The Liberty League Republican Party & the Constitution

Hugo Gellert

This image is number 17 from the portfolio "Aesop Said So", a portfolio of 20 images, done in 1936 in an anticipated edition of 50, only 33 were printed. The portfolio was also published in book form by Covici Friede, New York, 1936. Gellert wrote, illustrated and published the porfolio. Gellert used the fables of Aesop to inspire the images and did not illustrate the fables literally.

Hungarian-born, New York-based artist Huge Gellert was known for his powerful, and often controversial, sociopolitical satire. After training in lithography, painting, and stained glass design, he contributed political cartoons to Hungarian and American publicaitons beginning in 1916 as World War I raged in Europe. While pursuing an art career, he would go on to co-found the first antifascist group in the United States, the Anti-Horthy League, in 1928, and continue to fight for civil rights, worker's rights, and unions during the Depression.

In this lithograph from 1933, he takes on the newly-formed American Liberty League, an organization made up of wealthy business elites and right wing political figures, including several Nazi sympathizers, opposed to the New Deal and who campaigned against Franklin Roosevelt's re-election in 1936. The image shows an elephant with its trunk wrapped in the U.S. Constitution, a decorative sunflower hiding the fact that the elephant's trunk is, in fact, a venomous snake.

The text that accompanied this image reads: (The Cat and the Mice): A Cat, feeble with age, and no longer able to hunt the Mice, thought that she might entice them within reach of her paw. She tried to pass herself off for a scroll of parchment, in the hope that the Mice would no longer be afraid to come near her. / An old Mouse, who was wise enough to keep his distance, whispered to a friend: / "Many a parchment scroll have I seen in my day, but never one with a cat's head,/ "Stay there, good Madame," said his friend to the Cat, "as long as you please, but I would not trust myself within reach of you though you were stuffed with straw."