Tony Auth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist at the Philadelphia Inquirer who turned his pen on politicians, ideologues, religious leaders and authority in all its forms, died Sept. 14 at a hospital in Philadelphia. He was 72.
His death was confirmed by a daughter, Katie Auth. The cause was brain cancer.
Tony Auth began his career during the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal and remained a prolific, sharp-witted political satirist until this year, turning his attention to such issues as same-sex marriage equality, tea party politics and the gun lobby.
For years, he drew five cartoons a week for the Inquirer, and his work was widely syndicated to newspapers around the world. He won a Pulitzer in 1976 and was a finalist two other times, in 1983 and 2010.
A careful draftsman, Auth worked early in his career as a medical illustrator. He would happily have continued in that field, he said, if not for the Vietnam War, which turned him toward his chosen form of activism: drawing.
One of his starkest cartoons depicted presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon and Gen. William Westmoreland, the Army’s top leader in Vietnam, alongside a well-known photographic image of a naked Vietnamese girl, screaming in pain after a napalm attack.
“Who told the truth about Vietnam?” the caption reads.
“Every once in a while,” Pulitzer-winning Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoonist Clay Bennett told The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna for his Comic Riffs blog, “an artist comes along with a singularly unique voice and a style that seems derivative of no one before him. Tony Auth was such an artist.”
Auth never tried to hide his liberal political leanings, and his drawings tended to provoke more outrage from the right side of the political spectrum than from the left. Over the years, his bosses at the Inquirer defended him against attacks from the Republican Party, the occasional Democrat, the Catholic Church, bankers, the NAACP, police officers, supporters (and opponents) of Israel and countless others who believed that Auth had simply gone too far.
Like every political cartoonist, Auth knew it was his destiny not to be popular.
“Our job is not to amuse our readers,” he said in 2005, when he was named the first winner of the Herblock Prize, an annual award for editorial cartooning presented by the Herb Block Foundation, named for the late Washington Post cartoonist. “Our mission is to stir them, inform and inflame them. Our task is to continually hold up our government and our leaders to cleareyed analysis, unaffected by professional spin-meisters and agenda-pushers.”
Working at the intersection of illustration, satire and political engagement, Auth sought to reveal what he considered the underlying truths in public life. His cartoons seldom had side-splitting punch lines but relied instead on a sense of outrage and irony, showing the powerless struggling against the mighty.
“There’s nothing wrong with humor for humor’s sake,” Auth told the Comic Riffs blog in 2012, “but editorial cartooning is capable of so many reactions from people: tears, laughter, sadness — it’s just so rich.”
Auth often drew on the standard visual fare of cartoons, such as bloated plutocrats, politicians with exaggerated features and elephants in pinstripe suits to represent Republicans.
“In 1935 we said Social Security was socialism,” one of his elephants blithely said in a cartoon. “In 1965 we said Medicare was socialism. Now we say Barack Obama is a socialist. Time will tell.”
Standing next to a junked ambulance on concrete blocks and labeled “American Health Care,” a hefty man representing “Big Insurance” declares, “It doesn’t work too well, not everyone can afford it, but, man, it’s a Cadillac!”
From Vietnam to the Gulf War to Iraq and Afghanistan, Auth sought to look behind the flag-waving slogans for a deeper, often darker meaning.
In a 2012 cartoon, a clipboard-holding Uncle Sam looks over a tattered soldier, walking on crutches: “Let’s see . . . three tours of duty in Iraq, check. Wounded twice, check. Soldier, you’re good to go . . . to Afghanistan.”
William Anthony Auth Jr. was born on May 7, 1942, in Akron, Ohio, where his father was a tire-company executive.
At age 5, Tony, as he became known, developed rheumatic fever and learned to draw while recovering in a hospital. He finished high school in Southern California and graduated in 1965 from the University of California at Los Angeles.
While working as a medical illustrator, Auth began to draw political cartoons for an alternative weekly. He joined the Inquirer in 1971 and left in 2012 after a change of ownership. Since then, he had been drawing syndicated cartoons and working in digital formats for a website associated with WHYY, a public radio station in Philadelphia.
Auth also illustrated 11 children’s books by Daniel Pinkwater, Chaim Potok and other writers.
Survivors include his wife of 32 years, Eliza Drake Auth, an artist, of Wynnewood, Pennsylvania; two daughters, Katie Auth of Washington and Emily Auth of Conshohocken, Pennsylvania; and a brother.
“I get a lot of hate mail, but it’s predictable,” Auth told The Washington Post in 1977, describing the perils of his profession. “They claim I’m sort of taking advantage of free speech, that I ought to go to Russia, where I’d be shot, and that if America was any good, I’d be shot here, too.”