Fred Wright

• Name — Fred Wright • Born — 24 June 1907 • Birthplace — Derby, England • Died — 29 December 1984 • Occupation — cartoonist • Years Active — 1939–1984

Wright was born in June 1907 in Derby, England. As a young child, he emigrated with his family to the U.S. He learned to draw from his grandfather, an amateur artist who worked as a striper in automobile factories. During his late teenage years, Wright began to play saxophone professionally in clip joints and resorts. He also took courses at the Art Students League of New York from the socialist painter John Sloan, whose work often depicted poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods. According to Paul Buhle, Wright was "truly radicalized" by the Great Depression. While working as a saxophonist on cruise ships in the Caribbean, he met National Maritime Union (NMU) organizers who taught him a labor-oriented worldview. He was said to have been affected by "the deplorable conditions and injustices he observed in the West Indian colonies".

Wright sold his first cartoon in 1936, and soon thereafter regularly had his work published in NMU's newspaper, The Pilot. During World War II, he drew cartoons for the U.S. Army. After being hired as the UE staff cartoonist in 1949, Wright developed the cartooning style he is best known for. In Paul Buhle's characterization, Wright's work "heralded the abandonment of the symbolic proletarian muscular giant in favor of a more workaday Joe (or Jane) fighting back against inflation, automation, and employer attacks", while his "Art Young-type philosophical approach to the difficulties of modern existence transcended socialist and class clichés without... losing... basic points of unfairness and exploitation." In a book about post-WWII satire in the U.S., Stephen Kercher said that Wright Besides appearing frequently in UE's newspaper, the UE News, Wright's cartoons were printed on occasion in leftist publications such as the National Guardian and Monthly Review. Over the decades, Wright's cartoons and caricatures were collected in anthologies published by the UE. He also penned a presidential campaign satire, The Goldwater Coloring Book, which came out during the run-up to the 1964 U.S. presidential election. He experimented with early animated films, and created labor's first anti-Vietnam War cartoons in the 1960s. As an instance of his union cartooning, he assisted a May 1982 strike by electrical workers at the UE-represented Morse Cutting Tools plant in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The plant was owned by Gulf and Western Industries. According to The New York Times, "New Bedford shops were papered with posters by Fred Wright.... The posters depicted Morse as a cow being milked by Gulf & Western."

Wright died of cancer on December 29, 1984. At the time, he was creating a cartoon history of the Industrial Revolution.

* • Co-authored with William Cahn. * * * *

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