The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1934-08-16
" Workers Everywhere
Know and Love Him
as a Fighter


/ Robert Minor on his f1ftieth
birthday, near the painters colony
at Woodstock. Here you will find
the last votaries Of that mythical
pure" art which is imagined to be
above the struggle Of classes. Yet
among these talented, isolated, even
conservative artists one hears Rob-
ert Minors name mentioned with
profound respect. There is general
regret that this man Of enormous
plastic gifts has abandoned his
crayon. There is the vivid memory
Of his work in the cartoon, those
vast massive black and white fig
ures full OF muscle, action and an
internal spiritual power, which i'm
pressed itself indelibly on all who
saw it.
Artists ignorant of Minor the
revolutionary leader, recall with
pleasure and admiration his origi-
nal contributions to q field Of art
which Is eminent in America
and in which America leads the
world. Here, too, Minor was a revo-
lutionist. The newspaper, in this
land of super technology, is genu-
inc mass literature; and the car
toon, capable of being reproduced in
millions of copies, is mass art. In
the hands Of a capitalist class in
tent upon maintaining its tyranny
through fraud as well as force, the
cartoon is corrupt; it Is either out
and out political falsehood or, as in
the case of the comic strips, infan-
tile evasion.
Into this field, exercising so pow
erful an influence over the masses
that publishers spend millions on it
and politicians have sought by law
to suppress critical cartooniSts,
Minor brought a number Of limo
vations. The technical methods of
drawing cartoons in line and repro
ducing them as drawn-a method
used today by the entire American
press-is his contribution. He also
introduced a style so vivid, so
mighty in it's simple masses that it
already has developed school.
When one sees the work of such
bourgeois cartoonists as Fitzpatrick
of the st. Louis POST Dispatch, or
Rollin Kirby of the Scripps- Howard
Syndicate, or the gifted work Of
revolutionary cartoonists like Fred
Ellis and Jacob Burck, one sees
definitely and permanently the styl-
iStic influence of the artist Of genius
which Robert Minor is.
DUT Minors significance as an
~ artist lay not alone in his tech
rical gifts; it lay rather in the use
to which he put those gifts. A giant
in the world of graphic art, sue
cess by all the bourgeois standards
in the capitalist newspapers, he re-
nounced all this, the money and the
glory which the bourgeois world Of
fered him, and placed his gifts at
the service of the revolutionary
working class. Nor was this in any
sense sacrifice" Minors gifts as
an artist were an integral part of a
complete revolutionary personality;
they were part of his equipment,
not his whole being. Art was for
him only one of the instruments
which he employed for the cause
nearest his heart, the cause OF the
revolutionary proletariat.
When necessary he could, even in
the days when he was primarily the
artist, lay aside the crayon and take
up the pen or ascend the rostrum.
Drawing, writing, public speaking,
organizing, these were all means to
an end. an end which Minor first
saw, as was natural perhaps for an
artist before 1917, through the
blurred prism of anarchism; but
which he saw clearly after the Oc-
tober Revolution through the arch
way of Bolshevism.
At no time, after he reached in
tellectual maturity, did he sink into
the morass of pure" art. You will
find him as early as 1902 a member
Of the United Brotherhood Of Car
penters and Joiners Of America; as
early as 1907 member of the So
cialist Party. The diverse elements
Of his being, his versatile gifts we're
unified by the proletarian revolu-
ton. For this reason there was
something in his cartoons which his
initators in the bourgeois press
could not take over, which only the
young revolutionary cartoonists
could grasp and assimilate: their
revolutionary content. Minor not
only had the genius for speaking