-372), and he was the cover subject in Time (26 November 1945, 58-64). Webster’s books are: Our Boyhood Thrills and Other Cartoons (1915), Boys and Folks (1917), Webster’s Bridge (with text by William
Johnston; 1924), Webster’s Poker Book (with
text by George F. Worts, Marc Connelly and R.F. Foster and Foreword by George
Ade; 1926), The Timid Soul (introduction
by Ring Lardner; 1931), The
Culbertson-Webster Contract System (with Ely Culbertson; 1932), Webster Unabridged (1945), To Hell with Fishing (with Ed Zern;
1945), Who Dealt This Mess (with Phil
Calhoun; 1948), How to Torture Your
Husband (with Caswell Adams; 1948), How
to Torture Your Wife (with Caswell Adams; 1948), Life with Rover (with Philo Calhoun; 1949); and The Best of H.T. Webster (foreword by Robert E. Sherwood,
biographical introduction by Phil Calhoun, 1953). Webster was a member of
various New York clubs: Dutch Treat, Players, Society of Illustrators, and
Coffee House. An obituary was published in The
New York Times, September 23, 1952.
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