Background
Thomas Aloysius Dorgan was born on April 29, 1877 in the tenement district “south of the slot" in San Francisco, California, United States. He was the son of Thomas and Anna (Tobin) Dorgan.
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Thomas Aloysius Dorgan was born on April 29, 1877 in the tenement district “south of the slot" in San Francisco, California, United States. He was the son of Thomas and Anna (Tobin) Dorgan.
Polytechnic High School teachers Rosey Murdoch and Maria Van Vieck recognized and encouraged Tad's talent as an artist.
At the age of fourteen Dorgan left public school and obtained his first newspaper job in the art department of the San Francisco Bulletin.
Although untutored in drawing, he soon began to produce stinging cartoons of local events and personalities, which resulted in his employment as the comic artist of the Bulletin until 1902.
In that year his graphic talents recommended him to William Randolph Hearst who was seeking a political cartoonist of the Nast type to lampoon Tammany Hall in its conduct of New York City politics.
Dorgan was called to New Y ork to a place on the staff of the New York Journal.
In the mayoralty contest of 1905 Hearst ran against George B. McClellan, who was supported by Charles F. Murphy, the Tammany boss.
Dorgan’s powerful cartoons, depicting Murphy in convict’s stripes, nearly swung the election to Hearst, the Tammany candidate finally winning by the narrowest margin in the history of the office.
This was Dorgan’s only venture into political cartooning.
He turned to sports, became an authority on boxing, and was generally called upon to serve as unofficial referee in no-decision bouts.
Thousands of dollars changed hands on his decisions, which were never disputed.
Between 1900 and 1920 he was at the ringside of every championship boxing match, and dominated the sporting pages of the country with his syndicated sketches and comments signed “Tad”—the initials of his name.
It is said of him that he could sketch from memory any important blow or exchange of blows in the major fights of Corbett, Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, and Johnson.
When Dorgan was thirty years old he took over and developed the comic-strip characters of “Judge Rumhauser” and “Silk Hat Harry. ”
Despite their external resemblance to dogs they were in reality human beings—all too human, in fact, as Tad delineated their mortal frailties.
With a sardonic flick of his pen Tad could puncture hypocrisy and pretense, but the necessity of tickling a daily audience, without giving offense, hampered the exercise of his rapier gift.
His chief contribution to American life was his colorful use of slang, a large part of which he coined or put into circulation.
“Yes, we have no bananas, ” “23, skidoo, ” “Officer, call a cop, ” and “Let him up, he’s all cut, ” are a few of the meaningless but irresistible phrases of his invention.
“The first hundred years are the hardest, ” has passed into proverbial usage, while dozens of his shorter expressions have become an integral part of common speech.
“Apple-sauce” means obvious flattery; “chin-music” is idle chatter.
A hat was a “skimmer, ” shoes were “dogs, ” and a stingy person a “nickel-nurscr”—first to Tad and afterward to millions of his contemporaries.
Probably his best-known simile was “As busy as a one-armed paper-hanger with the hives. ”
For the last ten years of his life a chronically bad heart kept Dorgan a house-ridden invalid.
With a tremendous effort of will, yet with no apparent diminution of power, he continued to turn out his daily copy, keeping in touch with the sporting world by means of radio and the visits of faithful friends.
Personally, Dorgan was of a misanthropic, anti-social cast; had he taken the button off his foil he could have ranked just below Hogarth and Daumier as a graphic satirist.
