Your TR Source
President Roosevelt fishes at “third term pond” with some “policy bait” beside him.
The White House clipped and pasted into scrapbooks editorial opinions and political cartoons from around the country, and a fringe benefit for researchers is to see the evolution (or, sometimes, disappearance) of cartoonists, their styles, their capacity for clever concepts, their mastery of caricature.
President Roosevelt cuts another notch—”federal control of railroads”—in his big stick that already has several notches: “meat inspection,” “canal,” “R.R. rate regulation,” and “pure food.” In the background are James J. Hill, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Edward Henry Harriman holding knives with a banner behind them, “Angry R.R. magnates in their one act come by, entitled. We’re always agin the president.”
Seldom does a political cartoon simultaneously hit the mark in the presentation of an idea, or explanation of a situation in the news, and convey real humor (if such was intended). The otherwise little-known St. Louis cartoonist Elmer C. Donnell achieved both in this textbook-explication of President Roosevelt, his reform agenda — “his policies” — and relationship and reactions of America’s most prominent trust magnates of the day.
President Roosevelt pokes Edward Henry Harriman, who is reading a book, “My Letters to T.R. by Harriman,” sitting in the “truth” pew. Beside Harriman is a paper entitled “T.R.’s Letters to Me” and a top hat. The pew in front of Harriman is labeled “falsehood.” Behind the two men are several chuckling individuals and a sign that reads, “Daily Political Experience Meeting for the Benefit of the Public.”
The St. Louis Globe-Democrat was the major crosstown rival to Joseph Pulitzer’s flagship newspaper the Post-Dispatch (a Democratic journal), and therefore expected to side with Republicans unlike Pulitzer’s papers. However, in the controversy between President Roosevelt and railroad baron Edward Henry Harriman, almost all citizens were arrayed against railroad trusts in general, and Harriman in particular.
Crowds cheer from the stands with the labels of “West,” “North,” and “East” and William H. Taft rushes with the football of “Roosevelt policies” down the field. Oklahoma Governor Charles Nathaniel Haskell is carried off the field on a stretcher asking, “Whazza matter. Am I hurt?” Meanwhile on the field, President Roosevelt tackles William Jennings Bryan by the head as Thomas Louis Hisgen, Eugene W. Chafin, and Eugene V. Debs huddle on the field: “What are we going to do about it?” Ohio Senator Joseph Benson Foraker stumbles off the field on crutches.
Many political cartoonists of the Theodore Roosevelt era attempted to capture and communicate multiple issues of various complexity in one drawing. These genre drawings putatively laid many topics and personalities before readers, and perhaps were meant to summarize recent political developments. The mode required ambition and skill; some, like John T. McCutcheon and Jay N. “Ding” Darling, were masters, and thereby built foundations of their longevity and fame. Many political cartoonists who live in obscurity today managed the challenges poorly.