Walker, Ryan

WALKER, RYAN (1870-1932). One of the most beloved comic artists of the pre-1920 Socialist Party, Walker won the praise of Eugene Debs and others for his rebellious spirit and his art. He is remembered mainly for “Henry Dubb,” a politically backward worker and the spiritual cousin to the “Mr. Block” character in the IWW press.

Born in Springfield, Kentucky, Walker moved with his parents to Kansas City, Missouri, and submitted his first cartoon for publication to the satirical publication Judge in 1883. He traveled to New York a few years later to attend the Art Students League school, then full of radical teachers and students, and found regular work as an artist in 1895, rising to political cartoonist at the Kansas City Times in 1998. He moved East, worked at the Boston Globe, then freelanced and joined the International Syndicate as a cartoonist in 1904. He resigned to become a socialist cartoonist full-time.

Ryan had already begun contributing to the Appeal to Reason and added his work to the Comrade in the first years of the new century. At the Appeal, he developed the character who, enlightened after his own stupidity, would declare in the final panel. “I’m the Henry Dubb!” Two little volumes of his collected Dubb stories appeared in 1914-1915. Meanwhile, he became a touring lecturer for the Socialist Party, famed for his use of cartoons to explain issues to audiences. His published volumes in these years included The Red Portfolio: Cartoons for Socialism (1913), an appealing anthology of cartoons, most of them by himself or Art Young, with a fond and lively introduction by Debs himself.

Ryan joined the Party’s Lyceum Bureau in 1915-1916 for the coming campaign, then returned to the Appeal until its swing rightward, in support of the World War I. In the general collapse of the Socialist Party following the Russian Revolution and the Red Scare, he worked at New York’s Evening Graphic as Director of the Art Department, and meanwhile contributed to the English-language daily New York Call, succeeded by the New Leader.

The Great Depression found him in the Communist Party and the John Reed Club, by 1930 a cartoonist for The Daily Worker, with a new and less whimsical character, Bill Worker. On a visit to the Soviet Union, Walker took sick and did not recover. He died at the Rotkinsky Hospital in Moscow.

Flower, B.O. “Ryan Walker: A Cartoonist of Political Protest.” The Arena. 33(April 1905), pp. 392-405. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/190501FlowerRyanwalker/page/n7/mode/2up

“Ryan Walker’s Life and Work Built Around Struggles of American Labor—Revolutionary Artist Was Known to Thousands of US Workers.” Daily Worker, June 25, 1932.