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Theodore Roosevelt, as the infant Hercules, fights large snakes with the heads of Nelson W. Aldrich and John D. Rockefeller.
Once again Puck harkened back to classical mythology for a cartoon inspiration. In fact from its first days in the mid-1870s the magazine required of its readers a basic familiarity with mythology, opera, and Shakespeare, for its frequent allusions.
An oversized man labeled “Beef Trust,” with skeleton face, performs a magic trick on a stage by taking “Diseased Livestock” and pushing them through a tube labeled “Packingtown” to produce packaged “Pure Meat Products.” A diminutive man, “The Prof’s Assistant,” wearing a cap labeled “Inspector,” is standing on the stage on the left. Packingtown is a real section Chicago that was the setting for the horrible actions committed in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published as a book when this cartoon appeared. Caption: A monstrous and amazing feat of magic.
This cartoon by Udo J. Keppler is significant in many ways. It is a marker along the road of Puck‘s growing radicalism as it became more forceful in imagery and grim in details than cartoons of its past. In this regard it was willingly swept up in the tide of muckraking and reform in contemporary periodicals. In fact it nearly coincided with the book publication of the magazine-serialized Jungle by Upton Sinclair. In a sense it could have served as an illustration in the book, or its cover, because the Chicago setting of the revolting horrors of the Beef Trust and meat-packing industry (some of them actually fictional) were set in the real-life section of the city called Packingtown.