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

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?

Comments and Context

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.

Ehrhart’s double-page spread “Concerning the American Girl” featured the cartoonist’s trademark vignettes-on-a-topic, but also allows the magazine and its social cartoonist to register displeasure about a cleric’s attack on one its advocacies — the “emancipation” of the American Girl as typified by Ehrhart’s cartoons and the Gibson Girl of Life Magazine.

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.”

Comments and Context

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.

The theater business in New York City was thriving — despite the caption’s reference to many failures along the Great White Way. At one point there were almost productions of all genres in New York’s theaters.

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.

Comments and Context

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.

The magazine and its cartoonist has been subtly turning the spotlight on an otherwise unknown and modest jurist from New York State, Judge Alton Brooks Parker. Indeed he became the Democrats’         standard-bearer in 1904 (only to suffer major defeat the hands of the incumbent Theodore Roosevelt).

A haughty, well-dressed woman sits in the middle of a ballroom, holding a paper that states “Society hence-forth will strive to attract brains, not mere vulgar wealth. –A leader of Alleged Society.” Around her are animal acts, gambling tables, men eating on horseback, people with small animals, and a monkey, wearing clothing, squatting on the floor eating off china. Caption: Puck — Madam, you can attract neither brains nor decency to society with this miserable outfit.

Comments and Context

The “400” was the term given to the cream of American society, unconsciously bestowed by Ward McAllister, the unofficial arbiter of social events in Manhattan and Newport in the 1880s, and coined because of the capacity at one ball’s location. For social aspirants it became a term of ambition; for a growing class of moralistic conservatives — for instance, Theodore Roosevelt, who considered the playgrounds of the rich to be vulgar — and to the socially conscious and the poor, the activities of the 400 was something to disdain.

And then there were the cartoonists. A specialty of Charles Dana Gibson (although he traveled in its circles) in Life Magazine; and Samuel Ehrhart and C. J. Taylor, principally, in Puck, the doings of the society swells were fodder for ridicule. The activities depicted here are perhaps only slight exaggerations.

Thomas Collier Platt, with his young bride, passes through the gates to the “Oldboys’ Hymeneal Paradise” where they are greeted by a “Reception Committee” of several old men labeled “Depew, Potter, Dewey, Flagler, [and] Woodford” and their young wives.

Comments and Context

Cartoonist Ehrhart was not merely commenting on the “May-December” nuptials of the elderly Senator Thomas Collier Platt, and surrounding him with fellow white-haired friends. In a scene where many gray-bearded men are romancing young women, the foreground figures are indeed men who betook younger brides.

Admiral George Dewey, for instance, not only married a widow much younger than he, precipitating a scandal — not so much for the difference in their ages, but her religion (Catholic) and the strange choice of Dewey to transfer his $50,000 house, a gift bought from public subscription, to his wife. New York Senator Chauncey Depew’s second wife was 35 and he almost twice her age. Episcopal Bishop Henry Potter recently married his second wife, who was “only” 15 years younger.

A young woman talks with her father about the promises her boyfriend has made. Caption: Ethel — He has promised to give me every dollar he earns! / Papa — Better make him promise to give you every dollar he gets. He has a political job, you know!

Comments and Context

This Ehrhart cartoon shows a father, a likely parvenu or nouveau riche knowing the value of a dollar, reminding his daughter of the difference between earning a paycheck and receiving a paycheck.

As the future fiancee observes from around the corner, the social niceties of the day — preparing for the beau to ask for the daughter’s hand — seem as old-fashioned as the father’s ostentatious garb, or the daughter’s elegant dress, or the furnishings of Edwardian America.

John A. Dowie appears as a wizard at center, offering salvation and other products to gullible customers. The surrounding vignettes show various types of “people,” such as “The working people”, downtrodden and depressed, who are tricked into following the “Walking Delegate,” his pockets overflowing with money, and “The get-rich-quick people” who anxiously purchase bogus stocks and securities. There are those who have their palms read and those who believe they can build their own homes, as well as those who show off their castles with a huge “Mortgage.”

Comments and Context

This Ehrhart montage of thematic cartoons (that was becoming a popular, or at least common, feature in the magazine) is a caustic commentary of human nature: serving “people” as the putative motive of scammers and swindlers; and the inevitable gullibility of people in general.

The main cartoon, at the center, has a particular figure, not a generic con man, as its target.

An agent presents the grand entrance to “Bluff Court” to an excited young couple. The regal doormen add a royal quality to a spectacular looking dwelling that is actually an apartment with cramped and narrow quarters. Caption: The apartment house trap and its alluring bait.

Comments and Context

Cartoons like this by Samuel Ehrhart, a double-page spread in an issue of Puck Magazine, provide windows to students of history and researchers scarcely less pertinent than those saturated with politics and partisan debates. We learn in “social” cartoons how society was changing, what its standards and values were, and the concerns that often drove politics and political positions.

In this cartoon, for instance, the cartoonist conveys more than a humorous comment on apartment living, or even fraudulent claims of apartment-house managers. The montage would have no relevance but for the implied observation that America was producing a class of social-climbers, often too willing to be seduced by “respectable” addresses and superficial appearances (like lobbies) even at the cost of sardine-like living accommodations.

Cupids on horseback lasso attractive young couples and herd them toward the “Matrimonial Corral” in the background.

Comments and Context

Things were changing rapidly in American life during the years of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency — in politics, economics and the financial world, inventions and innovations, and personal freedoms. In this last category, this cartoon reminds us that a brief 20 years earlier, such scenes would have been impossible or implausible.

Romance and flirtations are as old as human nature, but public displays of affection, especially the freedoms of the “Emancipated Women” of the day, increased with liberty and eased social taboos. Cartoonist Ehrhart depicts courtship of the day as only a cartoonist could — employing every possible cliche and stereotype of the humorists and commentators. Bold chaperones, disapproving chaperones, flirtatious young women, handsome beaux, old maids, sportsmen, cupids everywhere, all having innocent fun in the drawing, and leading to the matrimonial chapel in the background.

At center, a young woman at seaside writes to her beau in the city, asking when he can come down (in verse by Edwin L. Sabin). Surrounding the main image are scenes of summer life at the sea, at the resort, on the road, and at home.

Comments and Context

S. D. Ehrhart became Puck‘s go-to cartoonist of humorous and light social commentary in special holiday and seasonal issues of the magazine in the century’s first decade. As here, his format was to feature one large drawing or central joke (or illustrating a poem related to the theme), surrounded by one-panel gags. Seldom did they refer to political issues, as magazines like Puck, Judge, and Life increasingly desired to attract general, and not narrowly partisan, readerships.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

A young man wearing a robe sits in a chair by a window, reading a book. A young woman nurse is attending to him and an old man, the doctor, has arrived for a check-up. There are medicines on a table in the foreground. Caption: The Nurse — The Doctor has come to take your temperature. / The Convalescent — I suppose it’s all I have left.

Comments and Context

This cartoon’s joke has little to do with a pretty nurse or a handsome patient, as might be assumed from many themes of the day. Rather, “taking” all he has left is a critique on the cost of doctors’ care, evidenced by the account-book on the table in the foreground.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Thomas Lipton checks the pulse of an animated feminine America’s Cup labeled “America 1851.” Caption: Dr. Lipton – Your condition, of course, is not alarming; but a trip abroad would do you a world of good.

Comments and Context

In 1903, Sir Thomas Lipton dreamed yet again of capturing the America’s Cup. The 1902 competition, in New York Harbor, had attracted major attention — three constituent races; the United States’s entry of bold new design; J. P. Morgan’s recent interest as an owner and fan… and Lipton’s British entry defeated, not even finishing.

Despite his flirtatious ways with the buxom America’s Cup depicted in Ehrhart’s cartoon, America in 1903 continued its unbroken string of victories. It was commented at the time that Sir Thomas might have been happier confining himself to his Lipton Tea business.

A “real American girl” sails a small boat around rocks that look like crowns of royalty in the “Sea of Matrimony” where boats labeled “American Fortunes” have shipwrecked. Caption: Puck — The real American girl is too clever to be wrecked here.

Comments and Context

This cartoon reflects a common theme, perhaps an easy target, of American cartoonists of this era: American women of social status seeking marriages with foreigners of nobility, or titles — or, as the critiques went, bartering wealth for “position.” To the extent this situation was real, it clearly was a two-way street, with the nouveau riche American families rescuing the fortunes (or lack thereof) of ancient landed gentry, usually British.

The situation was a common phenomenon, perhaps more honored by publicity than numbers. But the Vanderbilts and Astors were two families that established transatlantic ties if not empires. Even Charles Dana Gibson, cartooning’s chief proponent of American marital chauvinism, married into the Astor family.

A fashionably dressed woman wearing goggles is taking a drive in an automobile. Through a series of vignettes her slim figure and dress attract considerable attention. However, when she removes her goggles, exposing some blemishes to her looks, the men react with horror.

Comments and Context

This cartoon is more than a cartoon strip on the cliched idea of an ugly spinster being mistaken as a pretty maid by men she encounters. It is a window into some of the fads and fancies, manners and morals of a forgotten time. There are several distinctive elements that tell us that the turn of the Twentieth Century was a period of peaceful but profound changes in society.

The automobile was a new phenomenon, and a plaything of the rich. Women, so long inhibited in social matters, had graduated to solo bicycling, and soon thereafter “scorching” (fast automobiling…even as fast as 30 miles per hour!) on their own. We are reminded that, as on the first trains with coal dust and landscape dust with which to contend, early “car fiends” had to wear protective goggles and gloves. And in this time of the “emancipated woman,” men flirted more openly than they had barely a decade previously.

Puck tugs at the coat-tails of Andrew Carnegie, as he and John D. Rockefeller, Junior, pile money bags around the base of a statue labeled “Fame,” which they seek by endowing libraries and universities. Puck is suggesting that they could do more good for society by endowing places like a “Home for Consumptives.” Caption: Puck — You have qualified thoroughly as modern philanthropists, now why not do some good?

Comments and Context

When Puck Magazine had opinions, they usually were expressed in written editorials or, in cartoons, through the character of its mascot-figure Puck. Here he suggests to the nation’s two greatest benefactors of the day, that their largesse might better be directed to the sick and poor than to libraries and universities.

It is rather harsh criticism of the moguls, especially since the implication is that their donations are partly motivated by self-promotion. Carnegie Free Libraries still exist, as do universities and foundations funded by various Rockefellers. But as America was growing more prosperous, so was its underclass increasing. 

At center, men on horseback dine beneath palm trees, surrounded by vignettes showing various special dinners, such as “The girl-in-the-pie dinner,” “The dinner that was raided,” “The monkey dinner,” and others. A map shows streets, buildings labeled after dinner courses, and horse-drawn carriages. Men and women wearing formal clothing walk through a water fountain, captioned “Another prank of the 400.” Caption: Puck — Let us be thankful there are only Four Hundred of these.

Comments and Context

Ehrhart’s cartoon was another in his series of humorous critiques — a main drawing surrounded by related vignettes — pointing to the excesses of the upper class (“the 400”). The scenes, real or hyperbolic, range from wasteful to frivillous to degenerate.

Puck‘s cartoons in this vein — perhaps echoing Theodore Roosevelt’s “Malefactors of Great Wealth,” Mark Twain’s Gilded Age, and economist Thorstein Veblen’s critique of “Conspicuous Consumption” — increased in these years. The upper classes, as they engaged in superfluities, becamer subjects of scorn more than admiration.

The “Annual Report of the Fire Proof Fire Insurance Co.” is being reviewed by the directors. Vignettes show the manager of a company taking remedial measures to fireproof his establishment, only to find that his premiums have doubled.

Comments and Context

The extent to which seemingly every entity in the United States was coming under the umbrella of a “trust” organization, or monopoly of services and control of rates, is illustrated by this cartoon. Ehrhart’s larger point, however, is that fire-insurances companies were becoming rackets. The insured were obliged to add protections, whose costs were onerous; and then premiums were raised as such capital investments rose.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

“The Idle Stork” has little to do as the upper class chooses not to have children, whereas “The Strenuous Stork” is being worked to death by a population explosion among the lower class.

Comments and Context

As is the case in the 21st century, the birth rate among American whites and “old stock” declined at the turn of the last century. There is a double-reference to Theodore Roosevelt in Ehrhart’s cartoon. The first is the very theme and the caption. One of the president’s extracurricular campaigns was to preach against low birth rates, small families, willful sterility, what he called “race suicide.” He believed that all families, not only Anglo-Saxons in the United States, should be large; that increasing the family lines and “being fruitful and multiplying” was incumbent on healthy citizens. He sent letters of congratulation to parents of large families when he learned of them. In turn, a number of children during Roosevelt’s presidency were named Theodore.

The other reference to Roosevelt is the term applied to the exhausted stork in Ehrhart’s cartoon — the Strenuous Stork, obviously inspired by Roosevelt’s motto and one of his book titles, The Strenuous Life.

The vacant home of a millionaire appears at center, surrounded by vignettes showing the whereabouts and activities of the millionaire’s family members. His wife and a daughter are on the golf course, a son is cruising on a yacht, another daughter is at the seminary, and another son is marking time on a ranch, while “Papa [gambles] at Monte Carlo” and the pets spend their days in the kennel.

Comments and Context

Besides showing off Ehrhart’s considerable talents as an illustrator-cartoonist, this cartoon is benign group of drawings whose points illustrate the sharp observations of critics like the economist Thorstein Veblen. The critique of Veblen’s controversial but influential book The Theory of the Leisure Class (Macmillan, 1899) focused on the excesses of the wealthy. It described an unflattering pattern of the accumulation of personal wealth and its inevitable corrupting effect on societies. Veblen introduced the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to the language, and Ehrhart’s cartoon of a mansion made redundant by its family’s outside activities, could serve as an illustration of Veblen’s critique.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Various incidents are shown where a person refuses to perform a task because he or she is a specialist in some other field. The series concludes with two men speaking to each other over the caption, “The only specialists from whom nothing else is expected.” They are Weber and Fields, the German-dialect stage comedians immensely popular at the time.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1903-02-18