William Allen Rogers
Introduction '''William Allen Rogers''' (1854–1931) was an American political cartoonist born in Springfield, Ohio.
Biography He studied at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Wittenberg College, but never graduated. Rogers taught himself to draw and began submitting political cartoons to Midwestern newspapers in his teens. At the age of fourteen, his first cartoons appeared in a Dayton, Ohio-based newspaper, to which Rogers' mother had earlier submitted a selection of his sketches.The start of Rogers' career as an illustrator came in 1873 when he was hired by the ''Daily Graphic'' in New York. He was nineteen years old at the time. Rogers' job at the ''Daily Graphic'' was to help out with the news sketches and at times draw cartoons.In 1877, he was hired by ''Harper's Weekly'' to draw the magazine's political cartoons after the departure of Thomas Nast. The cartoons were dramatic adjuncts that illustrated the magazine's editorials. Walt Reed, author of ''The Illustrator in America: 1860-2000'', writes that while Rogers cartoons "never quite approached Nast's in power, his ideas were strongly presented and his drawings somewhat more skillful." Rogers remained at ''Harper's Weekly'' for twenty-five years, and lived in St. George, Staten Island.After leaving ''Harper's Weekly'', Rogers was hired by the ''New York Herald'', where he drew cartoons daily for a total of twenty years. He occasionally worked for ''Life'' too, and submitted cartoons and illustrations for ''Puck'', ''The Century Magazine'', and ''St. Nicholas Magazine''.Rogers retired as a cartoonist in 1926 while working for the ''Washington Post''. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1931.
Gallery File:William Allen Rogers - Only the Navy Can Stop This (WWI U.S. Navy recruitment poster).jpg|World War I United States Navy recruitment poster using one of Rogers's cartoons for the ''New York Herald''.File:GreatSealPress1878.jpg|George Bartle, who was the seal caretaker from 1852–99, for the March 1878 Harper’s MagazineFile:Great White Fleet return2.jpg|"Return of the Great White Fleet". The cartoon appeared in the ''New York Herald'' on February 22, 1909Image:Tr-bigstick-cartoon.JPG|1904 cartoon recreates the Big Stick Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt as an episode in ''Gulliver's Travels''
References
External links  * * * Drawing from Life at Smithsonian Libraries*