Don’t even get me STARTED on why we don’t celebrate on May 1 like everyone else
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Gil Thorp, 9/2/24
Happy Labor Day, everybody! I guess it’s now an annual tradition for a continuity strip character to appear as Rosie the Riveter to promote the American labor movement. I’m going to take this opportunity to be a bit of a killjoy and point out that the now-iconic “We Can Do It!” poster was actually a piece of internal propoganda produced by Westinghouse Electric in 1942 in an attempt to get its employees to work harder; another poster from the same series provides pretty good evidence of where on the labor/capital divide the ultimate sympathies of the campaign lay. “We Can Do It!” was not associated with the “Rosie the Riveter” concept at the time, was not widely seen outside Westinghouse during the war, and was largely forgotten until the Washington Post Magazine did an article about patriotic wartime art in 1982. Much more famous at the time — and perhaps more in tune with the labor movement — was Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Rosie the Riveter cover for the Saturday Evening Post, which features Rosie chowing down on a sandwich on her lunch break while grinding a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Perhaps we can get Abbey Spencer or Sarah Morgan to do this pose next year.
Alice, 9/2/24
Most cartoonists are of course more interested in making jokes about “Ha ha, we call it Labor Day but nobody’s working” than they are exploring and celebrating advances in workers’ rights, of course, which is kind of funny considering most cartoonists are freelancers who don’t get paid holidays of any sort. Hey, Alice, maybe instead of lying around all day you should organize your workforce!
Hi and Lois, 9/2/24
I know the whole dynamic of the Thurstons’ marriage is that Irma is perpetually enraged about her husband’s laziness, but he very much does have a job that he goes to every weekday with Hi. Like, that’s an important part of the strip lore. He’s also not unionized, as he’s management (I’m basing this on the fact that he wears a tie to the office, but I think given the lingering 1950s aesthetic that’s a pretty good rubric), so maybe this is just further topical commentary.
