Bancroftiana, Number 121 Fall 2002: Undergraduate Research: A Brave New World

The Wasp, September 4, 1880, vol. 5, No. 214, pp. 72-73. "San Francisco, A.D. 1900." This two-page illustration depicts downtown San Fransisco, some twenty years in the future, in the year 1900. The city streets are crowded with Chinese immigrants and the captions that appear within images are in English, although designed to look like Chinese characters.

The Wasp: Stinging Editorials and Political Cartoons

For over a decade in the late nineteenth century, San Francisco's The Wasp buzzed about the powerful and the pretentious, stinging both with relish. For the scholar investigating the contested terrain of western and national politics and race relations, it remains one of The Bancroft Library's most valuable and delightful resources.

Three brothers who apparently left Bohemia for political reasons founded The Wasp as a satirical weekly in 1876. The Korbels developed a successful San Francisco business manufacturing redwood cigar boxes that required lithographic labels, which they also produced. Hence, shortly after it began publication, The Wasp began to feature colored political cartoons. By the spring of 1877, it had developed its hallmark folio-size format with a pair of full-page cartoons on the front and rear covers and a double-page graphic as a centerfold. It appears to have pioneered the mass production of large-scale colored cartoons in the United States. Despite many changes of ownership and fluctuating literary quality, it would maintain this layout for twenty years.

The Wasp, April 6, 1878 vol 2, No. 88, pp. 568-569. "Stanford's Trap." Railroad magnate Leland Stanford is shown leading California newspapermen and politicians into a dark tunnel. The words above the tunnel read,"All Ye Who Enter Here Abandon Character." In the upper left hand corner of the image sits a ubiquitous "wasp" with binoculars, observing all that happens in California.

Such an ambitious production schedule proved costly. The Korbels sold the magazine in 1881 in order to devote themselves to the production of the Russian River wines and brandies that still bear their name. Most newspapers and magazines lost money, but they served the political ends of those who owned them. Charles Webb Howard, president of the Spring Valley Water Company and owner of much of Point Reyes, secretly bought the magazine and installed E.C. Macfarlane as publisher and front man. It was probably Macfarlane who hired Ambrose Bierce as The Wasp's editor without telling him who actually owned the magazine.

The Wasp, August 19, 1882, vol. 9. No. 316, pp. 520-521. "The Curse of California." This two-page illustration portrays the powerful railroad monopoly as an octopus, with its many tentacles controlling such financial interests as the elite of Nob Hill, farmers, lumber interests, shipping, fruit growers, stage lines, mining, and the wine industry.

For five years, "Bitter Bierce" dominated The Wasp, making it a major literary and political journal and initiating the acerbic definitions that would become The Devil's Dictionary. Bierce's vituperative wit complemented masterful cartoons by G. Frederick Keller, a superb lithographic artist inherited from the Korbel ownership. Though others produced drawings as well, Keller was The Wasp's mainstay.

Under Bierce, The Wasp lampooned and lambasted the state's most powerful corporations and individuals. He had a special animus for the Southern Pacific "Octopus" and for the Big Four who owned it, but he also attacked the high cost and inferior quality of water provided to San Francisco by the Spring Valley Water Company. In one cartoon, Howard picked the pockets of customers dying of cholera brought to them by his water company. Apparently unable to control his editor, Howard sold the magazine in 1883, the year Keller died. Bierce left it three years later.

The Wasp, Undated Page."San Francisco In Danger." The female figure identified as San Francisco stands beneath a tree labelled "Destruction" in a swamp of "rotten sewers" and "filthy streets" as a deadly snake representing "typhoid fever, measles, diptheria, leprosy, and small pox" threatens to crush her. The figure walking away from this scene carries a sign that reads "Board of Health."

Many of The Wasp's cartoons are so topical that they are indecipherable except to specialists, referring to long-forgotten scandals and corrupt politicians. Others retain sting— and embarrassment— more than a century on, for they give the lie to San Francisco as a tolerant town. All racial and ethnic groups except the normative Anglo-Saxons were fair game for the most degrading caricatures by Keller and others. Irish were depicted as Neanderthals and Jews as hook-nosed Shylocks, But the Chinese bore the brunt of The Wasp's venom. Week after week, they appeared as swarming rats, vampires, and the fiendish tools of monopoly capital. (Surprisingly, African-Americans seldom appear). Like the later Sunday cartoons, The Wasp is therefore a bonanza of source material for those studying racial relations and stereotypes.

For its first ten years, The Wasp built a stable of powerful enemies. With Bierce's departure in 1886, it lost much of its edge and gradually morphed into a journal of humor and society news rich with lucrative advertisements for patent medicine. The famous color cartoons stopped prodding the edges of libel and guttered out in the late 90s. Like insects trapped in amber, the magazine left behind images that give historians vital clues to the tenor of a bygone age.

—Gray Brechin