Your TR Source
Two businessmen sit in an office discussing the success of the local trolley service. Caption: Visiting Magnate — Is your new trolley-line a success? / Local Magnate — Not as great as we hoped. Nearly half the passengers can get seats.
The cover cartoon by cartoonist Nankivell can be read as a humorous complaint about crowded public transit — a critique that probably will always be fresh.
On the left, a theater manager is bribing an inspector during an inspection of fire prevention equipment, while the specter of the Grim Reaper hovers above. On the right, a female figure labeled “Public opinion” holds three diminutive men labeled “Politician, Manager, [and] Inspector” and points toward the remains of a theater following a fire.
The context of this cartoon, with artist Ehrhart being as forceful as he could be, is not named… but was clear to every reader: the recent Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago. Still regarded as one America’s most devastating disasters, the fire on December 30, 1903, less than a month previous, claimed more than 600 lives. It was a fire that spread quickly — a broken arc light igniting the muslin curtain — and the nation learned of burned bodies, closed exits, and bodies of panicked patrons crushed sometimes 10-deep in aisles and doorways.