Syd Hoff and "A. Redfield"

(Sent by a faithful reader.  Thanks, faithful reader!)

Dear Laughter Lovers, The first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street is a good opportunity to celebrate the centennial year of the New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hoff (1912-2004), who drew over five hundred cartoons for the magazine. None of them had anything to do with Wall Street, so what’s that got to do with O.W.S.? Patience, please. Syd Hoff broke into The New Yorker during the Depression, when the magazine decided that the Manhattan aristocratic swells of Peter Arno

could share the pages with Hoff’s uptown Bronx ethnics:

Though Hoff’s denizens are certainly underprivileged compared to Arno’s crew, you still wouldn’t know that it’s the Depression, and that many of them have much more to worry about than sharing a single phone line. Hoff’s New Yorker cartoons showed humorous empathy for the lower middle class that he was a member of, but no apparent antipathy for the class that employed and, very often, unemployed them at will. That’s not surprising, since Hoff’s employer, The New Yorker, was actually doing quite well during the Depression, in part by appealing, in its advertising, to that very class.

The copy for the ad, which appeared in the same issue as Hoff’s “It’s for me” cartoon, is, shall we say, very rich. It’s certainly for the upper reaches of the upper one per cent.

But if Hoff’s New Yorker pen left the very rich unscathed, a pen name, A. Redfield, let him express very different feelings in a very different New York publication, The Daily Worker. In a series of single-panel gags called “The Ruling Clawss,” which ran from 1933 to 1935 in The Daily Worker, Redfield dealt with issues that Hoff could not. A collection of these panels were published in a book of the same name, in 1935.

Here’s a sampling:

As you can see, the cartoons are about as subtle as a billy club, but those were not subtle times. Come to think of it, times never are. P.S. There’s currently a wonderful exhibition at the Miami Beach Regional Library, curated by Dina Weinstein, featuring the full body of Syd Hoff’s work. Dina has done an amazing job of documenting the life and work of a cartoonist who could do cartoons for both The New Yorker and The Daily Worker, as well as produce children’s books, like “Danny the Dinosaur” and “Sammy the Seal,” that are still in print over a half century after they were published. Cheers,

(Bob Mankoff is a cartoonist and the cartoon editor for The New Yorker.)