Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Saturday, February 27, 2021

NEW ADVENTURES OF HENRY DRUB (1915)

 Henry Drub was a foil of rich capitalists in a long-running series of cartoon strips by Ryan Walker (1870-1932) in the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason and (later) other radical newspaper.  Drub's willing and unthinking acceptance of the status quo, where the common man would work and the rich would receive the benefits, made him a popular character among young socialists.  The strips would end with the character staring into space and proclaiming, "I'm the Henry Drub" (or, sometimes, "I'm a Henry Drub").  Drub's wife and son (and readers of the strip) considered him an intractable fool.

Ryan Walker published two small books about Drub:  Adventures of Henry Drub (1914) and New Adventures of Henry Drub (1915) for the SOCIALIST PARTY of Chicago.  Walker was also an effective stump speaker for the Socialist Party of America and would often include examples of the Drub cartoons in his lectures.

Walker would later join the Communist Party.  He died of pneumonia while on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932.  He was 61.

Let's join Henry Drub as he is exploited by a "corrupt social system."


https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=77973&comicpage=&b=i

1 comment:

  1. Not too much worried about subtlety...I always wonder about Socialist Party types who jumped onto the Leninist bandwagon as it became available, even given all the evidence that the Workers' Paradise was in too many similar ways as exploitive.

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