One Hundred Cartoons

These are the cartoons Americans saw with their morning coffee, ink still wet from the press. Oscar Edward Cesare drew what he witnessed during the First World War: Kaiser Wilhelm as a Prussian ogre, doughboys in the trenches, home-front housewives turning away German spies with brooms, and the absurd theater of nations locked in mutual destruction. Originally published in the New York Evening Mail and other major periodicals, these hundred drawings capture a moment when cartoonists were the opinion-makers, the meme-makers of their day. The humor is period-specific. Some gags depend on now-forgotten jokes, references to politicians whose names faded into history. But the bones of the satire remain recognizable: the absurdity of nations marching toward slaughter, the vanity of generals, the endurance of ordinary people. Cesare has a sharp pen and, surprisingly, a tender heart. He mocks the fools while honoring the fallen. For anyone curious about how Americans once made sense of global catastrophe through humor, these cartoons preserve a world of fears, absurdities, and fragile hopes in black ink.