{"id":52620,"date":"2017-03-19T14:32:17","date_gmt":"2017-03-19T14:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52620"},"modified":"2017-03-19T14:32:17","modified_gmt":"2017-03-19T14:32:17","slug":"a-tale-which-must-never-be-told-a-new-biography-of-george-herriman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52620","title":{"rendered":"A Tale Which Must Never Be Told: A New Biography of George Herriman"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Tale Which Must Never Be Told: A New Biography of George Herriman<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>
\n2017-03-18<\/p>\n

Ben Schwartz<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

George Herriman, a Life in Black and White<\/em><\/a>
\nBy Michael Tisserand<\/a><\/p>\n

Published 12.06.2016
\nHarper
\n560 Pages<\/p>\n

ON MARCH 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson<\/a> took the oath of office and became our 28th president. While we remember Wilson for his internationalist foreign policy and progressive labor laws, he was also the first Southerner elected since the mid-19th century, and his racial policies reflected it. Wilson saw Jim Crow<\/a> as the necessary remedy to the aftermath of the Civil War<\/a>. As president, he normalized his revanchist views from the White House by expanding segregation of federal workers. Not surprisingly, 1913 also saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan<\/a>. An excerpt from Wilson\u2019s revisionist writings proclaiming the Klan \u201ca veritable empire of the South\u201d even appears in D. W. Griffith\u2019s<\/a> The Birth of a Nation<\/em><\/a>, a box-office smash which Wilson personally screened at the White House<\/a>, the first American film ever shown there.<\/p>\n

In that reactionary atmosphere, on October 28, 1913, in the New York Evening Journal<\/em><\/a>, William Randolph Hearst<\/a> debuted a new comic strip, Krazy Kat<\/em><\/a>, by one of his favorite cartoonists, George Herriman<\/a>. It starred Krazy, an androgynous cat in love with Ignatz, a brick-throwing, cat-chasing mouse. They lived in Coconino County, Arizona, desert mesa country, and Herriman shifted their backgrounds panel-by-panel \u2014 night to day, day to night, mountain to desert to town to river \u2014 with no rhyme or reason. They spoke in a patois of slang, Elizabethan English, Yiddish, Spanish, French, and tossed off literary allusions. When asked once about his basic upending of the natural order of cats, mice, dogs, time, and space, Herriman summed up his Weltanschauung<\/a>: \u201cTo me it\u2019s just as sensible as the way it is.\u201d.<\/p>\n

Krazy Kat\u2019s<\/em> whimsy caught on quickly in the Age of Wilson, and its large and devoted fan base ranged from high society to poets to school children to the president himself. What none of them knew then was that George Herriman was black. He passed for white<\/a> most of his life. And what we can only see now, thanks to an authoritative new biography of Herriman by New Orleans<\/a> historian Michael Tisserand<\/a>, is that, as far removed from social commentary as Krazy Kat<\/em> may appear, race was as much on George Herriman\u2019s mind as the president\u2019s…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Krazy Kat\u2019s whimsy caught on quickly in the Age of Wilson, and its large and devoted fan base ranged from high society to poets to school children to the president himself. What none of them knew then was that George Herriman was black. He passed for white most of his life. And what we can only see now, thanks to an authoritative new biography of Herriman by New Orleans historian Michael Tisserand, is that, as far removed from social commentary as Krazy Kat may appear, race was as much on George Herriman\u2019s mind as the president\u2019s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,1245,5,369,8,6462,20],"tags":[26545,9929,9930,14582,25524,1438,22010],"class_list":["post-52620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-ben-schwartz","tag-george-herriman","tag-krazy-kat","tag-los-angeles-review-of-books","tag-michael-tisserand","tag-new-orleans","tag-woodrow-wilson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52622,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52620\/revisions\/52622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}