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A. B. King tells Theodore Roosevelt that arbitration treaties are not the answer because individuals need higher morality in order for peace to last. The Church can provide the higher morality the world needs, but if the church could present it using science, such as French scientists do, there would be more success as bringing people back to the Church.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-12-12
President Roosevelt responds to William Jennings Bryan’s public letter by comparing Bryan’s platform with those of the current administration and of William H. Taft’s campaign. Roosevelt lists the cases that have been brought against the trusts, the railroads, and the shippers under his administration. He explains his actions in relation to the panic of 1907, outlines the reasons the trust magnates will support Bryan, and defends his actions related to campaign funding. Roosevelt critiques Bryan’s defense of Oklahoma Governor Charles Nathan Haskell by reiterating the extent of his corruption, and determines that it reflects directly on Bryan.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1908-09-27
President Roosevelt is sure Senator Lodge has seen his statement about Ohio Senator Joseph Benson Foraker and his letter about William Jennings Bryan. Roosevelt thinks Foraker’s situation is distressing, but corruption must be exposed. He is torn about William Randolph Hearst’s recent attitude. The amount of corruption in high places is shocking, but it has been natural for Roosevelt to fight it. Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park S. B. M. Young brought two such examples to Roosevelt’s attention, one regarding appointments tied to William McKinley’s election and one regarding the feelings of John Kean and Hamilton F. Kean about business interests.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1908-09-25
President Roosevelt explains to Lyman Abbott that the correspondence with Ohio Senator Joseph Benson Foraker and John D. Archbold proves that Foraker is obscuring his true political goals. Foraker says he is against Roosevelt on issues related to African Americans, but this is actually a cover for his opposition to Roosevelt and William H. Taft’s anti-corruption stance regarding companies like Standard Oil.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1908-09-19
Judge Elbert H. Gary, a constituent, approves of President Roosevelt’s policies, especially the Square Deal, and has spoken to others who agree. Gary has personally benefited from the policies.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1907-03-15
William Allen White has heard that Representative Victor Murdock’s bill regarding mail rates will fail, and would like President Roosevelt to assist Murdock if he can, as the postal service is in great need of reform. White would visit Roosevelt himself, but his wife Sallie Moss Lindsay White is ill.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1907-02-16
Five men attempt to push the “$5,000,000.00 corruption fund” rock off a hill onto President Roosevelt who is riding a horse underneath.
In April of 1907, there was much Washington buzz around the next year’s presidential campaign, and talk around the nation about President Roosevelt’s successor — perhaps it would Roosevelt himself, his favored candidate William H. Taft, or other Republican aspirants; and whether William Jennings Bryan would be nominated a third time by the Democratic Party. All this in addition to the Wall Street Panic, the ongoing Panama Canal construction, West Coast immigration problems, and much else.
The “G.O.P.” elephant holds a tambourine labeled “Stand Patism” and hands out free baskets labeled “Tariff Graft” containing a turkey, duck, or chicken to ragged figures labeled “Coal Trust, Steel Trust, [and] Wool Trust.” A long line of trust figures await their turn. Joseph Gurney Cannon, Nelson W. Aldrich, Joseph Benson Foraker, and Leslie M. Shaw appear in women’s clothing as the “Republican Salvation Army” singers, singing “There are no flies on Dingley.” A man labeled “Protected Monopoly” stands in the foreground, at the edge of the platform. Caption: Distribution of Christmas goodies by the Republican Salvation Army.
Politics occasionally did intrude in holiday issues of Puck as this centerspread cartoon by J. S. Pughe attests. The Salvation Army was a relatively new force in 1906, but there had been urban missions and soup kitchens in lower Manhattan for generations. Pughe’s venue is a larger auditorium than might have been typical of a Salvationist Christmas food charity, but other stereotypes are there: music with a tambourine, female singers with bonnets sharing their sermons in song.
The cartoonist’s attacks are seen in the graphic subtleties: an obscure “small dealer” — that is, an individual entrepreneur — squeezed between two angry trust magnates; a fancy spat and shoe peeking from under a mogul’s pant-leg; similar kid glove and diamond jewelry on the “downtrodden”; and the hymn praising Dingley. Three leading Republican senators, and Treasury Secretary Leslie M. Shaw bleat the gospel of high tariffs.
A game of chess is being played on the “[Depar]tment of Police” board, between a hand labeled “Political Pull” showing a cufflink labeled “Brass Check” and a hand labeled “Reform.” Some of the squares are labeled “Race Track, Suburbs, White Lights, Gambling District, Goatville, Financial District, Tenderloin, Red Light District, Lonely Beat, [and] Hell’s Kitchen.” The chess pieces are police officers, some in plainclothes, labeled “Crooked Captain, Inspector, Sleuth, ‘Fixed’ Captain, Honest Captain, Grafting Captain, Honest Inspector, Plainclothes Man, [and] Sergeant.”
A dozen years before this cartoon — when Theodore Roosevelt had assumed his position as president of the Board of Police Commissioners in New York City, and continuing through his tenure — corruption among the police ranks was rife. Startling revelations mostly were instigated by the municipal reformer Reverend C. H. Parkhurst, followed by a 10,000 page report by the Lexow Committee (chaired by state senator Clarence Lexow) exposing countless abuses by the Lexow Committee.
These scandals fueled the voters’ revolt that led to the election of the reform mayor William Lafeyette Strong; and his reformist administration in turn was fueled by prosecution of abuses. These reforms, and many others, were the assignment of the new commissioner, Roosevelt. He and his recalcitrant fellow board members (two of the four commissioners continually resisted his measures) addressed police bribery and protection schemes, merit promotions, and such.
Several clippings concerning public opinion over an issue regarding Senator Robert J. Gamble. Gamble’s son was reportedly on the U.S. Senate payroll while attending school in Maryland.
An interview with Seth Low, Chairman, on the bills drafted by his committee, in comparison to those drafted by Mr. Belmont.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1906-01-10
Report on Charles J. Bonaparte’s speech to the Women’s Twentieth Century Club, regarding Civil Service Reform and the “spoils system.”
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-02-24
“The Yellow Dog” sits on a plank on the shore of a body of water, with its left foreleg around the shoulders of a much smaller man labeled “Corrupt Business,” watching the sunset in the distance. The dog looks back over its shoulder at the viewer.
In the first half of 1906 the insurance-industry scandals and revelations continued in the daily press, moved somewhat to aftermaths like resignations of executives, flights to Europe, and continuing revelations.
The structure of corruption was being revealed to the public, not only interlocking directorates and numerous payoffs (industry leaders to each other; and “forgiven loans” and exaggerated consultation fees to politicians on boards). The insiders’ term “yellow dog funds” referred to secret accounts of money reserved for bribes and payoffs; “slush funds,” as later generations would call them.
A large man labeled “Big Shipper” appears as a blacksmith holding a diminutive man labeled “Small shipper” on an anvil labeled “The Rail Road” and striking it with a hammer labeled “Rebates.” On the floor at his feet is a pile of coins labeled “Illegitimate Profits,” and eager schoolchildren (Nelson W. Aldrich, Chauncey M. Depew, Thomas Collier Platt, and others) gather at the entryway hoping to “catch the burning sparks that fly like chaff from the threshing floor.” Includes verse.
This cartoon by Udo J. Keppler appeared only two weeks before the passage of the Hepburn Act, the long-awaited, intensely contentious, law that granted the Interstate Commerce Commission power to review and cap railroad rates; extending regulatory jurisdiction over lines and competition; and eliminated rebates and free passes. The Hepburn Act technically was a group of amendments to the toothless Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.
Its passage revolutionized fairer commerce and let small railroads establish themselves and compete, especially in under-served areas of the United States, which in turn spurred further development of the continent’s farming and small manufacturing activities.
The devil delivers a tiny piece of ice to a bloated businessman labeled “The Ice Man” wearing a fur coat and sitting on a heater in Hell. Caption: Satan — Yep, this is the biggest fifty pounds I can let you have. On account of the mild winter, ice is very scarce here!
Cartoonist L. M. Glackens scored a hat trick with his cover cartoon about ice deliveries in hot summer months. As a purely humorous cartoon, and in the days prior to electric home refrigeration, virtually every reader would appreciate the jab at ice deliveries literally shaving the weight of blocks for home ice boxes.
The second aspect was the cartoonist’s fun with icons. To show the iceman consigned, in hell, having to wear a fur coat, supplied with Tabasco Sauce for his drink, sitting on a steaming radiator, and the thermometer bursting its top, showed that the cartoonist was having a heck of an enjoyable assignment.
On the left a man labeled “Tariff Coddled Manufacturer” votes with one hand and receives a bribe in the other, in the form of a “High-Protection Schedule,” from a large hand labeled “Rep. Congress” extending above the U.S. Capitol. On the right a diminutive man votes with one hand and receives money with the other from a man leaning out of a saloon. Caption: It’s only a question of size.
Puck‘s drawing by its chief political cartoonist Udo J. Keppler, is generic — that is, a political cartoon with no politics — addressing no specific candidate or office-holder, nor discussing any pending legislation. In fact, through its existence, Puck routinely and often attacked political corruption and, as here, unholy alliances whether in high chambers of corporations or saloons in lowly slums.
The general problem Keppler attacks is not exclusive to the Gilded Age of Puck‘s birth, nor the Muckraking Era of this cartoon, nor the dawning Progressive Era.
William Randolph Hearst sits with two large, animated money bags resting on his lap, with arms and legs, and showing two large coins as heads. On the floor next to Hearst is a box labeled “WRH Ventriloquist.”
William Randolph Hearst was a phenomenon in American life for almost 65 years. His father George was a mining prospector whose discovery of silver, then gold, led to dominance in other fields, and lucrative investments in vast lands and livestock. George was elected Senator from California and presented his son “Willie” with the San Francisco Examiner as a plaything after the latter’s expulsion from Harvard.
Before his death in 1951, Hearst built a chain of more than 40 newspapers, many magazines, syndicates, radio stations, wire services, movie studios, and affiliated enterprises (lumber for newsprint, South American cattle for beef trade). He was godfather to the comic strip through pioneering color supplements, and owned early animated-cartoon studios. His career was unsympathetically portrayed in the classic movie Citizen Kane. Many of his properties still exist, now spread to cable and syndication television, and so do some his physical monuments like his spectacular fairyland of an estate in California, San Simeon.
Various forms of transportation owned by the government and operated by an abundance of government employees are depicted, suggesting that some level of corruption is an aspect of federal, state, or municipal ownership.
The brilliant L. M. Glackens, brother of the famous American “Ashcan School” painter William J. Glackens, was being given more and more space in Puck, to the delight of readers and subsequent researchers. He had a clean style, and presented trenchant commentary lucidly.
Glackens, addressing the issue of government ownership of municipal services — as the concept was being discussed across America, and implemented in cities like Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago — might have taken any other tack. Or, with a double-page spread to fill, he might have chosen several themes. But his comic vision of government ownership’s future in America was one of “featherbedding.”
William Travers Jerome, District Attorney for the State of New York, defends a bridge that leads to “Honest Government” against a group of men led by Benjamin B. Odell, with “Big Tim, Little Tim, Abe Gruber, [and Charles F.] Murphy” among his followers. Caption: “Now, who will stand at my right hand and keep the bridge with me?”
Timothy Daniel “Big Tim” Sullivan, the “Boss of the Bowery,” controlled everything — voters and voting, the police, dives, opium dens, and prostitution — in lower Manhattan below Union Square. He was killed when run over by a train (and his body unidentified for weeks) at only 52 years old. Ge might have risen to be the next boss of Tammany Hall but for his death and an apparent case of advanced syphilis.
When Sullivan went to Washington as a Congressman, his cousin, “Little Tim” Sullivan, always a right-hand man, was called back from his seat in the New York State Assembly to sit on the New York City Board of Alderman, where he soon became second in power to the city’s mayor. He predeceased his cousin, in 1910, by three years.
At the top of a human pyramid on a platform is “The Senator.” On the next level, two men are sitting on bags of money on a platform labeled “The Big Interests.” Below them are men with bags labeled “Graft” and “Dough Bag,” standing on a platform labeled “The Bosses.” Beneath them comes a larger group of men standing on a platform labeled “The State Legislature.” Finally, at the bottom is a group on a platform labeled “The People,” who are being crushed by the weight of those above them.
Puck‘s chief cartoonist Joseph Keppler, Junior, drew an unfortunately timeless indictment of American politics in this center spread drawing. The common people are oppressed, yet hold up the system — a system populated by more and more greed and pecuniary motivations.
At the top of the corrupt pyramid is the nobly robed statesman, the United States senator, the legatee of many people’s avarice and ambition. The generic corpulent figures with twisted smiles and overflowing pockets of money were a sad commentary on American politics, but a brilliant Muckraking-era portrait of necessary reforms.