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Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
"DO IT" FOR YOUR COUNTRY WALT KUHN. "Race by Suicide, T. R." Pen and ink with pencil on paper. 210x421 mm; 8 1/4x16 3/4 inches, image. Signed in image, lower right. Matted and framed. Verso contains stamps from Illustration House, Inc. South Norwalk CT and that of the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA. to whom it was loaned for their 1988 exhibition "Masters of the Pen." Circa 1905.
Kuhn made his living as an illustrator and cartoonist prior to his becoming known as an important American modernist painter. This political cartoon showing haughty pelicans holding a scroll that says "Race by Suicide" to a nervous female bird refers to Theodore Roosevelt's speech "On American Motherhood." In it, he expressed his fear of rising white American infertility and that the use of birth control or failure to keep up with the birth rate of ethnic minorities was to risk "race suicide." Pressure was put upon white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women to procreate because birth control was considered unpatriotic.
