"Swear!"
Kirby's recurring 'Mr. Dry', a top-hatted figure with an umbrella labelled 'Anti Saloon League' that stood for all prohibitionists, clasps hands with a hooded Ku Klux Klan member holding a whip before a burning cross. The drawing moves the Klan's stigma onto the League by showing a sworn alliance; historian Thomas Pegram describes the actual relationship as informal ties between some League officials and local Klans, while League activists at the time denied involvement with Klan vigilantism.
Propaganda techniques used in this cartoon
- Date
- November 11, 1923
- Period
- Interwar
- Made by
- Rollin Kirby (cartoonist, New York World)
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Themes, Event, Source, Rights
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Cartoon
- Issuer type
- Media
- Regime
- Coolidge Administration
- Leader
- Calvin Coolidge
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Persuade or win support
- Themes
- Elections and party politics, Race and ethnicity
- Event
- US Prohibition
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Library of Congress, retrieved September 27, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (1923 work by Rollin Kirby, d. 1952; LoC: no known restrictions)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Text on the object
Original (English) · read from the image, not independently checked
ANTI SALOON LEAGUE KU KLUX "SWEAR!" Sunday 11th Nov. 1923 [illegible — additional handwritten scheduling note] [illegible — handwritten notes, left margin]
'ANTI SALOON LEAGUE' runs down 'Mr. Dry's' coat sash; 'KU KLUX' appears on the hooded figure's robe front (the full 'KU KLUX KLAN' is implied but only these two words are legible). The title '"SWEAR!"' and a date are lettered below the drawing; faint cursive production notes in the lower-left margin and the artist's signature at lower right are too small to transcribe reliably.
