The Ruling Clawss, by A. Redfield, was originally published by the Daily Worker (US) in 1935. It is now republished as The Ruling Clawss: The Socialist Cartoons of Syd Hoff. Hoff was unknown to me. But after a career as a cartoonist for the New Yorker and Hearst publications from the 1930s he found fame in the USA as a children’s author and illustrator, with Danny and the Dinosaur (1958) selling more than ten million copies.
The cartoons in The Ruling Clawss are from 1933-35. They appeared in the Daily Worker as a single panel strip poking fun at the wealthy and ruling class during the depression and New Deal.
By then Communist Party USA was coming out of its ultra-left “Third Period” into the era of the “Popular Front” (ally with “progressive” capitalists against fascism). The cartoons work through broad brush strokes against the selfishness and greed of the US ruling class, still doing well in the Depression era .
They are not the same sort of thing as the later, more biting and politically intricate cartoons of Trotskyist cartoonists like Carlo and Laura, who would come to address a left in disarray over supporting or not the Russian Stalinist state. Those are available in the book from Workers’ Liberty In an era of war and revolutions. Hoff’s cartoons were firmly in a populist mould, satirising greedy individual capitalists rather than the whole system.
At the same time as Hoff was writing as A. Redfield in the Daily Worker, he had a regular strip published in the New Yorker, satirical but not biting against the follies of the rich and a commentary on tenement life for much of New York city’s workers.
Hoff was born in 1912, into a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, New York. By 1930 Hoff had his first drawing in the New Yorker. In 1931 he was politically activated by the Scottsboro Boys trial: nine black men accused, falsely, of raping two white women in Alabama. He joined the John Reed Club (a CP front group) and started to produce work as A. Redfield for the Daily Worker and the CP-linked magazine New Masses. After attending Camp Unity, an event affiliated to the CPUSA, he joined in 1935. The same year, this compilation of his cartoons was published by the CP. He was now a part of the Daily Worker staff and art director of New Pioneer, a youth magazine backed by the CP.
By 1939 Hoff was trying his hand at gag-writing, and at getting more books published. He had remained active in the Cartoonist Guild, supporting their campaigns for better pay, and a member of the CP. Hoff had gone on to create (in 1939) his most successful syndicated cartoon, Tuffy, about a little girl doing humorous things, which the press magnate William Hearst would declare to be vital for national morale during World War Two.
TheDaily Worker published his first children’s book, Mr His, A Children’s Story for Anybody, in 1939, with the byline A. Redfield. But by 1940 his output as A. Redfield was lessening (whether because he became disillusioned about the 1939-41 Stalin-Hitler pact, we can’t tell: more below). His next children’s book, Muscles and Brains (1940), was through an ordinary commercial publisher. His cartoon output during the war included a lot of patriotic propaganda.
In 1951, however, he appeared at a march to ban the atom bomb and was photographed next to arch-Stalinist Corliss Lamont. He was questioned by the FBI and gave a voluntary statement about his work as A. Redfield. In the McCarthy era of persecution of the left, then opening, in contrast to the current US far-right agitation to purge libraries and schools, children’s writers were largely left alone. Children’s books were seen as unserious and unimportant for blacklisting. But Syd Hoff seems to have dropped all political activity or affiliation after that. In an autobiography available on a commemorative website, and written in 1987, he made no mention of his A. Redfield work or support for the CP. Hoff died in 2004. In a 2000 letter to the academic Philip Nel, who has written an introduction to the 2023 book, Hoff was still at pains to ask that his CP past not be made public, believing it would harm him as a children’s author. Given the populist character of the cartoons, in tune with the CP’s Popular Front era, it is hard to discern exactly what Hoff was quite so concerned about.
We can only guess at Hoff’s view of Stalinist repression in the USSR, and the total destruction of the workers’ democracy of 1917, by the time he had got involved. We are left with one tidbit on Philip Nel’s website which tells us of a Hoff cartoon from 1939, “The locomotive of history”, showing a train leaving behind all those now-ex members of the CP who did not support the Hitler-Stalin pact. Like many other people who decided to hide their views during the repressive McCarthy era, Hoff ended up using his great talents to paint up, if only implicitly, a state that was worse-than-McCarthyite but with a red gloss.