NONFICTION - Oct. 27, 1996

DRAWN & QUARTERED The History of American Political Cartoons by Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop (Elliot & Clark: $29.95, 164 pp.). You begin with a grin. After all, for 242 years Americans have relished in the sharp stab of the sketch-pen and the subsequent whoosh of deflating gasbags.

“Drawn & Quartered,” though, is history as well as entertainment. And the history of American political cartooning proves to be as rich and unsettling, as loopy and wondrous, as the nation’s own.

Stephen Hess is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; Sandy Northrop is a filmmaker and broadcast producer (and wife of Los Angeles Times correspondent David Lamb). In this brisk and beyond-the-obvious book, the authors convey an understanding of the truths reflected by popular culture and bring eyes not only for the best of cartooning but also a few of the worst.

More than 250 political cartoons are reproduced here, beginning with the first political cartoon in a U.S. newspaper--Ben Franklin’s “Join, or Die” 1754 drawing of a snake cut into pieces, by way of urging states to join in union.

If cartooning went on to reach high-water marks with Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, the civil rights struggle and race relations were lows. “Martin Luther King Jr. became an invisible man in the cartoons of an era in which he was a prominent player,” the authors note.

And there is worse news: “Where there were once nearly 2,000 editorial cartoonists working at the turn of the century, there are only 140 full-time newspaper cartoonists in the United States today.”

Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman explains one problem: At this time in our history, Americans don’t just disagree, they insist on being offended “and they demand redress.” You begin “Drawn & Quartered” with a grin, but you finish realizing that our civic sense of humor is not something to laugh off.