Caricatures for Then and Now

Seven decades after the Great Depression, pieces by one its most published pundits live on in ILR's Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives.

John Baer's cartoons, echoing many of the same economic themes Americans are grappling with now, look as if they could have come out of yesterday’s newspaper.

A collection of Baer originals published from the 1930s through the 1960s is carefully stashed in the manuscript stacks in Ives Hall, where the temperature is a preservation-friendly 66 degrees.

Baer is credited by some for creating the term "New Deal" in a 1914 pamphlet and for popularizing the phrase in a 1931 cartoon. The pamphlet and cartoon are not part of the Kheel collection.

"New Deal" was the moniker which housed programs created by President Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps, Federal Housing Administration, Public Works Administration and other agencies were designed to stimulate the economy and help individuals regain economic security.

As Barack Obama begins his presidency in a new era of economic instability, some are calling for a new "New Deal."

Baer was known as the "dean of labor cartoonists." He published more than 12,000 cartoons, many of them related to labor issues. His artistic work spanned many decades and subjects.

Baer died in 1970 at age 83. A sampling of his cartoons was donated to the Kheel Center by "Labor," a railroad union publication which published many of his editorial cartoons.

The donation included some of Baer's personal files, sketches and scrapbooks, and correspondence and editorial files of Edward Keating, Labor editor.

The Kheel Center's collection of historical photographs, collective bargaining agreements, union records and other items adds up to more than 17,000 lineal feet – the equivalent of 36.7 million sheets of paper.