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Puck, v. 48, no. 1229

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The gospel according to St. William

The gospel according to St. William

William II, Emperor of Germany, with a Bible propped up on a Gatling gun, reads aloud from the gospels. There is a box of ammunition at his feet.

comments and context

Comments and Context

In 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm delivered a speech to German troops embarking to China to help suppress the Boxer rebellion. It is notable for two reasons. He ordered the troops to invoke the fighting spirit of Atilla the Hun, which invited a long-standing epithet used against Germans ever since. The other theme was addressed by cartoonist Keppler: the Kaiser resurrected the mantle of the Holy Roman Empire. Implicitly he, a Lutheran, inherited the legacy of the ancient religious and political confederation, hence the Bible and bullets in Keppler’s commentary. 

A hint not taken

A hint not taken

William Jennings Bryan offers a large knife labeled “16 to 1” to a laborer who is daydreaming about “Contentment.” The laborer sits next to a large bucket, labeled “1900,” of golden eggs labeled “Savings, Good wages, Steady work, No shut downs, Prosperity, [and] Good hours.” Bryan wants the laborer to use the knife to kill the goose, in the left foreground, labeled “Gold Standard” that lays the golden eggs.

comments and context

Comments and Context

“16 to 1” refers to the intentionally inflationary currency plan that would require the federal government to include silver as a medium of exchange and fix its rate at one-sixteenth of gold’s value. Especially after the discovery of major silver lodes in the West, this plan would make currency more elastic, and theoretically make economic life easier for farmers. This was one reason that both parties targeted the minds and votes of farmers in this era. The United States instead de-coupled silver, and went on the gold standard until the New Deal.