Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), approximately 1862-1937

A frenzy of activity is underway as many politicians and capitalists join the labor forces to construct the Panama Canal. Theodore P. Shonts, chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission, is standing on the right, holding a whip, and directing the laborers. In the background, large groups of men labeled “Order of Walking Delegates, The Idle Rich, Amalgamated Aldermen, [and] Insurance Presidents Union No. 6” are waiting, with tools, to be called into action. Caption: Let our superfluous citizens do the work.

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Comments and Context

S. D. Ehrhart’s expansive cartoon in Puck seized upon the news of labor challenges in the Culebra Cut portion of the Panama Canal construction, and built an elaborate cartoon-fantasy about people in politics, the social world, and finance being put to work at manual labor.

At center, President Roosevelt shows Uncle Sam and Columbia a large plant with flowers showing the members of his cabinet. The surrounding vignettes show a springtime dance of putti, Alton B. Parker shoveling snow at his home in Esopus, an art gallery, Irishmen marching in the rain on Saint Patrick’s Day, a woman cleaning house by sweeping a dust cloud of policemen out the door, and Roosevelt grafting a branch labeled “Indian School Mission,” with blossom of an unidentified bishop of the Catholic Bureau of Indian Missions, onto the “Interior Dept. Tree.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1905-03-15

A man dreams about enforcing the blue laws by punishing young men for playing baseball, a young woman for playing golf, even a young girl for picking flowers. He imagines them imploring him to allow them their particular Sunday pursuits.

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Since its inception in 1876, Puck Magazine was consistently skeptical on matters of faith and the practices of organized religion. Cartoons that addressed the general subjects included questions of science and evolution; putative hypocrisy of clerics; corruption among the clergy; financial, sex and other scandals of prominent divines; and churches’ support of “blue laws,” Prohibition, and Sunday closings.

A series of nine vignettes shows men putting themselves at risk in one way or another. One man gets up in the middle of the night to attend to a screaming infant, another tests breakfast cereals, a third dares to enter the kitchen to reprimand the cook, others survive the street railroads, one suffers the attack of mosquitoes, while others endure rude opera attendees, rural life, and a tour guide. At center, each “hero” receives a pension from Andrew Carnegie who is wearing a traditional Scottish kilt.

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Cartoonist Ehrhart drew these center-spread vignettes as news commentary on the announcement 1904 by Andrew Carnegie of the creation of the Carnegie Hero Fund with an initial endowment of $5-million.

President Theodore Roosevelt stands on a reviewing stand, holding hat in raised right hand as a large group of capitalists, industrialists, and financiers wearing the tattered clothing of tramps, march past the stand. Some carry placards with such statements as: “Irrigate the Trusts,” “No place to go but the Waldorf,” “We want the earth,” “Free quick lunches,” “Pity the poor banker,” “Dividends or we perish.” At the front of the group, J. P. Morgan carries a wooden bucket labeled “The full water pail.” Caption: “Aggregated wealth largely represented among Parker’s Supporters”–New York Tribune.

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It might be said now, as it was in 1904, that the Republican Party is the home of the wealthy class, industrialists, and plutocrats. And then as now, cartoonists have fed that stereotype. Also then as now, major figures of Wall Street have supported the Democratic Party in great numbers, whether from agreement on social and political issues or frank self-interest.

At center, Uncle Sam looks into a mirror while descending a stairway in a hall. “Swallow” and “Watson” are standing in the hall, holding candles. In the vignette at lower left, the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Roosevelt, Fairbanks, Parker, and Davis, arrive in costume. On the lower right they are unmasked and engaged in a game with Columbia. On the middle left is “Bryan” as “An Old Timer,” and on the middle right “Taggart” and “Belmont” play a prank on an elderly woman with a “Bogie Man” labeled “Militarism.” At top left, bobbing for “Campaign Funds” are “Taggart, Bliss, Cortelyou, [and] Belmont,” and at top right “Odell, Shaw, [and] Hill” are “Jumping the Issues.”

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Puck, a major Democratic publication, seems extremely unconcerned with the outcome of the imminent presidential election: little more than a week before balloting, its center-spread cartoon — traditionally a forum for powerful, persuasive political cartoons — instead published genre cartoons on a Halloween theme. Yes, with politicians as the characters, but more humorous than partisan. It possibly saw the writing on the wall, a massive Democratic defeat.

Three statues labeled “Cook, Walking Delegate, [and] Head Waiter” stand on the left and three statues labeled “Coachman, Car Porter, [and] Janitor” stand on the right. People are bowing down, kneeling, and performing other acts of veneration before them. In the center, Puck has unfurled a banner showing citizens pulling down the equestrian statue of King George III. Caption: Puck — Where is the spirit of ’76? This is what your forefathers did to King George.

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Sometimes a cartoon tells more about its times than its intended point. Cartoonist Ehrhart addresses the vagaries of modern life — the imperious attitudes, approaching arrogance and greed — as routine laborers and employees asserted themselves in modern life. Of course the cartoonist employed hyperbole, characterizing people in these positions as latter-day tyrants.

John Mitchell and Samuel Gompers, representing the United Mine Workers and the American Federation of Labor, are witches stirring a “dangerous brew” of labor violence in a cauldron labeled “Unionism” over flames labeled “Anti-Injunction Bill.” Steam rising from the pot is filled with threatening human figures and the words “Boycott, Mob Violence, Intimidation, Dynamite-Persuasion, Riot, Lawlessness, Anarchy, Parkism, Graft, [and] Incendiary Press.”

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Samuel Gompers, founder and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFofL), and John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers of America (the union was a constituent member of the AFofL), are portrayed in this famous cartoon by Samuel Ehrhart in Puck as fomenting union strikes and labor violence.

A devil takes the lid off a box labeled “Society” allowing fumes to escape which show the liberation of women, such as being granted divorces, horseback riding, driving automobiles, gambling, and smoking in social situations.

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Ehrhart’s Puck cartoon appeared a week before Easter in 1904. While its constituent details seem overtly scolding and of a moralizing nature, this double-page cartoon was really the contemporary cartoonists’ stereotypical theme at every year’s end of the Lenten season. Earthly pleasures and frivolous pastimes, putatively suppressed during Lent, were released after Easter, at least in the minds of editorial cartoonists of the day.

At center, a young woman asks Cupid about his flower garden where all the blossoms have male and female faces. Six vignettes show scenes from country and country club life that generally relate to relations between the sexes. A poem called “Cupidculture” is included.

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A double-page spread by Puck‘s counterpart of Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the Gibson Girl stylish cartoons in Life Magazine) at the time. These are seasonal gags in an issue dated in the middle of April. The poem in the central cartoon was written by Arthur H. Folwell, the editor of the magazine for more than a dozen years, later on the staff of the New York Tribune and writer for The New Yorker, and script writer for the Mr. and Mrs. comic strip.

Two Mormon elders discuss another Mormon who has been found guilty of bigamy. Caption: Elder Heaperholmes–He has been tried by the church and found guilty of bigamy. / Elder Holikuss–Guilty of bigamy? / Elder Heaperholmes–That’s the judgment. He’s been married only twice.

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Among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at the time of this cartoon, bigamy was more common than it is today. Mormons were heavily criticized outside of Utah and other areas where the sect dominated, and there were many laws proposed to restrict polygamy. Ehrhart’s cartoon — with the Temple and a horde of children surrounding one father in the background — jokingly suggested that Mormons disfavored those with merely two spouses.

The captain of an ocean liner offers a toast to his passengers sitting around a large dining table on a ship that is rocking a bit too much for most passengers. Caption: The Captain — Ladies and gentlemen, I drink to your very good health!

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Cartoonist Ehrhart here makes a humorous, not political, comment on a contemporary trend, the increasing popularity of ocean cruises. Rising prosperity in the United States enabled this trend that joined rail travel and resort vacations among the upper classes. Steamship lines hurried their production of luxury liners — in England by the White Star and Cunard lines; in Germany by the North German-Lloyd line. In the United States, J. P. Morgan devoted resources to enter, and, of course, dominate, the transatlantic passenger and shipping fleets. After purchasing shipbuilding companies in Cleveland and Philadelphia but failing to secure federal subsidies, he bought into Great Britain’s White Star line, even hiring its executive Bruce Ismay. (In 1912, it was the White Star’s The Titanic that famously sank, and its chief, Ismay, who shamefully climbed aboard a lifeboat as many perished.)

Two cameo scenes are separated by a telegraph pole labeled “Western Union.” On the left is a civic meeting claiming that “We must uphold our Public Morals and Civic Decency” where seated on a stage are businessmen labeled “Flagler, Schiff, Jessup [sic], Depew, Rockefeller, Hyde, Morgan [and] Sage.” On the right are the same men sitting in a room where they are straining to hear the report of the “Annual Statement” regarding “Sundry other profits from our Subterranean wires increase this total applicable to dividends by $5,000,000” over the din of coins spilling from a cornucopia connected to a telegraph pole and overflowing a barrel labeled “Western Union Pool Room Receipts.” Visible through a window are many buildings labeled “Pool Room.”

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This cartoon requires explanation beyond the depiction of prominent and greedy business tycoons of the day. In May of 1904, shortly before Ehrhart’s cartoon was drawn, the Western Union Telegraph system, which was an essential element of commerce and communication, curtailed the transmission of race track information, including facilitating gambling transactions.

At center a group of six men, including John D. Rockefeller and E. B. Thomas, warm themselves by a stove labeled “Standard Oil.” At bottom left Andrew Carnegie burns “U.S. Steel Bonds” and Charles Schwab attempts to burn “Steel Common” stocks. On the right Chauncey Depew burns speeches. On the middle left a tramp rests against a haystack in the warm sun. On the right William Jennings Bryan generates hot air while speaking to a group of farmers. On the top left a family burns the furniture in a fireplace. On the right E. B. Thomas sits in front of a fireplace where a lump of “Radium” is warming the room.

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Eben B. Thomas had risen from telegraph operator to the presidency of the Erie Railroad (and eventually the Lehigh Valley Railroad). He was very successful at consolidating rail lines and their efficiency, and maintaining labor harmony in an era of conflict. In his position he became a useful ally of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, especially in his geographic “domain” of central Pennsylvania, land of oil, coal, and steel mills.

At center, mannequin models are being constructed as stand-ins for actors. They are surrounded by scenes of price gouging, poorly attended performances, the use of wooden actors, indifference to customers, and haughty attitudes by theater staff, and the resulting failure of business. Above the main scene are the ghosts of past actors labeled “Booth, Gilbert, Forrest, Cushman, [and] Wallack.”

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Cartoonist Ehrhart was producing double-page spreads in Puck by 1903, approximately once a month, on social subjects, in a template of one major cartoon surrounded by a galaxy of related humorous jokes. Occasionally these commentaries had “bite,” however, as in this cartoon.

Justice, wearing a crown labeled “Law” and carrying a sword and scales, rides on the back of a snail, climbing a steep hill strewn with bolders labeled “Certificate of reasonable doubt, Appeals, Change of venue, Injunction, [and] Stays” toward the “Hall of Justice” at the top of the hill.

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Puck Magazine and other reformist but conservative Democratic journals, in the run-up to the 1904 presidential campaign, continued to oppose William Jennings Bryan, but cast about for a national Democrat with gravitas and appeal in the mold of former president Grover Cleveland.

A priest stands on the left holding a paper that states “The steady decline of womanhood from its old ideals.” Puck pulls back a curtain to reveal women in many roles in society, such as doctors, lawyers, school teachers, athletes, artists, nurses, secretaries, “Tenement House Inspectors,” and as members of such organizations as the “S.P.C.A.” Caption: Puck — Do you really think, my clerical friend, that the old ideals were better than these?

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Through its life as a publication, Puck frequently found fault with clerics and traditional denominations, although not with the Bible itself. Sermons and messages that Puck criticized usually dealt with what it deemed to be excesses, foolish pronouncements, and hypocrisy.

On the left, a theater manager is bribing an inspector during an inspection of fire prevention equipment, while the specter of the Grim Reaper hovers above. On the right, a female figure labeled “Public opinion” holds three diminutive men labeled “Politician, Manager, [and] Inspector” and points toward the remains of a theater following a fire.

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The context of this cartoon, with artist Ehrhart being as forceful as he could be, is not named… but was clear to every reader: the recent Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago. Still regarded as one America’s most devastating disasters, the fire on December 30, 1903, less than a month previous, claimed more than 600 lives. It was a fire that spread quickly — a broken arc light igniting the muslin curtain — and the nation learned of burned bodies, closed exits, and bodies of panicked patrons crushed sometimes 10-deep in aisles and doorways.

A well-dressed couple discuss the amount of money a jockey earned the previous racing season. The woman suggests that he should be able to earn more than the diminutive jockey. Caption: He — That jockey made $50,000 last season! / She — What! That little fellow! Why can’t you do something like that, John?

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Puck surrendered its political prerogative on this issue’s front page in favor of what it thought was a good joke, perhaps an early and brunette version of today’s “dumb blonde” memes. Of interest might be the specific reason the couple is impressed by the jockey’s earning of $50,000 the previous year. In today’s value that is approximately one million dollars.

In a courtroom, a prisoner and a police officer stand before a judge. The prisoner is explaining to the judge why he assaulted another person. Caption: Judge — You admit you sand-bagged the man. Have you any excuse? / Prisoner — Yes, yer Honor. De sand-bag wuz me own property and J.P. Morgan says a man has de right ter do wot he pleases wit’ his own property.

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In this cover cartoon, ostensibly a simple gag about a tramp, arrested for assault, grasping for a mitigating excuse by quoting J. P. Morgan, Puck cannot resist making a point about the negative aspects of the prominent mogul’s philosophy. “Logical extensions” should be questioned, Ehrhart stated via this cartoon.