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An oversized man labeled “Beef Trust,” with skeleton face, performs a magic trick on a stage by taking “Diseased Livestock” and pushing them through a tube labeled “Packingtown” to produce packaged “Pure Meat Products.” A diminutive man, “The Prof’s Assistant,” wearing a cap labeled “Inspector,” is standing on the stage on the left. Packingtown is a real section Chicago that was the setting for the horrible actions committed in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published as a book when this cartoon appeared. Caption: A monstrous and amazing feat of magic.

comments and context

Comments and Context

This cartoon by Udo J. Keppler is significant in many ways. It is a marker along the road of Puck‘s growing radicalism as it became more forceful in imagery and grim in details than cartoons of its past. In this regard it was willingly swept up in the tide of muckraking and reform in contemporary periodicals. In fact it nearly coincided with the book publication of the magazine-serialized Jungle by Upton Sinclair. In a sense it could have served as an illustration in the book, or its cover, because the Chicago setting of the revolting horrors of the Beef Trust and meat-packing industry (some of them actually fictional) were set in the real-life section of the city called Packingtown.

The other significant subtext of the cartoon is that in Puck‘s advertising pages, traditionally though the years, and even at this time, there were numerous ads for meat products, placed by members of the Beef Trust. Leibig’s Extract of Beef, Armour beef derivatives and buillions, and other products including medicines, were promoted only pages from this powerful pictorial indictment of the Beef Trust. Puck and other magazines dared to bite the hands that fed them.

Abuses were so extreme, and public revulsion so strong, that one magazine, after a series of exposes of patent medicines and advertising, “The Great American Fraud” by Samuel Hopkins Adams, actually refused to accept product advertising from some companies.

Almost lost as a small caption in the cartoon is the “diseased livestock” being stuffed into the showman’s magic tube; and perhaps quotation marks around the word “Pure” at the other end, but the public got the point.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1906-05-23

Creator(s)

Keppler, Udo J., 1872-1956

Period

U.S. President – 2nd Term (March 1905-February 1909)

Repository

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Page Count

1

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation