Politics at It's Best

This might be a BIG oddity to our younger viewers, but politics in the U.S. was not always so brutally divisive. Indeed, there was, from time to time, a little middle-ground; and there was even some room for folks to see a bit of humor, which could be pointed in either direction.

In 1941, Walt Kelly quit as a staff animator for Walt Disney, and he was hired at Dell Comics, where he eventually created his most endearing character, Pogo. Seven years later, he joined the New York Star and became a political cartoonist, then syndicated Pogo as a daily comic strip. It became one of the most widely circulated strips of the time, and ran from 1948 to 1975.

The comics were collected and reprinted in book format from 1951 through 1978. While several publishers displayed the work, such as this one by Crest, the vast majority were printed by Simon & Schuster. In all, there were 45 titles in that series, a few of which are presented at the left of this page. They were Trade-sized paperbacks, for the most part, but some were larger. In later issues, the books were printed under Simon & Schuster's Fireside label. You can see a complete list of the Pogo Books on Wikipedia.

The strip obviously spent a lot of time building up the characterization of its numerous players, then subtly incorporated important topics to the readers, such as greed, love, avarice, jealousy, etc., with ultimately comical outcomes. Kelly was not the only one to do this, of course. Al Capp did much the same thing with his Li'L Abner comic strip. In Capp's case, the microcosm that contained his metaphorical world was the fictional town of "Dogpatch." Kelly's setting was the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia, and all of his characters were animals. Still, many of them (especially some that were "just passing through") bore an uncanny resemblance to political figures of the day, and some of the social problems that came to the swamp were obviously taken from headlines.