Charles R. Macauley

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Raymond Macauley signed his name to a 1929 cartoon called Paying for a Dead Horse. The following year, it won him the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was an American cartoonist and illustrator, born on the 19th of March 1871 and died on the 24th of November 1934. Cartooning was only part of his working life. He also wrote and illustrated books. He moved in and out of the film business too, first backing a president's campaigns and later running a movie company of his own. What made a newspaper artist trust himself with a camera, and what happened when that trust met the film industry's finances? The answers sit in the newsrooms, the bookshops, and the movie houses that carried his work.

• 2. Ink and Deadlines

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  Canton, Ohio, was Macauley's hometown, the place where his career as a working artist took root. He built that career freelance, drawing as an independent illustrator alongside stretches as a staff cartoonist for individual papers. His cartoons ran in the Cleveland World, the New York World, and the New York Daily Mirror. They also appeared in the New York Evening Graphic and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Five different newspapers meant five different editorial pages carrying his signature over the years. His stint at the New York World ran until close to the end of World War I, when he left the paper. Leaving that paper opened the door to a different chapter in his career, one built around a camera rather than a pen.

• 3. Illustrated Worlds

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  In 1902, Doubleday published Emblemland, a book Macauley wrote and illustrated together with John Kendrick Bangs. Two years later, Bobbs-Merrill brought out Fantasma Land, another title that paired his own writing with his own artwork. In 1914, D. Appleton published The Red Tavern, extending that same writer-illustrator role into a new decade. Emblemland resurfaced nearly a century later, in 2010, when Evertype reissued it as Rollo in Emblemland: A Tale Inspired by Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. That 2010 edition kept his fantasy world in print long after his newspaper cartoons had faded from view. By then, his film career had already pulled him toward an entirely different medium.

• 4. Wilson On Screen

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  In 1912, Macauley wrote the screenplay for The Old Way and the New and appeared in the film himself as an illustrator. The picture was made to support Woodrow Wilson's presidential campaign that year. Four years later, in 1916, he made Motion Picture Portrait Studies of the President of the United States and the Cabinet. The film put Wilson and his cabinet on screen up close, made as part of his re-election push. Macauley also produced a separate film backing Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, extending his political filmmaking beyond the campaign trail. Two presidential campaigns and a League of Nations film were not the end of his time behind a camera. A company bearing his own name was still to come.

• 5. A Risky New Venture

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  Near the end of World War I, Macauley left the New York World and launched his own film company, C. R. Macauley Photoplays. The company produced Whom the Gods Would Destroy in 1919, also released under the title The United States Government in Action. That same year it released When Bearcat Went Dry. It followed with two more pictures in 1920, Seeds of Vengeance and The Gift Supreme. Running a film company came with financial risk. In 1919, an advice column in United States Investor warned readers that Macauley's company, and filmmaking businesses generally, were speculative and risky. That 1919 warning is the last mention of C. R. Macauley Photoplays in the record. By the following year, the company had still released two more pictures, Seeds of Vengeance and The Gift Supreme.