The Daily Universe celebrates 50 years

“I see the role of an editorial cartoon to be a cattle prod for discussion,” said Steve Benson, a political cartoonist at The Daily Universe in the mid-1970s. “What is unique about American society is that we have a very rumble-tumble, aggressive and exuberant forum in which we can, on a daily basis, express our views and that forum is the editorial page of hundreds of newspapers around the country.”

Benson, a Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist who currently works at The Arizona Republic, said a person can tell how free a society is by how that society treats its artists. In America, he said, the cartooning profession is robust, energetic and healthy.

“The role of cartoonists is not so much to answer questions as to draw people out and into the arena and get them to debate,” he said. “And cartoons often times are the jolt that gets the discussion going.”

Benson said Calvin Grondahl, a former Daily Universe political cartoonist who currently works for Ogden’s Standard Examiner, said it right when he said, “Editorial cartoonists throw the first punch in the bar fight and then stand back and watch everybody else join in.”

“In fact, it’s quite messy, but that’s the price you pay for free speech,” he said.

Benson said how well the editorial cartoonists are doing reflects the state of free speech in the nation.

He said that is the job of the editorial cartoonist: “To throw ink and raise a stink.”

Unlike in past years when The Daily Universe’s cartoons were created by its own political cartoonists, such as Benson, today the two political cartoons on the opinion page are usually pulled from a wire service.

“Every once in a while we’ll have a student who will submit something,” said Nathan Moulton, current Daily Universe opinion page editor. “We like to do that when there is some BYU issue that they can draw about to make it a little more local.”

In the late 1970s, Pat Bagley did just that.

“I was sitting in a class and was just bored stiff and started to doodle in my class notes,” said Bagley, BYU alumnus and current political cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune.

He said he got an idea for a cartoon about discrimination in BYU’s gender-segregated housing, a big issue in the 1970s under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which prohibits gender discrimination by public and private institutions of higher education.

Bagley’s idea for the cartoon went from a quick sketch, to a finished copy in The Daily Universe, to being printed in Time magazine, after a stringer sent the cartoon with the story on the issue.

Bagley said the issues addressed in the newspaper in the 1970s directly related to BYU.

“You always write about what you know, so doing cartoons about BYU got a lot of attention,” Bagley said. “They [students] might not care what is going on in places like Uzbekistan, but they really do care about what was happening – on the grass, on the quad – stuff like that.”

Since being at BYU, Bagley’s career has led him to not only be The Salt Lake Tribune’s political cartoonist, but to be, he said, the only political cartoonist he knows who has been published both in the New Era and Playboy magazine.

While at BYU, Bagley did a political cartoon at BYU on the issue of women’s dress. In the 1970s, women were required to wear skirts.

After trying to take a test and being turned away for wearing pants at the testing center, a woman went into the bathroom, took off her pants and buttoned up her long coat so it looked like she had a skirt on. Testing center employees let her in without her pants on. The woman wrote a letter to the editor about her experience.

Daryl Gibson, who was editor in chief at the time, said, “Soon after that [running the letter and cartoon in the paper], they allowed it – they allowed women to wear pants on campus. I really think that was part of it.”

Benson said the editorial cartoons were often at the center of campus controversies, questions and debates.

“We had the serious and then we had the lighthearted,” he said. “We had the ‘bada boom bada bing’ co-ed joke stuff and typical sophomoric campus humor.”

He said some of the issues addressed in The Daily Universe in the 1970s ranged from hunting season, a controversy over the reasons for killing animals, to developments in Provo, such as widening Provo Canyon Road; from public praying over food in the Cougareat to the John Singer case, where a polygamist was shot after police tried to arrest him for a conflict over the schooling of his children; from student elections, where the winners had only run for fun and bowed out after being elected, to dress code issues, such as when Neil Diamond came to campus and was allowed to perform despite his hair not being in compliance with BYU’s standard.

Benson said the paper addressed issues in such a way that it was a paper “to be reckoned with.” He said the staff wanted to “get the din level up,” and stimulate the students to open the paper.

“It’s what they call in traffic accidents…the rubber necking syndrome,” he said. “A lot of people don’t like accidents, but everybody slows down to look at them and whether you like the cartoon or not – whether you agreed with it or not – at least we got readers to rubberneck. We got them to slow down.”

He said through his cartoons he worked to raise not only the level of consciousness but to energize the level of discussion, contribution and argument.

“We’re not like court jesters who come in and sing and dance and do a comedy act to keep the king and queen,” he said. “There’s a purpose to our humor.”

He said on the days the cartoons ran, the Daily Universe boxes emptied quickly.

Benson attributes the success to an aggressive news staff.

“I really enjoyed getting up and going to work at the Daily Universe,” Benson said. “It was infectious; it got in my blood. I was permanently and irreparably infected at BYU.”

Nelson Wadsworth, the executive editor and faculty advisor, of The Daily Universe in the late 1970s, said the students during that decade were unafraid to address issues.

He said he has a folder labeled “Cans of Worms” with controversial issues that appeared in The Daily Universe while he was at BYU.

“I’ll tell you, I was in hot water at BYU from the day I arrived on campus to the day I left,” he said. “I’m not one to avoid controversy and I was constantly in the heat.”

Wadsworth said the political cartoonists worked as a team with the editorial board, which met each day to discuss what to do for the newspaper the next day.

“If you look at the Daily Universe during that year that Bagley and Benson were there,” Wadsworth said, “it was the most lively Daily Universe ever probably.”

Neil Diamond’s Hair:

“It was just a big tempest in a teapot,” Benson said. Several papers covered the story and Benson said Diamond appeared anyway with his “big, poofy hair-do.” Benson said at the concert, Diamond took out a newspaper clipping and read about the big controversy.

“He looked out at the audience and he said, ‘It’s not what’s on your head, but in your head that counts,’” Benson said. “Then he threw the newspaper article behind his head and the crowd just erupted in cheers.”

The student officers on the front row were clapping and cheering as well, Benson said, which created a controversy because the officers weren’t supporting the university’s standard.

For more Bagley and Benson cartoons:

To fund a trip to a national journalist convention in New York City, Benson and Bagley compiled several cartoons they’d done and published a book called, “I am appalled…: a collection of Daily Universe cartoons.” They sold enough copies on campus to send not just one representative but a whole delegation to the national convention in New York City. The book is available in the HBLL.

Copyright Brigham Young University 22 Nov 2005