Cartoon in the Washington Herald

William H. Taft wears a suit made of “T. R.” tags and asks J. S. Sherman who is hiding in a hole, “Where have you been Jimmy boy?” Sherman replies, “Dare I come out?” In the background is a “Hearst volcano” with “letters” and “accusations.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

Virtually every political cartoonist, whether pro-Taft or anti-Taft, had fun at his expanse; the broad aspects of William H. Taft were irresistible to caricaturists. But credit must be paid to an otherwise pedestrian cartoonist, Joseph Harry Cunningham of the Washington Herald, for adding some extra graphic stereotypes; it is surprising that they were not adopted by other cartoonists, or survived the presidential campaign.

Taft’s life as a retail politician — previously having been a judge, a cabinet officer, and diplomat — was at the hands of Theodore Roosevelt. President Roosevelt saw in his old friend and Secretary of War a competent administrator and loyal lieutenant. Taft’s wife and his brother Charles agreed with Roosevelt that Taft was a future president. Taft himself demurred, and saw himself as a future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (which he eventually attained).

When the party, and voters, were persuaded by Roosevelt’s earnest advocacy, Taft the presidential candidate was — as some feared, many predicted, and events affirmed — a lackluster campaigner and, to the best of his abilities, an ideological clone of President Roosevelt.

Political cartoonists found myriad ways to address this situation, as a fact to be ridiculed or more dispassionately depicted. Cunningham was joyously in the former camp, and he cleverly stressed the point by picturing Taft with a little Rough Rider’s hat atop his head; or, sometimes, wearing a Rough Rider uniform predictably bursting at the seams.

His cleverest icon borrowed from cartoonist Homer Davenport’s invariable costume for caricatures of President William McKinley’s eminence grise Marcus Alonzo Hanna — a gaudy checkered suit with dollar signs in every square of the pattern: denigration of Hanna’s wealth and McKinley’s supposed disdain of workers. “Dollar Mark” even was a ready-made pub. Along those graphic lines, Cunningham dressed Taft in a similarly gaudy, checkered suit, but with “TR” in every square. He was branded; but the symbol did not survive into Taft’s presidency… even while he strove to embody “My Policies” of Roosevelt.

The immediate context of this cartoon is a clever summary of the political profiles of Taft and his running-mate, Representative J. S. Sherman; and a largely forgotten campaign scandal in 1908. The “Hearst Volcano” (more properly a tornado as drawn by Cunningham, with Sherman in a tornado shelter) refers to revelations made by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.

Hearst was, himself, a frustrated presidential aspirant, but jealously — and revenge, on Democrats whom he thought betrayed him — were lesser motivations than a good old-fashioned, circulation-boosting scandal. For several years the Hearst papers had been paying for stolen correspondence from the files of Standard Oil’s president John D. Archbold. In a speech personally delivered by Hearst, and thereafter periodically dribbled out for years in his national chain of papers, Standard Oil was exposed as making bribes, influencing legislation, and otherwise perverting democracy. Both parties were involved.

Such was the tornado, and in 1908 careers were ruined (Senator Joseph Benson Foraker withdrew from electoral politics) and resignations demanded (the Treasurer of the Democratic Party resigned, a great embarrassment to its presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan). Members of the public and the political class both tensely waited for more revelations of the “Archbold Letters.”

Cunningham went further than a mere pictorial observation. By drawing a nervous Sherman peeking out from a tornado shelter he cleverly implied that Sherman was one of the politicians who had reason to fear the Hearst storm on the horizon. He had been paired with Taft on the Republican ticket as a sop to the party’s “old guard,” the traditionally conservative friends of corporations, trusts, and moneyed interests.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-09-27

Creator(s)

Cunningham, Joseph Harry, 1865-1946

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