A couple of weeks ago, a blood vessel burst in Gary Huck’s left eye. It was the same day that Bruce Rauner, Illinois’ new Republican governor, unveiled his state budget, calling for $6 billion in cuts to such sacred cows as the University of Illinois and Medicaid, and steep pension reductions for government workers. The proposal was criticized immediately by labor leaders as the latest salvo from Rauner against public employee unions. Huck sat at his desk in Rogers Park and read and took this all in and, at some point that afternoon, his left eye turned crimson. He said he doesn’t think it was a psychosomatic reaction to the proposed budget; he doubts that Bruce Rauner set out to intentionally cause anything in his head to pop.
“On the other hand,” he said, “irony is everything, and now I am literally seeing red — living my brand.”
Huck has a remarkable job, a line of work so extraordinary that regardless of your politics, you have to be amazed that he has held it for 29 years: Huck is the last full-time cartoonist employed by a major labor union. He’s the house jester for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, which is based in Pittsburgh.
“He draws our cartoons, illustrates leaflets, creates banners and posters,” said Al Hart, Huck’s editor at UE News, the union newspaper, distributed to its 36,000 members. “We like having our materials look smart, so the union has always seen Gary’s job as an asset. But what he does, in a sense, is also agitational art. He is giving us extra spirit in the struggle, helping members maybe lighten up and not give in to the pessimism that can develop. See, employers don’t care if you hate them, and they don’t care if you think they’re being mean. But if you can find a way to make fun of them, and do it incisively — well, that really bothers them.”
And so, with his work for the UE appearing in four different decades, Huck has become a Pete Seeger of caricature, known for scorching, blunt provocations. He is also — alongside the freelance labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki, who formed a syndication partnership with Huck in the early 1980s to sell cartoons to union and alternative newspapers — the subject of “Seeing Red,” an exhibit of their work running through Friday at Uri-Eichen Gallery in Pilsen (2101 S. Halsted St.).
“Gary and Mike are super well-known among progressives,” said gallery co-owner Kathy Steichen. “Partly because as unions have been more under attack and had to marshal resources, what they do is not so different from what Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart have done: They help us process visually, and easily, boiling issues down to the fundamentals that labor was always about — economic equality, worker rights …”
Subtlety won’t do.
In 1989, a union representative for General Electric workers asked Huck to come up with a cartoon protesting the company’s drug-testing program for employees. Huck drew the face of then-CEO Jack Welch at the bottom of a urine-sample cup and scrawled at the top: “How GE can promote drug testing…” It circulated so widely at GE that Welch himself called UE News to complain. (The union didn’t apologize.) In 2008, when employees at Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors staged their celebrated sit-in to protest the plant’s abrupt closing (UE represented its workers), Huck created cartoons and designed the picket signs. For the UE’s upcoming contract negotiations with GE, he has morphed the GE logo into “GREED.” And after Rauner’s budget was proposed, he drew a chain saw, its handle shaped like Illinois.
“Gary is definitely poster-ready,” said Peter Mueller, a frequent New Yorker cartoonist who grew up in Lincolnshire, lives in Madison, Wis., and is friends with Huck and Konopacki (who also lives in Madison). “He has hammered out this iconic style that, compared to classic op-ed cartoonists, you wouldn’t call artistic. Mike is about language, Gary is going for readable gags, easy to understand right away. He is a branch of op-ed cartoonist, and like other labor cartoonists — none of whom but Gary work full time for a union anymore — he is fighting a fight he will never win in an ever-shrinking field comprised of dying venues.”
So subtlety can’t do.
The UE, which was founded in the 1930s by workers from GE and Westinghouse and RCA, once had a membership of more than 600,000 workers. And though the UE historically has been on the left politically, not everything that Huck draws wins lock-step approval these days. A couple of months ago, for instance, in the wake of the Ferguson, Mo., riots, Huck tweaked Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting of a policeman sitting at the counter of a soda fountain beside a young boy. He made the white child a black child, with hands raised in surrender. That went into the UE News, and Hart said it received some backlash from members. Still, Huck has become a cornerstone of the union.
Part of its culture.
Par for its course.
Huck is 64, with white hair, a white beard and, alternately, the easy jocularity of John Slattery’s Roger Sterling on “Mad Men” and the ranging, evasive eyes of a former ’70s radical. Asked if he’s surprised he’s still employed by a labor union as a cartoonist, he said he doesn’t like to remind them for fear they’ll notice: “There was a time in the ’70s when I thought that any job that wasn’t what I wanted it to be would be selling out. There was a guy I would see (when he lived in Southern California) who delivered mail and got stoned, and I remember thinking he had it all figured out, he was not part of the problem.” He laughed at the thought.
Huck moved from Pittsburgh to Chicago last summer when his wife, Tavia La Follette, joined the theater studies faculty at DePaul University as a visiting professor. They have 5-year-old twin boys, and most weekdays consist of Huck dropping them at school and then coming back to the apartment, reading the paper and drawing new cartoons — most for the UE, some for publications that buy from Huck and Konopacki. On a recent afternoon, he sat at his desk before the computer he uses to draw, wearing Crocs, socks, jeans rolled at the cuffs and a dark Mister Rogers-esque cardigan. His office, in the kitchen, is an arm’s length from the fridge.
At his old office in UE headquarters, he could see Heinz Field across the Allegheny River.
Now his view is the corner of Fargo and Greenview avenues, where he sees “people walking past from the rehabilitation center down the block, people running into one another — cars running into one another, depending on the weather. During that last big storm (in early February) I saw a car get stuck, and two people tried pushing the car out, then one of the people pushing reached in and tried to grab the bag of the woman in the car, who started yelling, which caused everyone outside to start yelling and me headed out the door to help — so in general, I see comings and goings, which is nice, but nothing that has changed my view of humanity.”
Huck grew up in Racine, Wis. His father was a union president and factory tool grinder (“short, big voice, ability to artfully swear”); his mother stopped going to school when she was young because she didn’t own any shoes, he said. Huck was a Marine in the early 1970s, though he was never sent to Vietnam. Instead he was stationed in California, where he drew on the side for underground military newspapers and became interested in the migrant farmworkers movement there. Later, in Wisconsin, he designed T-shirts”), then cartoons for the long-running Racine Labor union newspaper (which closed in 2001), eventually hooking up with Konopacki, who had been drawing for striking newspaper workers.
Said Konopacki: “We cut our teeth as labor cartoonists in the early ’80s during the recession, starting syndication in 1983, two years into the Regan administration, which were not great years (for workers), so people took notice. We were a niche of cartooning, discovering what labor cartooning was as we were doing it. We considered ourselves advocacy journalists, but as it turned out we were carrying on a tradition that went back to the start of the labor movement.” Indeed, Huck replaced Fred Wright, who died in 1984 and whose single-panel, “Dennis the Menace”-like accessibility defined labor cartoons for decades.
In the years since, Konopacki’s labor cartoons remained fairly traditional — full of caricature, broadly cut images and not so different from contemporary op-ed cartoons — but Huck’s gradually adopted the bleaker edge of agitprop and appropriation, silhouettes of hangings and wordless images of prison cells and coffins. Which is tonally appropriate: As recently as a decade ago, the client pool for Huck and Konopacki’s syndicated work was about 300 newspapers and newsletters deep. These days, it’s roughly 100.
“At a union, though, Gary is it, probably the last of his kind forever,” Konopacki said. “When he retires, I doubt he’s replaced, and regardless of what you thought about the history of labor cartoons, that’ll be that.”
For now, Huck’s employed.
Politicians, strikes and CEOS come and go. Rauner’s face (“Silly Putty,” said Huck) is easy to caricature; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (“too bland”) is hard. “I’m confident in my craft at this point,” Huck said. “I follow the flow of ideas, so nothing distracts. I have a computer, a printer, a scanner, all supplied by the union. If someone calls and asks if I have right-to-work cartoons, my question for them is: ‘How many do you need?'”
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