Creature of the Headlines

"I'M FOR TRUTH, Justice, and the American Way," Doug Marlette says, when asked to describe his politics. Pressed to be more specific, he steadfastly refuses to label himself. "Labels have sort of lost their meaning," he says. "I feel that my values and attitudes came out of going to Sunday school in Magnolia Street Baptist Church. I believe what they taught me, I believe what they taught me in civics class in Maddox Junior High School in Laurel, Miss. I took them seriously." Then he adds, musingly, "I don't know whether they intended that."

Marlette came to Harvard this year as the first political cartoonist ever to be granted a Nieman Fellowship. Now the staff political cartoonist for the Charlotte Observer--a respected and liberal (at least for the South) daily--Marlette grew up in the South, in places like Greensboro, N.C., where he was born, and Laurel, Miss., where he did most of his growing up. And it was in the small towns of the South that Marlette learned the values that provide the subtext for his cartoons: the idea that the Constitution and the Sermon on the Mount amount to more than nice words for homilies and Fourth of July speeches; the idea that they are actually a practical plan for running your life and governing the nation.

These values were tested by the Civil Rights movement and particularly by the Vietnam War. Marlette went to Florida State University, a hotbed of political activism during the Sixties; he marched in the moratoriums, marched on G. Harrold Carswell's house, and in between drew cartoons for the FSU Flambeau, the university daily. Somehow, he kept his innocence, and the wonderful sense of possiblity and hope that characterized the Sixties breathes through his cartoons. They are not cynical. Even at their most satirical, there is a sense of alternative life, an implication that things don't have to be this way.

MARLETTE ENJOYS working for the Observer. "I would trust my editors to do right," he says, "more so than, say, the editors of the Washington Post." Yet there have been inevitable problems being a Left (and I will use that label even if Marlette won't) cartoonist in the middle of the Bible Belt. "After a year or two at the Observer," Marlette says, "my editors were getting a lot of pressure from the powers that be. What were they doing allowing this kid to come into Charlotte with both guns blazing?" Partly in response to this uproar, the editors moved Marlette's cartoons to the Op-ed page, where they could more clearly be seen as distinct from the opinion of the newspaper itself.

It helps a lot, though, that Marlette is himself a Southerner. "This is something that annoys my readers," he says. "Particularly when they don't like my cartoons. They'd like to be able to say that I came down from the outside, an 'outside agitator.' My newspaper likes to stress that I was raised Southern Baptist." It also helps that Marlette's liberalism is not libertinism; not the "anything goes" of the East Side limousines, but a belief in the dignity of man. "I don't like liberals much," Marlette says. "Although it's sort of an uncomfortable position because liberals generally like my cartoons. But their certitudes are not my certitudes."

America today is the victim of self-inflicted wounds; we have given up on our country, maybe with good reason--but having rejected it, it has come to deserve rejection. If the dream is dead, it may be because the dreamers are overtired. Yet there are some who have the courage to keep the wonder of America alive, and one of these is Doug Marlette. With his cartoons, he confirms the vision of a generation which--if it has since mostly died and gone to law school--still was more alive than any which have followed it.

"The cartoons that have the most impact," Marlette says, "seem to be the ones that express something that's latent in the unconscious.... There's an immediacy that comes straight out of the unconscious." In stripping away our lies and hypocrisies with the gentle lash of a Number Two brush, Doug Marlette reveals the better nature inside us all. There's more than one way, Huey Long, for every man to be a king.