The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism, by Sue Coe and Stephen F. Eisenman. New York: OR Books, 2025. 190pp, $22.95
When I eyeball the work of Sue Coe, the highly awarded radical illustrator, painter and lithographer, what comes to my mind is a forgotten 1935 book, Karl Marx in Lithographs, by Hugo Gellert.
Review by Paul Buhle.
From Comrade Gulliver by Hugo Gellert
There’s a good reason, if also personal. I went to interview Gellert in New Jersey, in 1984, and found the 91-year-old artist voluble in memories of The Masses magazine—he had long since been the only surviving staffer of any kind. The radical modernist experiment in words and pictures reached wide audiences before it was suppressed, for opposing the US entry into the First World War.
To extend this story a little before turning to the book at hand, the Hungarian-American Gellert traveled back through a Hungary amidst revolution and counter-revolution. He subsequently became a leading artistic antifascist, a collaborator with Communists in art and politics. Karl Marx in Lithographs is easily his most didactic work.* Here, Capital rules ruthlessly, murderously, in iconography that reminds us, in turn, of some of Sue Coe’s favorites, notably Francisco Goya, not to mention a favorite contemporary of Gellert, Kathe Kollwitz.
The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
Cue, Sue Coe. Growing up in the English countryside, so close to a hog butchery that she could hear the screams of the animals being slaughtered and smell the process, Coe took an art degree and emigrated to New York City at the dawn of the 1970s. It would be a mistake, as more than one friendly critic has noted, to see any of Coe’s work as far from the experience of animals at large, animals mostly endangered by ruthless, mechanized human activity. Sometimes—rarely—animals of all kinds are seen in a utopian future, reconciled with a better humanity and highlighted by children. This is clearly her idea of the classless socialistic society.
The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
Hugely successful and widely admired in a variety of art forms, she has very often published in World War 3 Illustrated, the annual lefty anthology best known for bringing forth young radical artists. Coe even provided the vivid image of an African-American worker as the frontispiece of Wobblies! A Centennial History of the Industrial Workers of the World, the 2005 anthology that started my own later-life project of radical comics
Coe calls herself a activist artist, and for good reason. Meat-packing has been high on her list, but factory farming, the hyper-exploitation of immigrants and victims of the prison-industrial complex, the curse of AIDS and, very often, war in its various grisly forms can be seen. She does not want us to turn away from the horrible.
The Birth of Fascism (2017) by Sue Coe.
The Birth of Fascism (2017) might be viewed as the precursor to The Young Person’s Guide, and a handful of her art on Trump specifically from that period, is on view again here. The interpretive essays by Stephen F. Eisenman, retired professor and art historian, also columnist for Counterpunch, offers a fresh element of collaboration. Eisenman is nothing if not didactic: he explains that US democracy has never been all that democratic, despite endless narcissistic claims, but that fascism is much, much worse. The undercurrent of “racial fascism” never really disappeared from the mainstream, and the pseudo-scientific American theories of race superiority found a welcome home in Hitler’s Germany.
The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
A reviewer earlier this year, in the London Morning Star (formerly the Daily Worker), praised The Young Person’s Guide but posed the problem of the “melodrama” in the artist’s work, what he called “the exaggerated emotional effect …..[of] focusing on grief pain and suffering.” In the critic’s view, this tendency somewhat diminished Coe’s impact, as has the common place alternative in Left art, an exaggerated sentimentality. Each extreme, according to the critic, tends to emphasize “feeling” over understanding and serve the reader poorly.
The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
This is criticism-among-comrades that continues a discussion going back well over a century. Socialistic best-sellers on the page, in theater and in film achieve an emotional pitch that is not likely to be cerebral, nuanced or even necessarily in line with modernism. Popular audiences are unapologetically sentimental, even if they enjoy pratfalls, especially in ridicule of the wealthy classes.
The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
Without saying so, Coe meets this criticism head on, in the traditions of angry audiences turning their rage upon the villains in the pay of the ruling class. Weapons makers dance over the pyramids of corpses, a chorus line of skull-headed dancers carries on beneath boots squashing a hapless victim. Trump appears again and again, a monster, trophy hunter of infants, assaulting the embodiment of the Statue of Liberty, and so on. The images of death and destruction, lined up one after another in the book, are demanding: LOOK!
And that, surely, is Coe’s point. Eisenman insists properly that she mixes mythic and contemporary images, adopting the role of a reporter of current events, while also the fine artist widely seen in museum and other public exhibits.
*My interview with Gellert is in the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University’s Tamiment Library collection.
