Automobile driving

President Roosevelt flies down the road driving an automobile with William H. Taft in the backseat. To the left side of the car the Republican elephant tries to keep up. There is a sign, “the presidential Glen Echo,” in the foreground and the White House and the Washington Monument in the background. Senator Joseph Benson Foraker holds up a watch and cries, “In the name of the speed limit, slack up.” Caption: Town Marshal Foraker: “Stop! in the name of the law.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

Contemporary news stories, and even local geography, inform this cartoon by Jack Smith of the staunchly Republican journal, the Washington Herald.

A fashionably dressed woman wearing goggles is taking a drive in an automobile. Through a series of vignettes her slim figure and dress attract considerable attention. However, when she removes her goggles, exposing some blemishes to her looks, the men react with horror.

comments and context

Comments and Context

This cartoon is more than a cartoon strip on the cliched idea of an ugly spinster being mistaken as a pretty maid by men she encounters. It is a window into some of the fads and fancies, manners and morals of a forgotten time. There are several distinctive elements that tell us that the turn of the Twentieth Century was a period of peaceful but profound changes in society.

An automobile driver who broke the traffic laws has been placed in jail with other criminals. Caption: Fines are a farce when dealing with the auto law breaker.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The brand-new phenomenon of automobiles and “scorchers,” speed-demons who terrorized pedestrians and animals on rural roads and city streets, provided sustenance for police, ambulances, and cartoonists. Some of these reckless drivers reached speeds of 30 miles an hour.

President Roosevelt drives a car with a cage that has four men in it in the back while a man in a striped shirt with a lasso and a revolver rides on the front. Caption: President Roosevelt has had so many adventures with cranks that he travels now only in an automobile with cell attachment, in which the cranks are accommodated.—(Ulk.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1903-11-15

Secretary of State Hay informs President Roosevelt that he is going for a long drive in the country today, but will see Roosevelt the following day. He hopes that Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt is better.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1901-1905

Theodore Roosevelt says that if George von Lengerke Meyer is willing, Meyer can ride out with him. Roosevelt thinks the situation is a bad joke on him, as he “unwittingly increased the punishment for desertion” while he was President.

Collection

Massachusetts Historical Society

Creation Date

1911-02-07

Kermit Roosevelt describes life in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with Belle Roosevelt; including Belle’s driving habits, their servants, and home life. He is pleased that Theodore Roosevelt won the libel suit. Kermit intends to enlist if the United States enters the war.

Collection

Arizona Historical Society

Creation Date

1915-05-26

Kermit Roosevelt updates the Fergusons on his activities at school and the Roosevelt family. He jokes about Martha Ferguson catching skunks and feels he may qualify as a second-assistant skunk catcher. Roosevelt recently visited Edmund Heller and Edgar Alexander Mearns at the Smithsonian Institution to watch them work on bird and rodent specimens.

Collection

Arizona Historical Society

Creation Date

1911-02-11

An automobile driven by a chauffeur speeds down a road, surrounded by newspaper clippings with headlines about numerous traffic accidents involving pedestrians struck by automobiles, including one where a chauffeur was charged with first-degree murder in the death of a 13-year-old boy.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The original artwork for Udo J. Keppler’s double-page cartoon featured actual newspaper clippings pasted to the drawing — twenty-two actual accounts of automobile accidents and fatalities of recent vintage.

A donkey recklessly drives an automobile labeled “Democratic Party,” bearing down on the Republican elephant labeled “G.O.P.” standing in the middle of the roadway. An arm labeled “Standpatter” reaches out from the left and an arm labeled “Insurgent” reaches out from the right. Each grabs the Republican elephant and pulls it in opposite directions. Caption: Both — Quick! Come this way, dearie!

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-08-17

An automobile driver is pursued by the ghosts of many animals that have probably been hit and killed by automobile drivers since the invention of the automobile.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-04-20

An enormous automobile and driver stand in the middle of a rural landscape among a crowd of people who have brought many things that are of value to them, which they are offering to this new god of mobility. A path of destruction appears in the wake of the automobile, which is depicted beneath a black sky.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-06-08

Vignettes depict scenes of events at Newport, Rhode Island, during the summer: fashionably dressed young women arriving by carriage and automobile, women socializing among themselves and with men, driving automobiles, and yachts in the harbor. Caption: What a Puck artist saw at society’s summer capital.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-07-11

In this six panel comic, a couple out driving an automobile decides to take the car to a repair shop to have the horn adjusted. The mechanic begins to dismantle the car, telling them about all the problems he is discovering with the car. The mechanic presents them with a large bill and tells them to “drop in in about six months and see how we’re getting along” with the repairs. The couple stops at a restaurant and orders “three cents worth of orange seeds.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1915-01-02

A steely-faced young man drives an automobile, looking straight ahead. A beautiful young woman snuggles next to him, looking up at him.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1915-01-02

A young woman sits behind the steering wheel of an automobile.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-11-14

President Taft, as a railroad brakeman, stands atop a freight car labeled “Administration Route.” He is waving to a woman labeled “Reactionary Politics” driving an automobile. The train is headed for a tunnel labeled “Revolt of the West.” Above the train is a bar labeled “Insurgent Movement” from which strips of rope are hanging, labeled “Burkett, Beveridge, Brown, Nelson, Clapp, Cummins, Dolliver, Bristow, [and] La Follette,” an insurgent group of senators who broke with Taft’s policies. Includes note: “A telltale is a bar to which strips of leather or rope are attached to warn brakemen on freight trains when they are approaching a bridge or a tunnel.” Caption: But there is still time to duck.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1909-11-17

An automobile driver tries to negotiate workmen in the roadway, children playing ball in the street and darting in front of automobiles, absentminded pedestrians stepping off the curb, and people exiting streetcars into oncoming traffic. Includes a lengthy caption about the hazards an automobile driver faces on city streets.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1913-01-29

Vignettes show accidents taking place in various forms of recreation. At center is an automobile accident involving a horse-drawn carriage. Surrounding scenes show golf and baseball, hunting and fishing, and mountain climbing.

comments and context

Comments and Context

“Wreckreation,” the second major contribution to Puck by the forgotten master Harry Grant Dart, is not a political cartoon but social commentary verging on grim humor.

A candlestick with flame labeled “Speed Madness” is surrounded by speeding automobiles caught in the illumination. People are falling out of the cars and the wreckage is collecting in the basin of the candlestick holder.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The concern over “speed madness” in the day was indeed real, despite the fact that forty miles per hour was considered “scorching.” Automobiles were proliferating, ever more affordable, and produced by dozens of manufacturers from New York to Cleveland to Detroit to Chicago. They were gasoline-driven, mostly, but also electric and steam.