Rollin Kirby's cartoon "Swear!", dated 11 November 1923, shows his prohibitionist figure Mr. Dry, lettered "Anti Saloon League," clasping hands with a hooded Klansman before a burning cross. Library of Congress.
What the drawing shows
Two figures grip hands. One is Kirby's Mr. Dry: top hat, umbrella, and the league's name lettered on him (the archive's transcription note places it on his coat sash). The other is a hooded Klansman with a whip. A cross burns behind them. The words on the sheet are labels and a single command, plus a handwritten date.
ANTI
SALOON
LEAGUE
KU KLUX
"SWEAR!"
Sunday 11th Nov. 1923
Who drew it
Rollin Kirby, cartoonist for the New York World, drew the sheet; the handwritten date reads Sunday, 11 November 1923. The Library of Congress holds it as item 2016682737 with no known restrictions. The archive retrieved it on 27 September 2026 and records it as public domain, Kirby having died in 1952.
How to read it
Mr. Dry was Kirby's stand-in for prohibitionists in general, and here he swears an oath with the Klan. The cartoon's method is guilt by association: the league's opponents did not need to prove anything about its policies if they could put it in a hood's company. The archive record cites the historian Thomas Pegram, who describes the actual connection as informal ties between some league officials and local Klans, and notes that league activists of the time denied any part in Klan vigilantism. The drawing shows a sworn alliance. The evidence the record cites shows something looser.
A newspaper cartoon mocking a powerful lobby is the press doing its job, and Kirby had every right to draw it. By 1923 the Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, was in force, and the league that had campaigned for it was not a weak target. Still, an overstatement is an overstatement, whatever one thinks of Prohibition. The fair reading keeps both points: the league was fair game, and the handshake went further than the record does.
The case study A hooded order paid its salesmen by the head cites this cartoon. The wider fight over liquor is read in The liquor fight was mostly signed in public.
Sources
- FRAME object record, "Swear!", 11 November 1923. Rollin Kirby (cartoonist, New York World). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, retrieved by the archive 27 September 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (1923 work by Rollin Kirby, d. 1952; no known restrictions).
