Putting some ginger into the campaign

William Jennings Bryan attempts to ride a bucking donkey that has a “Standard” oil can attached to its tail. In the background, President Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst cheer.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Albert Turner Reid was one of the breed of cartoonists whose signatures routinely were more elaborate than their drawings. From his home base in Kansas he drew for several publications throughout his career; and was widely reprinted. He had a handsome style and a flair for caricature, if not for accurate animal locomotion.

The subtext of this cartoon, although not named, was the Archbold Letters — a body of correspondence between the president of the Standard Oil trust, John D. Archbold, the successor of John D. Rockefeller. The many letters revealed collusion and corruption, bribery and influence peddling, between Archbold and politicians of both parties.

Two aspects that were casually incorporated in the cartoon illustrate why the scandal was so significant in the 1908 campaign. Reid pictured the “Standard” oilcan that carried fireworks and was tied to the Democratic donkey’s tail. Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan was in no way implicated in the scandalous letters, he was, properly, shown as the person most discomfited. President Roosevelt — likewise personally free of any taint in the letters — made the revelations, and Bryan’s initial defense of his corrupt Democrat allies, a campaign issue.

Similarly dispositive, rather remarkable, are the side-by-side figures cheering the mayhem in the background. Theodore Roosevelt and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst were bitter enemies and rivals — the animosity mostly Roosevelt’s; he despised the views and tactics of the muckraking Hearst. The publisher, one of the developers of “yellow journalism,” had been an extreme radical who mellowed his views, somewhat, as he sought political offices as a Democrat — New York mayor, governor, senator, and eventually the presidency (he did serve two terms in the United States House of Representatives). Year by year he grew more conventional and sometimes closer to Roosevelt’s policies, for instance opposing the League of Nations.

But in 1908 he produced the explosive Archbold Letters at a critical moment in the campaign. His functionaries had been stealing the implicating documents for two years. Their release was old-fashioned sensationalist journalism, almost a Hearst trademark. But the timing likely was calculated to harm the Democrats. Ohio’s Republican Senator Joseph Benson Foraker was implicated, and his career effectively was finished in disgrace.

(Theodore Roosevelt, on the other hand, could not have been too resentful of the exposure of his fellow Republican; Foraker was a longtime intra-party foe and major irritant to the president and his agenda. Most recently Foraker continually attacked the president for his actions in the Brownsville Affair, when a regiment of black soldiers was cashiered for what the White House considered a coverup of guilty parties in a melee involving death and injury to townspeople near an army base.)

Through the volume and substance of the letters, and Roosevelt’s weaponization during the campaign, indeed had him cheering next to old nemesis Hearst.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-10-06

Creator(s)

Reid, Albert Turner, 1873-1955

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