Puck, v. 53, no. 1359

The vacant home of a millionaire appears at center, surrounded by vignettes showing the whereabouts and activities of the millionaire’s family members. His wife and a daughter are on the golf course, a son is cruising on a yacht, another daughter is at the seminary, and another son is marking time on a ranch, while “Papa [gambles] at Monte Carlo” and the pets spend their days in the kennel.

Comments and Context

Besides showing off Ehrhart’s considerable talents as an illustrator-cartoonist, this cartoon is benign group of drawings whose points illustrate the sharp observations of critics like the economist Thorstein Veblen. The critique of Veblen’s controversial but influential book The Theory of the Leisure Class (Macmillan, 1899) focused on the excesses of the wealthy. It described an unflattering pattern of the accumulation of personal wealth and its inevitable corrupting effect on societies. Veblen introduced the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to the language, and Ehrhart’s cartoon of a mansion made redundant by its family’s outside activities, could serve as an illustration of Veblen’s critique.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

William Jennings Bryan escorts an old woman labeled “Dem. Party” on his right arm. Coming up behind them is “A.B. Parker,” well-dressed, wearing a top hat and overcoat.

Comments and Context

Following up on Puck‘s center-spread cartoon of the previous week that featured a depiction of the obscure Alton Brooks Parker, this issue placed Parker on the front page. Keppler’s cartoon suggests that Parker, or rumors of his possible presidential candidacy, plagued the party’s titular leader William Jennings Bryan. Clearly there was a movement among the party’s conservative Eastern and “sound-money” wing, to boost Parker.

Parker was the Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, a distinguished platform, but not one of national prominence or a traditional springboard into politics. Puck was either aware of the machinations, or possibly party to them, as an anti-Bryan organ. As part of the campaign to bring the judge into the sunlight, he gave a speech to Union College on “The Educated Man in Politics,” and was the subject of a complimentary profile in The Summary, a publication of the New York State Reformatory at Elmira, N.Y. Neither was a substantial source of publicity, so notices like those paid by Keppler in Puck helped create a boom.