“God rest you, merry gentleman, let nothing you dismay”

Theodore Roosevelt stands at an open window, greeting a group of men singing Christmas carols. The carolers are John D. Rockefeller, Joseph Benson Foraker, Henry H. Rogers, Edward Henry Harriman, David J. Brewer, and James Roscoe Day.

Comments and Context

Cartoonist L. M. Glacken’s Christmas Day cover drawing in Puck featured a frequent theme of the day — a frequent practice, now largely moribund, of carolers singing hymns and Christmas songs house to house. The “Outs,” they sometimes were called, especially when not invited indoors for warmth and refreshments.

The carolers in the Glackens cartoon certainly were on the “outs,” at least at the window of President Roosevelt. History has remembered Senator Joseph Benson Foraker, veteran of several brutal disputes with fellow Republican Roosevelt, most recently over the Brownsville Affair and black soldiers; Edward Henry Harriman, railroad trust magnate whom Roosevelt recently branded an “undesirable citizen”; and Standard Oil’s twin leaders John D. Rockefeller and Henry H. Rogers, recently avoiding the penitentiary over corporate misdeeds.

The other two carolers will be more obscure to later students, and Glackens averted their faces, as relatively minor figures who nevertheless incurred Roosevelt’s wrath.

James Roscoe Day, Chancellor of Syracuse University, and a Christian minister, was author of the book The Raid on Prosperity, first serialized in Appleton’s Magazine, that swam against the current of the Muckrakers. Day was a frequent critic of the president. In his attack on reform he called insurgents and early-day progressives the real “Reactionists.” His arguments caused barely a ripple in public debates, or in subsequent history.

Justice David Brewer had been appointed to the Supreme Court by President Benjamin Harrison, and remains one the Court’s most active and voluble jurists. He authored the famous line (1892) recognizing that “America [is] a Christian nation,” never crossing the Constitution’s religious freedoms nor its citizens’ requirements, but frequently regarding the social traditions as close to the force of law. He became increasingly conservative before his death in 1910, especially regarding property rights. He did, on the Court and previously on the Kansas Supreme Court, uphold minority rights; he missed the pleadings of Plessy vs Ferguson due to family illness, but indicated that he would have sided with racial-minority plaintiffs.

As the Progressive Era dawned, Brewer fought against many reforms, and engaged in frequent controversies, outside the Court, with Roosevelt. The president in turn described Justice Brewer privately as a “menace to the welfare of the nation,” and as a judge who had “a sweetbread for a brain.”

Roosevelt’s traditional Christmas greeting — “God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay” — takes on a sarcastic tone, as the president leans from the window of a glowing and warm home over a freezing and ragtag group of “outs.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1907-12-25

Creator(s)

Glackens, L. M. (Louis M.), 1866-1933

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