Scenes at the Gridiron Club Annual Dinner
In the upper left hand corner, a man measures the door of the White House at five feet while Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks stands at six feet, four inches. In the upper right hand corner, Samuel G. Blythe, president of the Gridiron Club, stands as President Roosevelt and Vice President Fairbanks remain seated. In the lower left hand corner is a man dressed up as “Cuba,” and in the lower right hand corner Clifford Kennedy Berryman gives a chalk talk about the teddy bear with the caption, “Initiation Act.”
Comments and Context
The exigencies of newspaper publication deadlines seem evident in this cartoon. One of the most famous altercations of the American presidency — certainly the most contentious of a Washington D.C., institution, the annual Gridiron Club dinner — was depicted by an artist of the morning Washington Herald on the published date of the dinner. The anomaly is that the cartoon’s vignettes are presented as a round-up, but a cartoon drawn actually after the fact could not have avoided the tense confrontations at the dinner.