#1598 A Conversation with Political Cartoonist Phil Hands

He's one of about 50 political cartoonists left in the United States. I greatly admire him and so glad to be able to interview him. I had some doubts, you know, how do you interview somebody on an audio-only forum about something as visual as a political cartoon, but he was terrific and I did my own research on this. I know a great deal about Theodore Roosevelt cartoons. I've given lectures about that and we've had a symposium that focused in part on that at Dickinson State University in western North Dakota.

And, by the way, you should all come to our annual Theodore Roosevelt Center Symposium. This one will be in September and the subject this year is conservation. You can find out more about that by going to TheodoreRooseveltCenter.org. But we did one on political cartoons with Rick Marshall, who's a great historian of cartoons and has a book called Bully on some of the greatest of all the Theodore Roosevelt cartoons. Roosevelt was probably the most cartooned person in American history, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon.

So it's fascinating, all of this, and so I had this chance to talk with Phil, and it was an amazing conversation, and you'll see on our website, ltamerica.

org, some of the cartoons that he has drawn and a couple of them that I've discovered about Thomas Jefferson. And so I've known these existed for a long time, but I've recently began to look more closely at them, and there are many, but the three that stand out are ones that we talked about on this program, including Jefferson as a prairie dog, you know, Lewis and Clark captured a prairie dog in today's South Dakota, got it all the way back to Washington DC alive. Jefferson displayed it, it was in hibernation, unfortunately, so pretty sluggish, but Jefferson displayed it at the White House, at the president's mansion, for a period of time and eventually sent it on to Philadelphia for Charles Wilson Peale, the great first American museum director and minor figure in the Enlightenment, painter, among other things. He eventually died and of course he had it displayed at taxidermy and so on. But it was the country's first, the eastern part of the country's first recognition of the prairie dog, and the cartoonist immediately said, ah, I can make that work for Thomas Jefferson.

So we'll have those on the site also.

Amazing. And I just want you to hear a little bit of the after conversation that we had, just a minute or two, because Phil Hans said a really interesting thing and of course it went through me like an arrow or a bullet. He said, you know, someone can write an essay of a thousand words and nobody will read it, but I can draw a cartoon and everybody will see it, which is a very, very interesting insight and, of course, critique of the sort of long form work that I get to do. He's also agreed to do a cartoon of me in my airstream to make fun of me on this quest. I have to go see America.

I wanted to be able to share with all of you an original cartoon that Phil will draw to make fun of me. I said, go ahead and make fun of me to the extent that you wish to. And so he's going to do that. It might take him a little while to produce that, but this is the sort of direction we're taking. this program.

Under the old rubric of the Jefferson Hour, it would have been pretty difficult to do this, except on the first section in which we talked about those Jefferson cartoons, but now that we've rebranded in this more ecumenical way, listening to America, we have the chance to look at a whole range of phenomena, music and art, and in this case, political cartoons and geography and landscapes and the themes of water in the West and the future of race relations in the United States. The approach we're making to the 250th birthday of the United States on July 4th, 2026, all these things are possible and they would have been a little bit constrained under the old rubric. So that's the main reason why we've changed the nature of the program, and it's all very, very interesting. Let's go to the show.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I have the pleasure today to be talking with Phil Hands, who is a newspaper cartoonist who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and we've gotten to know each other a little bit over the last few months. So welcome, Phil.

And shortly after that, the local newspaper where I lived in Grosse Pointe, Michigan at the time, which is a suburb outside of Detroit, there was a local weekly newspaper called the Grosse Pointe News, and they had always run local political cartoons in that newspaper. And their cartoonist left for a bigger weekly newspaper. And I applied or showed the editor my work and decided I wanted, I said I wanted to try it, give it a shot. And he gave me an opportunity when I was 16 years old to start drawing a weekly editorial cartoon about the community in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. I was paid $25 a week to do that.

And at the time, it was really exciting for me to have a deadline on a weekly basis and to really focus on local politics. I would take my sketchbook to the city council meetings and draw the city councilors and the various public officials, and they were terrified of me. And the idea of a 16, 17-year-old kid having that power to intimidate these adults in the room was really exciting for me. And I sort of just fell in love with the idea of being a political cartoonist, using sort of the opportunity to use both sides of my brain, I like to say, where I can be artistic and, you know, be creative, but also really analytical about the current events and the issues of the day. And so that's sort of my journey to becoming a political cartoonist.

I started in high school, and I was passionate about it for forever, kept at it through college. After college, I had the opportunity to come to Wisconsin, to Madison, and draw cartoons for the Wisconsin State Journal as an intern right after college. And I sort of have stuck around ever since. I went to grad school in Madison. In 2013,, I was finally added to the staff of the Wisconsin State Journal and became a full-time cartoonist.

My college professor, a man named Martin Garhart, who was actually the same art instructor who instructed Bill Watterson, who drew Calvin and Hobbes, and also a pretty famous cartoonist named Jim Borgman, who was a political cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize in the 1990s. You've probably seen his work on the comic strip Zits, but he had the same art professor, Martin Garhart. And he was a firm believer that drawing was a learned skill, and you could teach a novice the tools to become a competent draftsman. You know, it used to be that drawing was an important skill if you were going to be a scientist or a historian, or you would have to know how to draw to be able to convey ideas that were important. And so it's sort of something that we assume now that only people that are naturally amazingly gifted at.

art can draw, but anyone can.

It's a little bit more complex, I'm guessing, to draw cartoons of people whose visage, whose look, is not widely known. Yeah, I mean, you know, the easy out on.

When Scott Walker was the governor of Wisconsin several years ago now, he became sort of a high profile governor, national figure. But the character that I created of him didn't really look like him anymore by the time I was done. But it was. it sort of had a feeling of him and it was a different character than who the man was. And that character, I love.

drawing Scott Walker, that character that I created of him, sort of spoke to me and would give me his own ideas. It was really interesting to create my own.

I drew his ears so low on his head. But I got his bald spot right. And he explained to me that the bald spot that he had on his head was not male pattern baldness. He had hit his head in the cabinet. At one point, his wife had said, you should go, have that looked at, you should have a doctor come check it out.

And he refused to listen to his wife. And, you know, when he finally went to the doctor a year later, the doctor said, No, the hair is never going to grow back on that spot of your head. Now, do I believe that he didn't have male pattern baldness? Not at all. Not at all.

But I thought it was a fun story. And it was. it was interesting when our reporter was in the room at the time and wrote up that that exchange the two of us had and became sort of a national story of Scott Walker was the governor that blamed his bald spot on a cabinet. And when he dropped out of the race, the New York Times described him as the governor who blamed his bald spot on the cabinet.

But yes, I draw a lot of cartoons about Donald Trump.

Because Evers is the most boring governor that there could possibly be. He's a decent, honest broker who has good ideas for how to fix Wisconsin, but he's just not engaging or, you know, captivating. Drawing him has been really a joy recently.

And so people had never seen a political cartoon before until they saw one of my cartoons criticizing Trump, and they thought it was completely outlandish that someone would draw a cartoon making fun of this great man who's running for president in their perspective and opinion. Without understanding, there's this history going back to Thomas Jefferson of people making fun of politicians in cartoons. And so I think that's a good thing that Trump has done, bringing these new people into politics, engaging them. But a lot of those people are very critical of my work because they don't agree with me on a lot of those issues. Now, when it comes to drawing cartoons about Madison, Wisconsin, I'm generally to the—while I'm left of people in the Trump world, I'm to the right of a lot of people in Madison, Wisconsin.

And when I draw a cartoon criticizing a council decision or the mayor, or I did some cartoons critical of the Defund the Police movement during the George Floyd protests, boy, did I get a lot of flack from lefties on those issues. So I like to consider myself a fierce political moderate. The right has gone way to the extreme, in my opinion, and so I'm probably a little bit pushed towards the left nowadays just because of how extreme the right has gotten. I'd love to be a old-school Rockefeller Republican, but that position doesn't exist anymore. Have you had death threats?

No. I have avoided the death threat,

serious death threats. I've had people explain to me that they own firearms. I've done some cartoons critical of the Second Amendment and firearms in America, and I've had people sort of casually explain that they do have firearms when they criticize me, and I don't consider that a serious death threat. Other cartoonists have gotten much.

In the next segment, and starting with Thomas Jefferson, you're listening to a special edition of Listening to America.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm talking to Phil Hens, a political cartoonist in Madison, Wisconsin. You know, you're really caught between a rock and a hard place if the people dislike you because you're occasionally critical of them and Donald Trump. Madison is one of the most liberal places in the world, certainly one of the most liberal places in the United States, dominated by the left, not the right, and you get some complaints from that crowd if you touch on any of the third rails that they feel strongly about. That's a sign that you're.

I think we have districts that voted 90% for Biden in the 2020 election, so yeah, it's real lefty here. Well, but there's Boulder, Colorado. I mean,

So, he was a young man about the age of Meriwether Lewis. Jefferson was 30 years older than he was, and he drew two really remarkable, unfair, of course, cartoons about Thomas Jefferson. The first of them shows Jefferson as a prairie dog vomiting up money to attempt to buy the Floridas. So, not only our state of Florida, but the Gulf Coast, all the way to Texas, they were known as the Floridas. And in 1844, Jefferson was wanting still to buy them.

They were more strategically important to him than the Louisiana Purchase. And the cartoonist James Aikens shows Jefferson as a prairie dog, puking money at the feet of these others, these people who might sell, including Napoleon Bonaparte. What's interesting about that to me, Phil, is that the prairie dog is very topical, because that prairie dog wouldn't have been known by James Aikens if Lewis and Clark hadn't sent a live prairie dog back from the West to Thomas Jefferson. So, Lewis and Clark captured a live prairie dog in what's now South Dakota. They built a cage for it.

They brought it all the way down, sent it, rather, all the way down the Mississippi and Missouri River systems, to New Orleans. It went around Florida and up to the Chesapeake, to Baltimore, and by wagon over to Thomas Jefferson's White House. And so, Aikens is making fun of the president for his interest in such things. At the same time, he's showing that Jefferson is being stung, I believe, by Napoleon. If you look at the upper left corner of the cartoon, a little hornet with a Napoleonic hat is stinging the prairie dog in the buttocks, causing it to vomit forth this money for the purchase of the Floridas.

I think you would say that's a pretty complex cartoon, that there are too many things going on for it to be simple enough for a 20th or 21st century audience.

that provides an easy identification, or they make fun of some characteristic Nixon's five o'clock shadow and his hook nose, or Henry Kissinger's sort of lugubrious, sagging face. So in this case, Aiken is making fun of Jefferson, not only for his foreign policy, which is the point of the cartoon, but he's getting in a little jab about Jefferson's scientific curiosity, his fascination with such a creature as the prairie dog. But I think it's a good cartoon. In some of these early cartoons of this era, there are captions, you know, like the bubble, the thought bubble or the speaking bubble, and sometimes they're whole paragraphs long, and when you look at them in books or online, you almost have to have a magnifying glass to read the text. That's an early phase of the cartoon before people figured out that they need to be simple, the text needs to be readable, you can't put too much in them, that they have to speak almost immediately to the audience, right?

Yeah, and that's a product of our modern,

You wouldn't just throw it aside. This was a unique piece of art. And so I think that's why it can be so much more complex.

Everybody knew that there was an allegation of a sexual liaison with an enslaved woman, sometimes known as Dusky Sally. There were satiric poems and squibs written about it. And so they used...

And so in Jefferson's time, when people saw him as the cock strutting with an obvious face, and then looked at the other figure, they would almost automatically think, well, that's a black hen. That's, oh, that's probably this famous, that's the rumor of Jefferson and the slave woman. And so a very effective anti-Jefferson cartoon.

That's absurd to say. But, you know, when they first got together, let's put it that way, he was in his 40s and she was 14 or 15 years old. So she was just barely more than a girl. Brought his younger daughter, Mariah, to France. Sally Hemings was the chaperone, and she was about 14 years old.

Automatically produces some.

And what was it? It was Roy Moore,

He claimed that this was all fake news, of course. But so you're a long way from the Deep South. You're aware of this story. If you can remember it, try to walk us through how you come up with the idea. Okay, there's this, the young women, there's the mall, there's this older guy, the Ten Commandments.

How does your brain work to gel into a recognizable political cartoon? I think that one probably just, you know, a lot.

All right, so let me just throw.

You know, one of the things that's hard about Trump is that the joy of being a cartoonist, the real joy, is taking somebody who's decent and respectable and serious and making them ridiculous, you know, or somebody like Joe Biden and making him, you know, ridiculous. But Trump's already ridiculous. He's already a caricature of what you think he would be. And he says things that I couldn't come up with. And he's serious about them.

So it's a challenge to try and figure out how to how to lampoon somebody who's.

Jefferson was six foot two and a.

So the point of this is that Jefferson was trying to steer a neutral course between the Napoleonic Wars, between Britain and France. And we had an embargo that failed. And Jefferson was doing everything in his power to make sure the United States wasn't drawn into this world war, partly because Jefferson was a pacifist, but also because he realized that this was not our fight. And so you have George III with his hand in Jefferson's pocket, trying to get money to, you know, a bribe of some sort to avoid drawing the United States into the war. And you have little tiny Napoleon on the right with his pulling actual coins out of Jefferson's pocket.

So it's automatically understandable. I mean, nobody would not see that this is Napoleon. And George III, maybe not so much, but clearly an Englishman. And that's certainly the tall, thin Jefferson in the middle. So the cartoon is sort of self-explanatory in a way.

And yet the cartoonist, Peter Pencil, I'm guessing that wasn't his birth name, has these long thought bubbles, huge, and the writing is so tiny that I can't read it. So obviously that's a style we don't use anymore, isn't it? That's correct. Yeah, we would try and.

How do you know that? I can just tell, by the way it's drawn, that the way that Jefferson is drawn is very realistic, like it was taken from an official portrait or something like that. And it just feels like the.

And there were some cartoons, but the newspapers were mostly local in nature. And so it would be almost impossible for someone living in Georgia or Vermont to say what they thought Thomas Jefferson looked like. But cartoons like this got us as close to sort of an identifiable image as we could get in that era to someone like Jefferson. And Napoleon wins because of his size and because of the incredibly overdrawn military bicorn hat that he's wearing. So this has all the elements of the cartoons that we know and love.

It's just text heavy.

Yes. Yeah. And it's interesting.

And it was completely by accident that I did it. My editor noticed it. And then, after the fact, somebody pointed out to me, like, oh, my God, I can't believe I did that in a cartoon.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm talking with Phil Hans, a political cartoonist with several books, by the way. And you can find his work at Wisconsin State Journal. He's also syndicated. So you may have seen his work without knowing who he is.

Cartoonists are often sort of anonymous figures. They occasionally rise above the radar to become well known. But for the most part, when you see a cartoon in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, you you take in what it offers and don't think too much about the author. I know that doesn't hurt your feelings, because it's just the.

And so and yet the visual is always so potent. But after this, the technology has been evolving until today. Of course, we've evolved right out of paper printing. But you have probably thoughts about the history of cartooning or favorite cartoonists that you.

He's so famous, he was actually depicted in the in the movie Gangs of New York in one scene, you know, so he was. he was a man about town and everyone knew who he was. He developed. I believe it was the. the elephant is the symbol for the Republican Party and and helped popularize the.

the donkey is the symbol of Democratic Party. I think somebody else had done that first, but he really drove it home. He created the first images of Santa Claus. So when I think a lot of today's modern cartoonists, we sort of look back to him as sort of the first great American cartoonist. I'm a big fan of Herblock, who, who did amazing work.

And in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and even the 2000s, a little bit. He was the legend at the Washington Post and created the created the concept of McCarthyism, created the word McCarthyism, the whole concept of of red redscaping people or smearing them. We always draw these buckets of smear that would label McCarthyism. One of my favorite political cartoonists that people don't know about is Dr. Seuss.

He did a lot of political cartoons. He was very anti-Hitler before the rest of the world was anti-Hitler. He did all of these amazing cartoons in the 30s, with Americans being naive to the danger of the rise of fascism. And that's, I think there's a great book called Dr. Seuss goes to war.

It's this fascinating editorial cartoons. Herblock is famous for his caricatures.

And I just, something about, I love that. I love his sick view of the world.

My friend, Rick Marshall produced a book called Bully, I believe, that has a set of Roosevelt cartoons. No one book could contain them all. You've met him, right? At the cartoon conference. I believe I did.

Yes. Yeah. You all gather from time to time,

I'm sure it can, with the, you know, the one newspaper after the next blinking out. How is that working, the transition from print to digital? Do digital cartoons have the?

That doesn't make me a bigger deal, but I think our work is more ubiquitous. It's everywhere out there. It's shared on social media. It's shared on Twitter. I had a Canadian politician repost one of my cartoons and alter it to fit Canadian politics recently.

Didn't he actually hop in one of the?

and then he went down into one of the famous cuts in the mountains and he was in a Cyrus steam shovel and he was allowed to operate the steam shovel for a few minutes before he could do any real damage. But there's a famous photograph of Roosevelt in a white suit digging the Panama Canal. What a different era. But of course, the most famous of all the cartoons of Roosevelt was by Clifford Berryman. It had an impact way beyond the cartoonist's idea, beyond his hopes.

Roosevelt went to Mississippi in 1902 to hunt bear. He couldn't get a bear and one of his handlers found an old she-bear sleeping and clubbed it and tied it to a tree. And then, when Roosevelt came up, they said, now you may kill your bear. And of course, he scoffed and said he wouldn't do that. That's not sport.

That's not the Roosevelt way. And so Clifford Berryman, who was a prominent Washington Post cartoonist, drew this cartoon of Roosevelt looking indignant and turning away, leaning on his rifle. And the bear is not an old she-bear now. It's a tiny little cub bear. And the title of the cartoon is Drawing the Line in Mississippi, in part because Roosevelt was there as the president of the United States to help adjudicate a border issue between Mississippi and another state.

And so a lot got packed in there. But the public loved this. They loved this depiction of this cub bear. And so that's one of the sources of the teddy bear. And Berryman, for the rest of his long and extraordinary career, whenever he was depicting Roosevelt, he put that same bear somewhere in the frame as a sort of a T.R.

signature. It is a cute bear. So we're recording this a week after the State of the Union message in 2024, where President Biden, who's over 80 years old, was very spirited and talked back to hecklers and seemed to really relax into one of the best public presentations he's had during the course of his presidency. So how did you decide to ennoble that in the cartoon?

Just to share that, like, I think right now the Union is strong, and a Trump presidency.

I would say it's not even the perpetually offended. I think people nowadays, unfortunately, especially young people of a certain ilk, look at, seek out being offended. Seek out ways to be offended by issues, to show how virtuous they are. Plenty of people tell me that I'm doing good work, that it's, I get ballots from both sides. So you have a cartoon, let's say, showing that.

I get angry messages on Facebook. I even still get angry handwritten letters from people. So there's all sorts of ways that people can express their disdain for me. Usually, older people will give me a phone call or a letter. Younger folks will attack me on Twitter.

But yeah, and I wouldn't say, I think the angry phone calls are my favorite just because get to interact with people. I had a guy recently call me and tell me what an idiot I was. He left me three voicemails over the New Year's holiday and told me what an idiot I was. And I finally decided to call him back and say, Sir, was there a specific complaint you had or were you just venting? And he said, I'm sorry, I was drunk when I called you.

I apologize. Very Wisconsin-y.

And the thing about that, Phil, is that I almost invariably get a letter of apology after that, saying, not so much I was drunk, but I was angry. I shouldn't have done that. Thank you for taking me seriously. Most of that is a shot across the bow, right? They want to be heard.

They want you to acknowledge their point.

when people say I'm an idiot. Do you think they feel the irony of that? I think they do. Once they realize that the person they're criticizing is actually a person that has a whole perspective on the world, they're much less angry about the issue. I found that maybe that's just because people are nice in Wisconsin, which I think is actually a true fact.

But once I have a conversation with anybody, no matter how much we disagree, we usually come to a civil ending to the conversation. So, in the few minutes that we have,

Or is that where we're headed?

You know, I'm probably doing this because I sort of had a goal and a vision to be an old school cartoonist and I was able to do it. I'm really fortunate to do it, but I can't see my job existing for the next person behind me at the Wisconsin State Journal. Um, and I think the young talent, the people have seen that as well. Um, but I don't think cartooning is going away. I think it's just going to change and we're going to, I mean, you know, the internet's full of editorial cartoons called memes, making fun of people left and right, you know?

Now, are they as good as what I can do? Absolutely not, but people will always have a passion for satirical commentary. that's image driven.

And so there is still a great love of the visualization of ideas. I think you're absolutely right. So, Phil, your cartoons have not been gathered into a book. Is there an archive? Can people go to a website to see them?

Yeah. I mean,

com. Most of my recent work is there. My, my Facebook page has a whole collection of my work going back for forever. It's Phil Hayen's editorial cartoons. It's my, it's my Facebook page.

And I should, I need to get together and, and put together a book of my work. I've been working at the State Journal now for over 10 years, and 10 years sounds like a good time to, to collect things and sort of remember how smart and brilliant I used to be and how much I've fallen off since then. So I hope you will.

Do you have a cartoon or a short?

And they would say he was playing checkers and Putin was playing chess. And so the cartoon is titled playing the foreign policy game and you see Obama and he puts his checkered piece down and he says, King me. Putin says, checkmate. And Donald Trump jumps in with his hands and he says, scissors, because he's playing rock, paper, scissors. So I'd like that cartoon, cause it's sort of encapsulated everything.

But my favorite cartoon, which is very specific to Wisconsin, um, you might, might've heard about this, but the Milwaukee Brewers have a sausage race at the seventh inning of each game, where a group of people dressed as sausages run around the stadium. Whoever wins, wins a prize or whatever. Um, but it's pretty famous in Wisconsin. The racing sausages are our household name here. Um, and back about 10 years ago, Arizona had an immigration law where they were going to start, uh, pulling people over because they could pull people over for any reason and ask them for their immigration papers.

And a person in Wisconsin said we should have a law like that in Wisconsin. And so I envisioned what an Arizona style immigration law would look like in Wisconsin. And I had a cop pulling over the chorizo sausage, asking him for.

We'll see you next week for another important edition of Listening to America.