An oversized man labeled “Beef Trust,” with skeleton face, performs a magic trick on a stage by taking “Diseased Livestock” and pushing them through a tube labeled “Packingtown” to produce packaged “Pure Meat Products.” A diminutive man, “The Prof’s Assistant,” wearing a cap labeled “Inspector,” is standing on the stage on the left. Packingtown is a real section Chicago that was the setting for the horrible actions committed in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published as a book when this cartoon appeared. Caption: A monstrous and amazing feat of magic.
comments and context
Comments and Context
This cartoon by Udo J. Keppler is significant in many ways. It is a marker along the road of Puck‘s growing radicalism as it became more forceful in imagery and grim in details than cartoons of its past. In this regard it was willingly swept up in the tide of muckraking and reform in contemporary periodicals. In fact it nearly coincided with the book publication of the magazine-serialized Jungle by Upton Sinclair. In a sense it could have served as an illustration in the book, or its cover, because the Chicago setting of the revolting horrors of the Beef Trust and meat-packing industry (some of them actually fictional) were set in the real-life section of the city called Packingtown.
