Commencement day in the senate

Chauncey M. Depew and Thomas Collier Platt hold awards “For Good Attendance” and “Reward of Merit” at commencement exercises, with Charles W. Fairbanks sitting in the background in the Senate chamber.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Puck began to focus its aim New York State’s two Republican senators on January 10, 1906, in a cover cartoon portraying Thomas Collier Platt and Chauncey M. Depew as Falstaff and Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s King Henry IV casting about for some men to bribe. Word had leaked out — if a huge publicity campaign can be called “leaking” — that William Randolph Hearst had bought Cosmopolitan magazine. It pledged to be the muckraker among muckraking journals. It hired David Graham Phillips to be its lead investigator; he was to expose the United States Senate as a cancerous center of corruption, and the face of Depew would dominate the first cover.

So it happened. “The Treason Of the Senate” was the sensational series of articles, and Depew was skewered from the start. Cosmopolitan‘s circulation shot up past a half-million copies per month.

By the time of this issue of Puck in June, the reports begat more rumors and reports of deeper corruption, in the New York delegation and the entire Senate. A New York State Senate commission issued a whitewash-endorsement of the two senators. At the time, United States Senators were elected by state legislators, not popular vote, although these charges against Depew accelerated the enabling Constitutional amendment that altered the system in 1913.

The perfunctory endorsement highlighted excruciating challenges for Depew near the end of his career. He was an original Republican, campaigning for John C. Fremont for president, four years before Lincoln. Through the years he was active in Republican politics, often in the background, but prominent enough to frequently be caricatured in the pages of Puck. During the Gilded Age he was extremely busy, and well paid, as an employee and lawyer of major railroads, specifically the New York Central.

In 1905 Depew’s ties, often questionable, with railroads, banks, and insurance companies, were exposed one after another; then came the Cosmopolitan cover story. The cosmetic endorsements in their hands indeed had the gravitas of Sunday-school certificates.

The exposures, criticism, and public disquietude effectively neutralized the powers they once enjoyed; and both retired at the ends of their terms.

It was the series by Phillips in Cosmopolitan that became the flash-point of Muckraking articles in the Age of the Muckrakers. President Roosevelt felt for “poor old Chauncey,” and he bristled at Phillips’ broad brush — rich in innuendo and gossip and short on documentation and proof. So in response the President delivered his “Man With the Muckrake” speech, asking journalists to hew to facts and be fair.

Roosevelt’s other basic problem was that the publisher of Cosmopolitan, William Randolph Hearst, was then serving in Congress himself, so the political firestorms he inaugurated were suspect.

Sitting behind the two magnificently caricatured Senators is another favorite target of Roosevelt, the supremely icy nonentity, Vice-President Charles W. Fairbanks, who, per the constitution, served as President of the Senate.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1906-06-20

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