Puck, v. 61, no. 1575 | - Theodore Roosevelt Center

When Taft is president

William H. Taft is globe-trotting from the “Washington White House” to the “Guam White House,” the “Philippine White House,” the “Hawaiin [sic] White House,” the “Cuban White House,” and the “Porto [sic] Rican White House.”

Comments and Context

Puck, like most Americans by mid-1907, had come to assume that President Roosevelt’s not-so-subtle intention to engineer the Republican Party’s nomination of Secretary of War William H. Taft as his successor, would succeed. And, further, that Taft’s election over any putative Democratic candidate was also likely.

Elisha Roosevelt sicketh the bears upon the bad boys of Wall Street

Theodore Roosevelt stands on a hill in the background, as two large bears labeled “Interstate Commerce Commission” and “Federal Courts” break up a crowd of Wall Street capitalists and stock market manipulators, causing them to scatter in all directions. The men include Charles S. Mellen, William K. Vanderbilt, Henry Huttleston Rogers, J. Pierpont Morgan, James J. Hill, George Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, James McCrea, William H. Newman, Edward Henry Harriman, and Joseph Benson Foraker.

Comments and Context

Cartoonist Udo J. Keppler, and Puck magazine, editorially, stretched theology, or at least the province of Biblical allusions, in this cartoon “Elisha Roosevelt.” The brief passage from II Kings 2:23-24 recounts the story of Israelite prophet Elisha, having succeeded Elijah and seeing him bodily taken into the clouds, is unsure of his ability to be God’s anointed prophet.