Puck, v. 56, no. 1456 | - Theodore Roosevelt Center

The unwelcome light

Puck directs a large floodlight to illuminate a cave. Charles H. Dietrich, Joseph R. Burton, and J. Edward Addicks shy away from the light. Pennsylvania governor Samuel W. Pennypacker, as a court jester, holds up a large sheet of paper labeled “Press Gag Law.” A man running to the right holds a paper labeled “R.R. Rebates.” Another man, possibly John D. Rockefeller, stands next to containers labeled “Paper Trust, Oil Trust, [and] Gas Trust,” and a diminutive figure, possibly New York State Senator Thomas F. Grady, stands behind Pennypacker, holding up a paper labeled “Anti-Cartoon Bill.” An octopus labeled “Mormonism” is visible at the entrance to the cave on the left.

Comments and Context

The main point of Udo J. Keppler’s cartoon — the origin of Puck‘s pushback — is the infamous “Anti-Cartoon” legislation proposed by Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Pennypacker, passed as the Salus-Grady Act in 1903, and kept on the books until the end of Pennypacker’s term, but never enforced. The law was supported by Pennypacker and followed the unsuccessful passage of an earlier bill sponsored by Republican Representative Frederick Taylor Pusey. That bill, on which the subsequent law was modeled, would have outlawed “any cartoon or caricature or picture portraying, describing or representing any person, either by distortion, innuendo or otherwise, in the form or likeness of beast, bird, fish, insect, or other unhuman [sic] animal, thereby tending to expose such person to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule.”

Cartoonist Charles Nelan, formerly of the New York Herald, had been depicting the former Philadelphia judge Pennypacker as a parrot, repeating the words of thoughts of state Republican boss Matthew S. Quay. The cartoons appeared in the Republican (but anti-Quay) daily, the Philadelphia North American.

The modern war god

A Jewish man dressed as Mars, the Roman god of war, and decorated with symbols of money, stands in the doorway of a munitions store labeled “Marsheim Bellonaberg & Co.” and “Ordnance Dept.” A notice posted on the side states “War Loans a Speciality” and a sign reads “By Appointment to H.I.M. the Czar & Mikado – Cash Vobiscum.”

Comments and Context

Ehrhart’s cartoon smacks of anti-Semitism to contemporary eyes, but it uses the age-old stereotype of Jewish money-lenders as a stick with which to beat England and English banks. As Russia and Japan bled each other dry in their war, the English, as money-lenders to “the Czar and the Mikado” respectively, profited off both. The British made loans at high interest, and sold munitions similarly.

A dozen years later, the tables were turned when the United States and its banks of Morgan and other houses virtually financed the carnage of the Great War — all sides of the conflict, all parties. It was widely charged that such war profiteering, including windfalls of manufacturing, arms, and shipping, were reasons that American refrained from joining World War I as long as it did.