City and town life

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

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.

For all of the fascination with new “horseless carriages,” and the exciting promises they held for average citizens, automobile safety was of prominent concern. Few cities and fewer suburban towns, and fewer still rural areas, had paved roads. Dust and dirt, stray animals and careless children were all challenges. Speed limits were difficult to establish and harder still to enforce.

A customs officer places a tax stamp on an American heiress. Surrounding vignettes suggest other ways of generating revenue, such as taxing “poodles and other precious pups,” people who tell tall stories, “divorce,” “sidewhiskers,” “amateur elocutionists,” and “rubber plants,” “instead of putting it all over the poor old consumer.” Caption: Some stamp-tax suggestions for raising the wind.

Comments and Context

The subject of a federal income tax is almost as old as the Republic itself. The first serious proposals were floated in 1812 as government expenditures rose in the face of a war with England. Similar pressures resulted in a tax on all incomes during the Civil War; imposed in 1862, they were lifted a decade later. The only major Democrat tariff of the late nineteenth century was the Wilson law of 1894, and a tax on incomes was imposed to offset the loss of revenue from lower tariffs.

The courts had declared a federal income tax unconstitutional, so at the dawn of the Taft Administration a political and economic “perfect storm” presented itself. The federal government’s budget was growing exponentially larger as the country expanded its population and modern needs; there was general dissatisfaction with high tariffs, for reasons ranging from high consumer prices to resentment of bloated trusts; conspicuous consumption among the wealthy (and wealthy predators, as characterized by Theodore Roosevelt) fueled a public acceptance of taxes on upper income brackets; and a general trend toward collectivist policies, as in European countries, where governments played — and took — a larger percentage of the public’s business.

A priest stands at the pulpit in a cathedral, preaching from the “Holy Ledger.” Beneath his feet is a cut-away of an area labeled “Rentals” and revealing bags of money above the phrase, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The bottom half of the image shows the squalor of poor families living in sections of the city identified as “Filth Lane, Tuberculosis Alley, Bacteria Court, Thug Corner, Squalor Street, [and] Fire Trap.”

Comments and Context

The great radical cartoonist Art Young, creator hundreds of effective and famous cartoons over his long career, once called “Holy Trinity” the favorite among his cartoons. The color double-page in Puck was prompted by an article about the Episcopal Church in New York City owning a multitude of tenements. Its clergy, in Young’s powerful Puck cartoon, were in effect slumlords

This Puck cartoon garnered much attention at the time, as much as the expose that inspired it. Charles Edward Russell, who had written the expose in Everybody’s Magazine, in 1911 reported that Trinity Church had quietly destroyed 156 of the tenements they owned. “It was one of the great cartoons of history,” he wrote. Young himself added in his autobiography His Life and Times, “He went on to say… that I could feel that thousands of people in New York were better housed and more comfortable because of the power of my pencil. That commendation was the fines reward that had come to me since I had begun to draw.”

A bespectacled man wearing a top hat and overcoat stands in the street, holding a book titled “Old Sleuth the Detective.” Near him, young children are reading the newspapers labeled “Daily Scandal Monger,” “Morning Cyclone of Crime,” “Daily Rot, Daily Scooper, [and] Morning Scavenger.” Behind are newsstands labeled “All the Sensation Papers” and “Don’t Fail to Buy the Sunday Slop Bucket,” with headlines such as “How to Poison a Whole City,” “Murder,” and “Crime.” Caption: Dime Novel Writer–And they used to say that my books were bad for young peoples’ morals!

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1897-03-17

Two men, one labeled “Producer,” use a pulley system labeled “U.S. Parcels Post” to ship a package labeled “Direct to Consumer” beyond the reach of a man labeled “Express Co.” straddling a “R. R.” station and a man labeled “Middleman” standing in front of a “Commission Market” to a man labeled “Consumer” and a woman standing at the other end of the pulley system. The consumer in turn sends payment for the goods received by the same system. Caption: What the parcels post would mean to them both.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-01-04

In a busy street scene in a city, numerous electric signs advertise cafes, theaters, restaurants, and cigarettes. Also shown are pedestrians on the sidewalks and automobiles on the street.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-10-10

In a crowded street between tenement buildings, street vendors line the street. Vignette views depict storefronts, vendors, and a social gathering on a street corner, possibly around a photographer.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-08-15

People dine at sidewalk cafes and dance at a hotel rooftop cabaret, while lovers stroll in the moonlight at Riverside Park. Raymond Crawford Ewer sketches from life New York 1914. Caption: Hotel-top and other views to show that the stay-at-home New Yorker is not to be pitied.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-08-22

In a crowded outdoor scene, possibly in “Times” Square, Japanese paper lanterns are hanging and almost everyone is wearing Japanese-style clothing. Among the porters, street vendors, and street railroad conductors are depicted Jay “Gould,” H. O. “Thompson,” Charles A. “Dana,” Whitelaw “Reid,” Benjamin F. Butler, “Bergh,” Elizabeth Cady “Stanton,” Joseph “Pulitzer,” Samuel J. “Tilden,” Thomas De Witt “Talmage,” William M. “Evarts,” and “Grace, Murray, [and] Barrett,” and Marcus “Daly,” along with Puck holding his lithographic pencil.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1886-01-13

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

At center, an effeminate Santa Claus stands in front of a fireplace where stockings are hanging. His bag of toys is on the floor nearby. He considers taking the stockings “for the Belgians.” The surrounding vignettes show scenes depicting the “knitting craze”: a chess player knits while waiting for his opponent to make a move; a society woman knits while walking the dog, with a servant following her to carry the yarn on a tray; a man knits while sitting in the bathtub, the only free time he has; passengers and a conductor knit while riding on a streetcar; a boxer drops a stitch when caught off guard by the gong; and a drunkard tells his wife “No, my dear, I wash tnitting at the tlub.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-12-26

Two winter scenes are depicted with a verse by Breton Braley printed between them. On the left is “The Christmas Coach” showing a stagecoach with passengers riding on top, with a crescent moon and winter spirits in the night sky. On the right is “The Spirit of the Snow” showing the Snow Spirit spreading snow over a city at night with a church in the background. Each half of the spread includes a remarque at the bottom signed with monogram (E within a box) and showing a 19th century farmhouse and a church.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-12-19

A bird’s-eye view of Mott Street in Chinatown, New York City, shows street life and buildings. Vignettes depict Chinese people engaged in various activities that characterize daily life in Chinatown. Caption: The rest of New York moves, but Chinatown stays.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-11-28

Four elderly men and two elderly women watch a fashionably dressed young woman as she walks down the sidewalk.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1913-10-15

A beautiful young woman poses for a group of wide-eyed male photographers. Caption: But remember, there is some Great Scenery around Broadway and Forty-Second Street in the Summer time.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1913-08-13

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

A city sidewalk is crowded with women who are denied entry to upscale shops. An old woman labeled “Necessity” creates a maelstrom that drives many of the women to seek shelter where they can, which happens to be a brightly illuminated building topped with a “$” where the Devil is sitting, waiting for them. Caption: It is not inclination, but necessity, that drives the underpaid shop-girl to the Devil.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1912-12-11

Four toll-takers labeled “Retailer’s Profit, Commission Broker’s Profit, Rail Road’s Profit, [and] Express Company’s Profit” stand on a bridge spanning a small waterway that separates the rural “Producer” on the right from the city “Consumer” on the left. Flying overhead is an airplane labeled “Parcels Post.” Caption: If you don’t like it, you know what you can do.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-12-13

One large hand, labeled “City Tradesman,” has grabbed a family of four from another large hand, labeled “Country Hotel Keeper.” Caption: “Let go there! Give me a chance at ’em! You had ’em all Summer!”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-09-20

On the left, pedestrians and people in and on top of buildings look with amazement at an airplane flying over a city. On the right, citizens no longer take notice of all the airplanes crowding the sky above the city. Caption: As it was a year or two ago / As it may be a year or two from now.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-08-23