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A very short President Roosevelt and a tall Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks stand beside a table. A silhouette of George Washington is on the wall. Caption: (Reproduced from an exceedingly rare woodcut.)
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905
A large crowd of people rush forward to the “Exchange Desk,” bearing Christmas gifts which they wish to exchange.
“Many unhappy returns.” The subtext of L. M. Glackens’ post-Christmas cover cartoon in Puck is how America had changed in, say, one short decade. Ten years prior, America was trying to crawl out from a devastating depression punctuated by labor strikes and strife, and from a turbulent presidential election enlivened by fears of radicalism and a Populist movement.
By 1906, after a war and a presidential assassination, the United States found equilibrium, and enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity under President Roosevelt. It was a time of record immigration, but a simultaneous shift of urbanites to suburbs; and new industries generally absorbed the new workforce.
President Roosevelt conducts the orchestra at the “Congressional Vaudeville” with a baton labeled “The Big Stick,” with two band members, Elihu Root and William H. Taft, performing “Overture President’s Message.”
This cover cartoon in Puck Magazine appeared one week before President Roosevelt’s annual message. The address was anticipated more than many previous such messages (mandated by the Constitution, but its timing and frequency a matter of tradition, as is its common name, the State of the Union address) because 1906 had been tumultuous year in Washington by any measure; and Roosevelt recently had returned from a trip to Panama to inspect progress on the canal.
In fact the message was not an address at all — Woodrow Wilson established the precedent of a president delivering the speech to a joint session of Congress, directly, something that Roosevelt might have relished himself — but a message. The message, as a synopsis of the year’s achievements and a program for the coming year, really went over the heads of legislators and to the public; that is, he proposed few specific legislative measures. (Some observers saw this as the subtext of a president who increasingly was relying on proclamations and executive orders.)
Two Martians, one holding a telescope and yawning, express relief now that the election for governor of New York has been decided (in favor of Charles Evans Hughes). In the background, on planet Earth, fireworks mark the celebration in New York. Caption: The Martians — Yag be thanked, it’s all over! We can get a little sleep now that we know how the New York election came out.
Puck perennially faced the challenge of addressing current events, and its readership expecting pertinent commentary, when the exigencies of deadlines — planning, writing and drawing, printing, distribution — sometimes meant that issues actually were prepared ten days or so in advance of the cover dates. It was only a real problem at election times.
Through the years Puck met the challenge by showing political parties shaking hands, no mention of the candidates; Judge‘s cartoonist once drew a campaign train in an awful smash-up, leaving the face of the losing candidate to be drawn in the moments prior to publication. In this issue, cartoonist L. M. Glackens pictures election turmoil on faraway earth while two Martians refer to the election, but not the winner.
Vignettes show panels from comic strips featuring Foxy Grandpa, Alphonse and Gaston, Happy Hooligan and the donkey Maud, Buster Brown, and the Katzenjammer Kids, around a central panel with William Randolph Hearst, a candidate in the election for governor of New York, sitting on Maud, with clones of the “comic people” behind him.
It might seem a cold day when a cartoonist contemplates the gubernatorial election of the godfather of the comic strip and foresees a dystopia, but that is how L. M. Glackens portrayed the campaign parade of William Randolph Hearst on election eve, 1906. That issue’s cover cartoon depicted publisher (and congressman) Hearst as a virtual murderer, but in the center spread’s glory, a grand parade of Hearst and, presumably, his most loyal or sole supporters, the stars of his Sunday comic supplements, march with him.
In the five vignettes, Glackens (achieving fair approximations of the actual cartoonists’ work; some of them had recently drawn for Puck) had fun with the logical extensions of such characters in positions of power.
Vignettes show how livestock is treated before being slaughtered and sent to the butcher.
The Packingtown neighborhood of Chicago — its real name — was largely unknown to most Americans until the actual vast slaughtering and packing landscape of the major meat companies gained notoriety as the setting for Upton Sinclair’s sensational book The Jungle.
Not wanting that impression to linger with American consumers, the five major meat packers that comprised the Beef Trust responded with planted articles, advertisements, testimonials, and such. And cartoonists like Puck‘s L. M. Glackens followed suit with predictable commentary and satire.
The devil delivers a tiny piece of ice to a bloated businessman labeled “The Ice Man” wearing a fur coat and sitting on a heater in Hell. Caption: Satan — Yep, this is the biggest fifty pounds I can let you have. On account of the mild winter, ice is very scarce here!
Cartoonist L. M. Glackens scored a hat trick with his cover cartoon about ice deliveries in hot summer months. As a purely humorous cartoon, and in the days prior to electric home refrigeration, virtually every reader would appreciate the jab at ice deliveries literally shaving the weight of blocks for home ice boxes.
The second aspect was the cartoonist’s fun with icons. To show the iceman consigned, in hell, having to wear a fur coat, supplied with Tabasco Sauce for his drink, sitting on a steaming radiator, and the thermometer bursting its top, showed that the cartoonist was having a heck of an enjoyable assignment.
Anthony Comstock, as a monk, thwarts shameless displays of excessive flesh, whether that of women, horses, or dogs, with a “Jane Doe Warrant.”
Anthony Comstock, father of “Comstockery” — the assertion of Victorian moral values on society — continued his crusades past the Victorian Era, to his death in 1915. The term has survived because some people maintain that his puritanical attitudes have survived to today.
His initial dander was up over the publication and dissemination, especially through the mails, of obscenity. The his definition of obscenity broadened, and his fulminations spread to birth-control information, free-love and socialist tracts, prohibition, Sunday-opening ordinances, and suppression of nude sculptures and paintings like the 1913 semi-nude “September Morn, “which resulted in extraordinary publicity and reprinting of the fairly chaste image.
Theodore Roosevelt stands at center, beaming, with several supporters (Elihu Root, Thomas Collier Platt, William H. Taft, Charles W. Fairbanks, Joseph Benson Foraker, and J. S. Sherman) and a bunch of hands pointing toward him. Caption: The sum and substance of the Republican platform.
In mid-term years of administrations in these days, state political parties often “endorsed” the president and his policies; or, of course, if out of the White House, would nod to the most recent positions of the parties. In 1903, Senator Joseph Benson Foraker of Ohio embarrassed his in-party Ohio rival Marcus Hanna by drafting an extreme, not generic, endorsement of President Roosevelt and actually promoted his renomination.
Hanna had presidential ambitions himself (of which Foraker was aware) and was put in a tight place: a leader of the party such as himself could not be perceived in opposition to his president. Hanna wanted to hold off making any sort of commitment, and wired Roosevelt that he would understand. The president wired back that he understood that anyone supporting the administration would naturally vote its approval.
Freshmen college students are being tested for “Beer Capacity,” on the “Cigarette Tester,” and the “Rah Rah Recorder” at “Sis Boom University.” Caption: The freshmen are taking their entrance exams.
Puck does take note of the autumn ritual that is the opening of the college year. Cartoonist L. M. Glackens employs reasonable cynicism by choosing to address entrance tests and ignore academic potential, specialized aptitude, and chosen fields of study. Instead he depicts the popular cliches about some students at some colleges — beer, cigarettes, and sports.
Various forms of transportation owned by the government and operated by an abundance of government employees are depicted, suggesting that some level of corruption is an aspect of federal, state, or municipal ownership.
The brilliant L. M. Glackens, brother of the famous American “Ashcan School” painter William J. Glackens, was being given more and more space in Puck, to the delight of readers and subsequent researchers. He had a clean style, and presented trenchant commentary lucidly.
Glackens, addressing the issue of government ownership of municipal services — as the concept was being discussed across America, and implemented in cities like Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago — might have taken any other tack. Or, with a double-page spread to fill, he might have chosen several themes. But his comic vision of government ownership’s future in America was one of “featherbedding.”
A large William H. Taft wears a stars and stripes turban, with a large knife labeled “The Big Bolo” stuck in his belt and a notice attached stating “For Stand Patters.” He is speaking to a group of diminutive figures labeled variously “Congressman” with a “Manila Souvenir Spoon,” “Philippine Industries, Free Trade Promises, [and] Senate Bill.” In the background, on the left is the boarding ramp to a ship, and on the right are two entrances to a railroad station platform labeled “To Washington Direct.” One entrance is labeled “Philippine Free Trade” and the other is labeled “Stand Pat.” Taft is telling them to be sure to choose the correct train, i.e., not to enter through the “Stand Pat” gate. Caption: Our Foremost Filipino — Now, boys, after all my talking, don’t go and take the wrong train.
In 1900, President William McKinley named William H. Taft to be civilian governor of the Philippine Islands. It was position that carried responsibility and diplomatic skills, because the new United States territory was restive and rebellious, more so than any of the new acquisitions won in the Spanish-American War. In the next three years more than 100,000 deaths resulted from the Filipino Insurrection.
Taft’s father Alphonso had been United States Attorney General and Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant. William H. Taft served as United States Solicitor-General under President Benjamin Harrison. After his service in the Philippines, President Roosevelt appointed Taft his Secretary of War, with several foreign assignments in Panama, the Philippines again, and in Cuba, where he briefly and simultaneously served as provisional governor. On one of his goodwill trips to the Philippines and Japan (on which Alice Roosevelt, the President’s daughter, joined and was feted) he conducted back-channel negotiations with Japan to diffuse tensions over immigration matters.
A fashionably dressed young woman is being escorted by a rabbit and a young child dressed in a red suit. The woman looks back over her shoulder at three unhappy monks standing outside a stone church or monastery.
Puck scarcely took second place to any of its contemporary weekly or monthly rival magazines when holiday themes and seasonal issues took prominence. In Puck‘s early and purely political years, comments on Lent, Easter, and Christmas were highlighted less, frequently relegated to back pages. But during the Belle Epoque, and when Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Japonisme, and the “poster style” of advertisements and covers predominated, Puck was a player.
Louis M. Glackens, a mainstay of Puck‘s staff from this time until 1914 (and then a pioneer animated cartoonist), contributed many covers like this: fanciful themes; solid compositions; underlying lightness; and handsome coloring. His brother William was a major figure in the Expressionist artistic movement, a member the so-called Ashcan School, one of “The Eight.”
A young woman with a shotgun over her left shoulder carries a dead turkey.
By 1904, the cartoonist L. M. Glackens (brother of prominent American Impressionist painter Louis Glackens, one of “the Eight”) executed many of the magazine’s holiday and seasonal covers in the era’s best poster-like traditions.
This handsome cover is impressive for its composition and color, but notable too for what it tells subsequent readers about the social mores: it is an “emancipated women” of the time, assertive and proud and solo.
A young woman plays a lute as a group of rabbit cavaliers dance around her. In the background, two monks whisper to each other at the entrance to a monastery.
Louis M. Glackens continued his role as Puck‘s artist for holiday, seasonal, and specialty theme issues, with cartoons such as this. Decorative illustrations, social cartoons, and holiday artwork, more than occasionally gracing Puck covers as the century progressed, doubtlessly attracted additional readers; or, as the magazine’s business office might have noted, stopped the disinclination of partisan readers to buy a week’s issue, if they disagreed with the political message on most covers.
In a dining room, a man sits at a table eating, a woman has opened a door, and three men stand in the doorway, singing Christmas carols.
Puck‘s Louis M Glackens, increasingly its assigned cartoonist specializing in holiday covers and poster-like illustrations, manages a little subtle humor in this otherwise ubiquitous festive scene. The Christmas carolers are thin and at least one of them casts a hungry eye on the Christmas dinner. In the warm house, a portly man sits by a glowing fireplace about to dine, alone, and the setting sun in the background indicates that dinner time approaches… perhaps not for the carolers.
Glackens’ cartoons and themes for Puck were in contrast to the painting is his increasingly famous brother William. A former newspaper cartoonist and illustrator himself, William joined others of similar resumes, including John Sloan, George Luks, and George Bellows, drawing with trademark slashing brush strokes and markedly different thematic preoccupations than those of Louis at Puck
In a kitchen, a young woman prepares a pie while four young children watch. A dead turkey lies on a table and a large pumpkin stands on the floor.
Increasingly during the first decade of the twentieth century, Puck devoted more issues to holidays and seasonal observances, as with this Thanksgiving-themed issue. And increasingly the magazine devoted more attention to decorative covers. Rose O’Neill, Frank Nankivell, and L. M. Glackens were most often assigned these covers and spreads; and memorable reflections of the spirit of the times, like this happy drawing, tenderly colored, resulted.
A crowd of people wearing colonial dress gather around an old man who is firing off a cannon during the Fourth of July celebration, 1903.
In the first years of the new century, Puck subtly devoted less space and editorial attention to partisan politics, and more to humorous images, decorative covers, and social topics. The magazine was a full decade away from sublimating politics in a major fashion, and that decision might have been motivated by the disinclination to offend roughly have of its potential readership… but in any event the humorous and decorative artwork, and non-political themes, were asserting themselves on Puck‘s covers especially.
Cartoonist L. M. Glackens was a master of political subjects and especially humorous illustration, as demonstrated by this cover, including its subtle coloring. In a decade he proved his mastery of animated cartoons, too, as a pioneer in that field for various studios.
A little girl takes all the colored eggs from the Easter Bunny’s basket. She is putting them in her apron, but some have fallen on the ground and are broken. A hen wearing a bonnet is in the background.
Puck‘s annual Springtime/Easter issue was graced with a poster-like design by L. M. Glackens. This was one its most attractive covers at a time when social themes, humorous drawings and jokes, and decorative holiday-inspired artwork insinuated themselves on covers. With the flat-color background and silhouetted figures, the drawing has a feel of Japonisme — then a reigning “look” in poster art in the United States, Europe, and of course Japan.
Glackens was relatively new to the Puck staff at this time, although he had submitted occasional drawings as far back as the days of the World’s Fair Puck in 1893. When he left the magazine 1n 1914, his talent and (evidently) celerity were put to use in the nascent animation field. His brother William was the famous American Impressionist painter, one of “The Eight” or “Ashcan School.”
Uncle Sam hugs a youthful John Bull, with firecrackers on both sides and a remarque below showing a Revolutionary War soldier sending the British and the British Lion back to England.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1902-07-02