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Two men talk in the yard of a rural home. Chickens in the yard scratch the soil and pull up the plants. Caption: Citimann — I see you raise your own vegetables. / Suburbanite — No! I simply plant a small garden so as to keep the chickens at home.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1902-08-06
A man labeled “Candidate for Senate,” holding wads of cash, stands in front of a sign that states “Sale of seats to the United States Senate has been prohibited.” Nearby the “Senatorial Box Office” has been boarded up and locked with a sign indicating “Closed.” Uncle Sam, as a police officer with a night stick labeled “Public Opinion,” is directing the man to the new entrance to the Senate, which is marked by the presence of a “Ballot Box” and a man labeled “Voter” standing next to the box. Caption: Uncle Sam — This way, Sir.
A slow but steady advocacy of Civil-Service reformers since the 1870s had been the abolition of the Constitutional method of electing senators to the United States Senate; that is, by votes of each state’s legislature, and not popular votes of each state’s citizens. The movement gained adherents, less from the logic of the situation, and more because elevation to Senate often had become a corrupt scheme of influence, bribes, and payoffs. In 1909, Illinois Republican Representative William Lorimer was appointed to one of the state’s senate seats by the legislature, and immediate charges of vote-buying were raised. In 1912 the United States Senate accepted a report of findings and denied Lorimer his seat 10 years after this cartoon’s advocacy. As perhaps the “final straw,” within a year three-fifths of the country’s states ratified the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution providing for the direct election of senators. Today, there is a movement among libertarians to restore the Constitutional Framers’ view that congresspeople and senators need to have distinctive methods of representation.