Theodore Roosevelt, wearing his Rough Rider uniform, shares a feast with many wild animals sitting around a large banquet table in the wilderness. A bear is making a toast. Wearing buckskin, “Teddy Jr.” is sitting on a rock at a small table with a bear cub. Caption: The Bear (with deep feeling) Here’s hoping that when next we meet, we see you first.
Comments and Context
Puck took another opportunity at a holiday time, Thanksgiving 1905, to run a non-political cartoon. J. S. Pughe’s drawing certainly was not partisan, either, but today might be considered as advocating a social cause: Opposition to animal cruelty. Theodore Roosevelt’s joy of the hunt, and descriptions of shooting and slaughtering (though always for food, hides, or specimens) are off-putting to more readers today than in his time.
Pughe was Puck magazine’s go-to animal cartoonist for almost all subjects and jokes. Occasionally W. M. Goodes and L. M. Glackens drew animals, and drew them well. And when Will Crawford joined the staff he excelled in delineating horses. Other cartoonists, for other magazines, specialized in animal drawings too (anthropomorphic animals were common in humor around 1900) — Walt Kuhn, who later organized the landmark Armory Show of modern art, Bob Addams, A. Z. Baker, Gus Dirks, Leighton Budd, Frank Ver Beck, A. C. Conde, Eugene Zimmerman (ZIM), Emil Flohri, and the great A. B. Frost, most of whose work was outside the magazines (e.g., Uncle Remus).