Wright, Fred

WRIGHT, FRED (1907–1984). The leading labor-Left cartoonist of the 1940s–1970s, Fred Wright was the most universally reprinted artist after Art Young. As labor caricature, his work heralded the abandonment of the symbolic proletarian muscular giant in favor of a workaday Joe (or Jane) fighting back against inflation, automation, and employer attacks.

Wright was born in Derby, England, descendant of many generations of wheelwrights. Emigrating to America with his family, he first learned drawing from his grandfather, an amateur artist and a striper in automobile factories. In his late teens, Fred became a professional saxophone player, in resorts and in New York “clip joints.” During the late 1920s, still interested in drawing, he attended classes at the New York Art Students League, where he first met radicals. The Depression truly radicalized him, and on board ship—where he had gone to work as a musician—he came into close contact with organizers of the National Maritime Union (NMU). Wright drew his first published labor cartoon in 1936 and began drawing regularly for the first time in the NMU organ, the Pilot, and then for an army base newspaper during World War II. He returned afterward as a staff artist of the Pilot, and his work was widely reprinted in the labor press—until the rightward-turning NMU chiefs insisted that he draw Communists as rats.

Tempted to return to a musician’s life, Wright chose instead to join UE News. There he came into his own. His Art Young-type philosophical approach to the difficulties of modern existence transcended socialist and class clichés without, however, losing the basic points of unfairness and exploitation. Over the years, he believed, his style became simpler, with more frequent use of old gags in new dress. His weekly cartoons filled several anthologies, the largest, So Long, Partner! (1975). He was more widely reprinted in Europe—he was especially beloved in Italy and England—than any U.S. labor-radical artist since Young. He contributed a campaign satire called Goldwater Coloring Book (1964), several experiments with early animated films, and labor’s first series of anti–Vietnam War cartoons of the 1960s. At his death, he was at work on a cartoon history of the industrial revolution.

“U.E. Mourns Fred Wright.” UE News, 14 January 1985.

Wright, Fred. Interview. Oral History of the American Left. Tamiment Library, New York University.

Guide to the Fred Wright Papers, 1949-1986. UE.13. ULS Digital Collections, University of Pittsburgh. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ue13