On Burne Hogarth Vs. Joseph McCarthy

When the New York Times wrote their obituary on the passing of School of Visual Arts co-founder Silas Rhodes, I expressed wonderment at a story that had Rhodes and his SVA partner the cartoonist Burne Hogarth appearing before Joseph McCarthy. The dates didn't quite match up to what I remembered being McCarthy's heyday, I'd never heard the anecdote from the tens of thousands of interview words from Hogarth I've read, and the phrasing seemed specific but kind of loosely anecdotal.

So I asked around. The Times writer declined to e-mail me back, Hogarth interviewer Gary Groth said he vaguely remembered something like such an appearance and that it was not out of the question, and Ammar Abboud reminded that Burne Hogarth was known to be a member of the Communist Party before World War II. Bart Beaty, however, tracked down what had to have been the Times writer's source: an article in the Times from 1956. Bart:

I was in the library today doing some fact-checking for another project and so wandered down to the microfilm room and grabbed the New York Times from 1956.

Here is the deal on Rhodes and Hogarth as communists, taken from the Silas Rhodes obit.

A Jan 19 1956 story entitled "3 School Owners Deny They're Red" reported on hearings in Washington. The "balky" (great term!) witnesses were Michael Freedland, who ran the Radio and Television Technical School in Allentown PA, and Rhodes and Hogarth, who ran the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York.

According to Paul Tierney, attorney for the Senate subcommittee, the CIS had received $1,176,712 from the government because they had 278 former GI's enrolled, about 46% of their total enrolment.

Joseph McCarthy was a member of the subcommittee, which was chaired by John McLellan (Democrat, Arkansas). The NYT quotes the exchange that is cited in the recent Times obit of Rhodes, with McCarthy insisting that their decision to plead the fifth was proof that they were communists, and Rhodes firing back about his war record.

The article notes that both Rhodes and Hogarth insisted that they had not been party members since opening their school on August 20, 1947, but would not testify about their membership prior to that date.

So there you go, the bit from the obit is basically recounted straight from the original reporting from 51 years ago.

As to why Hogarth never talked about it, that one is a mystery to me too.

Anyway, that's an interesting footnote to comics history. I don't know if it's yet another footnote or a pertinent follow-up that the school changed its name to its present-day iteration later that same year.
 
posted 3:06 am PST | Permalink
 

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