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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A game of chess is being played on the “[Depar]tment of Police” board, between a hand labeled “Political Pull” showing a cufflink labeled “Brass Check” and a hand labeled “Reform.” Some of the squares are labeled “Race Track, Suburbs, White Lights, Gambling District, Goatville, Financial District, Tenderloin, Red Light District, Lonely Beat, [and] Hell’s Kitchen.” The chess pieces are police officers, some in plainclothes, labeled “Crooked Captain, Inspector, Sleuth, ‘Fixed’ Captain, Honest Captain, Grafting Captain, Honest Inspector, Plainclothes Man, [and] Sergeant.”
A dozen years before this cartoon — when Theodore Roosevelt had assumed his position as president of the Board of Police Commissioners in New York City, and continuing through his tenure — corruption among the police ranks was rife. Startling revelations mostly were instigated by the municipal reformer Reverend C. H. Parkhurst, followed by a 10,000 page report by the Lexow Committee (chaired by state senator Clarence Lexow) exposing countless abuses by the Lexow Committee.
The sun, wearing a football helmet, beams rays onto a football-shaped planet that shows a stadium with fans in the grandstands and a football game in progress. In the background is the outline of a young woman’s head looking on.
As college life resumed in the fall of 1906, so did the football season. At the time the sport was mostly confined to universities, colleges, and preparatory or secondary schools. Research has revealed President Roosevelt’s initiative and role in rescuing football from criticism and possibly banishment from schoolfields at this very time. There were few helmets (despite the sun’s gear) or other equipment, few rules or even field markers, and few palliatives for what was largely conducted, and enjoyed, as a violent sport frequently reveling in serious injury and death.
Theodore Roosevelt, dressed as a Rough Rider, leads a group of laborers, armed with shovels, to work on the Panama Canal. One man in the background wears a hat labeled “Jake,” perhaps referring to John F. Stevens, who took over the chief engineer position for the canal construction in 1905.
This lively image of a determined President Roosevelt, clad in Rough Rider uniform and not in presidential formalwear, is iconic, of brilliant simplicity. It explains to readers the tenacity of the famously tenacious president, especially when he was confronted by challenges facing his pet project.