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A young boy labeled “1914” sits in a chair, smoking, and offers Uncle Sam, sitting opposite him, a drink. He gestures toward two bottles labeled “Hope” and “Fear.” Caption: The New Year — Have something on me, old man! What’ll it be?
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1913-12-31
An angry mob of bankers, brokers, and financiers threaten Santa Claus who is hanging off the statue of George Washington outside Federal Hall in Manhattan, New York City, New York. Caption: Chorus of Bankers and Brokers — Just say Christmas to us this year, that’s all! We dare you!
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1913-12-10
In a perspective view with the “Eye of the Law” at the vanishing point, the “little ones” shield the more important figures in the foreground. From small to large are the “Weigher, Appraiser, Inspector, Superintendent, Manager, Trust Scapegoat, Government Scapegoat, Sugar Trust Director ‘Don’t Touch Sugar Trust it gave to Your Campaign Fund’, [and] High Government Official ‘Don’t Touch Sugar. It gave to Our Campaign Fund.'” Caption: The little ones close to the eye hide the big ones farther away.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1909-12-15
At a royal wedding, the groom is enclosed in packaging labeled “Guaranteed Under the Pure Prince Act” and stamped “Serial Number 606.” An elderly man behind the resigned bride is examining the princely groom who is supported from behind by a gentleman.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1913-10-22
Charles F. “Murphy” holds “Father Knickerbocker,” a symbolic figure for New York City, his hands bound behind his back, over a large tub labeled “City Hall,” his head underwater among “Plums” labeled “Good Things, Appointments, Contracts, [and] Jobs.” Edward E. “McCall,” kneeling next to the tub, has pulled out a plum labeled “Control” and is handing it to Murphy. Caption: Boss Murphy — Take your time, Ed, and get ’em all. His Knicklets here won’t bother you.
A tiger labeled “Tammany” stands on the edge of a bluff overlooking New York City on the opposite side of a river, at night.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1913-09-17
At center, the father of four children is buried beneath their “Graduation Bills.” Surrounding vignettes show the children, “Gladys, aged 6” at her “Kindergarten Graduation,” “Herbert, aged 12” at his “Academy Commencement,” “Egbert, aged 18” graduating from “High School,” and “Clara, aged 22” at her “‘dear old’ College” graduation, all in the space of about 3 weeks. Hanging on the wall in his study is a sign that states “Whither are we drifting? We are drifting to the poorhouse d—- quick.” Caption: Or, the beginning and the end of commencement.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1913-06-11
Two older men, a former Confederate soldier and a former Union soldier, walk arm in arm to purchase tickets for a double-header baseball game. A young boy in the foreground tips his hat, and in the background, a line is forming at the ticket booth and the grandstand is already crowded. Caption: One national flag. One national game.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1913-05-28
Four aged, nude suffragists try to drag John Bull into a pool of water labeled “Woman Suffrage.”
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1913-04-23
Several Republicans with presidential aspirations and/or delegates to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, and a young boy holding a pillow labeled “Stand-Pat Press,” stand around “Stand-Pat” King Canute on the seashore with cliffs at their back, as he commands the rising tide of “Tariff Revision.”
Samuel Ehrhart returned to Puck’s political-cartoon pages with a standard use of the King Canute legend, frequently employed by cartoonists; it was a misuse, actually, because the real story of Canute is not that the king tried to command the waves to recede, but to illustrate to his court that his powers were not unlimited.
In any event Ehrhart had a chance to reconnect Puck with partisanship, as it had been addressing generic issues with force but without regard to party positions or specific personalities to this point in the 1908 campaign. In this cartoon, the king is a generic figure but his retinue is, exclusively, high-tariff Republican proponents from the Senate and House.
A sketch after Trumbull’s painting “The Declaration of Independence” shows John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Thomson, standing around a table where John Hancock is sitting, as a businessman labeled “Spirit of 1908” rushes in from the left. Caption: Where would we be now if modern counsel had prevailed in ’76?
The objections of “big business” and “robber barons” to most proposed reforms and gradual cleansing of the American business economy was long-standing. It was predictable, almost continuous from every perspective of argumentation — literally reactionary.
Yet the context of this cartoon by S.D. Ehrhart likely was not the economy in general, or the prerogatives of major entrepreneurs in general, but the response to the Wall Street Panic of the previous October. Few corporate titans blamed their own activities or back-room chicanery. It was easy to advocate for the status quo — “standing pat” as to policies — and blame the Panic on the number of Muckrakers’ exposures, the wave of new laws and regulations, and the “agitation” generated by the incessant criticisms of President Roosevelt.
A “Party Boss” is fashioning a president from “Presidential Timber,” using parts labeled “Subserviency, Respectability, Party Regularity, Clean Record, [and] Urbanity” which he plans to dress in “Some Body’s Shoes” and a “Presidential Frock Coat.” The surrounding vignettes show that a president must be good at “Reviewing a Parade, Getting His Picture Taken, Receiving Ambassadors, Laying a Cornerstone, Going Home to Vote, [and] Shaking Hands.” Caption: So, as usual, when we get a live one, we don’t know what to make of him.
S. D. Ehrhart’s double-page cartoon in Puck at the end of 1907, obscure today, might have been any artist’s greatest back-handed compliment of President Roosevelt of any cartoonist’s during Roosevelt’s lifetime. And Roosevelt is neither depicted nor named.
At top left is “The Spirit of ’76,” showing a family about to sit down to tea, as boxes of tea are visible through a window in the back of the room, floating in Boston Harbor. The father, who has just entered, states: “Away with that tea or you’re no daughter of mine! Not a drop in this house until the hateful tax is taken off!” At bottom right is “The Spiritless 1907,” showing a family sitting at the dinner table where the grandfather is about to carve the beef. He states: “Ain’t it a shame the prices they charge for beef. But we’ve got to have it, Trust or no Trust.” At the bottom left, disgruntled patrons exit a “Market,” counting their change.
Cartoons in journals like Puck (and since, in the field) primarily have been partisan, political, or somewhere in the middle and to varying degrees of intensity, “commentary.” The commentary can be humorous, as S. D. Ehrhart’s once were, or more biting and incisive, as his became. This was generally true of his fellow cartoonists at the time, and magazines like Puck‘s rival Life always tended toward the social-commentary mode.
This Thanksgiving cartoon is an example of the evolution. Ehrhart eschewed the traditional holiday-themed humorous vignettes. His commentary here is not aimed at a candidate or a party, but at what he sees as declining American values like self-respect and a spirit against outside dominance of private life.
At center, a woman wearing a newspaper dress drinks “Subsidy Brand” champagne chilling in a bucket labeled “Wall Street Cooler,” while a man labeled “Corporate Interests” writes a check. A bust statue of “Horace Greeley” is visible in the background. The entire scene is framed by an octopus with tiny male figures caught in its tentacles. Surrounding vignettes show a newspaper editor as he looks to his staff (larger than life) and to the newspaper owners (diminutive), a “Business Manager” telling an “editorial writer” to tone down comments about a “forest spoliation matter [because] the boss has acquired some interests out there,” and a newspaper reader “who has read the paper for forty years” influenced by the resulting editorial – “I guess that western forest steal ain’t as bad as they made it out. This editorial says it’s been grossly exaggerated.”
People today are aware, and often concerned, that newspapers show bias. In fact since before the Revolution most newspapers were intended to assert partisan points of view. Readers expected and often welcomed the situation. It was only in the twentieth century that newspapers self-identified as neutral or independent or non-partisan, or “news only,” even if editorial pages leaned left or right, Democrat or Republican. That facade faded away, or morphed into outright partisanship.
It is interesting that S. D. Ehrhart’s biting cartoon “The Kept Newspaper” foreshadows some criticisms of the twenty-first century. Those criticisms arise not from a newspaper’s overt stances, even in the choice of stories or slanted headlines for one party or the other. The concern is about subtle distortions embedded deep in stories, and corporate (or other) string-pulling, not merely party politics.
Vignettes show how it might look if the summer were as cold as spring. In the central image, bathers at the seashore wear fur clothing and must step over steam-pipes for heating the surf. Surrounding images show a couple in the midst of a proposal being interrupted by walruses, patrons enjoying hot-sauce drinks “At the Fizz Fountain,” people bundled up on the resort porch happy to be free of mosquitoes which “die at a temperature of 14° or less,” and a guest getting a hot water bottle delivered to his room.
Puck‘s increasing reliance on genre cartoons in its center-spreads — non-political, humorous news commentary — had grown to every four to six weeks by 1907; and increasingly the assignments went to S. D. Ehrhart and L. M. Glackens.
This example by Ehrhart dealt with current events for readers — very current by necessity, because the lingering Spring cold-weather pattern might have quickly passed when magazines were printed and distributed.
Vignettes depict the craze for cigar bands and the various ways in which they can be used to celebrate special occasions, such as getting married, the birth of a child, a holiday turkey dinner, on clothing to identify a family, as collectibles, and as a closure for a coffin. Caption: Dedicated to the gent who smokes ’em with the belts on.
As Puck magazine’s color centerspreads were increasingly given over to humorous cartoons, usually vignettes of commentary on a social, not political, issue of the day, the three cartoonists usually handling the assignments were S. D. Ehrhart, L. M. Glackens, and J. S Pughe.
This cartoon addresses the cigar-band mania. Evidently men collected colorful and decorative cigar bands, like some collected wooden cigar boxes with elaborate color labels. Also, Ehrhart seems to take aim at the propriety, or lack of it, of smoking a cigar with the band still on it.
Vignettes show a country woman harvesting canned fruits and vegetables from “The Quaint Old Kitchen Garden,” surrounded with scenes of a young boy catching canned “Salmon” from a stream filled with other canned fish, an old man trying to catch cans of chicken running about the farm yard, a man loading a wagon at the “Freight Depot” with food products shipped from New York, and a milkmaid at a dairy opening a can of “Condensed Milk” at “Milking Time.” Caption: “Table stocked daily with an abundance of eggs, milk, fresh fish and vegetables.”
The caption of S. D. Ehrhart’s topical genre cartoon is, of course, a phrase that frequently appeared in brochures, signs, and newspaper advertisements for weekend or summer-vacation getaways at farms and rural spots. Whether farmers were committed to sell their produce to larger concerns, and needed to rely on canned goods, or not, Ehrhart’s cartoon probably was more representational than satirical.
These days it can be difficult to find, say, orange juice that is not from fruit grown in Mexico, Brazil, etc., according to labels. Or avocados not with Mexico or other Central American “countries of origin,” even when purchased within miles of Temecula, California, where ninety per cent of all avocados are grown.
Woodrow Wilson, as a doctor, holds aloft a bottle of “Tariff Subsidy Morphine” among a group of men at the “Democratic Sanitarium – Morphine and other Drug Habits Cured.” On a table are bottles of “High Protection Cocaine, High Protection Dope, [and] Tariff Subsidy Morphine.” Caption: Dr. Wilson — Don’t be alarmed, gentlemen. We won’t take it from you all at once. We’ll taper you down gradually, and after a while you’ll have confidence enough in yourselves to get along without it.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1912-09-11
A man labeled “Infant Industries” is having a seizure in front of Uncle Sam and Columbia. Columbia, holding a purse labeled “High Protection,” is giving him a hand-out while Uncle Sam reaches into his pocket. Caption: Whenever he spots an easy-looking couple, he flops and has one.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1912-03-20
Patrons of the Musée du Louvre steal paintings and other art objects and walk past museum guards. Caption: A recent inventory of the pictures in the Louvre showed that three hundred and twenty-three canvases were missing. Among the artists included were such masters as Boucher, Carot, Coypel, David, Millet, Vernet, Constable, Reynolds, Lawrence, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1911-10-18