User:Strudjum/sandbox

Move from Chicago to New York City, 1894

In Chicago, Powers did additional artwork for another newspaper, the Chicago Herald, before accepting a "lucrative offer" in 1894 from newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane to move to Manhattan to join the staff of the widely popular New York World.^[1][6] That newspaper was owned by Joseph Pulitzer, who at the time was recognized as "the foremost newspaper publisher in the world."^[9] That lofty status, however, began to be seriously threatened in November 1895, when William Randolph Hearst acquired the New York Journal, which would become the flagship of a network of newspapers he intended to establish across the United States.^[10][11][b] Under Hearst's new management that year, the Journal experienced a remarkable increase in daily readership, rising from 30,000 to 100,000 in just a single month and then, after a year, to over 430,000.^[12][13] In order to sustain such growth and eclipse Pulitzer's success in the two publishers' fierce circulation war, Hearst implemented a plan to bring together at the Journal the finest editors, reporters, and illustrators in American journalism.^[14][15] In 1896 he lured Brisbane away from the World; and the following year Brisbane, now chief editor and noted columnist at the Journal, coaxed Powers to leave the World as well and to join a stellar group of cartoonists being assembled by Hearst, one that included such artists as Homer Davenport, Richard Outcault, Frederick Opper, and Jimmy Swinnerton.^[14]

Continuing presence of Powers' work in the World

Given his corporation's legal battle to secure Powers' services, it seems unlikely that William Hearst would voluntarily permit his new staff artist on the Journal to publish any more original content for his greatest competitor. Yet, the continuing appearance of Powers' work in the World for a decade after 1896 and his repeated identification in that newspaper as its caricaturist and special-assignment interviewer raises many questions regarding the final judgement in Powers' employment trial. The cartoonist's ongoing associations with the World provide evidence that there were conditions and details in the court's ruling that allowed Powers, possibly as a freelancer for a prescribed period, to provide material for publication in the World and credited specifically to that daily. Accordingly, many of his comic strips, front-page editorial panels, caricatures, interviews with prominent people, and investigative articles carrying the byline "T. E. Powers" can be found prominently featured in issues of Pulitzer's newspaper until at least 1906.^[17]

The August 26, 1901 issue of the World features a half-page news story credited to Powers, accompanied by his illustrations and under the very bold heading "POWERS TRAILS COLER TO ISLIP". The cartoonist, who is identified in the article as the "Evening World's Artist Interviewer", recounts in detail how he had recently followed New York City's "shifty" comptroller Bird Sim Coler for 15 miles on Long Island, from Amityville to Islip, in order to obtain for Pulitzer's newspaper an exclusive interview with the controversial official.^[18] Powers is once again identified as the "World's famous caricaturist" in a May 2, 1902 promotion for another intervew he conducted on behalf of the newspaper, one with the "astonishingly successful Wall street millionaire" John W. Gates.^[19] The resulting article, titled "John W. Gates Interviewed by T. E. Powers" promised to reveal the "secret of Mr. Gates's success".^[19] Illustrated again with "Powers's pictures", the feature was scheduled for release in the next Sunday edition of the World.

Yet another example of Powers' continuing work for the World relates to the 1905 Wall Street scandal and its associated trials involving James Hazen Hyde, then the vice president of the prestigious financial services and insurance company Equitable Holdings.^[20] During one of the trials, Powers attended the proceedings to sketch full- and half-figure caricatures of Hyde. Those images are accompanied by the artist's comments regarding the young man's dapper attire and his physical appearance while testifying on the witness stand. Those images can be viewed on two pages in the November 15, 1905 edition of the World.^[20]

A fourth and final example of Powers' work appearing in the World relates to another high-profile trial involving Standard Oil executive Henry Huttleston Rogers, who served as a key witness in a lawsuit concerning an alleged monopoly conspiracy by Standard Oil in the state of Missouri. In a very large single-panel editorial cartoon, Powers depicts in caricature a cavalier Rogers seated in court in the witness chair and being cross-examined by Missouri Attorney General Herbert S. Hadley as a trio of other lawyers look on with wide-eyed interest.^[21] Powers' cartoon also shows John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, with a small halo above his head as he sits next to Rogers. As Hadley simply asks Rogers the question, inside a dialog bubble, "What is Your Name?", Rockefeller interjects and responds on Rogers' behalf, proclaiming "We Refuse to Answer".^[21] In another chair behind Rockefeller sits his nephew William G. Rockefeller, who at the time was treasurer of the giant oil company. Mocking the exceedingly slow pace of the trial, Powers shows all the characters in his cartoon with extremely long white beards, visually implying that the tedious proceedings might take years to conclude.

Comic strips and single-panel cartoons under Hearst

Until Power's retirement from the Hearst Corporation in 1937, all of his published drawings for the company reflected the political, economic, and social opinions of his employer and aligned with the established editorial policies of his principal New York-based newspapers, the Journal and the American. Powers' cartoons and those created by his colleagues were seen each day by millions upon millions of readers, not only by Hearst-owned newspapers but also through Hearst's syndication network of client newspapers. That network consisted of hundreds of other independent, third-party newspapers and other publications that paid fees for the rights to republish news articles, opinion columns, editorial cartoons, comic strips, and other content produced by Hearst's employees. At its height in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Hearst Corporation owned 28 newspapers in every major American city, and those papers, combined, had a daily circulation of nearly 13 million readers.^[22] The addition of the network-affiliated newspapers increased the total readership to nearly 20 million Americans who received all or much of their news and other daily print information from Hearst sources.^[22][23]

Powers over time became one of William Hearst's favorite staff artists as T. E.'s comic strips and single-panel cartoons gained a large and loyal following for Hearst's newspapers and for the steadily rising number of client newspapers under syndication.^[24] By 1916, Hearst-Vitagraph advertisements in trade journals were announcing that "Five hundred newspapers today are using the great Tom Powers cartoons."^[25] The commercial and critical success of those pen-and-ink creations were perhaps due to how relatable their themes were to many readers. Powers' drawings regularly portrayed and lampooned the everyday challenges facing the inhabitants of New York City and in other cities where residents coped with the rigors of parenthood set in urban environments, dealing with troublesome neighbors, balancing tight family budgets, commuting woes, keeping up with changing fashion trends, as well as with a host of other local social, economic, and political, issues. Some of the titles of Powers' comic-strip series are How'd You'd Like to be Charlie?, Home, Sweet Home, Mr. Nobody Holme, Mrs. Trubble, Ysobel The Suffragette, Never Again, The Down-and-Out Club, Sam the Drummer, Married Life From the Inside, The League of Husbands, and The Nut Club.^[1][24][c]

"Joy" and "Gloom"

To enhance the theme of his pen-and-ink drawings and to underscore the emotional tone of their storylines and intended messaging, Powers began adding to his cartoon panels two little, very simply drawn, elf-like characters. One is a round-headed female stick figure he named "Joy". Ever-smiling, she wears a stylized tutu and ballet slippers and has a single strand of hair curling upward from the top of her head. The other character, "Gloom", is Joy's relentless enemy. A dour male figure, he wears a small black pointed hat, often a coat and long pants, and has a face dominated by a long nose and straight black whiskers.^[1][24] Joy and Gloom often appear together in Powers' cartoons; at other times, separately, occupying spaces in the foreground of his comic strips or frolicking in the bottom corners of panels. Each character also occasionally mobilizes and leads groups of equally small allies or followers into Powers' cartoon panels, at times acting as "miniature Greek-chorus characters".^[26] Joy and Gloom and their comrades quickly became widely recognized by the public at large as trademarks of Powers' artwork. Their appearances extended too beyond his comic strips and, as described by The New York Times, were "generally employed as pictorial footnotes to his editorial cartoons."^[3].

The first appearance of Joy and Gloom in a published drawing by Powers remains undetermined, although the two figures began to be seen with increasing frequency in his newspaper strips and panels in 1910. Joy and Gloom quickly became popular, so much so that the Chicago publishing firm Reilly and Britton sought to capitalize on the cartoon characters broad appeal and in January 1912 announced the release of a 72-page book titled Joys and Glooms: A Book of Drawings by T. E. Powers.^[27] In the foreword of this compilation of drawings, readers are greeted with the following upbeat message from Powers, a greeting that also summarizes the constant battles between the forces of Joy and Gloom:

May this book cause the Joys to banish the Glooms from among those who turn these pages. When old Field Marshal Gloom and his staff meet you in the street and General Despair hisses in your ear, “I'll Get You Yet!" remember the brave and gallant army of General Joy, always within call. . . . Beat the drum; and troops of Joy will scatter the regiments of Misery, Anguish, Revenge, Worry, Jealousy and Envy. Optimism will pluck handfuls out of the beard of Old Grouch. Good Cheer will send Jinx Hoodoo on the run. Don't be a Gloom. Be a Joy. It is so easy.^[28]

Selections of Powers' cartoon panels in his 1912 book portray with both slapstick action and wry humor a wide range of subjects, such as con men, superstitions, job and marriage frustrations, the campaign for women's suffrage, daily life in urban and rural settings, health issues, and sports. One highlight in the book is Powers' multi-panel illustration of Ernest Thayer's 1888 mock-heroic poem "Casey at the Bat". In the final panel of Powers' depiction of that poem, the "mighty" baseball player Casey sits dejectedly on his Mudville team's bench after striking out and losing the game. Above his head is a small raincloud, while in the panel's foreground a troop of seven Glooms marches triumphantly in celebration of his failure.^[29]

Joy and Gloom toys

Powers' use of Joy and Gloom in many of his published drawings continued for another 25 years, until the cartoonist's retirement from Hearst in 1937. Later examples of his little characters' extended popularity are the "Joy & Gloom" fabric novelty dolls and wooden pullstring toys marketed by manufacturers from 1926 through 1928. In the August 1926 edition of the wholesale toy catalog Playthings, the Unique Novelty Company of New York advertises its Joy and Gloom "Flapper" dolls "Designed by the Celebrated Cartoonist, T. E. Powers".^[30] The cloth dolls were being offered at wholesale for $16 per dozen ($290 today).^[30]

Powers soon partnered with businessman H. L. Rollens to establish the Joy and Gloom Toy Company to produce a line of "very clever wooden action pull toys", complete with moving jointed figures of the two long-famous imps.^[31][32] Advertisements for Joy and Gloom pullstring toys can also be found in 1926 issues of Playthings. One advertisement in the catalog grandly states that "these are the most original and amusing action toys ever offered to retail at $1.00" ($20 today). The various versions of the toy were initially sold at the company's offices in the West Concourse of Grand Central Terminal and then elsewhere in New York.^[33] By October 1926, however, Powers and Rollens had appointed the Strobel-Wilken Company, also headquartered in New York City, to be the "Sole Selling Agents in the United States" of Joy and Gloom Toys.^[34] The wooden amusements were also promoted personally by Powers, "praised" in the print media by actor-humorist Will Rogers, and marketed nationally to adults as well as to children in news items and advertisements repeated in 400 Hearst-affiliated newspapers.^[35][36]

Political caricatures and editorial cartoons

Powers' comic strips were admired by his colleagues not only for their sheer comedy but also for their uncomplicated style in execution.^[24] In its obituary for the artist in August 1939, The Sun newspaper in Baltimore alludes to the deceptive simplicity of many of his drawings and reveals the caricature that was Powers' personal favorite:

Using a relatively simple line-drawing technique, which looked easy to duplicate but was not, Mr. Powers had a gift for caricature. His own favorite cartoon was one he drew of President Calvin Coolidge sawing wood. Mr. Coolidge liked the drawing and his request for the original, on White House stationery, was one of the cartoonist's most cherished mementos...While conceding that few caricatures were flattering, Mr. Powers once observed that he had encountered few men who objected to being caricatured. "In fact," he said, "most of them seem to like it."^[24]

Over the years, Powers' caricatures were increasingly employed in Hearst newspapers and magazines to underscore the chain's political opinions and to illustrate news reports and human-interest stories. Powers' output of editorial cartoons rose markedly in the early 1900s, especially during the presidential term of Theodore Roosevelt.

Cartoon support for President Roosevelt's "progressive thought", 1901-1909

William Hearst's newspapers and many other American dailies enthusiastically supported the United States' war with Spain in 1898.^[37] In their extensive press coverage of that brief conflict, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt became a subject of keen interest for his role as the "intrepid leader" of the "Rough Riders" and that cavalry regiment's actions against Spanish troops in Cuba.^[38] All the sensational publicity surrounding Roosevelt's military exploits elevated him from being a formerly "obscure Cabinet assistant" in the McKinley Administration to becoming a war hero and rising star in American politics.^[38] Yet, "T. R.'s" celebrity did not guarantee continuing support on the opinion pages and comic panels of Hearst's newspapers. Later in 1898, when Roosevelt ran as the Republican Party's gubernatorial candidate in the State of New York, Hearst, pro-Democrat, backed instead his opponent in that election, Augustus Van Wyck.^[38] Roosevelt still won the contest, although narrowly.^[39]

While Hearst and his newspaper staff did not support Roosevelt's New York campaign in 1898, they did support much of his progressive agenda as governor, including the Republican's efforts to curb government and corporate corruption and enact policies to curb increasing monopolistic business practices.^[40] Later, in 1901, when Roosevelt as vice president of the United States succeeded to the presidency after William McKinley's assassination, the new president once again found support for his "Square Deal" progressive policies in the investigative reports, editorials, and in the political cartoons and comic strips featured in Hearst's publications.^[41] It was during this period when it was reported that Powers had become Roosevelt's favorite newspaper cartoonist, especially after the artist portrayed the chief executive "threatening fat, silk-hatted figures labeled 'The Trusts' with the then famous 'big stick'".^[3]

Throughout Roosevelt's presidency, Powers and other Hearst staff artists regularly produced panels that championed or alluded to the president's efforts to advance his progressive policies domestically and to project internationally the United States' emerging military and economic power.^[42] His editorial drawings also illustrated the opinion columns of Hearst's reform-minded writers and reporters or "muckrakers", who sought to uncover and highlight corruption in both governmental offices and corporate boardrooms.^[43] In his 2007 book William Randolph Hearst: Final Edition, 1911-1951, historian Ben H. Proctor summarizes the objectives of the newspaper publisher's ongoing journalistic "crusade" and touches on Powers' part in promoting its ideals:

The Hearst crusade technique, which advocated "moral and progressive thought in the community", appeared daily. Editorials and pronouncements, coupled with political cartoons by such talented artists as Frederick Opper, Winsor McCay, and T. E. Powers, crusaded for such important local and national issues as municipal subways, public school reforms, a fair and judicial enforcement of laws by city and state officials, food safety and public health issues, women's suffrage, child labor laws, an aggressive foreign policy by the United States, and the expansion and modernization of the nation's naval fleet.^[42]

"The Political Round-Up", 1913

T. E. Powers also drew illustrations for other Hearst publications outside the corporation's growing newspaper division. During the latter half of 1913, he provided all the editorial cartoons for "The Political Round-Up" section of Hearst's Magazine. That section in the monthly periodical features essays that comment on notable personalities and events at the forefront of discussions in American political circles. In the magazine's July issue that year, Powers' drawings complement texts covering voting rights, including women's suffrage; the "tariff wars" being debated in D.C. in the summer of 1913; the blatant excesses of "pork-barrelism" by both the Democratic and Republican parties; and the alleged diplomatic overreach by William Jennings Bryant, who at the time was secretary of state in President Woodrow Wilson's administration.^[44]

When compared to T. E.'s comic strips and to his earlier caricatures and political drawings, Powers' editorial cartoons in Hearst's Magazine appear to show greater attention to line, detail, and composition. The magazine's July 1913 issue includes, for example, Powers' editorial cartoon subtitled "Republican Tariff Lies",^[45] which shows three anthropomorphic animals representing the three principal political parties at the time: the Democrats' donkey smokes a tobacco pipe while confidently strolling away from the scene and carrying a scroll marked "Tariff Bill"; a moose, representing Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party and missing its entire right antler, stares with a "shell-shocked" expression; and the "G.O.P" elephant—his left foot, trunk, and right eye bandaged—sits in a chair in a battle-weary pose and rests his front-left leg's "elbow" on a table.^[45] In this cartoon, Powers not only captured the dynamics of the pro- and anti-tariff debates in the U.S. Congress in 1913,^[46] he also captured the realities of the nation's political climate and landscape in the aftermath of the previous year's presidential campaign, which saw a Democrat reoccupy the White House. For the newspaper readers in 1913 who did not appreciate the subtleties of his adjacent drawing, Powers added a typewritten caption beneath the panel that reads, "If Mr. Wilson would have his own and his party's days long in the land which the gods of politics have given them, he must not forget that the Democrats didn't win the election; the Republicans lost it."^[45]

Animated shorts

By 1915, Powers' characters—including Joy and Gloom—remained so popular with the general public that they started to appear in an entirely different medium outside the pages of newspapers and magazines. Beginning in December that year, Powers' original pen-and-ink creations were brought to "life" in animated shorts presented semi-weekly to movie theater audiences as entertaining additions to Hearst newsreels. The cartoons, with varying run times less than three minutes, were developed by the International Film Service (IFS), an animation studio established by the Hearst Corporation earlier in 1915.^[48][d] In staffing the new service, as in the past for his newspapers, Hearst lured top talent away from other companies with more lucrative salaries, in this case hiring experienced artists like Gregory LaCava, Bill Nolan, and Frank Moser away from their jobs at the studio of animation pioneer Raoul Barré.^[49]

After the depletion of his studio staff by Hearst, Raoul Barré found it necessary to accept, at least for a short time, contracted animation work or "'farmed out'" projects from IFS.^[50] Barré and his cartoonists, under La Cava's direction and Powers' supervision, produced a series of eight Hearst-Vitagraph newsreel cartoons based solely on the "Phables" comic strip characters created by Powers. That series, according to film historian Leonard Maltin in his 1980 volume Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animation, replicated faithfully the "stylishly simple fashion" of Powers' drawings as well as the newspaper cartoonist's "impish sense of humor".^[26] The first of Barré's Hearst-Vitagraph newsreel cartoons, one now lost, was The Phable of Sam and Bill, which was released by IFS on December 17, 1915.^[49] Two weeks later, on December 31, Feet Is Feet: A Phable premiered. The titles of the remaining animated shorts by Barré—all released during the early months of 1916—are as follows: The Phable of a Busted Romance, The Phable of the Phat Woman, Mr. Nobody Holme–He Buys a Jitney, Never Again! The Story of a Speeder Cop, A Newlywed Phable, and Cooks vs. Chefs: The Phable of Olaf and Louie.^[49][51]

Four weeks after the release of Barré's first Powers-inspired cartoon, the American film-industry magazine Motion Picture News announced the animated series in its January 15, 1916 issue. In the article titled "Cartoonist Powers to Draw for Hearst-Vitagraph", the periodical provides examples of what cartoon characters theatergoers could expect to see in upcoming newsreels:

TOM POWERS, the cartoonist, is presented as one of the main features of the Hearst-Vitagraph News Pictorial. "Joys" and "Glooms," which have appeared in the Hearst newspapers, will scamper across the screen as a part of the Hearst-Vitagraph semi-weekly news film. "Mrs. Trubbel" will continue to stir up domestic discord, but in thousands of theatres, in addition to the columns of the Hearst papers. "Powers' Phables" will bring in motion on the screen the weaknesses of human nature. "Never Again!" the "Down and Out Club" and "Charlie and George" will be other features to be seen in motion from the pen of Powers.^[52]

Throughout the rest of 1916 and 1917, IFS continued to produce either in-house or contract with outside animators more newsreel cartoons based on Powers' characters and on comic-strips drawn by some other Hearst artists, such as the series Bringing Up Father by George McManus, Happy Hooligan by Frederick Opper, and Krazy Kat by George Herriman.^[48] Finally, in 1918, financial problems facing IFS forced Hearst to reorganize his expanding newspaper and wire services, including the establishment of the International Newsreel Corporation (INC) under the management of E. B. Hatrick. Hearst's new entity continued to arrange licensing agreements and the production of additional "amusement films", including the resumption of animated cartoons featuring Powers' characters Joy and Gloom.^[53][54] To "serve as an amusing conclusion of the news events of the day", the first new Joys and Glooms cartoon was on the Hearst newsreel distributed to theaters by Universal Pictures on November 3, 1921.^[53] Continuing into 1922, their appearances in Hearst newsreels initially alternated with the release dates of cartoons based on the newspaper comic-strip series Indoor Sports and Outdoor Sports by Tad Dorgan, one of Powers' fellow cartoonists at the Journal and the American.^[53]

War, women's suffrage, and the "Raw Deal"

Many momentous events occurred internationally and nationally between 1914 and Powers' retirement in 1937. Some of them dramatically affected the course of the United States' development in the short term; others, for generations to come. Overall, Powers' editorial drawings in this period and those of his colleagues on the Journal and the American remained reflective of the priorities of William Hearst's thinking on such important issues as the war in Europe, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the federal policies of President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

World War I

The titanic military struggle ignited by an assassin's bullet in Europe in 1914 soon affected all of Europe and its colonial possessions, as well as other nation states around the globe. World War I and its immediate aftermath dominated press coverage through 1919, including the news headlines and editorial pages of Hearst's newspapers. Prior to the United States' formal entry into the conflict in April 1917, his newspapers generally opposed America's involvement in what Hearst viewed as exclusively a European concern, promoting instead the idea that the United States should remain a neutral party and not enter into "entangling alliances" with either the Allied or Germany-led Central powers.^[55] Harboring a great distrust of Great Britain’s and France's self-interests and the veracity of their wartime propaganda, Hearst opinion columns and editorial cartoons professed an "America First" position, although it was a position with a decidedly pro-German slant.^[56]

An editorial cartoon by Powers printed under syndication in a February 1915 issue of the New York Tribune represents Hearst's and his staff's suspicions regarding Great Britain's wartime motives and, more specifically, its early maritime tactics to avoid the targeting of British vessels by German submarines or "U-boats". Among the chain of events leading up to the United States declaring war on Germany in 1917, was the sinking of the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania in the North Atlantic two years earlier, on May 7, 1915. Powers' 1915 cartoon, published three months before the ship's destruction by a U-boat's torpedo, documents an incident at sea that embodied Hearst's suspicions about Britain's anti-German propaganda and at the time prompted the U.S. State Department to investigate reports and telegram London to express Washington's "grave concern" that the Lusitania and other British vessels, acting upon instructions from their governmental authorities, had recently flown the "neutral" flag of the United States rather the Red Ensign of the United Kingdom as required by maritime law.^[57] Powers' cartoon of this international incident features a large representation of the Lusitania stopped at sea near a surfaced U-boat. Titled "Disguised", the drawing also shows the ocean liner flying a large American flag and the ship's British captain yelling to a wary crewman aboard the German submarine holding binoculars. In a dialogue bubble above his head, the crewman asks the ship's captain in broken English and with eye dialect to simulate a German "accent", "Who Iss It. Vat boat?" The captain, pointing up to the American flag on the liner's aft pole, responds, with Powers again using non-standard spelling and punctuation to convey a British accent, "'Cawnt you see 'Im A Blooming Yankee!!".^[58]

Despite the United States' reluctance to commit militarily to the war, the sinking of the Lusitania and a series of other international incidents and controversies from the latter half of 1915 until early 1917 began increadingly to sway American public opinion against Germany and its autocratic kaiser, Wilhelm II. Once America finally declared war on the Imperial German Government in April 1917 and entered the conflict on the side of the Allies, Hearst and his staff of newspaper editors, columnists, and cartoonists fervidly supported the nation's war effort. To that end, T. E. Powers produced a wide assortment of anti-German drawings and American patriotic images for publication.

The following are descriptions of two of the many patriotic themes that Powers used during the war for his editorial cartoons. One drawing from January 1918 is titled "On the Job" that depicts a colossal American soldier, a "doughboy" with a shouldered rifle, marching ashore in France. Warmly greeting him with outstretched arms are two lilliputian-sized figures representing French Marshal Joseph Joffre and Liberté, while on the horizon two small caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm II and German General Paul von Hindenburg observe the gigantic American's arrival with shock and dismay.^[59] The other drawing, titled "Pulling His Teeth", was published just three days before the ceasefire ending the World War I. Powers shows Uncle Sam as a dentist, using a hefty pair of pliers labeled "Peace Terms" to pull out three of the kaiser's molars, one of which is inscribed "Militarism", another marked "Submarines", and the last one, in broken German, reads "God punish America".^[60]

Landscape artist

Cartoons and caricatures were not Powers only interests artistically. He was also an accomplished oil painter, particularly of landscapes and maritime-related scenes. Over the years his works were accepted for display in both national and international exhibitions, including the prestigious International Exhibition of Modern Art, which was presented in New York City from February 17 to March 15, 1913.^[71] Also known as the "Armory Show", the event opened "informally" on February 15 on Lexington Avenue, between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth streets, and showcased 1,500 contemporary works by American painters and sculptors as well as 400 pieces by European masters in those same branches of the visual arts.^[72][73] The New York Times in its coverage of the extensive exhibition lists "T. E. Powers" among the painters selected by the "committee of domestic art" to present their works. A few of the other American artists represented at the Armory Show were Max Weber, Kathleen McEnery, Albert P. Ryder, Philip Hale, Leon Dabo, and George Bellows.^[72] Two of Powers' landscapes were selected by the committee for display and are listed in the show's catalog as entry numbers 968 and 969.^[71] A supplement to the catalog later documents that Powers' two paintings were actually not displayed due to their not being delivered to the Armory.^[74]

With few exceptions during his career, Powers consistently signed his pen-and-ink creations with "T", followed by three horizontal bars symbolizing "E", and followed then his surname. His paintings, on the other hand, are consistently signed at the lower-right corner of his canvases in all capital letters “TOM POWERS". Periodically, original drawings and oil-on-canvas works by Powers still become available through various concerns such as Heritage Auctions and Eldred's Auction House, which in the past have sold on consignment some of Powers' paintings and pen-and-ink works.^[75] He was survived by his wife Louise, two brothers, and his sister.^[5] Louise continued to reside in New York City until her death in the Bronx on December 27, 1944.^[69][76]

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

At Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum contains, according to the university's website, "the world's largest collection of materials related to cartoons and comics, including original art, books, magazines, journals, comic books, graphic novels, archival materials, and newspaper comic strip pages and clippings."^[80] As part of their extensive collections, this specialized library and museum hold some original works by T. E. Powers, along with many copies of publications from the late 1890s and early decades of the twentieth century that feature his drawings. Some of Powers' work in the Ireland Library and Museum collections include examples of his comic strips, original random drawings, and a highly stylized art nouveau poster created by Power to use as cover art for the August 1896 issue M'lle New York Magazine.^[80] The poster, minimalist in its composition, depicts a woman standing in the dark and reading pages by candlelight while on the floor a cat, appearing to be fightened, peers up at her.^[81]