Monday, July 17, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: According to Hoyle
Harry Hershfield came up with some great strip ideas in his earlier years -- Homeless Hector about an endearing stray dog; Dauntless Durham of the USA, a satire on melodramas, for instance-- but once he settled on the Jewish businessman motif with Abie the Agent in 1914, he gave the impression of being a one-trick pony from there on out.
Abie the Agent was never a big hit known in the hinterlands, but in certain metropolitan areas, specifically those with a substantial Jewish population, Abie was a perennial favorite. But when Hershfield had a contract dispute with Hearst and jumped ship in 1929, it seemed like either he could no longer work outside the genre he had created, or his new employers wanted only more of the same from him.
His first new gig was with the New York Evening Graphic, producing Meyer the Buyer for a very short time. This was an outright copy of Abie, the only ever so slight nod to originality being a different occupation for the protagonist.
After getting away from the slimy MacFadden organization. Hershfield went the other direction, going about as upscale as you can by signing on with the New York Herald-Tribune. For them he created today's obscurity, According to Hoyle.
The phrase "according to Hoyle" refers to the de facto standard rulebooks to card games, initially penned by Edmund Hoyle waaaaay back in the eighteenth century. The phrase came to mean essentially 'playing by the accepted standard rules' and entered the idiom. I mention this for no very good reason, because the name of this strip seems purely arbitrary -- there is no theme of card-playing, or playing by the rules whatsoever. I guess Hershfield just thought it was a catchy title.
What the strip is about is another businessman, this one named Hugo Hoyle. He is yet another doppelganger for Abie the Agent with the important exception that he's been stripped of his Jewish dialect and Yiddishisms. In other words, he was Abie without any distinctive personality at all. Why make Abie a boring goy in the new strip? My guess is that the Herald-Tribune, a paper that served the elites of New York City, felt that their mostly Protestant upper-class readership would not take kindly to a Jew in their paper. This was the 1930s and anti-Semitism was most certainly not limited to Germany; in fact in US whitebread households it wasn't an uncommon belief that the Great Depression was actually caused by Jewish businessmen.
Hershfield produced the feeble According to Hoyle half-page Sundays from March 4 1934 to July 28 1935. He seemed not to know what to do with it, so he just recycled his Abie the Agent material with the heart and soul of it completely absent. Negotiations finally reopened with the Hearst organization, perhaps with Hershfield now somewhat more malleable in his contractual requirements, and According To Hoyle was put to bed. Abie the Agent, now a little tired with age, was brought back for a final run. Unfortunately by then the strip seemed to have lost its way and clients for the revival were few and far between.
Labels: Obscurities
