dutchmen

[George Thompson]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 10:22 pm
Subject: Re: dutchmen

> Last Friday Jesse wrote:
>
>    >>>>>
> I like this so much I have put the image up on the web:
>
> http://www.jessesword.com/dictionary-guardian.gif
>
> <<<<<
>
> My son requests permission to pass this link to non-specialist
> lists, where
> he thinks his friends will enjoy it. He is specifically concerned
> propagation of the link endanger your bandwidth.
>
> -- Mark
> [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

Since it seems that this caricature is going to spread around the
world, I will offer a few notes on the artist.  As Chaucer so well put
it, "Go, litel email"

The artist who drew this cartoon was Hans Stengel, a figure in the
Greenwich Village art scene of the early & mid 1920s.  I've looked for
him in a few (print) handbooks of American art & illustration and have
found nothing -- I could check others, but he seems forgotten.

Checking Proquest, the historical NYTimes and the APS files, I find:
He committed suicide by hanging himself with his belt in a closet of
his apartment at 134 W. 4th street, while friends were having a party
in another room.  He was 34, born in Wisconsin, though the follow-up
story said his ashes were to be sent to his parent in Lubeck, Germany,
and until recently had been the Dramatic Editor of the NY Evening
Journal.  New York Times, January 29, 1928, p. 3 & January 30, 1928,
p. 23.

APS turns up a fairly long memoir of Stengel by a friend.  This
explains that he was taken back to Germany by his parents when an
infant, raised there and served in the German army in WWI, until the
U. S. entered the war, when he returned to the U. S., but was jailed
here as an enemy agent.
CARICATURE; The Life and Death of Hans Stengel.  Marcus Goodrich. The
Bookman; a Review of Books and Life, 1928, Vol. 67, Iss. 5; p. 525ff

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org