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Theodore Roosevelt assures William Sulzer that he will read over the bill and provide feedback. He informs Sulzer that it must be private, and he believes that big business should not be antagonized for being big, and that it should be clear in the law. He agrees with Sulzer that trying to roll back the industrial revolution would only do harm.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1912-02-01
Theodore Roosevelt concurs with Daniel Rhodes Hanna about his point on big business. Roosevelt suggests that those on Wall Street would rather any candidate but him, because he insists upon regulation on big business.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1912-02-05
The writer of the article draws parallels between corruption and graft in politics and the corrupt practices that allow big businesses to accumulate and control most of the money in the country. The article quotes heavily from an article in Everybody’s Magazine by Lincoln Steffens that criticizes the few rich businessmen who control most of the capital of the country.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-02-10
Sheet music for “Strenuous times,” an instrumental march. The cover depicts an armed Uncle Sam rounding up various commercial and industrial trusts such as oil, cattle, and railroads. The trusts are represented as large men in top hats.
Dr. Danny O. Crew Theodore Roosevelt Sheet Music Collection
1906
A disheveled Uncle Sam sits at a messy table in a restaurant after a wild party where too much alcohol has been consumed. There are overturned chairs, and a man labeled “Capital” lies on the floor beneath one end of the table. An overturned bottle labeled “Overspeculation” spills contents labeled “Overissue of Securities.” Another bottle is labeled “Overbuilding.” Bottles on the floor are labeled “Waste” and “Overproduction,” and a spill is labeled “Overestimation of Natural Resources.” Wax from a candle on the table is labeled “Overconfidence” and a bottle next to Uncle Sam is labeled “Overcapitalization.” Lying on the floor at the other end of the table, among overturned chairs, is a man labeled “Labor.” On the table above him is a spill labeled “Overspending,” and a box of cigars labeled “Overbuying” is spilling its contents on the floor. In a broken mirror on the back wall are the words “National Vanity,” and printed on a window is “Rationalism.” Caption: Uncle Sam — “And this is Thanksgiving Day!”
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1910-11-23
An over-sized man labeled “The Individual” casts a shadow labeled “Incorporation” which is caused by a light, on the left, held by a “Corporation Lawyer” and a “Corporation Legislator.” On the right, a female figure labeled “Dept. of Justice,” carrying a shield and a fasces, assails the shadow. Caption: “Whatever of wrong there is, is not the fault of the Corporation, but of the officials in charge of it. And for the individual committing the offense there should be punishment.”–Alton B. Parker.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1910-11-02
A man labeled “Producer,” laden with farm produce, is stopped on one side, and a man labeled “Consumer” is stopped on the other, by a masked man between them labeled “Food Speculator” who is pointing handguns labeled “Cold Storage” at both. They have been ambushed on the “Road of Supply and Demand” and the middle-man is now going to profit from both the producer and the consumer. Caption: Good guns in bad hands.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1909-10-06
A tall male figure labeled “U.S. Public Land Grant” looks like a Trojan horse from which corrupt figures labeled “Land Grafter, Timber Grafter, Mineral Grafter, Corrupt Official, [and] Power Monopolist” emerge clutching a “Fraudulent Title” or a “Transferred Claim” seeking “Mineral Rights, Timber Rights, [and] Waterpower Rights” and other claims to public lands.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1909-11-24
Handwritten essay regarding industrial relations and big business. Published in Metropolitan Magazine, January and February 1920.
1917
A dejected, well-dressed man labeled “The Corporation” sits next to an ice bucket filled with bottles labeled “Wall St. Brand, Privilege Brut, Immunity Fizz, [and] Stand Pat Sec,” while in the background William Jennings Bryan and William H. Taft are holding bottles of “Publicity Lithia.” The “Corporation” man misses those days when Mark Hanna was a driving force in presidential campaigns. Caption: The Wine Agent — Gee! When Mark was alive I opened a case a minute.
It might seem odd that cartoonist Udo J. Keppler chose to delve almost five years in the past to invoke the name of a political boss who wined and dined corporate donors. Mark Hanna, senator and chairman of the Republican National Committee, was a confidant of President William McKinley, a presidential aspirant himself, and friend of the rich and famous, cultivated his party’s connections with policies favored by corporations and trusts.
Party officials of intervening years, and of both parties, played that role too: representing the desires of corporations, and enabling national policies to serve their growth. It was not a conspiracy of oligarchs, of course: expanding corporations created jobs and grew the economy as well.
Moses, holding the Ten Commandments, is confronted by an angry mob of capitalists, businessmen, and politicians, some shaking their fists at him. Caption: Chorus of “Conservatives” – Dangerous, socialistic, un-American doctrines!
This powerful indictment of endemic corruption at the upper levels of American society was drawn by Udo J, Keppler, whose father Joseph (founder and chief cartoonist of Puck) had addressed the same issues with classic drawing like They Can’t Stand the Light, showing United States Senators shrinking from spotlights in the dark. But his son’s cartoon — of this evergreen subject — encompassed more than political corruption.
In fact only four of the major, identified figures are national politicians; the majority are business leaders, a magazine editor, and even a university president. Keppler unwittingly reinforced the view that lawlessness and compromised morality had spread throughout American life.
A sketch after Trumbull’s painting “The Declaration of Independence” shows John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Thomson, standing around a table where John Hancock is sitting, as a businessman labeled “Spirit of 1908” rushes in from the left. Caption: Where would we be now if modern counsel had prevailed in ’76?
The objections of “big business” and “robber barons” to most proposed reforms and gradual cleansing of the American business economy was long-standing. It was predictable, almost continuous from every perspective of argumentation — literally reactionary.
Yet the context of this cartoon by S.D. Ehrhart likely was not the economy in general, or the prerogatives of major entrepreneurs in general, but the response to the Wall Street Panic of the previous October. Few corporate titans blamed their own activities or back-room chicanery. It was easy to advocate for the status quo — “standing pat” as to policies — and blame the Panic on the number of Muckrakers’ exposures, the wave of new laws and regulations, and the “agitation” generated by the incessant criticisms of President Roosevelt.
A throng of petty criminals in a prison point to a small cell labeled “For the Incorporated Law Breaker,” insisting that white-collar crime goes unpunished. Caption: The cry of the small crook.
In this powerful double-page cartoon, the great Art Young speaks for the small fry, not excusing them but painting a contrast, versus the “big fish” in the American justice system.
Young, increasingly in his cartoons (in 1911 he would help found the socialist magazine The Masses) he spoke for the downtrodden and, often, those he depicted as falsely accused. In this Puck cartoon, however, he seeks to contrast, even in bold coloring, the mass of petty lawbreakers with trust magnates and titans of industry who were — as per articles in newspaper and magazine, books, public confessions, Congressional hearings,and publicized lawsuits — miscreants and criminals too, but never sentences to prisons.
Fagin from the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, labeled “Corporation Lawyer,” watches as his protégé, Oliver Twist, labeled “Public Service Corporation,” picks the pocket of Uncle Sam on a city sidewalk. Caption: Instructor in the art of stealing and getting away with it.
Public Service Commissions sprang up through the United States in 1907, the result of enabling and supportive measures included in reform legislation passed by Congress in 1906; and successful programs in states like Wisconsin.
Basically, Public Service Commissions in states did what federal cabinet bureaus and regulatory agencies did over the interstate domains. They usually combined oversight of the several public utilities in one commission — transit, power, light, rivers, and roads.
A woman labeled “Corrupt Corporations” stands in a bell tower, hanging onto the clapper of a bell labeled “Third Term” which bears the countenance of Theodore Roosevelt.
“Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight” is one of those occasional lines from a poem that is otherwise obscure by a poet who is known for nothing else. The same situation sometimes attends songs and hymns. In the case of this cartoon’s theme and caption (which correctly should be “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight”), a poem by a 16-year-old girl from a small Michigan town, traded for a subscription to a Detroit newspaper, gained a semblance of immortality.
Rose Hartwick Thorpe was the young poet, and she based her poem on the poignant love story, possibly a legend, of a girl whose lover was sentenced to death by the Puritans, at the ring of the curfew bell in the evening. She pleaded with the Roundhead executioner, who turned away her cried for clemency. In desperation she climbed to the town’s bell tower and physically prevented the clapper from ringing. Soon thereafter Oliver Cromwell entered the town and was so moved by the girl’s devotion that he pardoned the prisoner.
A hand labeled “Collections” holds a pin, about to pop a big red balloon labeled “Big Business Orders.”
“Coming events cast their shadows before” is a proverb so obvious as almost to be trite. It was first used in these words in the poet Thomas Campbell’s Lochiel’s Warning, 1801. Even back in ancient Rome, Cicero had written similarly, “Certain signs precede certain events.” Everyday people can call those events “warning signs,” or ascribe a sense of foreboding to “intuition.”
Cartoonist Udo J. Keppler was prescient and a first-rate analyst — necessary traits for one of America’s prominent political cartoonists — yet he needed no mysterious crystal ball to portray in simple, direct, bright-red graphics an imminent financial crisis.
The Greek mythological figures of fate are represented in the form of a man (representing Lachesis) labeled “Commercial Lawlessness,” sitting with a pile of money on his lap and handing money labeled “Bribery” to a man (representing Atropos) wearing a uniform labeled “Crooked Inspection.” The latter holds a pair of scissors labeled “Disaster,” and is about to cut a thread that extends from the businessman to the figure of Clotho labeled “Human Life” standing between them. At their feet, on the left, are railroad and steamship accidents, a building fire, and dead bodies, and, on the right, is a ticker tape machine.
The Muckraking era, once enlivened with spirits of zeal and righteousness, focused on corrupt areas of American life that were not inevitable curses. Institutional corruption — bribery, lax enforcement of laws, and favoritism — had cancerous effects on American life despite laws and reform. In his career, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt encountered overcrowded and unsanitary tenements were cigars were made, when he was a crusading Assemblyman in the 1880s, and “arrangements” between policemen and saloon owners when he was a crusading police commissioner in the 1890s. Rules and regulations could be irrelevant on the street.
The smells of disaster were in the nostrils of reformers and muckraking cartoonists alike when Udo J. Keppler drew this striking cartoon about the unholy alliance between inspectors and “interests.” Only a few years previous, two of America’s most horrible disasters occurred — both of which could have been avoided by safety measures, reasonably enforced: the sinking of the General Slocum excursion boat and the Iroquois Theater fire.
A man labeled “Corporate Corruption” and a baby boy labeled “Rail Road Scandal” lie sick in bed. Another young child labeled “Life Insurance Scandal” is trying to climb into the bed. Hanging on the wall above the bed is a portrait labeled “E.H.H.” A man departing the room carries a doctor’s bag labeled “Interstate Commerce Com. M.D.” On a table in the foreground is a bank for “Other People’s Pennies” and a bottle of “Legislation Drops.”
The point of Udo J. Keppler’s cover cartoon can be summed up as observing that the insurgent-Muckraking era’s reforms, especially those enacted in bloody battles of 1906, would not enforce themselves.
Railroad legislation and regulations, mostly in the areas of combinations in restraint of trade and rebates, required diligence and imagination to enact. The public spectacles, diving deep into many and tangled insurance scandals, likewise resulted in legislation and regulations, but were a tangled web.
Uncle Sam, as Laocoön, is pictured with two men, one labeled “Business” and the other “Labor,” entwined with snakes labeled “Tariff Uncertainty” in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1911-10-11
A large businessman labeled “Centralized Wealth” uses candle snuffs labeled “Control of Credit, Control of Bank Deposits, Control of Transportation, Control of Public Utilities, Control of Food Supply, Control of Natural Resources, Control of Business, [and] Control of Wall Street” to extinguish candles labeled “Initiative, Untainted Success, Ambition, Independence, [and] Individualism.” An insert shows Puck talking to a socialist speaker. Caption: Puck (to Socialist orator) — Sit down! You don’t have to talk. This large person is making socialists faster than you can make them!
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1911-01-18