John Henry
Bob Newton possesses what is believed to be the largest collection of original political cartoons, 13 of which received the Pulitzer Prize.
Bob Newton sits in the office in his home near Granbury. Relics of another time and place hang from the room’s walls in every direction.
They are newspaper cartoons, a collection his mother started more than 70 years ago. At the time of her passing, they were passed to the son, who has been a loyal guardian and committed custodian of the collection that grew to more than 400 original cartoons, most of them signed by the artists.
His is believed to be the largest collection of original political cartoon art in the country, including work from 13 Pulitzer Prize winners. All of them are powerful displays of clever — and very talented — artists’ visual satire and, in some cases, subversive commentary.
Free speech is a glorious thing. Thank you, Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment thinkers who influenced them.
Most importantly to Newton are what they represent, particularly during presidential elections every four years. For most of these, one could simply sub out the actors of the day and print today. The issues are exactly the same generations later.
It’s simply the best evidence that history informs not only about the past, but the present and future, too.
“We have the last of the Mohicans, a dying art,” Newton says. “Everything you see here is an original. There’s not one thing here that was a copy of or duplicate.”
Helen Newton became politically active with the Eisenhower 1952 presidential campaign, Bob Newton tells me. The family lived in Oakhurst. Newton recalls Helen eventually becoming the chairwoman for the East Side for Eisenhower, or, more likely, deploying some liberty here, “East Siders for Ike.”
“She was my hero,” Newton says. “She was a crusader.”
She became a prolific letter and opinion writer. Her political activism led to friendships and acquaintances with some of the players. Among them was U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, the anti-communist East Texas congressman whose story would eventually be told by Hollywood.
“Thank you for your letter to the Lufkin News opposing the Ku Klux Klan,” Wilson wrote to Helen in August 1984. “I have never thought that freedom of speech was intended to protect those who incite racism and violence against anyone, much less a significant portion of our local population.”
The cartoon collection began around 1953. Helen was seated next to Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Tom Little at a banquet in Nashville. They struck up a conversation, and he eventually asked her to come by to see him at his office at The Tennessean the next day. While there, he gave her an original cartoon, a sketch of President Eisenhower looking for a needle in a haystack.
An obsession was born.
John Henry
She began writing to cartoonists, who would send her their original work.
“Some of these cartoonists became her good friends,” says Newton, who calls his mother “the original networker.”
Subject matter of the collection includes a number of pieces related to NASA. Helen worked as an administrative assistant during NASA’s earliest days in Houston.
“She got to know all of the original astronauts,” Newton says. “Most of these are signed by them.”
Newton says she got to know the cartoonists so well that she was able to, say, barter with them. ‘If you draw something about Apollo 12, send one that will be printed, and I’ll have the astronauts sign the original.’”
Newton on occasion will travel to various spots with 80 or 100 of the cartoons on display. We met him at the Fort Worth Club, where the curious wandered through the maze of art history.
Perhaps the most powerful, at least to me, was Newton Pratt’s 1939 illustration depicting a boot labeled “Nazi Aggression” stomping out the word “Appeasement.”
“There is no ‘peace’ in appeasement.”
It’s a message that was relevant then, at the beginning of Western civilization, and to the current day. Newton, 83, has begun thinking what to do with his treasure of history whose lessons, like Pratt’s cartoon, will be relevant 50 and 100 years from now.
When Helen began her collection 70 years ago, Newton says there were upwards of 275 newspaper cartoonists. There are still some good ones out there, but their number has dwindled as the influence of newspapers and the fractured news platform has waned. And many of those create using some sort of software, not simply the hands God gave them or the rudimentary tools of the time.
TCU and Baylor, Newton says, have expressed interest in being the collection’s repository.
The winner of the collection, whether that be the universities or another institution, will be the one who makes the secret, solemn vow.
“First and foremost, I want them to be displayed,” Newton says. “It is to not have them put in the school vault. There’s enough here to actually, I think, have a dedicated museum.”
History, not to mention the greatness of humor and satire, in some cases, deserves nothing less.
