Hand-to-hand fighting

Edward Henry Harriman walks up behind President Roosevelt in the first section. They get into a tussle in the second section; and then Roosevelt walks away as Harriman’s battered hat sits on the ground. He is pressed up against a lamp pole with stars coming out of his head.

comments and context

Comments and Context

This early cartoon from cartoonist Jay N. “Ding” Darling’s career depicts President Roosevelt walking along the sidewalk — coincidentally with his foot over the subsequently affixed mailing label to “The President / Executive Mansion;” this was a “comp” (complimentary) copy received by the president himself and pasted into the White House scrapbook.

Several congressmen labeled “Gardner, Champ Clark, De Armond, Sulzer, Goldfogle, Ollie James, Fitzgerald, [and] Burton Harrison” and others are engaged in a brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the background, Sereno E. Payne is addressing the Speaker of the House, Joseph Gurney Cannon.

Comments and Context

As the sixty-first Congress was seated in March 1909 the Democrat Party had reason to feel confident about their future in the House of Representatives. The party still was in the distinct minority, but a growing restlessness in the electorate presaged political changes; more and more Republican representatives declared themselves anti-Establishment Insurgents likely to resist the House’s Old Guard; and the popular Theodore Roosevelt would be abroad for more than a year, his Republican influence absent from politics.

In spite of a rosy future, party members presaged Will Rogers’s aphorism several decades hence: “I don’t belong to any organized political party; I am a Democrat.”

Report of a fight that occurred outside the Precinct E polling center in the Fourth Ward in Cincinnati involving U.S. Marshal Vivian J. Fagin, his supporters, and his political opponents and their supporters. Fagin and a young man named Thomas allegedly beat a man who tried to vote for his opponent. Fagin has been arrested and denies the charges against him. To prevent further unrest, officers in the ward have been instructed to use their nightsticks to administer “practical justice.”

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906

“Miss Democracy Select School” over doorway. Theodore Roosevelt is challenging a group of Democrats. Hill, Olney, Davis, Parker, and others, are in front of the school house.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1904-06-24

A large group of children in a nursery are fighting amongst themselves. They are labeled “England” and “Russia,” “Austria” and “Italy,” “Greece” and “Turkey,” “France” and “Germany” fighting over a child or doll labeled “Alsace Lorraine,” “Roumania” and “Servia,” and in the background on the left, “Denmark” and “Sweden,” and “China” and Japan. The mother of the house, an angel labeled “Peace,” looks tired and exasperated. There is a dead bird in a birdcage hanging on the left. Caption: Madam Peace–Goodness, gracious! – were there ever such troublesome children? They are always promising to be good, and yet they are always squabbling!

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1897-03-17

Uncle Sam takes off his jacket as he steps toward two men labeled “Cuba” and “Spain” fighting with each other. Like Cuba’s tattered clothing, it is a war-torn landscape. Caption: Uncle Sam–In the cause of humanity it is my duty to separate them.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1898-04-20

President McKinley addresses an audience from a stage in a theater. Behind the curtain, an overturned hat labeled “Aldrich” lies on the stage next to a man holding papers labeled “Committee on Finance,” kneeling before another man who is about to strike him with a club labeled “Demands of Western Senators.” Two other “members of the cast” are engaged in a fist-fight.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1897-06-16

At center, a brawl is underway among reserve soldiers anxious for action. Surrounding vignettes depict war-related shortages and other problems at home, such as “printing the baseball news on the tenth page now” and “no more Paris fashions.” At top, boxer Jack Johnson approaches a French soldier playing “Aux Armes Citoyens” on the trumpet. At bottom is “Our valiant correspondent at the front” locked in a safe labeled “The Daily Howl” in the middle of a battlefield.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1914-09-05

Gladiator William Maxwell Evarts stands over fallen and wounded gladiator Levi P. Morton. Coins spill from a gash in his left side, earning Evarts a wreath of “Popular Approval.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1885-01-28

Secretary of War Elihu Root holds up a lantern to illuminate a scene in an “Anti-Canteen Saloon” where soldiers have gone to drink and socialize in the absence of a canteen on the army base. It is over-run with drunkenness and violence. Caption: What the W.C.T.U. has effected by abolishing the army canteen.

Comments and Context

Reformers argued, eventually with success, that Army canteens, even if liquor was dispensed there, had advantages over saloons and such establishments off military bases.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs