Levering, Albert, 1869-1929

Men dressed as Native Americans stand on board a ship labeled “The Good Ship Dope,” throwing cartons and boxes of adulterated and unhealthy food products over the sides, into the harbor. Caption: A lesson in practical patriotism taught by the Boston tea party.

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Comments and Context

Albert Levering might have been the most industrious cartoonist in the history of Puck magazine. When his drawings do not crawl with figures, props, labels, and detailed backgrounds, his other work — like interior humor cartoons and book illustrations — are replete with crowded visual elements and intricate shading. Levering also drew for Life and Harper’s Weekly.

A crowd of people, many with belongings in tow, wait for the rope to drop so they can dash for available apartments. In the background, apartment buildings are being constructed, all indicating that they will be finished in a very short period of time, to meet the rising demand for housing. Caption: The rush for apartments is getting very Oklahoma.

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Comments and Context

This magnificent and detailed center-spread Puck cartoon by Albert Levering comes down through history as almost a complete checklist of the day’s prominent social classes, ethnic groups, professions, “types,” and representatives of life during the Roosevelt economy. Upwardly mobile people, new home construction progressing at a fevered pace, citizens and businesspeople alike depicted as extreme stereotypes — all are represented in the cartoon, from domestic servants to thieving plumbers and rental agents.

A huge triple-decker touring vehicle, with “Dining Hall, Kitchen, Servants Hall, High Finance and Recuperation Apartment, State Rooms, Hair Dressing Studio, Gossip Den, Nursery, [and] “to Gymnasium on the roof”, travels down a dirt road in the countryside.

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Albert Levering’s detailed and imaginative centerspread cartoon in Puck reprised a theme frequently used by the magazine’s former star Frederick Burr Opper in years past — speculations and projections, like “The Apartment House Of the Future,” “The Street Car Of the Future,” “The Summer Resort Of the Future,” etc.

During an intermission or after a “Comic Opera at Mrs. Van Varick-Shadd’s,” a large crowd of men and women wearing formal evening clothes look with chagrin at three women wearing short red dresses, who have secured the attentions of several young men. A painted scene in the background shows nude women cavorting at the seaside.

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One of Puck‘s social crusades, increasingly in the new century, was skewering the upper class — not for its excesses nor frivolity nor shallowness, but for its malignities: divorce, corruption, and scandal. Other publications like the cartoon weekly Life made similar criticism, but not as scathing, largely in Life‘s case because its editors and cartoonist Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the Gibson Girl and society drawings) were members of high society.

A large crowd of men and women, all wearing formal evening clothes, and the women draped with stunningly sparkling jewels, are at a ball given by “Mrs. Gaster.” Caption: Central office at Mrs. Gaster’s Ball.

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Puck magazine and others, especially as the Muckraking Era dawned, criticized the excesses of the wealthy society denizens of the Conspicuous Consumption class. In fact the Gilded Age — the term having been applied by the eponymous, scathing novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 — was dying. Its gaudy death throes were exemplified in ostentatious events like the ball depicted by cartoonist Albert Levering. The “400,” the exclusionary term coined by the social arbiter of the wealthy in the 1880s in his Social Register, was more commonly seen by the public as the Idle Rich, and worse, instead of model citizens.

A high society auction is being conducted in a circus-like atmosphere where spouses are unloading their unwanted partners for various reasons to the highest bidder. On the left, a lecherous old man, wearing top hat and tails, is peering at a young woman and her daughter. The woman wears a leash which is held by her smug, well-dressed owner. On the right, in a small crowd, a man appears to be offering a bid. Other commodities are available for inspection in little stalls in the background. Caption: The matrimonial mart.

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For almost two decades, Puck had been a magazine of politics, commentary, humor, cartoons, and reform. But in the very first week of 1905, it transformed into a journal that embraced elements of radicalism; perhaps not revolution, but radical reform prescriptions for the American body politic, and with a sense of urgency.

A tall man labeled “Consumer” serves as the May pole to a group of chubby girls labeled “Steel Trust, Lumber Trust, Sugar Trust, Wool Trust, [and] Glove Trust” who are winding ribbons labeled “Schedule” around him. He is standing beneath cherry blossoms which spell “Puck.”

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Seldom missing the opportunity to employ a pun, the issue marking May Day, the international workers’ day, Puck created a neologism in the caption to Albert Levering’s cartoon: “A Maypolitical Party.”

William H. Taft stands in a large room at the White House looking shocked. All the furnishings, from animal skin rugs to lamp shades, andirons to woodcarvings and the faces in paintings, wall trim and moldings to embroidered chairs, show the countenance of Theodore Roosevelt.

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The Executive Mansion (first formally called the White House under President Roosevelt) underwent many expansions and renovations through the years, especially after invading British troops burned it during the War of 1812. Major alterations were ordered by Roosevelt shortly after he assumed the presidency. Modernizations included the trappings of Victorian furnishing and decoration of that era, especially ordered by Chester A. Arthur; and expansion was designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, as the West Wing.

A large group of revelers toots horns to celebrate the new year and the arrival of a young boy labeled “1909.” Father Time labeled “1908” departs, taking Thomas Collier Platt with him.

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An otherwise innocuous, generic, celebratory cartoon in the 1908 New Year’s Eve issue of Puck has a political element as a bonus; and a rather pointed barb at that.

A macabre figure of the Roman god Mercury labeled “Speed Mania” leads automobile drivers speeding along country roads in an automobile race. They are being cheered by crowds even while having accidents and running over spectators.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-10-26

Vignettes depict man’s return to nature through scenes of hiking, hunting, and camping. Some scenes show a palatial “shack in the woods,” deer being groomed and fed on “The day before open season,” a woman camping with several of the comforts of home, and men hunting moose from an automobile.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-07-20

An enormous automobile and driver stand in the middle of a rural landscape among a crowd of people who have brought many things that are of value to them, which they are offering to this new god of mobility. A path of destruction appears in the wake of the automobile, which is depicted beneath a black sky.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-06-08

A wave labeled “Republican Voters’ Revolt” crashes into the dining room of a ship where “Cannon, Payne, Taft, Knox, Sherman, Root, Aldrich, Woodruff, Dalzell, Crane, Wickersham, Lodge, Parsons, Hitchcock, Depew, Hale, Elkins, Ballinger, Smoot, Penrose, [and] Cox” are dining, and upsets a dish of “Party Plums,” as well as a bottle of “Stalwart Grog.” Caption: “We were crowded in the cabin, / Not a soul would dare to sleep; / It was midnight o’er the waters, / And a storm was on the deep.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-04-20

A large circle of men is each lifting from the pocket of the man in front of him “The Other Mans Money” as they march around a large map labeled “The United States of America.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-02-23

A socialite, prisoner “no. 500,” is having a tea party with her society friends outside her cell labeled “Cell no. 500 Our Noble Martyress.” Caption: When the suffragettes of American society become martyrs to the cause.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-02-09

A guest arrives at a suburban family’s home on Christmas Eve. The guest is welcomed and given a drink and a large meal where he carves the turkey. After the children are put to bed, he helps decorate the Christmas tree, reviews building plans while standing in the snow at midnight, and sleeps under a pile of blankets. He wakes at 5:00 a.m. on Christmas day to a “chorus” of children playing musical instruments and cries of delight over their Christmas presents. He is fed a huge breakfast, after which he pulls the children on their sleds. Finally, he announces that he must get back to the city and makes his departure, only to be left sitting on an outdoor bench, in the cold, at the “Welcomehurst” train station.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1909-12-01

A man labeled “Consumer” walks with crutches labeled “Free Oil” and “Free Hides,” and is heavily wrapped with bandages labeled “Free Valerianic, Free Cerium, Free Acorns, Gambier, Fossils, Free Orange Peel, Free Spunk, Coir, Rennets, Free Aniline Salts, Ipecac, Divi-Divi, Free Manganese, Free Turtles, Rags, Plumbago, Insects, Tonquin, Teeth, Free Brazilian Pebble, Free Pulu Litmus, [and] Free Rope ends.” He has just been discharged from the “United States Congressional Clinic” where “Matron Taft” stands at the door and doctors “Sherman, Payne, Aldrich, [and] Cannon” watch from a window as they clean their medical instruments.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1909-08-25

At center a man speaks on the floor of the House chamber while other legislators attend to their own business. The audience in the gallery above strains to hear without realizing that the process of legislation takes place in committee rooms and not on the House floor. Caption: A sample session in these days of legislation in committee rooms. Just a little side-show for the gallery.

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Comments and Context

Albert Levering’s brilliant and complicated cartoon — he seemed incapable of ever designing a simple or uninteresting drawing — provided readers with a humorous but actually fairly realistic depiction of “action” on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Except for relatively few visitors to the House galleries through the years, it was not until C-SPAN that citizens could see how realistic this scenes was. Alternatively, how empty the House chamber often is during debates.

Crowds of people sit in grandstands and in the “Bleachers” section, using various devices to be comfortable while watching an airshow. Some recline on mattresses, others lean on sticks that provide back and neck supports, and some have binoculars attached to supports. Caption: The latest thing in grand-stands.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1912-01-10

On the left, J. P. Morgan, with an oil can labeled “Legislation,” oils the “Wall St.” engine of a large machine. Above is a “Deposits Steam Pipe” and nearby is a sign that states “Keep Out of the Engine Room.” A large belt labeled “Control of ‘Other Peoples Money'” turns the “Public Service Machine” which operates a device with spokes, the ends of which are shaped like spiked shoes. As the Public Service Machine revolves, the ends of the spokes kick a man labeled “American Citizen” in the rear as he shovels coal labeled “Savings” into a boiler labeled “Syndicate Bank Boiler Co.” Caption: Around and around and around!

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-02-01