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Something shocking happened last week in the small world of editorial cartooning. A cartoonist quit. John Sherffius of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suddenly resigned, though he had no place better to go. Predecessors Daniel Fitzpatrick and Bill Mauldin had won Pulitzers during the 1950s and rank among the greatest cartoonists of the last century. Five years ago, after a blue-ribbon committee made a nationwide search, Sherffius was hired to do their job. The liberal Post-Dispatch of Fitzpatrick and Mauldin exists today mostly as legacy. For most of the 20th century conservative readers -- who abound in Saint Louis -- had other daily papers to turn to. Those papers are history; the Post-Dispatch survives as a sort of utility, a local monopoly that must try to have something for everyone. In the eyes of readers and staff, if not her own, editor Ellen Soeteber has been moving her editorial page toward the center and prodding Sherffius to follow along. "I love the rumor that John was too liberal for the Post-Dispatch editorial page," Soeteber says. "That's like being too communist for Fidel. We're the only metropolitan-wide paper. We do have a special responsibility to serve up a menu of ideas. But I would never presume to alter the 125-year -- as of today -- tradition of what I call the progressivism of the Post-Dispatch. I was deputy editorial-page editor of the Chicago Tribune for three years. You can't be making U-turns all the time." But "progressivism" can mean whatever a newspaper wants it to, and a U-turn isn't the same as a slow but steady change of course. About a year ago, coworkers say, Sherffius's bosses started getting after him to tone down his more liberal cartoons. "Everybody improves by editing," says Soeteber. "I would put [cartoonists] in the same category as columnists -- nobody is 100 percent sacrosanct. I don't believe in messing [with cartoons] except in the most extreme circumstances, but I think we all get better by giving and taking." On Monday, December 8, Sherffius had the idea of drawing elephants whooping it up. They wore party hats and lamp shades, lugged bags stuffed with swag, and waved champagne bottles and fistfuls of cash. The caption: "The party of fiscal discipline." Sherffius was told the cartoon was unbalanced. "We had some disagreement,"says Soeteber, "about whether the cartoon captured what was going on in Congress." So Sherffius added a donkey. It's hard to say what this donkey was supposed to signify about the Democrats. An elephant was riding it, but there was a cigar in its mouth. "An editorial cartoon is sort of a creative bubble," says Matt Davies, cartoonist at the Journal News in Westchester, New York. "It takes hours to build, and if it's right, it's a perfect bubble. It's unlike a column. A column you can tweak and mess with. In the ten years I've been doing this I've seen maybe three cartoons that could have been tweaked. 'The party of fiscal restraint.' Everybody knows that's supposed to be the Republicans. If you put a Democrat in there you negate it. As soon as you try to dumb the thing down for the reader you kill it." Sherffius's changes didn't ruin his cartoon -- the original idea was strong enough to survive the incongruity. But he told Soeteber and the editorial-page editor how upset he was, and before the day was over he resigned. He says, "I felt that ultimately my cartoons were not a good fit for the page." Davies, who's president elect of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, can't think of another cartoonist who walked out the way Sherffius did. "It takes a lot of courage," he says. "It takes a lot more courage to quit your job than to put out a cartoon that gets you in a lot of trouble." Soeteber posted a statement online praising Sherffius's work and wishing him well. But among cartoonists, the most important thing the statement said was said in passing: "Until we complete a search for his replacement, the newspaper will run a number of syndicated cartoons." It's no longer a given at American newspapers that a departed cartoonist will be replaced at all, not even at papers with the traditions of the Post-Dispatch. Cartoonists at the Buffalo News have won two Pulitzers, but when one of them, Tom Toles, moved to the Washington Post last year the News decided not to replace him. Steve Breen won a Pulitzer at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey in 1998, and when he left for the San Diego Union-Tribune three years later he wasn't replaced. The New York Daily News lost its cartoonist two years ago, began carrying syndicated cartoons, and recently redesigned its editorial page so that there's no need to run a cartoon at all. And of course the Chicago Tribune's still looking for a successor to Jeff MacNelly, a three-time Pulitzer winner. MacNelly died three and a half years ago, during the Clinton presidency. "With the job outlook as thin as it is," says Davies, "the idea that you would be so unhappy with overt editorial control that you would be willing to subject yourself to the unhappiness of unemployment -- to me that says a lot about the value of editorial freedom. And maybe that's why the Chicago Tribune doesn't want to hire a cartoonist. They might understand that." Davies is suggesting that the most important reason the Tribune hasn't replaced MacNelly isn't budgetary. "A big salary for a cartoonist is a rounding error for a paper like the Tribune," he maintains. It's that a cartoonist worthy of the Tribune would demand more freedom than the Tribune might be willing to give. "Do they really want to deal with that?" he says. "I want somebody who really provokes people," Soeteber says. "A cartoonist should be provocative. He should make you laugh, make you cry, make you think. I'm more concerned about that than the politics." That said, before she can replace Sherffius she has to define the job she needs to fill, and she volunteers that she's not sure how she'll do it. "One, you say it's their viewpoint, and you label it as such. Two, some newspapers take the stance that the cartoonist should be an extension of the editorial page and their positions should match. I'm not sure where I land on that." Either way, an editor is asking for trouble. A cartoonist who brings many more readers to the editorial page than will ever read the editorials hijacks the page. Even if he's not, he's assumed to be speaking for the paper that's given him such a conspicuous platform -- why else would he have it? As for the cartoonist who'll take his cue from the editorials -- advertise the job that way and take your pick of mediocrities. "I don't want to say anything that will deter really talented cartoonists from applying here," says Soeteber. "I'm pointing out the philosophy out there at some papers." I asked Bruce Dold, editor of the Tribune editorial page, his concept of the job his paper's been in no hurry to fill. He e-mailed me: "I would expect a cartoonist to live with the same kind of scrutiny as a columnist, but I don't expect columnists to follow the Tribune editorial line. They are entirely free to disagree with the editorial views of the paper. . . . The op-ed page, though, presents a clash of columnists. There is only one cartoon. So I would like a cartoonist to be a good fit philosophically with the Tribune, as Jeff was. By a good fit, I mean a cartoonist who disagrees on some issues with the editorial page, but who is not constantly at war with the editorial page." Robert Ariail of the State newspaper in South Carolina thinks he'd be a good fit with the Tribune. Six months ago he talked to Dold and got the idea Dold was very interested. But instead of an offer, silence followed. Other cartoonists before Ariail who thought they were close to a job experienced the same thing. Ariail has the impression that it's people above Dold who won't let him act. "I have spoken to Bruce as recently as last week," Ariail told me a few days ago. "I had sent him a cartoon for his eyes only kind of gibing them -- just as a release for me. He called me back. I think he's interested in me. But I say that and I don't really know." Ariail wanted to hear about Sherffius. When I said why he'd quit, Ariail responded, "Well, good for him." Ariail has a properly gloomy outlook on the trade he's in. "A decade ago there were 200 full-time editorial cartoonists," he said. "Now there are only 100. Make it 99."
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