Justice

Meyer D. Rothschild, president of the National Jewelers’ Board of Trade, responds to the opinions of United States Court Judges James L. Martin and George C. Holt, who do not believe smugglers should be imprisoned if a fine will serve justice. Rothschild states that all smugglers, rich or poor, deserve the same punishment and in order to discourage future smuggling, those convicted of smuggling need to be imprisoned. Fining smugglers a fraction of what they make selling the smuggled goods does nothing to deter the practice and harms honest businessmen.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1911-11-18

Israel Frederick Fischer congratulates Theodore Roosevelt on becoming a grandparent and asks if he intends to act on the injustice referred to in the enclosed communication.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1911-08-18

Uncle Sam watches as President Roosevelt uses a “justice” crop and attempts to ride a bucking bronco with various labels on it: “sedition,” “intimidation,” “labor unionism,” and “boycott.” Caption: Uncle Sam: That’s right, Teddy! Throw the cold steel into him and don’t let him throw you. Roosevelt: Don’t worry, Uncle, I’ve broken worse ‘broncs’ than this.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1903-06

President Roosevelt carrying a big stick stands beside a man labeled “Senate” casting a vote into the “Dominican Ballot.” To their left stands a woman blindfolded, holding scales in her right hand and an enormous sword “justice” in her left.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The Dominican Republic was a longtime irritant in hemispheric and world politics and commerce, as successive corrupt governments defaulted on international loans and payments, leading to numerous threats from European powers to forcibly collect reparations. President Roosevelt’s desire for regional harmony and justice, coupled with his opposition to European military activity in the Caribbean, directly led to his promulgation of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

President Roosevelt holds up his fist at crowd of people who hold up signs, including one that reads, “To hell with the Constitution!” A donkey is in the corner and says, “We are behind you, Mr. Roosevelt.” Caption: “‘I stand for equal justice’—Theodore Roosevelt.”

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906-04-24

Marie-Francois-Sadi Carnot lies in state after being assassinated by an Italian anarchist. In the right foreground, a female figure holding a sword labeled “Law and Order” is stepping on a large snake labeled “Anarchism.” A wreath resting against the sarcophagus is labeled “Sympathy and Respect of the Civilized World.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1894-07-11

A large arm labeled “Justice” reaches down from above to grab Matthew S. Quay as he tries to make his way from the “Penitentiary” on the left to the “United States Senate” on the right.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1899-01-25

Justice, holding a large sword and carrying a lantern, and with a cloth labeled “Justice” over her mouth, searches a cemetery, among tombstones labeled “Formed no opinion died 1660, Formed no opinion 1600, Haven’t read papers 1776, [and] No opinion died 1670,” for jurors who are uninformed of the assassination of President James A. Garfield. The image includes an insert showing a man hanging from a gibbet labeled “Verdict of 50,000,000 Illustrated.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1881-10-26

Justice, an old woman, sleeps at a desk, with cobwebs, spiders, and mice taking over the courtroom. Outside a window an armed group of vigilantes have broken down the door to a jail and removed a man whom they are about to hang from a nearby tree. One man carries a flag that states “Lively Lynchers.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1883-07-04

President Roosevelt will look into an unnamed matter and try to see justice done.

Collection

Harvard College Library

Creation Date

1908-02-12

Theodore Roosevelt, as “Siegfried,” stands at the edge of a ring of fire around a female figure (Brünnhilde) labeled “Justice” in a deep sleep. Among the flames are the words “Public Indifference, Graft, Conservatism, Special Privilege, [and] Political Expediency.”

Comments and Context

Through the decades of its existence Puck magazine relied on Biblical and dramatic themes, as well as mythology and opera on which to set allegorical motifs for modern political commentary. The elder Joseph Keppler, founder of the magazine and a supporter of the German opera in New York City, had been on the stage in his native Vienna as he simultaneously pursued art and politics.

Puck‘s readers of the day would have been familiar with classical allusions, probably more than would readers today, but Puck began as a German-language weekly and continued a German edition for many years. So the heaviest of Wagnerian operas likely would have been familiar in all the details of settings and references. It was one Puck‘s early writers, Bill Nye, who famously wrote “the music of Richard Wagner is not as bad as it sounds.”

A large cannon labeled “Violence” explodes out the back end, catching John J. McNamara, James B. McNamara, Samuel Gompers, and possibly Clarence Darrow in the blast. Two large cannon shells labeled “Murder” and “Dynamiting” lie on the ground on the left.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-12-27

Draft manuscript of speech delivered in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway. Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1906 but postponed his address to the Nobel Prize Committee until after the end of his Presidency.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site

Creation Date

1910

An old and haggard “Justice” sits in a chair on a rock in the East River. Cobwebs have grown over her sword, scales, and an “Indictment.” In the background, the steamship General Slocum is engulfed in flames. (It burned on June 15, 1904, with a loss of over 1,000 lives.) Caption: “Slocum? Slocum? Where have I heard that name?”

Comments and Context

This front-page cartoon is a brutal and stark presentation of the fact that the East River fire and sinking of the excursion boat the General Slocum — a maritime accident still recorded as one of worst disasters in New York City and United States history — had gone relatively neglected by investigators and responsible agencies. The public was properly outraged at the time of the sinking, but many properly thought that justice lagged.

The cover cartoon marks the first appearance in Puck of Carl (sometimes spelled Karl) Hassmann. Like several of Puck‘s cartoonists through the years, Hassmann was born in Vienna (where he died also, after living in the United States and drawing for the magazine until 1914) and brought a fine-arts, painterly sensibility to his work.

Justice, wearing a crown labeled “Law” and carrying a sword and scales, rides on the back of a snail, climbing a steep hill strewn with bolders labeled “Certificate of reasonable doubt, Appeals, Change of venue, Injunction, [and] Stays” toward the “Hall of Justice” at the top of the hill.

Comments and Context

Puck Magazine and other reformist but conservative Democratic journals, in the run-up to the 1904 presidential campaign, continued to oppose William Jennings Bryan, but cast about for a national Democrat with gravitas and appeal in the mold of former president Grover Cleveland.

The magazine and its cartoonist has been subtly turning the spotlight on an otherwise unknown and modest jurist from New York State, Judge Alton Brooks Parker. Indeed he became the Democrats’         standard-bearer in 1904 (only to suffer major defeat the hands of the incumbent Theodore Roosevelt).

A large, angry female figure representing Justice draws a sword labeled “Law and Order” as she strides toward striking union laborers who, taking the law into their own hands, are beating a “non union” worker and burning another tied to a tree. A factory is in flames in the background.

Comments and Context

Largely forgotten today is the labor strife of the 1890s until World War I in America. A few famous clashes populate the history books: Homestead, the Pullman Strike, the Ludlow (Colorado) Massacre, in industries from mines to textile factories, and a radicalized labor movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at the extreme, but there many local strikes and confrontations. Many of these resulted in deaths and injuries.

Puck represented the type of sincere reform element, like President Roosevelt, conscious of workplace injustice, child labor, onerous hours, unsafe conditions but, however, repelled by labor violence. Initial, and sometimes long-term, reactions are represented by Keppler’s powerful cartoon.

An angry mob of strikers with clubs, guns, and bricks pursues a man labeled “Independent Labor” who has fallen near his wife and child in front of the statue of Justice. Justice is bound with red tape labeled “Politics.” Her scales and fasces lie on the ground next to her feet.

Comments and Context

Sixteen years previous in 1886, another year of labor strife, cartoonist Keppler’s father Joseph Senior drew a similar double-page cartoon of a worker being pummeled by strikers. In that cartoon, titled “Between Slavery and Starvation,” the worker was also a “scab” (someone who agreed to work despite strikers boycotting the factories and shops) and in that cartoon the radical Catholic priest and labor agitator father Edward McGlynn gave his blessing to the violence. In this powerful cartoon, drawn in 1902, another year labor strife, Keppler Junior alludes to the “scab,” not critically but otherwise using a term of approbation. And the fettered figure of Justice implicates merely a violated principle but the system comprised of the courts and the larger political establishment. Especially with the Anthracite Coal strike settlement of that year, and President Theodore Roosevelt’s enlistment of presidential influence, labor saw the pendulum begin to swing its way.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

On the left, a husband and wife, wrapped in chains with a large padlock labeled “Unhappy Marriage,” fight in front of Justice who holds the ends of the chains. Opposite the couple is a member of the clergy who is arguing with Justice that divorce is an “awful immorality” and must be stopped. Caption: The Church–Stop this awful immorality! / Justice–You are wrong! Divorce is rather an aid to morality. Statistics prove that countries where divorces are granted are more moral than countries that forbid them!

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1900-02-07

“Justice” holding her scales is being buried under an avalanche of paper labeled “Law,” as a “Legislator” at the top turns the crank spewing legislation from the U.S. Capitol.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1900-01-10

Theodore Roosevelt will be unable to travel to Tuskegee, Alabama, for the Tuskegee Board of Directors meeting. He would like to speak with Booker T. Washington regarding the injustice done to Washington at the Ulrich trial.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1911-12-06