Part One: Analyzing Visual Components

A political cartoon, a type of editorial cartoon, is a cartoon graphic with caricatures of public figures, expressing the artist’s opinion. They typically combine artistic skill, hyperbole, and satire in order to question authority and draw attention to corruption, political violence, or other social ills.

First, we will walk through a political cartoon analysis together.

Worked Example, Southern Ideas of Liberty:

The political cartoon below was published around 1835 by an anonymous author, possibly in Boston. It is a response to the tarring, feathering, and lynching of anti-slavery activists in several southern states. Around 1835, several slave states passed resolutions calling for the North to suppress abolitionist activities and societies, as they were a threat to the slave-labor economy of the South. The image is titled “Southern Ideas of Liberty.”

Figure 1. 1835 political cartoon titled “Southern Ideas of Liberty.”

 

In the image, a judge with ass’s ears and a whip, seated on bales of cotton and tobacco with the Constitution underfoot, condemns a White man (an abolitionist) to hanging. The prisoner is roughly dragged by two captors toward a crowd of jubilant men who surround a gallows. In the distance, a cauldron of tar boils over an open fire.

The text below the image reads:

Sentence passed upon one for supporting that clause of our Declaration viz. All men are born free & equal. “Strip him to the skin! give him a coat of Tar & Feathers!! Hang him by the neck, between the Heavens and the Earth!!! as a beacon to warn the Northern Fanatics of their danger!!!!”^[1]

What to Look For

The visual components of a political cartoon are the ones you can see in the image. They speak to artistic choice, symbolism, and realism vs. fantasy. What visual elements do you see in the political cartoon above? As you read through the list below, look at the image and think about how each visual element was carefully chosen by the artist to send a message or evoke an emotion.

Figures

Who are the people depicted in the cartoon? Are they real historical individuals or are they symbolic of a larger group or movement? Where are the characters in relation to each other?

Animals

Often, animals are used in political cartoons in place of people or institutions (like the snake in Ben Franklin’s cartoon on the previous page) – do you see any animals or humans who have been given animal or animal-like features? What are some common traits or characteristics assigned to that animal? What might be the historical context of the animal being used?

Buildings or Furniture

Do you see any buildings in the image? What type of building is it? Is it standing or crumbling? Is there any furniture in the image like a throne, a chair, a table, a carpet, etc? Is it luxurious furniture or is it rough? What might be the purpose of including certain types of furniture?

Objects

Look for any other objects in the image like ladders, trees, household items, boats, trains, etc. What do you think they represent? Is it a direct representation or a symbolic representation? How is it being used and by whom?

Symbols

Do you see any logos, insignias, flags, shapes, or other symbols? What group or person are they connected to? Where are they in the image in relationship to the other visual components? Are they being used to label another component?

Style Choices

This section pertains more to how the artist drew the visual elements, rather than what they drew. Look for elements like exaggeration of features or objects, irony in the way people or objects are depicted in relationship to one another (irony is defined as “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects”), or the use of analogy comparing a complex situation or issue to a simple one in order to make it easier to understand (i.e., comparing a presidential election to a horse race).

As you can see, analyzing a political cartoon is not always cut and dry. Sometimes, one element can fall into multiple categories or be from different perspectives. Much of this analysis is “could be,” since we do not know what the author’s actual intention was when the cartoon was created. We can only speculate based on what we see and what we know. The following Practice Questions will test your ability to analyze the visual components of a different cartoon.

Part Two: Analyzing Creative Components

The creative components refer to things about the cartoon that you cannot see in the image: the author, the purpose or agenda, the audience, the ideology, and the context. Looking at our example from above (“Southern Ideas of Liberty”), we can run through the creative components for our analysis:

Author

Who was the author/artist? What did they do for a living? What were their political or social beliefs and associations? (i.e., were they a Whig or a Democrat? Abolitionist? Wealthy or working class?)

Purpose/Agenda

Was the piece created to help support or to speak out against a person, institution, or organization? Was it meant to make a logical argument or a more emotional appeal to the audience? What was the author’s agenda in creating the cartoon?

Audience

Who is the audience that this piece is targeting? What do you think is the gender, race, socioeconomic status, nationality, and education level of the target audience?

Ideology

What basic ideals is the cartoon supporting or speaking out against? (i.e., freedom, independence, courage, self-reliance, immorality, dishonesty, greed)

Context

Figure out where and when the cartoon was first published. What type of historical context was the cartoon printed in? What else was going on at the time that could have had an influence on the content of this particular cartoon or on its author or audience? Think about social, cultural, political, economic and military events, even natural disasters or climate events. All of these would have informed the context of the political cartoon you are analyzing.

Out of these five elements, the Purpose or Agenda and the Context are the most important for understanding political cartoons. The purpose or agenda of the cartoon is the most important because it shows what issues were important to people at the time of its creation. If you go to the Library of Congress website and select a decade on the left-hand menu, you can scroll through the cartoons and see which topics have the most material. This can be a good measure of which issues, people, or events were being frequently discussed during that time period.

Context is important because political cartoons are essentially a form of propaganda, which is a medium that is difficult to understand outside of its own time period. For example, many people in the modern era are required to read Virgil’s Iliad in school as an example of Classical literature, but few realize that it was actually written as a propaganda piece to boost the image of the Emperor. Nearly anyone who read the Iliad at the time it was written would be able to recognize it as propaganda because of the literary features, language, and subject matter. Context is sort of like an inside joke, where you “had to be there” to get it. Since we cannot be back in history, our context has to be taken from what we know about the time period from other sources.