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Three-quarter length portrait of Alice Roosevelt, standing facing left with her right arm extended over the back of a chair. A parrot sits on her wrist. She wears a hat on her head decorated with flowers.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1904
Theodore Roosevelt speaks on a platform in the middle of a crowd at the first Progressive Party Convention in the Chicago Coliseum. Banners and signs with state names are arranged around the arena.
Following what he felt was the Republican Party’s unfair endorsement of William H. Taft for the 1912 presidential election, Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” Party, running for president under its auspices.
Photograph of Alice Roosevelt standing in front of a large tree trunk with her arms crossed and her body slightly angled to her right. Roosevelt is wearing a patterned dress with a high lace collar and a brooch.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1902
Photographs of the library at Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay, New York home. Various animal heads and portraits adorn the walls, including one of Roosevelt’s father, Theodore Roosevelt.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1912-1918
Photograph of the library fireplace at Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay, New York home. Various animal heads and portraits adorn the walls, with chairs and couches spread about.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1912-1918
Photograph of the library at Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay, New York home. Various animal heads and portraits adorn the walls, including one of Roosevelt’s wife, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1912-1918
Photograph showing President Theodore Roosevelt, John B. Goff, and other men on horseback with a pack of hunting dogs with mountains in the background.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1905
Photograph showing President Roosevelt on horseback, holding a rifle.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1905
Photograph showing President Roosevelt on horseback; mountains in background.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1905
A large crowd of people rush forward to the “Exchange Desk,” bearing Christmas gifts which they wish to exchange.
“Many unhappy returns.” The subtext of L. M. Glackens’ post-Christmas cover cartoon in Puck is how America had changed in, say, one short decade. Ten years prior, America was trying to crawl out from a devastating depression punctuated by labor strikes and strife, and from a turbulent presidential election enlivened by fears of radicalism and a Populist movement.
By 1906, after a war and a presidential assassination, the United States found equilibrium, and enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity under President Roosevelt. It was a time of record immigration, but a simultaneous shift of urbanites to suburbs; and new industries generally absorbed the new workforce.
Senator Jacob H. Gallinger appears as a Dutch girl praying to the angelic spirit of Marcus Alonzo Hanna holding a ship labeled “Ship Subsidy.” Caption: From the gallery of privilege and graft.
Simple cartoons, well executed, are excellent windows to the past, even if, sometimes streamlined, they are windows metaphorically somewhat jammed. This Udo J. Keppler cartoon is an example of both clear presentation and voluminous details with which contemporary readers would have been familiar.
It is to be understood, primarily, that subsidies of American ocean ships was a major topic of the times, and a roiling controversy in 1906 (and before) even as a crowded agenda of reform legislation and regulatory reforms occupied Washington’s attention.
The “G.O.P.” elephant holds a tambourine labeled “Stand Patism” and hands out free baskets labeled “Tariff Graft” containing a turkey, duck, or chicken to ragged figures labeled “Coal Trust, Steel Trust, [and] Wool Trust.” A long line of trust figures await their turn. Joseph Gurney Cannon, Nelson W. Aldrich, Joseph Benson Foraker, and Leslie M. Shaw appear in women’s clothing as the “Republican Salvation Army” singers, singing “There are no flies on Dingley.” A man labeled “Protected Monopoly” stands in the foreground, at the edge of the platform. Caption: Distribution of Christmas goodies by the Republican Salvation Army.
Politics occasionally did intrude in holiday issues of Puck as this centerspread cartoon by J. S. Pughe attests. The Salvation Army was a relatively new force in 1906, but there had been urban missions and soup kitchens in lower Manhattan for generations. Pughe’s venue is a larger auditorium than might have been typical of a Salvationist Christmas food charity, but other stereotypes are there: music with a tambourine, female singers with bonnets sharing their sermons in song.
The cartoonist’s attacks are seen in the graphic subtleties: an obscure “small dealer” — that is, an individual entrepreneur — squeezed between two angry trust magnates; a fancy spat and shoe peeking from under a mogul’s pant-leg; similar kid glove and diamond jewelry on the “downtrodden”; and the hymn praising Dingley. Three leading Republican senators, and Treasury Secretary Leslie M. Shaw bleat the gospel of high tariffs.
Joseph Gurney Cannon leads a procession including Nelson W. Aldrich, Joseph Benson Foraker, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Leslie M. Shaw who are carrying the golden ark of the Dingley Tariff, with figures labeled “Trust, Infant Industries, [and] Protected Monopoly” bowing as it passes.
Approximately a decade had passed since the last major revision of tariffs in the United States, when Puck Magazine published this scathing cartoon by Udo J. Keppler. It depicted the sacrosanct regard for high tariffs among Republicans and industrialists (trusts), and specifically the inviolability of the Dingley rates. Those schedules took effect in 1897 after a major Depression during the second Cleveland administration, and prosperity returned, punctuated by good weather, record crop yields, the war with Spain, and a presidential assassination. The five years of President Roosevelt saw unprecedented prosperity.
To an extent high tariff rates were responsible, but not in the minds of powerful Republicans. In Keppler’s drawing, the kneeling figures are generic, and those bearing the ark of the covenant all are senators, excerpt for Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon, and Secretary of the Treasury Leslie M. Shaw.
The heads of Chauncey M. Depew labeled “Compliments of New York” and Thomas Collier Platt labeled “From the Empire State” lie on desks in the “U.S. Senate” chamber, with Uncle Sam scowling in the background.
This over cartoon by Udo J. Keppler in Puck Magazine might have run any year while the twin graybeards Chauncey M. Depew and Thomas Collier Platt were senators, such was the routine assessment of the magazine and indeed much of the public (even of New York State’s citizens — this was at a time when state legislators, not the voting public, elected senators, a Constitutional system that had grown corrupt).
Indeed the concept of the cartoon might have been applied to previous New York senators, who generally were elderly and settled into careers serving special interests. And this was the case in other states’ delegations as well, since the senate had evolved into a club of a few powerful bosses.
In the interior of a frontier cabin, a long table is set for a Christmas turkey dinner. Around the table are seated several people, some of whom are surprised to discover an arrow stuck in the turkey, shot by a Native standing outside the open door of the cabin.
In Puck Magazine’s holiday issues — Easter, Midsummer, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas — the publishers generally yielded space routinely reserved for political cartoons to thematic, seasonal, or purely humorous subjects.
The 1906 Christmas number was no exception, and Puck‘s Austrian import Carl Hassmann was counted on to provide superb-poster like artwork in addition to clever ideas. This center-spread cartoon, in fact, is not very clever or funny — a Native American startles Colonial revelers at dinner with an arrow aimed at the holiday turkey — but does tell us something about the times of the cartoon’s creation. The Pilgrims are rather more up-to-date than their 1600s versions, especially the women, and the Indian is not depicted as a savage but rather a friendly prankster.
Santa Claus, labeled “G.O.P.,” reaches to place the “Star of Hope” on top of a Christmas tree trimmed with lemons, marble hearts, a stuffed bear “From Teddy,” two “Little Big Sticks” and a “Big Stick,” a ball of “Promises,” and three balls labeled “Gas, Guff, [and] Wind.” On a nearby table is Joseph Cannon as a “Joe in the Box,” a “Home made frosted cake from Uncle Joe’s Pantry,” and a book of “Fairy Tales by Uncle Sam.”
J. S. Pughe’s cover cartoon directly addresses a crisis in America’s handling of the Philippine Islands as an American territory, during an important moment of policymaking. The matters at hand were important to the Filipinos, of course: trade, tariffs, and economic sovereignty.
To the American public, especially since most of the bloody insurrection was quelled — largely by President Roosevelt’s amnesty and promises of self-determination — questions concerning the Philippines had become a matter of great indifference. Governor-General William H. Taft, returning to the United States and engaging in policy speeches, remarked that the sure way to clear a hall of reporters and attentive listeners was to mention the Philippines.
European leaders from England, France, Italy, Japan, Russia, Germany, Austria, and Turkey are among the crowd enjoying the entertainments at the “Casino Del’ Europe.”
Carl Hassman, Puck Magazine’s Viennese import who specialized in statements more than cartoons, often apocalyptic and frequently in poster styles, combined those attributes in this cartoon featuring the world’s monarchs in a fantasized setting. Royals and nobility sit, primping and resplendent in their medals and finery, at an imaginary casino.
There was no such assembly of nobility at the time time. In 1907 there was the second International Peace Conference at the Hague — the call for which was one of United States Secretary of State John Hay’s last acts — but royals largely sent political figures and subalterns in their stead to what was largely viewed as a useless exercise. In 1910 there would an astonishing array of the world’s royalty, in London for the funeral of King Edward VII. In a vast parade, almost as if the players knew it would a ghostly apotheosis of the monarchical system, every major and minor potentate from the world over participated, and jockeyed for prominence against each other.
Illustration shows rows of toys, dolls, teddy bears, soldiers and drummers, and trees.
The annual Christmas issue of Puck in 1906 was given to Frank A. Nankivell for its cover design. In recent years the holiday issues of the magazine were given to decorative or poster-like images. It made the special themes more widely attractive to readers and advertisers, especially downplaying politics and partisanship. These issues usually were more pages — often 32 or 48 pages instead of Puck‘s usual 16 — and carried more color cartoons and advertising.
Nankivell was born in Australia, where he drew cartoons for various publications before he moved to Japan, where he drew for the Tokio Puck (no relation to Joseph Keppler’s New York Puck), then drawing for newspapers and magazines in San Francisco and finally Puck in New York.
President Roosevelt conducts the orchestra at the “Congressional Vaudeville” with a baton labeled “The Big Stick,” with two band members, Elihu Root and William H. Taft, performing “Overture President’s Message.”
This cover cartoon in Puck Magazine appeared one week before President Roosevelt’s annual message. The address was anticipated more than many previous such messages (mandated by the Constitution, but its timing and frequency a matter of tradition, as is its common name, the State of the Union address) because 1906 had been tumultuous year in Washington by any measure; and Roosevelt recently had returned from a trip to Panama to inspect progress on the canal.
In fact the message was not an address at all — Woodrow Wilson established the precedent of a president delivering the speech to a joint session of Congress, directly, something that Roosevelt might have relished himself — but a message. The message, as a synopsis of the year’s achievements and a program for the coming year, really went over the heads of legislators and to the public; that is, he proposed few specific legislative measures. (Some observers saw this as the subtext of a president who increasingly was relying on proclamations and executive orders.)
Theodore Roosevelt, with halo, kneels on a burning pyre and is tied to a stake labeled “III Term” by tapes labeled “Popularity / Party / Pressure.” A crowd of on-lookers cheers in the background. Caption: “I can conceive of a situation that would compel Mr. Roosevelt, no matter how painful it might be, to accept a third term.”–Attorney-General Moody.
There have been many martyrs and saints burned at the stake through history. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs documents many; there was the famous torching of Joan of Arc, and during the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and subsequent periods of religious accountability, opposing factions burned people with regularity.
The figure of Theodore Roosevelt in the cover cartoon of Udo J. Keppler, therefore, is not meant to represent the sentence of any particular saint (or sinner), although allegorical models were plentiful.