Crows

A glum Thanksgiving Day feast is occurring with the downtrodden Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine and his supporters “W.W. Phelps, [Roscoe Conkling at an open door], William Mahone, Cabot Lodge, [John Logan], Robeson, Dorsey, [W. Reid, Benjamin F. Butler], Elkins, Platt, [Cyrus W. Field, and] C.A. Dana” gathered around a table, and with John Kelly as a dog next to a plate with a small bird labeled “Compliments of N.Y. Citizens.” Reid is removing the top of a platter labeled “Campaign” where there is a “Crow” that is “Compliments of the People.” Through a window, where Puck is looking in, can be seen Grover Cleveland carrying a large turkey labeled “Presidency” over his shoulder, and across the street is Jay Gould offering his “Congratulations.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1884-11-26

A large crow labeled “Bryan” perches on a branch labeled “Denver Convention,” holding a slip of paper labeled “Nomination” in its beak. Sitting on the ground below is a fox labeled “Eastern Democracy.” Caption: A cleverer crow than the bird of Aesop’s fable.

Comments and Context

The story of the Fox and the Crow is one of the most popular of Aesop’s many fables, and appears to have predated Aesop by centuries. many cultures have variations of the tale and its lesson, and variations or re-tellings are famous, at the hands of La Fontaine, Martin Luther, and even DC Comics.

Many modern readers, to whom Aesop is no longer taught or shared, might think that the lesson is that the fox chatted, and fooled the crow into replying, thereby droppings its morsel of food. In the fact the “moral” throughout the centuries and societies, is not that the fox was so clever as to fool the crow into speaking, but that the bird was susceptible to flattery. In the fable, the fox repeatedly praised the crow’s beautiful voice (the first indication of false flattery) until it proudly opened it mouth to sing… and dropped the food.

An American bald eagle carries a scarecrow that looks like Uncle Sam, with battleships for hat, hands, and feet, across the Pacific Ocean toward “Japan,” where crows wearing military uniforms stand on the shore. The sun is rising in the background.

Comments and Context

Displaying more than a little cynicism, Puck magazine and its cartoonist J. S. Pughe portrayed the upcoming departure of the Great White Fleet from San Francisco in December 1908, a few months hence. A few months earlier, President Roosevelt’s secretary William Loeb confirmed rumors and announced the purpose of the circumnavigational cruise on August 23.

Pughe mockingly underplays the status of America’s naval forces, but correctly perceives one of the battle group’s main goals — to impress the world, and Japan especially, with America’s might.

The Russian Bear, as a soldier with rifle, has been turned into a scarecrow. A crow labeled “Japan” bites its nose. Another crow labeled “England” is perched on its cap. A crow labeled “Germany” is flying around its head. A crow labeled “Turkey” is on the ground at its feet. A crow labeled “China” is perched on the rifle butt. All these crows, and several others on a fence nearby, are cawing with laughter at the scarecrow.

Comments and Context

The term “Sick Man of Europe” has been applied through centuries of international diplomacy to several countries — the Ottoman Empire and Turkey during periods of decline, and Great Britain when parts of its empire fell away. In the years prior to World War I, Russia surely wore the mantle.

At the time of J. S. Pughe’s cartoon, a decade preceding the war, Russia had been weakened by internal protests, exacerbated by brutal suppression and international approbation; and border wars, regional conflicts in lands it once dominated, and defiant attacks by stronger neighbors. It had lost allies and puppet regimes in the Baltic and Slavic territories. When Czar Nicholas I provoked Japan around the time of this cartoon, it was met by savage military response (eventually pleading for intervention, which came in the person of President Roosevelt).

A scarecrow in a corn field, labeled “Nomination,” is fashioned out of pieces of cloth labeled with the names of several states: “Indiana, Illinois, Mass., Mich., Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, West Virginia, [and] New Jersey.” It wears a sash labeled “Repudiation.” Standing in the background is a farmer wearing a hat labeled “Democracy” and carrying a rifle labeled “Nat’l. Convention.” A crow labeled “Bryan,” with the face of William Jennings Bryan, is sitting on a fence, eyeing the corn field. Caption: The Democratic Farmer — If that doesn’t keep him out, I’ve got something here that’ll fix him.

Comments and Context

Pughe’s clever cartoon (and brilliant caricature) proved prescient, less than a year before the 1904 Democrat presidential nominating convention. The party (labeled “Democracy”) is depicted, in rare form, by a farmer rather than a donkey or animal form. His weapon to keep the crow Bryan from his field — if the ragtag scarecrow-of-states failed to repel the crow, is a shotgun labeled “National Convention.”

Indeed in 1904 it would be conservative back-benchers who stifled another move to nominate Bryan another (third) time, and they engineered the nomination of the obscure Judge Alton Brooks Parker. And a platform was adopted that moved the party away from Bryan’s economic views and populist proposals.

Theodore Roosevelt writes to Professor Kofoid of the University of California, Berkeley, regarding articles and pamphlets written by Henry Chester Tracy, Abbott Handerson Thayer, J. A. Allen, and Edward William Nelson on the topic of birds, plumage, and biological research.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1911-02-02