Boxer Dogs Playing Poker
Cassius Marcellus Clay, the wry commercial artist who gave the world dogs playing poker, was born in upstate New York in 1844. He was named after the abolitionist Quaker,Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, one of the most eloquent anti-slavery politicians of the antebellum South, Kentucky Sen.
The young Quaker draftsman, known to friends and family as Cash, received no formal art education, but was placing sketches in his local newspaper by the time he was 20. He published a drawing in Harper’s Weekly in 1878, composed an opera about the New Jersey mosquito epidemic of 1881, and invented what he called “comic foregrounds,” those placards of headless musclemen and bathing beauties tourists like to prop their own heads above, to be photographed. All this while holding down a startling variety of day jobs in banking, education, and journalism.
In 1903, Coolidge was commissioned to produce a series of humorous paintings for the Brown & Bigelow Company, a purveyor of advertising calendars. His favorite subjects were large dogs like mastiffs, collies, Great Danes, and St. Bernards doing things only people can do. In nine of the 16 pictures, they drink bootleg whiskey and beer, smoke cigars or fusty meerschaum pipes, and avidly play five-card draw. A typical scene has them sitting in a comfortable den around the green felt top of a card table. A shaded lamp centered above them casts the scene’s only light. According to the grandfather clock in one of the dens, it’s 1:10 in the morning.
To a dog, Calvin Coolidge poker players are upper-middle-class magistrates and attorneys and men of affairs. The only females in the series are a couple of beagles that utilize their unrolled umbrellas to break apart a game in “Sitting Up With a Sick Friend”, and a lascivious black poodle dog presenting a tray of beverages in an unpublished version on “A Bold Bluff.”
The house paintings portray a good deal the indistinguishable poker and sexual politics that Tennessee Williams embellished more darkly in A Streetcar Named Desire, first brought out in 1947. Set in a New Orleans tenement to the tenors of a tinny blues piano, the play is a world in which men drink, holler, smoke, and play poker. (The Poker Night, in fact, personified Williams’ working title.) Except for one valet de chambre, Mitch, they all comport suchlike dogs–as in, “You dog, you.” The primary female personas are the bitchily insecure enchantress Blanche DuBois and her pregnant tenderer sister, Stella Kowalski. In either event, their game is to domesticate the bad dogs.
But contrary to Stanley Kowalski, thrusting his sinewy weight around in the 1st wife-beater T-shirt, Coolidges dogs are emasculated from the same cloth as Harry S Truman, the uxoriously conservative Kansas Town haberdasher who advanced on to become a magistrate and, by the time Streetcar opened, our most main line Chief Executive. The dogs don either flannel suits or handsome leather collars.
A teentsy lager or scotch was took in, his memoirist secerns us, prohibition era notwithstanding. For the overmastering majority of men it had been a pastime rather than a formula to make hard currency, although winning always trumped the hell out of losing. Even the apparent cheating of Coolidges A crony in need, in which a English bulldog passes the ace of clubs under the table to a scrapper holding the 3 additional aces, is more than an ironic relation to the riverboat sharping of old than to anything these dogs would continually recur to while playing against one another.
Poker nights had comprised and circled on the calendars by solid male voters since 1875, the same year a New York Times editorialist felt arrived at the conclusion the national game Is not base-ball, but poker. By the change state of the century, the United States Printing Company, a purveyor of playing cards, had put together the 1st set of consistent rules for draw poker and mailed them to card clubs and newspapers round the country.
