The Great Easter 1913 national calamity inspired artists to depict fundamental truths in editorial cartoons more powerful and pithy than words or photographs
A picture is
worth 1,000 words, estimates the cliché—and sometimes that is actually true. Immediately
after the dozen or more violent Easter Sunday 1913 tornadoes ripped through the
cities of Omaha, Council Bluffs, Terre Haute and
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| "A Helping Hand," published in the March 31, 1913 issue of the Rochester Evening Times in upstate New York, expressed both sympathy and the means for others in the nation to aid the Easter 1913 flood victims |
elsewhere in Nebraska, Iowa,
Missouri, Indiana, and other states, followed by the Noachian flooding across a
dozen other states, editorial cartoons about the natural disaster peppered
newspapers nationwide for weeks—often on the center front page directly under
the banner headline.
These
editorial cartoons often expressed some overarching fundamental truth that
escaped the daily reporting (which was focused on the details of individual news
stories breaking that day) or even photographs (which captured one specific
tragic moment)—sometimes without using a single word. Here are 20 from
11 different newspapers.
One of the
first cartoons to be published—not 24 hours after the devastating Omaha tornado—was
“Our heartfelt sympathy, neighbor,” on the front page of the Monday, March 24
issue of the St. Joseph News-Press the
very next day,
depicting a man (not labeled, but doubtless representing St.
Joseph, Missouri) comforting a weeping woman labeled Omaha. That sympathy was
more like shaken empathy: about 8:30 PM Easter night, a bit over two hours
after the Omaha tornado, another violent F4
twister 200 yards wide cut a swath of destruction 45 miles long through
rural Missouri and Iowa, killing 2 and injuring 8, passing just north of St.
Joseph. In other words, St. Joseph itself had just dodged a bullet.
One of the
most famous cartoons to emerge was published on the front page of the Omaha Daily Bee the following day,
Tuesday, March 25. Called simply
“The Tornado,” it depicted the death-dealing Omaha
tornado as a human skull. This image was widely reprinted at the time and also
during the 2013 centennial, notably for the Nebraska PBS documentary Devil Clouds.
A feeling of
helplessness in the face of overwhelming forces was expressed differently in
various cartoons. “A Disaster,” published on page 5 of the
Wednesday,
March 26 issue of the Chicago Tribune, conveys
as sense of heaven-delivered arbitrariness with a finger pointing toward Earth
as if to say ‘your turn’.
That same
day, another image “Trapped,” depicts a vicious animal trap set in the midst of
an unidentified city (presumably Omaha, although the image
could also refer to
Council Bluffs and Terre Haute as well), published on the page 6 of the March
26 issue of Missouri’s Kansas City
Journal.
The next
day, a giant genie-like figure labeled “The Elements” was outright
laughing at
man’s helplessness in the Chicago Tribune
cartoon “How Great is Man” on page 7 of the March 27 issue.
By then, the
floodwaters were reaching peak record-setting heights in Ohio and Indiana, and
buildings were burning in Dayton, Rochester, and other cities. So artists were incorporating
those catastrophes as well. Continuing the theme of the supreme indifference of
the gods is “When Man Learns
Humility!”on the front page of the Omaha Daily Bee of Saturday, March 29,
depicting a beautiful but callous goddess upending a giant urn of water
flooding away houses and tiny people.
The Grim
Reaper made his appearance in many cartoons, such as in “The
Conqueror” on the
front page of the March 27 issue of the St.
Joseph Gazette, where he looms over flooded homes.
And unmistakable
are his skeletal hand and scythe in “Wind, flood, and fire”
published on page 6
of the March 28 issue of Missouri’s Kansas
City Journal.
He is
also hinted at in the two cloaked figures labeled “Famine” and “The
Looter” in
the chilling cartoon “On the Heels of Disaster” published in the March 28 issue
of the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times.
Utter
bewilderment and appeal of the victims is wordlessly expressed in the
bereft
husband and wife of “The Deluge,” published on the front page of the March 27
Cleveland Plain Dealer.
That same
wordless despair was depicted in the implied widowhood of the lone female
figure standing amidst wreckage with her small daughter and infant in the cartoon
“Home” on the front page of the March 26 issue of the Omaha Daily Bee…
...as well as in
the stooped shoulders of the elderly farmer surveying wreckage in “Have to
Start All Over Again,” published in the March 30 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
But late
that first week, the character of the cartoons begins to change. In one of my
all-time favorite cartoons, “Coming!” undeservedly buried on page 14 of the
March 27 issue of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, Uncle Sam is diving
straight into the floodwaters to rescue
drowning Dayton—powerfully expressing response to President Woodrow Wilson’s
appeal to the nation for aid and also his dispatching of the Secretary of War
along with Army, Navy, and Red Cross personnel.
That same
day in the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times,
a similar theme was expressed in “A Prompt Response,” depicting Uncle Sam standing
up and
strongly rowing a boat named “The Nation” laden with supplies toward a
grief-stricken and stranded woman and her daughter.
Around this
same time, the editorial cartoons also began to express encouragement to buck up,
not admit defeat, and start reconstruction to return bigger and better—and for
those less afflicted to contribute to the aid of those
suffering devastation. For
example, in “Looking Ahead,” published on the front page of the October 28
issue of the Omaha Daily Bee, two
figures stand amid wreckage: a female figure labeled “Purpose” shaking hands
with a determined carpenter, his toolbox labeled “Omaha.”
In “One
Touch of Nature,” published on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Saturday, March 29, a
prosperous business man is tossing a bulging money bag into a chest labeled
Ohio Flood Fund alongside a
careworn woman giving two coins—clearly an
allusion to the Biblical (New Testament) parable of the widow’s mite. And the
chest, I wager, is a visual reference to Cleveland’s innovation in federated
giving, the Community Chest, founded just the month before and undergoing its
first major test in the monumental 1913 flood, Ohio’s worst-ever weather
disaster.
The next
month, some of the editorial cartoons take on an air of defiance. Notable is “The
Spirit of the Hour” published on the front page of the Dayton
Daily News on April
10, where an outsized muscular workman (dressed like a nineteenth-century
pioneer) labeled “Dayton” is declaring “I’ll lick you yet!” to a wreckage-covered
Neptune-like spirit labeled “The River” which is shrinking back apprehensively.
The next
day, April 11, the Dayton Daily News published
“The Reminiscence Club” on its first page, depicting another pioneer-dressed
figure labeled “Dayton” rushing away, stating, “Sorry to leave you, gentlemen,
but I must be
getting back to work,” leaving behind three figures sitting on
fresh lumber, two of whom are labeled “Noah” and “Johnstown,” (this last
clearly a reference to the Johnstown Flood of 1889—see “An Unnecessary Tragedy”).
The cartoons
didn’t stop in mid-April, nor are these the only ones, by any means—I have many
more and am on the lookout for others, as there were likely hundreds drawn and
published. A fitting conclusion to this sequence is
the cartoon “The Spirit of
the Pioneer” published on the first anniversary of the Easter tornadoes on March
22, 1914 in the Omaha World-Herald,
depicting a determined carpenter holding a hammer and blueprints, with other
homes being reconstructed behind him.
© 2015 Trudy
E. Bell
Next time: Terror at Terre Haute
Further reading
Bell, Trudy
E. “The Devastating Nebraska-Iowa-Missouri Tornadoes of 1913: Harbingers of the
U.S.’s Now-Forgotten Most Widespread Natural Disaster.” Unpublished paper
presented at the Missouri Valley History Conference, February 25, 2007. Text
and slides downloadable from my 1913 flood web page (from column at far left).
Bell, Trudy
E., The Great Dayton Flood of 1913, Arcadia Publishing, 2008. Picture
book of nearly 200 images of the flood in Dayton, rescue efforts, recovery, and
the construction of the Miami Conservancy District dry dams for flood control,
including several pictures of Cox. (Author’s shameless marketing plug: Copies
are available directly from me for the cover price of $21.99 plus $4.00
shipping, complete with inscription of your choice; for details, e-mail me), or
order
from the publisher.
