That distance proved wise for Hoff. The FBI did indeed call on him in the 1950s. In a statement to the bureau in 1952, Hoff downplayed the cartoons he’d drawn as A. Redfield, as well as his staff position at the Daily Worker. (...)
The work he produced hardly feels its ninety years. If it weren’t for the attire in which Hoff’s oafish representatives of the ruling class are outfitted — tuxedos aplenty, modest gowns for the women — and his propensity for drawing the rich as almost uniformly overweight, the illustrations could be of the modern-day United States. After all, our era has much in common with that of “A. Redfield’s”: eye-popping inequality, rampant homelessness and police brutality, racism, and the many pompous, moronic captains of industry.
Hoff’s rich are a pathetic bunch. “Well! Well! Well! And how’s the Giant of Wall Street today?” asks a physically imposing personal trainer to his shrimpy client in one illustration. “Well, darling — I believe Fascism is coming,” a man tells his wife in another cartoon, reading from a newspaper. “Oh, my!” she responds, “And this is the maid’s night out!”
Yet another, with a tuxedoed young bourgeois lamenting to his date, glass of champagne in hand: “Papa says if I’m expelled from one more college I’ll have to take charge of one of his factories.” In another, an old capitalist spiffs himself up with cologne and a flower in his buttonhole, only for his maid, the object of his desire, to walk right by him, unnoticing.
While these people see themselves as paternalistic figures to their legion of workers, they resemble nothing so much as giant toddlers.
These industry titans are vindictive too, and stingy, but it’s unearned. Often, they’ve merely inherited their wealth.
A little boy berates a butler, “How the hell many times must I ring for you!” A boss stands on stage in front of a room of workers at a gathering organized to push a company union. He rattles on about “we who turn the wheels of industry,” and his employees stare back, stone-faced. One woman, draped in pearls and sitting on a couch, says to the other, “I’m against unemployment insurance — it’d make people lazy.”
These capitalists are a group living a delusion. They are shielded from the world by a coterie of protections: mansions, guards, servants. “I ain’t afraid of nothing!” one general says to another, never mind that he is not one of the soldiers who will have to risk their lives in the war. (...)
All of it rings true: when I encounter the rich, they are always speaking about themselves, even on the rare occasions that they seem to be talking about something larger. When the world rarely disturbs your domestic sphere, your interests tend to contract to, well, yourself.
It all makes for a very boring milieu. Without fetizishing hardship, one can observe that those whose every tribulation has been cushioned by enormous amounts of money don’t tend to be very interesting; they have nothing to say because they have experienced little. (...)
The work he produced hardly feels its ninety years. If it weren’t for the attire in which Hoff’s oafish representatives of the ruling class are outfitted — tuxedos aplenty, modest gowns for the women — and his propensity for drawing the rich as almost uniformly overweight, the illustrations could be of the modern-day United States. After all, our era has much in common with that of “A. Redfield’s”: eye-popping inequality, rampant homelessness and police brutality, racism, and the many pompous, moronic captains of industry.
Hoff’s rich are a pathetic bunch. “Well! Well! Well! And how’s the Giant of Wall Street today?” asks a physically imposing personal trainer to his shrimpy client in one illustration. “Well, darling — I believe Fascism is coming,” a man tells his wife in another cartoon, reading from a newspaper. “Oh, my!” she responds, “And this is the maid’s night out!”
Yet another, with a tuxedoed young bourgeois lamenting to his date, glass of champagne in hand: “Papa says if I’m expelled from one more college I’ll have to take charge of one of his factories.” In another, an old capitalist spiffs himself up with cologne and a flower in his buttonhole, only for his maid, the object of his desire, to walk right by him, unnoticing.
While these people see themselves as paternalistic figures to their legion of workers, they resemble nothing so much as giant toddlers.
These industry titans are vindictive too, and stingy, but it’s unearned. Often, they’ve merely inherited their wealth.
A little boy berates a butler, “How the hell many times must I ring for you!” A boss stands on stage in front of a room of workers at a gathering organized to push a company union. He rattles on about “we who turn the wheels of industry,” and his employees stare back, stone-faced. One woman, draped in pearls and sitting on a couch, says to the other, “I’m against unemployment insurance — it’d make people lazy.”
These capitalists are a group living a delusion. They are shielded from the world by a coterie of protections: mansions, guards, servants. “I ain’t afraid of nothing!” one general says to another, never mind that he is not one of the soldiers who will have to risk their lives in the war. (...)
All of it rings true: when I encounter the rich, they are always speaking about themselves, even on the rare occasions that they seem to be talking about something larger. When the world rarely disturbs your domestic sphere, your interests tend to contract to, well, yourself.
It all makes for a very boring milieu. Without fetizishing hardship, one can observe that those whose every tribulation has been cushioned by enormous amounts of money don’t tend to be very interesting; they have nothing to say because they have experienced little. (...)
In his original 1935 introduction to The Ruling Clawss, Daily Worker writer Robert Forsythe (a pen name for Kyle Crichton) wrote that rather than being fueled by a hatred for “the ponderous-paunched females” and their capitalist husbands depicted in the cartoons, Hoff was driven by something else.
“To a man of Redfield’s apparent good sense, it would be extremely foolish to waste good rage over people as fundamentally ass-like as these,” he writes. “What actuates him, obviously, is a feeling of relief and gratitude and superiority. In great part, superiority.”
Such superiority, or arrogance, on the part of the working class, writes Forsythe, “is always a source of great concern to the upper classes.” He continues: “Acting on the assumption that their eminence in life constitutes a condition about which the rest of the world should be envious, they are perpetually nonplussed at discovering that the workers, and particularly the revolutionary artists, consider them not objects of envy but subjects of great comic importance.”
No amount of money can make a person cool: Elon Musk’s life is proof of that. It’s clear that Hoff saw the rich this way, too. Yes, they were the class enemy and inflicted severe harms on the working class and the planet, but they were fundamentally beneath him and his fellow workers, not worthy of hatred. Ninety years later, the buffoonery of the likes of Musk and his many wealthy counterparts have helped restore this view of the rich.
by Alex N. Press, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: NYRB
