The Dissidents: Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! And Cartoonists!

It’s 1916. President Woodrow Wilson - a deeply divisive authoritarian who is also a white supremacist with open contempt for constitutional rights - sits in the Oval Office. Racial tensions, unprecedented economic inequality, a groundswell of support for unionization, and the rise of both a reactionary far right militia and a growing radical opposition shake the very foundations of American society. A pandemic is two years away. And the 1900s have only just gotten started. “AMERICA IS A COUNTRY ON THE BRINK OF CHAOS.” The Dissidents follows a group of real and influential political cartoonists who worked for the magazine The Masses - Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Cornelia Barns, and others, dominant in their day but now forgotten - as well as a fictional young German immigrant from Cleveland, Joe Hertle, who has come to New York to make his name. They rub elbows with the great opposition voices of the day, such as journalists Max Eastman and John Reed, and the radical provocateur Emma Goldman. What they document in their cartoons and illustrations is a country spiraling into darkness, under attack by German saboteurs and private militias, plagued by racism, and rocked by class war. For the crime of documenting the times they live in, these cartoonists are indicted for sedition and put on trial by the U.S. government - with twenty-year sentences hanging over their heads. Two others are forced to flee the country into exile. Another is incarcerated by the U.S. army and scheduled for execution.