About The Wasp

The Wasp

The Wasp was an American weekly satirical magazine published in San Francisco, California, from 5 August 1876 to 25 April 1941 — a sixty-five-year run under a succession of names that included The Illustrated Wasp, The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, The Wasp News-Letter and the San Francisco News-Letter Wasp. It was the West Coast's answer to the New York humour weeklies, distinguished by its pioneering use of colour lithography and by the editorship, from 1881 to 1885, of Ambrose Bierce, whose column "Prattle" and whose satirical definitions — later collected as The Devil's Dictionary — first reached readers in its pages.

The Wasp is remembered today in two registers at once: as a technically innovative and often brilliant vehicle of political satire aimed at railroad monopolists and corrupt politicians, and as a source of some of the most notorious anti-Chinese cartoons in American print, images now routinely cited in studies of nineteenth-century racism.

The Korbel Brothers and the First Issue, 1876

The Wasp was founded in 1876 by Francis Korbel, a Bohemian expatriate, and his two brothers — the same family that founded the Korbel Champagne Cellars in Sonoma County. The first issue appeared on 5 August 1876. The Korbels brought to journalism an unusual technical asset: before publishing, they had manufactured labelled cigar boxes, and in that trade they had mastered the mass production of colour lithographs. At a time when most American periodicals were printed in black and white, The Wasp could offer lavish chromolithographed cartoons, a visual richness that, as the Darwin Correspondence Project has noted, it shared with the better-known New York magazine Puck, which it resembled in blending political comment with humour.

The magazine's title promised a sting, and its temper lived up to it: San Francisco journalism of the era was famously personal and combative, conducted in a small, homogeneous city where editors were expected to fight for their opinions in print. The Wasp's first lead artist, George Frederick Keller, served until 1883 and produced the cartoons on which much of its reputation — good and bad — rests.

A Succession of Names

The magazine's long life can be traced through its title changes, catalogued by bibliographer Edward E. Chielens. It began as The Wasp (August 1876–January 1877), became The Illustrated Wasp (January–September 1877), then The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp (September 1877–December 1880). It reverted to The Wasp from December 1880 to October 1895 — the title under which its most famous work appeared — then appeared as The Wasp: The Illustrated Weekly of the Pacific Coast (1895–1897) and The Wasp: A Journal of Illustration and Comment (1897–1928). Its final decades ran as The Wasp News-Letter (1928–1935) and the San Francisco News-Letter Wasp (1935–1941), reflecting a merger with San Francisco's venerable News Letter.

The Bierce Editorship, 1881–1885

In 1881 the magazine was sold — in secret, according to the standard accounts — to Charles Webb Howard, who installed Edward C. Macfarlane as publisher and hired Ambrose Bierce as editor. Bierce served from 1 January 1881 until 11 September 1885. A Civil War veteran whose bitterness had been honed in London and San Francisco journalism, Bierce made The Wasp his platform: he revived his column "Prattle," a weekly barrage against the targets of his contempt, and serialised in its pages many of the mock dictionary definitions that he later gathered into The Devil's Dictionary, the classic of American satirical literature.

Under Bierce, The Wasp waged verbal war on the railroad tycoons he regarded as public enemies and indictable criminals — above all the Southern Pacific interests of Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker. He also attacked Oscar Wilde in "Prattle" during Wilde's 1882 San Francisco visit, a famous literary feud preserved in Bierce scholarship. When Bierce left in 1885, he carried "Prattle" to William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner from 1886 onward, but his Wasp years remain the crucible of his mature style.

Keller's Cartoons and the Railroad Octopus

George Frederick Keller's cartoons gave The Wasp its visual identity. Among the most reproduced is "The Curse of California" (1882), which depicted the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly as an octopus gripping the state's industries — an image that entered the permanent iconography of American anti-monopoly politics. Other Keller cartoons addressed the Mussel Slough tragedy of 1881, in which settlers died in a dispute with the railroad, showing Crocker and Stanford as robbers of their victims; and the visit of Oscar Wilde in 1882. Keller's final cartoon appeared on 30 June 1883, after which, in the words of the magazine's historian, he left the San Francisco area and was never heard from again.

Later artists continued the cartoon tradition: the magazine commented in images on Hawaii's Bayonet Constitution of 1887, showing King Kalakaua toppled, on rival powers contesting the islands, and, in 1892, on organised labour painted as murderers. Richard Samuel West's The San Francisco Wasp: An Illustrated History (2004) catalogued this visual record, and the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco has exhibited a selection of more than fifty Wasp cartoons, with West as guest curator.

The Anti-Chinese Cartoons and Their Legacy

No honest history of The Wasp can omit its ugliest pages. Published in a city where the "Chinese question" dominated politics — amid Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party agitation and the congressional drive toward the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the magazine's cartoons traded in gross racial caricature: Chinese immigrants depicted as rat-like invaders, as in Keller's November 1881 image proposing a mock Statue of Liberty for San Francisco harbour in the form of a stereotyped Chinese man with an opium pipe and rats at his feet; "What Shall We Do with Our Boys?" (1882), blaming Chinese workers for white unemployment; and "The Three Troublesome Children" (December 1881), in which Columbia struggles with caricatured Chinese, Mormon and Native American figures.

Scholar Nicholas Sean Hall's 2013 study in California History analysed these images as central documents of the anti-Chinese movement in the American West, and Wasp cartoons are now frequently reproduced in Asian American educational and anti-defamation materials as examples of early stereotyping of Chinese immigrants. The same colour-lithograph craft that made the magazine famous made its prejudices unusually vivid and durable — a fact modern exhibitions and scholarship confront directly rather than excuse.

Satire, Circulation and Influence in the West

At its nineteenth-century height The Wasp had nearly 10,000 subscribers, and contemporary evidence suggests it believed itself — with some reason — a prominent cultural arbiter and source of social criticism in the American West. Its targets spanned the region's life: greedy San Francisco rail magnates, corrupt federal politicians, religious movements, labour organisations and visiting celebrities. Like its eastern models it treated Darwin with hostility in its cartoons, even though Bierce himself admired Darwin's intellectual achievements.

The magazine also claimed political scalps. In Keller's 1882 cartoon "Siesta," a muse of the illustrated press lulls the era's troubles to sleep while a skeleton donkey wears Denis Kearney's trademark hat on a sword hilt, annotated "Killed by the Wasp" — the magazine taking credit for the undoing of Kearney and his Workingmen's Party.

The Long Final Decades, 1895–1941

After 1895 The Wasp continued as an illustrated weekly of the Pacific Coast, and from 1897 under the more sober subtitle "A Journal of Illustration and Comment" — a title it kept for thirty-one years, through the 1906 earthquake era and the First World War. The 1928 retitling as The Wasp News-Letter, and the 1935 combination as the San Francisco News-Letter Wasp, joined it to one of San Francisco's oldest journalistic names. Publication finally ended on 25 April 1941, months before the United States entered the Second World War. Few American satirical magazines have matched its sixty-five years.

Survival and Scholarship

Scanned volumes of The Wasp are available through the Internet Archive, and its cartoons are held and exhibited by institutions including the Bancroft Library and Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. Gray Brechin's account in Bancroftiana (2002), West's illustrated history (2004) and Hall's California History article (2013) anchor modern study of the magazine. Its record is thus doubly preserved: as a foundation document of western American satire — and of Bierce's career — and as evidence, studied in classrooms, of how the popular press of the 1880s taught a city to see its Chinese neighbours. Both legacies belong to the history of The Wasp.