Item #79504 Maryland, My Maryland! Edmond DUFFY.

Maryland, My Maryland!

Item #79504

DUFFY, Edmond. Maryland, My Maryland! [Baltimore: ca. 1931]. Lithographic print, 21_ x 15? inches. Mounted on board. Slightly tanned and foxed. Artist's presentation inscription and limitation statement in lower margin. Very good. One of thirty copies of this dark and dramatic lithographic print depicting the lynching of Matthew Williams in Salisbury, Maryland in 1931. Williams worked as a laborer for a wealthy factory owner, Daniel J. Elliott, in town and was charged with murdering his boss over a wage dispute, although some uncorroborated accounts claim it was Elliott's son who committed the crime and pinned it on Williams. Williams himself had been shot in the altercation and was taken to the hospital, where a mob of over two thousand broke through the doors and forcefully dragged him to the courthouse where he was hanged. His body was then carried into town, doused in gasoline, and burned. The print depicts Williams hanging from a tree with his hospital bandages still around his head. His body is twisted in pain, and in the background a group of small figures stands next to a bonfire raising guns or other objects above their heads. The artist of this piece, Edmund Duffy, was a multiple Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist who often targeted racist groups and hate crimes with his work. A colleague of Duffy's once noted that he had "an immense capacity for hatred, but his hatred [did] not rise to incandescence except when turned on injustice" (Harrison, p. 28). The artist worked for the BALTIMORE SUN and H.L. Mencken between 1925 and 1948 (where his first printed cartoon admonished President Coolidge for his limp response to Klan activities) and is perhaps best known for his editorial cartoons surrounding the Scopes Monkey Trial. The BALTIMORE SUN covered the story of Williams' lynching extensively. Duffy's decision to use the title of Maryland's state song for the title of his depiction of this vicious hate crime as a further indictment of his fellow Marylanders, along with angry comments from Mencken, led to riots and public protests - not against the crime, but against the paper. This copy of MARYLAND, MY MARYLAND is inscribed by Duffy to the novelist Joseph Hergesheimer and dated 1932. Hergesheimer was also a friend of Mencken's whose ornate and elaborate prose garne.

Price: $6,750.00

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