Fred Wright

Fred Wright (June 24, 1907 – December 29, 1984) was an American labor cartoonist who created thousands of illustrated news strips, along with posters, leaflets, and strike placards, while working for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). He started getting his cartoons published in the late 1930s in the National Maritime Union newspaper, The Pilot. In 1949 the UE hired him as its staff cartoonist, and he remained with the UE until his death in 1984. 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 was said to have been affected by "the deplorable conditions and injustices he observed in the West Indian colonies".

Cartoonist Wright sold his first cartoon in 1936, and soon thereafter regularly had his work published in NMU's newspaper, The Pilot.

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." 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.

Death Wright died of cancer on December 29, 1984. At the time, he was creating a cartoon history of the Industrial Revolution. In 1989, John Nichols of The Blade described Wright as the "father of modern labor cartooning". Buhle labeled Wright the second-most widely published labor cartoonist after Art Young.

Works

Co-authored with William Cahn.