thank you for coming and i appreciate your questions. during the recent visit to green bay we stopped by the library to learn about the life and career of political cartoonist while >> he commented on national and local and regional news and events. he is an individual who was born in 1931 in northern was conned. he served a stint in the korean war from 1954 to 1956 such impacts some of his views and then goes to w. madison and

earns a journalism degree. after that, he does come to green bay and works as a promotion manager which is in some of the oldest television stations in the state. he does that for 13 years and then beginning in 1968 he becomes affiliated with one of the newspapers in the chronicle and later becoming to green bay chronicles is a daily newspaper. he starts out as the manager or the editor if you will of the commentary page and quickly becomes the cartoonist for the newspaper. his career spanned from 1968 until the time of his death in 2013. >> i am a professor of democracy justice studies and political science here at the university of wisconsin green bay and i'm here to talk a little bit about one of the special collections that we have here in the archives which are the political cartoons and everything else cartoons of lyle lahey.

so i'm going to just talk through them and get a little give a little insight into what they say about wisconsin and the shared political life. every once in a while they would be a there would be a cartoon that would actually be funny only in a really dark and sort of sad way. i love how this cartoon you can kind of imagine in the newspaper and the kind of being hit hard by the depiction of the death and destruction and then i think this kind of comment about killing to democratize expecting something about the position towards the war and the u.s. involvement abroad we really see throughout the entire collection or even some of the latest cartoons and we will talk about them in a little bit. they tend to spread democracy abroad that but we also see him being critical of actions in the middle east in iraq and afghanistan and libya and i think that we could imagine serious. this is some of those cartoons

that i think can stop you even though there is a type of dark humor it's the type of irony that is painfully think to look at. all irony is that bread and butter of their trade. putting things in a very sustained way that safe way that kind of point out what's ironic about the situations or hypocrisy and i think that is another theme throughout. here the sort of question about how can democracy be spread if it harms people is important and i have another cartoon that we will talk about in a minute that has the same sort of logic so that is sort of a consistent theme. i love this cartoon because i think it epitomizes the powerful things about specifically for cartooning. and one of the things that's great about this cartoon that occurs throughout his work and we will see other examples is

this mouse. and i think you could set up a debate and this is what i might give my am i to do with my students whether it stands in for the cartoonist but certainly it provides iconic commentary what is going on in all of the cartoons and i think the mouse has maybe not a particular partisan perspective but a small democratic perspective of standing up for the little people. the reason it's a mouse as it is it is a small character but is always watching and noticing and commenting and in really clever ways but also kind of dark and funny ways and this is happening in the 70s when inflation is driving up prices and you can see the mother has dog food and this is nice because so much political cartooning is really focused on the electoral

progress and he does a lot of that it's asking about what does politics mean inside the household when prices go up? there are tons of great cartoons in the collection about oil prices and gas prices and food prices. and i think the sort of concerned for everyday people to so people who read and burgers and not stake, this mouse standing in as a symbol for that and it's a really unique concern but i see that as the importance of common people and working class people in this community. so i love this cartoon and i think it's fun. i do think that cartooning became a voice for him if you will. there is evidence in all the cartoons as the evidence he did in a few conversations i had with him i had the opportunity to meet him and he very much was a well bred man, a person who had specific views and

commentary and care at all about the world around them. i do know that in terms of the cartoons he had opportunities to take what he viewed as more of a bland approach and could have become syndicated as a cartoonist but he felt green bay deserved their own cartoonist to represent their issues and things going on here. >> because he is concerned and is able to kind of illustrate when the hypocrisy is occurring he doesn't hesitate from criticizing the causes you might assume he would be standing with it so i think this is a really interesting view of what is happening in the late 70s when we still have a lot of militancy around the issues of abortion and we also have debates and the supreme court and the public sphere about capital punishment. also we have our little mouse hiding on top.

and there is a place where he is pointing out schilling is a pretty complex idea asking us to think about how it is you can before on situation and against it in another and vice versa. through this pretty simple and easily interpreted scene. the treatment of watergate is really funny. and not just because he uses the cartoon technique of the exaggerated features but because they are also serious political questions that are set in domestic spaces so i love the idea of mixing he already knows he's leaving the white house and getting a tape recorder as he going a going away present and i think you can see here one of the reasons that these can be useful for teaching. so for students to be all to out of figure out what's going on in this cartoon means they have to

learn a bit about watergate and they have to learn a bit about what actually occurred. they have to sort out though to figure out there is a whole other association that politically literate people used to decipher cartoons that ran students study cartoons that helps them build up the associations have become more critical and well-informed citizens. a lot of them are very gone with the details and know that anything is a scandal that they don't know what the big deal was. they know that he's not a crook, but there's lots of great cartoons about the tape and so it's a great way to teach these historical moments. the reason why we are particularly pleased to have these in the archive is that they provide a visual

documentation and allow us to complement the other materials that we have comes over the case of local politics we have to city council proceedings which are from gavel to gavel what's happening in each of me being that then we have been captured in a different way than what is in the actual record. we couldn't get all of them out on the table and a lot of them are commenting on the politics. a lot of them are criticizing the state legislature for raising their own pay raise or rewarding themselves instead of the common people not being concerned enough about poverty and inequality but the reason why i think this one is kind of fun is some of the topics i want them to l