Attempted Bloggery: I. Klein: The Triumph of the Melting Pot

Friday, June 5, 2020

I. Klein: The Triumph of the Melting Pot

An original drawing by I. Klein of many men (and one woman) sporting straw hats was offered recently on eBay where it sold with a best offer. The art has a notation saying it "must go June 5," which suggests when, but not where, it may have been published. The Triumph of the Melting Pot is, we learn, the universal acceptance of fashionable straw hats by the divers ethnicities and races that populate 1920s New York (a Broadway street sign is clearly visible). Most disturbing, at least to modern sensibilities, is the caricature of the black couple that is the unfortunate focus of this gag. Could this racist stereotype possibly be from a New Yorker cartoon?

It could be and it is: it appeared in the issue of June 5, 1926, during the magazine's second year. Such images, regrettably, were common in the New Yorker of the 1920s and they persisted in the mainstream print media to at least as late as the 1950s. Their ubiquity in the culture, of course, does not in any way excuse them. It's important to remember that this image and others like it shaped the attitudes of a generation towards race. Were there objections? Maybe, but the artists, editors, and advertisers who were in a position to act seem to have been silent.

The Triumph of the Melting Pot
I. Klein
The New Yorker, June 5, 1926, page 28

The figure at the lower right wears a beard that identifies him as a member of the Orthodox Jewish community. Why does he wear not one but three straw hats? Is he hawking them?

I. Klein's signature

Klein uses no half-tones, just a complex interplay of light and dark. Also, we see the 1926 prices of different straw hats when an issue of the New Yorker cost fifteen cents.

Detail with signage

Caption

The sea of straw hats is really quite a tour de force. The man catching the straw hat is all in white, making him stand out. (Another black man is behind him.) The arc from the hat through the man's raised arm and his body serves to direct the eye to the racial caricature of the man raising his hat.