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An actress and her manager sit in an office. Caption: The Star — I’ve had my diamonds stolen three times and been married four. Now, what else can I do? / Manager — You might take lessons in acting!
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1902-03-19
A series of vignettes illustrate how women’s social life impacts their domestic life, their problems with servants, the troubles neglected children get into, and how home life can be improved by curtailing their social life. The heading over the main scene states: Grand Federation of the Housewives of America for the Protection against incompetence, insolence, & dominance of the Servant Girl in the household.
Puck delivers two blows against common themes of the day: Feminism that resulted in what critics then called “The Emancipated Woman” is depicted by cartoonist Ehrhart as producing unruly children and troubled marriages, and, Puck suggests, if women returned to their household duties, the scourge of unsophisticated and domineering immigrant servants would end.
Several scenes of wit and humor in life are depicted, including children swimming and being rebuked for playing baseball on the Sabbath, women doing plein air painting, men yachting, and young women discussing courtship. At bottom right, “American progression of three years (Next!)” shows a repair shop moving forward with the times, from wagon repair to bicycle repair and then to automobile repair.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-09-11
A thin, tattered “Pullman Sleeping Car Porter” holds a piece of paper “Tips Daily Average on each Trip” which shows a 70% reduction in tips between 1890 and 1900. At the bottom it states “Pullman Porter’s Labor Union.” He is appealing to the president of the railroad company to become a salaried employee. An insert shows the Pullman porter “As we used to know him,” plump, with his pockets stuffed with cash and with rings on his fingers. Caption: “Say, Boss, if the public won’t pay me my wages any longer I guess the company ‘ll have to do it!”
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-09-04
An “Absentee Millionaire” stands on land labeled “Europe” spraying money from a hose connected to an “American Hydrant source of income,” suggesting that wealthy Americans spend more money in Europe than in their own country.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-08-28
At center, two masked men recklessly drive an automobile down a country road, frightening every man, woman, and beast, and chasing them out of the roadway. Other vignettes depict scenes of summer activities, including swimming at the beach, hunting, fishing, excursion boating, and courting.
Beginning in the mid-1880s, Puck devoted one special issue, and many cartoons and short stories in other issues, to “Mid-Summer” themes. On these pages, politics took a subordinate place to humorous cartoons on social subjects, such as in this double-page spread by Ehrhart.
A large red devil turns the crank of a large wheel decorated with scenes of gambling and with male and female figures labeled “Reformers,” “Citizen’s Committee,” “Women’s League,” and “Salvation,” as well as police officers hanging onto the wheel as it spins.
Published just after Easter, this Puck cartoon visited a frequent theme of cartoonists, as well as clergy and reformers, especially during the Lenten season, about sinful habits, and how society could ameliorate the unfortunate results of wanton behavior. Easter sermons predictably made headlines in these times.
Columbia welcomes a woman labeled “South America” to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-05-08
Passengers in a railroad sleeping car tell the porter to make sure to put them “off at Buffalo” so they can visit the Pan-American Exposition.
The humor in this non-political cartoon is noting the various social types flocking to the fair in Buffalo: society snobs, pretty girls, rural types, foreigners, cowboys, old maids, and children. A point of irony, certainly no prediction of any sort, is the brandishing of a handgun; within four months President William McKinley would be assassinated by an anarchist with a handgun at that very fair.
A young couple, wearing formal evening dress at a fashionable card party, discuss whether the card game “euchre” is gambling, with men and women playing cards at tables in the background. Caption: He. — Some clergymen denounce progressive euchre as gambling. She. — I think they’re horrid! He. — But I think it is gambling. She. — I think you’re horrid!
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-04-24
A wizard holds the strings to a wooden jumping toy shaped like a globe with a head, arms and legs. He is surrounded by vignettes with captions: “An early fake,” “The Millerites, waiting for the world to ‘come to an end,'” “The ‘Materializing’ fraud,” “The ‘Get Rich Quick’ delusion,” “The Dowieite’s short-cut to Heaven,” “The superstition of modern drug worship,” and “The profitable ‘Religion’ of Christian Science.”
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-04-10
Columbia is adjusting her bonnet, which is a battleship labeled “World Power” with two guns labeled “Army” and “Navy.” It is spewing thick black smoke labeled “Expansion.” She is inserting a tiny sword as a hatpin to hold it in place.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-04-06
The domestic servant evolves from country housewife to an employed domestic through seven scenes beginning with the barefooted housewife receiving “the summons to the land of the free.” In scene two she is greeted by relatives who presumably coach her in the fine art of choosing her employers, which she does in scene three “with haughty discrimination.” In scenes four and five she fills her leisure time with social activities, such as attending church and enjoying social gatherings at home. The central figure, scene six, shows her as an over-sized and defiant “Kitchen Tyrant” with four well-dressed women, on their knees, pleading with her. The final scene shows her downfall, “a ready and delightful solution of the whole problem; – one that we are all coming to.” It shows a tall skyscraper, “Family Apartment House” offering “more comforts than at home – no more wrangling with servants – meals, laundry work, valets, chambermaids, and all domestic service provided by the management.” In the background is a row of low, brownstone-like walk-ups, “This row of dwellings to let cheap. No reasonable offer refused.”
A frequent theme of cartoons in the 1880s and ’90s was the “servant problem.” It was mostly related to maids and kitchen help, and mostly affected middle-class families. This was still a time when people of modest means strove to have domestic help as a basic part of their households. The “Problem” had several aspects: the difficulty in finding competent, or any, servants; the problems inherent in hiring recent immigrants, especially regarding language and social skills; retention of servants and their frequent demands for independence. Cartoonists hit upon the anomaly of servants ruling the households they were paid to serve.
Illustration showing the British Lion, wearing a military uniform, aghast by the tattered look of a female figure labeled “Peace,” her clothing torn, head and left arm bandaged, and walking with a crutch, the dove at her feet looks plucked. In the background is a sign stating “The last Boer ditch” stuck in ground labeled “South Africa.” Caption: Great Britain. — Didn’t you tell them the war was over? Peace. — “Yes; – and they immediately filled me full of lead; – said it was only a rumor of war!
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-02-20
In a series of vignettes, a rural family arrives in the city to stay at the “Walledoff,” a fashionable hotel [the unsophisticated rural man’s pronunciation of “Waldorf”]. The patriarch of the family repeatedly mistakes each encounter for something grander than its appearance.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1901-01-30
At center is a theater manager, his hands and pockets stuffed with money. Around him are four scenes showing how he manages a scam to extort higher prices for the theater tickets, using scalpers (called “Speculators”) and by bribing the police. A fifth scene shows how the public can change this practice, by not attending the theater productions. Caption: The manager the real culprit.
Puck here ventures into a controversy largely forgotten today, but a hot issue at the time, when theaters and musical production proliferated on Broadway. The so-called “Theatrical Trust” was comprised almost exclusively by Jewish mangers, owners, and producers. The “culprit” in the center drawing by Ehrhart has mildly Semitic features, but in the pages of Puck‘s rival comic weekly, Life, the first decade of the century saw a relentless campaign against scalpers, purveyors of offensive content, ticket scams, shoddy construction materials (theater fires were not uncommon), and banishment of certain critics. Life ran many theater reviews, and its critics were banned from many theaters. The “war” attracted charges of anti-Semitism because of vituperative columns and cartoons with caricatures.
A customs official ushers a titled member of the nobility on board a steamer, as a wealthy American woman, with thoughts of a royal wedding, holds up a bag full of money. Caption: Deport the vagrant nobleman as we deport other vagrants.
This theme — American heiresses chasing foreign nobles, even if they lacked estates but owned pedigrees — was a popular complaint and a frequent theme in literature and cartoons at this time. Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the Gibson Girl society figures) decried this tendency, even as he married into the Astor clan.
William Jennings Bryan offers his small, ineffective umbrella labeled “16 to 1,” “Anti-trust,” and “Anti-Expansion,” to a woman labeled “Columbia” who is carrying a more effective umbrella labeled “Prosperity.” Caption: Bryan. — Won’t you come under my umbrella?
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1900-09-05
Illustration shows four scenes related to New York City residents: in the upper left, “August in Madison Ave.” showing the well-to-do leaving town to beat the summer heat; in the upper right, “August in Mulligan Alley” showing the working class suffering from the summer heat; in the lower left, “The ‘better element’ in his element” showing wealthy men relaxing in comfort at the shore; and in the lower right, “The ward politician making ‘dives’ popular” showing a local politician handing out free tickets to mothers and children at popular middle class beaches and amusement parks. Caption: Why the “better element” never happens to get a popular vote in New York City.
This cartoon is an example of social commentary by Puck, though it is frankly gentle in the days of Naturalism in literature and exposes of the slums, when Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives excited public controversy. The book by Riis, an ally of Theodore Roosevelt, resulted in reforms and regulations easing the plight of the urban poor. Neither the milieu of the Malefactors of Great Wealth, nor the street urchins, are depicted here in extremis, but the ministrations of political organizations and police groups are lauded.
New York City Mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck is drowning in a sea of ice blocks labeled “Ice Trust.” Richard Croker, holding a life preserver labeled “Tammany Machine Power,” is swimming toward him. Caption: Help me, Cassius, or I sink!
Judge Robert Anderson Van Wyck was easy to portray as a “clean” politician — old-line New York family; sitting judge — but as a Tammany puppet he was as corrupt as other Democratic mayors of the era in New York City. This cartoon delineates complicated political “currents” of the day, but also illustrates the fact that average readers were quite literate, perhaps more so than those of the twenty-first century. Politics: Tammany allowed the American Ice Company a monopoly in the city of New York. Boss Richard Croker and Mayor Van Wyck profited from stock kickbacks. When a heat wave threatened New York, a scandal erupted which threatened Van Wyck’s standing. The subtext: In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius recounted to Brutus how he had persuaded Caesar to swim the stormy Tiber River, but Caesar feared drowning and called out for help. The point of Cassius’s story was that Caesar could be manipulated and also was less than omnipotent. This cartoon portrays Van Wyck as being manipulated by Tammany and vulnerable politically.