Silverton's Favorite Son
Three of our town's murals are directly or indirectly related to Silverton's most famous resident. At the turn of the century, America's most influential political cartoonist was Homer Davenport. And his legacy is remembered in the town's annual festival, "Homer Davenport Days". Working at the Hearst papers, he helped expose some of the great scandals of the day, covered presidential elections and the sinking of the Titanic , and was so popular and valued that he was for a time paid as much as the US president. Ultimately, Davenport’s work became so well recognized for skewering political figures he considered corrupt, that his opponents attempted to pass a law banning political cartoons. The bill, introduced in the New York State Senate with the prodding of U.S. Senator Thomas Platt ,did not pass, but the effort inspired Davenport to create one of his most famous works: “No Honest Man Need Fear Cartoons." shown above. Behind Platt is Boss Tweed, exposed in the Tammany Hall scandals a generation earlier by Thomas Nast, an inspiration of both Davenport and his mother, who became enamored of the cartoonist's work while pregnant with Homer, and resolved that her son would follow in the man's footsteps.
His memoir "The Country Boy", though poorly circulated, was compared to Twain's as americana. And he remained a simple country boy at heart, though he became a close friend of William Randolph Hearst and made his career in cities like Portland, San Francisco and New York. It is perhaps his yearning for his Willamette Valley roots that endears him to his hometown as much as does his fame.
Davenport is remembered not just by political cartoons in American History books, but also by horse enthusiasts, as he brought some of the first Arabian Horses to the United States via a "Lawrence of Arabia"-worthy adventure to the middle east. But that story's for another day (and blog, as it has its own mural.)
Davenport was an enthusiastic supporter of Teddy Roosevelt and left the Hearst Papers for a time to support his campaign. The party considered him worth $1000 a week ( in 1904!), and then spent $200,000 to circulate the cartoon of Uncle Sam endorsing T.R. below, considered the largest vote-getting cartoon in the history of American Politics.
Mateo and I recently got back from a trip to central California, Sarah's family's ancestral homeland and the location of Mateo's first Patriots Game! We'll chronicle the adventure in the next couple of blogs....
