Levering, Albert, 1869-1929

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.”

Comments and Context

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.”

The hapless consumer — an iconic figured eventually supplanted by the political cartoonists’ average voter, John Q. Public — is strapped, immobile, by the children at the May day picnic. To depict the predicament more clearly, Levering has the “innocent” children as representatives of various trusts that still controlled the prices of many consumer goods in America. Further, the young girls are all chubby, from prosperous families; and the consumer is thin and wan.

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.

Comments and Context

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.

Such were physical changes, but psychological changes were easier to depict in the hands of a cartoonist. Cartoonist Albert Levering of Puck, in one of the most detailed drawings it ever published, imagined a White House interior characterized not by design suggestions of incoming President William H. Taft’s predecessor; but indeed a ballroom inhabited by the very spirit and personality of Roosevelt.

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.

Comments and Context

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.

After the elections of 1908, many members of Senate and House of Representatives were retiring. Puck took special delighting in noting the departure from the national political scene of Senator Thomas Collier Platt. Platt had been a presence in Republican politics since 1881 when, as New York’s junior senator, he resigned his seat in concert with New York’s senior senator Roscoe Conkling. In a patronage dispute with the new president, James Garfield, they expected vindication by reelection of the state legislature (the public did not vote for senatorial candidates at the time)… but were surprised to be rejected. Conkling left politics; Platt — called by cartoonists of the day, chiefly Puck‘s, “Me Too” Platt” — survived and became a greater dictator of Republican politics and his state and through much of the national party.

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.

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.

It is clear that Levering was not offering a civics lesson, that legislation was effected in committee rooms. More, his cynical point was that legislation is not introduced nor considered nor dispatched and voted upon in the well of the House. Then, as now, business is conducted more in cloak rooms than in committee rooms.

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

A group of highwaymen labeled “Trust, Express Company, [and] Protected Monopoly” rob a stagecoach labeled “The Consumers’ Coach.” The driver, labeled “Congress,” is throwing them a pouch labeled “U.S. Parcels Post.” Caption: What else do you expect when the driver is in league with the highwaymen?

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-07-19

A ship founders at sea during a storm, with many passengers on deck, but the sailors, bowing to pressure from “anti-vivisectionists,” are rescuing the dogs first. Caption: “Women and children first” would cease to be shipwreck etiquette if the anti-vivisectionists had their way.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-04-05

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

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.

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.

In this cartoon, characteristically correct in its numerous details, the figures toss the horrible products that filled the grocery shelves of muckrakers’ America. Readers of a later day might assume that the labels and products flowed from the mind of a sarcastic cartoonist — but many of the descriptions are accurate, sadly true, or slight exaggerations, according to sensational articles of the day, for instance those in various magazines by Samuel Hopkins Adams about foods, “patent medicines,” and advertising.

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.

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.

But there is a deeper historical lesson in the cartoon, as there usually is. At the time of this cartoon, it was announced that one last land distribution in the Oklahoma Territory would be made. Unlike the famous 1889 Land Rush (from which sociologist Frederick Jackson Turner concluded that America’s frontier had ceased to exist; a psychological, more than a geography, lesson), and smaller subsequent “rushes,” the 1906 distribution would be an auction for lands in the half-million-acre Big Pasture area. President Roosevelt would declare Oklahoma to be the forty-sixth of the United States.

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.

Comments and Context

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.

Such cartoons, at the time, were humorous treatments of logical extensions: population growth, the encroachment of commercial advertising, and such. Today it is clearer that such cartoons reflect also the growing prosperity of average Americans, and the fruits of leisure time and increased popular pastimes.

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.

Comments and Context

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.

These new thematic preoccupations were birthed in roughly measure by the growing decadence among America’s rich, and the spirit of the times; after the turn of the century, American editors and writers, and some politicians, developed Social Consciences. It was a time of muckraking about business; Naturalism in literature and Expressionism in art — noticing the underbelly of American life; and political reform manifested by insurgency and progressivism.