President Roosevelt –“Good heavens, what have I done!”

President Roosevelt holds his big stick and looks at the men he has killed with it: “confidence,” “prosperity,” “good wages,” “capital,” “business,” “industry,” and “labor.” In the background is a bird labeled “hard times.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

For all the detail invested by J. F. Collins in this cartoon — down to the bulging veins and hair on the caveman’s legs — he strangely drew one of the least convincing Roosevelt caricatures ever published. Artistic license would have allowed the characteristic pince-nez spectacles, yet they were neglected. Thanks to the label on the Big Stick, we are assured that the guilty thug is Theodore Roosevelt.

It is surprising how few cartoonists, even the most partisan, connected President Roosevelt’s earnest crusades over the almost seven years of his administration with the Wall Street Panic. Collins did so in this cartoon, directly, supposing that Roosevelt had a guilty conscience about the reforms he pursued and the corporate corruption he fought. We can suppose that even the most partisan journals generally assumed that the robber barons, collectively, had sown the seeds of their own destruction.

Regarding that destruction, despite lingering scars from the Panic, by the time of this cartoon’s publication the major fears and much of the damage had been ameliorated. J. P. Morgan, with the administration by his side, moved financial mountains like chess pieces, and avoided a major depression.

The magazine The Meddler, about which very little is known today, appropriately had as its chief cartoonist an artist who is similarly obscure in history. Collins drew comic strips and humorous artwork for the Evening Telegram in New York City in 1906 and 1907, and again in 1909. His cartoons for The Meddler either interrupted his work there, or he moonlighted as a freelance cartoonist. It was not uncommon that magazines were launched during that era solely to score partisan hits during presidential campaigns — and the Taft-Bryan campaign took place during Collins’s hiatus from the Telegram.

In 1910 he began drawing Sunday comic strips as a house artist for the World Color Printing Company of St. Louis. Few of its artists lived in St. Louis; it was a printer of prepared four-page Sunday comic supplements, selling to mostly rural papers around the United States. Some of its cartoonists were quite accomplished and went on to greater fame — for instance George Herriman of Krazy Kat. Some in its stable were middling talents who created, or inherited or traded with fellow artists, Sunday strips.

Collins was in this latter group. In 1910 he drew Colonel Cheese. From Dick Wood he inherited the children’s feature Pinkie Prim. Probably his most popular, at least longest-lived, page was Mr. Smarty. His dabbling in political cartoons displayed a fiercer side of his nature.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-12-28

Creator(s)

Collins, J. F.

Language

English

Period

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

Page Count

1

Production Method

Printed

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