American Anti-Imperialist League

A huge Uncle Sam gets a new outfit made at the “McKinley and Company National Tailors” with President William McKinley taking the measurements. Carl Schurz, Joseph Pulitzer, and Oswald Ottendorfer stand inside the entrance to the shop and Schurz is offering Uncle Sam a spoonful of “Anti-Expansion Policy” medicine, a bottle of which each is carrying. On the right are bolts of cloth labeled “Enlightened Foreign Policy” and “Rational Expansion.” The strips on Uncle Sam’s trousers are labeled “Texas, Louisiana Purchase, Alaska, Florida, California, Hawaii, [and] Porto Rico.” Caption: The Antis. — Here, take a dose of this anti-fat and get slim again! Uncle Sam. — No, Sonny!, I never did take any of that stuff, and I’m too old to begin!

comments and context

Comments and Context

Lose weight or be measured for new clothes? The three men offering Uncle Sam reducing serums are Carl Schurz, a liberal Republican who moved to the United States in 1848, was named a Union General by Lincoln, and supported Horace Greeley, Grover Cleveland, and other reformers; Oswald Ottendorfer of the German-language New York Staats-Zeitung newspaper and head of the Anti-Imperialist League, and Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World.

Secretary of War Taft forwards a letter from David Jessup Doherty about the Philippines and suggests that President Roosevelt might find it to be an interesting read.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906-10-20

Robert Wexelblatt praises Philip McFarland for his even-handed approach in his dual biography Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century. Wexelblatt notes that the disagreements between the writer and the politician will interest most readers, and he highlights Twain’s anti-imperialism as the foremost of these issues. Wexelblatt commends McFarland for explaining the views of Twain, Roosevelt, and their contemporaries in the context of their time. He notes that McFarland also covers the similarities between “the two most famous and celebrated Americans,” and he credits McFarland for his research and his lively prose. 

Photographs of Twain and Roosevelt, and the front cover illustration of Mark Twain and the Colonel, accompany the review.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal