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President Roosevelt stands in the middle of a variety of books about war and implements of war, including “the big stick,” “Essays on War. Roosevelt,” “The Art of War,” and “With Roosevelt at San Juan.” He is dressed in colonial attire and has a paper that reads, “call for a peace congress at the Hague.”
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1904-08
William Jennings Bryan blows a spit ball into a cage with two bears: President Roosevelt and William H. Taft. There are two signs on the cage: “Don’t tease the old bear. He’s ugly” and “Grizzly bear (Theodorus Roosevelticus). Habitat–District of Columbia. Almost extinct.”
There are two related themes or subtexts in John Scott Clubb’s cartoon about the election of 1908. The first is pertinent to the headlines of the day, the raging controversy that followed the Hearst papers’ revelations of the “Archbold Letters” between the president of the Standard Oil trust and various politicians and elected officials. Figures high and low and in both parties were exposed; careers were ruined, and the presidential campaign was upended.
New York Gubernatorial candidate Charles S. Whitman, a crusading District Attorney, commands a ship labeled “New York State G.O.P.,” which is flying a banner decorated with an elephant. The ship is headed for a mine painted with the face of Theodore Roosevelt. A fish with a question mark above it appears to be trying to get away from Roosevelt.
In the 1914 midterm elections, Theodore Roosevelt was still the leader of the Progressive party, and campaigned for Bull Moose candidates (relatively few, nationally, in 1914, two years after the third party’s presidential defeat), and therefore against Whitman. The reformer Whitman won the governorship in 1914 and 1916 before losing in 1918 to Alfred Emanuel Smith.
President Roosevelt is pictured standing atop “Sagamore Hill,” trying to take flight on his “Big Stick.” He sports two large wings marked, “Down with Peace,” and “Hurrah for War.” Above his head is a cloud labeled with the year, “1916.”
Cartoonist John Scott Clubb and other Democratic cartoonists were wary of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential ambitions in 1916. Roosevelt was widely criticized for his “Preparedness” advocacy, and thus depicted as a war-monger. Woodrow Wilson, the incumbent, based his own campaign on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”