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Theodore Roosevelt believes that the United States Senate resolution is foolish, regardless of the ex-superintendent’s remarks.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-12-23
President Roosevelt accepts Assistant United States Treasurer Fish’s resignation. Ordinarily Roosevelt would regret receiving such a letter, but in this case he is sure Fish will continue to serve excellently while in Congress.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1908-10-03
The heads of Chauncey M. Depew labeled “Compliments of New York” and Thomas Collier Platt labeled “From the Empire State” lie on desks in the “U.S. Senate” chamber, with Uncle Sam scowling in the background.
This over cartoon by Udo J. Keppler in Puck Magazine might have run any year while the twin graybeards Chauncey M. Depew and Thomas Collier Platt were senators, such was the routine assessment of the magazine and indeed much of the public (even of New York State’s citizens — this was at a time when state legislators, not the voting public, elected senators, a Constitutional system that had grown corrupt).
Indeed the concept of the cartoon might have been applied to previous New York senators, who generally were elderly and settled into careers serving special interests. And this was the case in other states’ delegations as well, since the senate had evolved into a club of a few powerful bosses.
A large hot air balloon with Theodore Roosevelt’s face flies a banner of “Republican Congressional Candidates” and carries a basket overflowing with election hopefuls (and a small conventional balloon labeled “Cannon’s Boom,” referring to a short-lived effort to have Joseph Gurney Cannon contest the 1908 presidential nomination. On the ground, Samuel Gompers is using a sling-shot in an effort to shoot down the balloon.
Campaigns for the presidency and seats in Congress were much, perhaps mercifully, shorter in the Roosevelt Era. The cartoon by Udo J. Keppler marks the October commencement of the elections in November.
Despite a “boomlet” urging Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon to vie for the presidential nomination, he and virtually every other Republican candidate were tethered to the administration and popularity of Theodore Roosevelt, like it or not. Most, from the old guard to the insurgents, did like it.
On the Senate floor, several Senators engage in a free-for-all around a signpost labeled “Rail Road Interests.” Watching the melee from the “Visitors’ Gallery” is Joseph R. Burton.
J. S. Pughe’s center-spread cartoon in Puck, 1906, is a reversal of many cartoons drawn through the years (most memorably by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler’s 1889 gallery of moneybags, “Bosses of the Senate.” Pughe’s variation was to draw the floor of the Senate ripped out, and the well reconfigured as the floor of a stock exchange.
New York Senator Chauncey M. Depew is portrayed as a pliant errand-boy, presumably to corporate masters, and a gaggle of senators, most prominently Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, pile on each other at the “Railroad Interests” station. Senators hasten to make inquiries with trusts, or receive instructions from them; indeed at the time many politicians in Washington frankly presented themselves as serving the corporate interests in their states.
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.
Chauncey M. Depew and Thomas Collier Platt hold awards “For Good Attendance” and “Reward of Merit” at commencement exercises, with Charles W. Fairbanks sitting in the background in the Senate chamber.
Puck began to focus its aim New York State’s two Republican senators on January 10, 1906, in a cover cartoon portraying Thomas Collier Platt and Chauncey M. Depew as Falstaff and Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s King Henry IV casting about for some men to bribe. Word had leaked out — if a huge publicity campaign can be called “leaking” — that William Randolph Hearst had bought Cosmopolitan magazine. It pledged to be the muckraker among muckraking journals. It hired David Graham Phillips to be its lead investigator; he was to expose the United States Senate as a cancerous center of corruption, and the face of Depew would dominate the first cover.
So it happened. “The Treason Of the Senate” was the sensational series of articles, and Depew was skewered from the start. Cosmopolitan‘s circulation shot up past a half-million copies per month.
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.
A large “Corporate Vulture”, wearing a cap usually associated with John D. Rockefeller, feeds a bag of “Dough” to a chick labeled “‘Our’ Senators.” Two other chicks in the nest, which is made of money, are labeled “‘Our’ Legislatures” and “‘Our’ Judges.”
With little subtlety, and a caricature (with trademark skull cap) so dispositive as to require no label, cartoonist J.S. Pughe savaged the Standard Oil mogul John D. Rockefeller in this Puck cover.
Without the graphic hyperbole, the situation depicted in the cartoon was true. At first it was the wealth in coffers of companies like Standard Oil that enabled Rockefeller and his counterparts to influence the legislatures, solons, and platforms in states where the trusts were headquartered.
A large William H. Taft wears a stars and stripes turban, with a large knife labeled “The Big Bolo” stuck in his belt and a notice attached stating “For Stand Patters.” He is speaking to a group of diminutive figures labeled variously “Congressman” with a “Manila Souvenir Spoon,” “Philippine Industries, Free Trade Promises, [and] Senate Bill.” In the background, on the left is the boarding ramp to a ship, and on the right are two entrances to a railroad station platform labeled “To Washington Direct.” One entrance is labeled “Philippine Free Trade” and the other is labeled “Stand Pat.” Taft is telling them to be sure to choose the correct train, i.e., not to enter through the “Stand Pat” gate. Caption: Our Foremost Filipino — Now, boys, after all my talking, don’t go and take the wrong train.
In 1900, President William McKinley named William H. Taft to be civilian governor of the Philippine Islands. It was position that carried responsibility and diplomatic skills, because the new United States territory was restive and rebellious, more so than any of the new acquisitions won in the Spanish-American War. In the next three years more than 100,000 deaths resulted from the Filipino Insurrection.
Taft’s father Alphonso had been United States Attorney General and Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant. William H. Taft served as United States Solicitor-General under President Benjamin Harrison. After his service in the Philippines, President Roosevelt appointed Taft his Secretary of War, with several foreign assignments in Panama, the Philippines again, and in Cuba, where he briefly and simultaneously served as provisional governor. On one of his goodwill trips to the Philippines and Japan (on which Alice Roosevelt, the President’s daughter, joined and was feted) he conducted back-channel negotiations with Japan to diffuse tensions over immigration matters.
Theodore Roosevelt, as Hercules, wears a lion skin and holds a sword. He faces a nine-headed hydra, with each head identified as that of a senator. The hydra’s tail is labeled “U.S. Senate.”
In an earlier time, such as when this cartoon in Puck appeared, average people were conversant with elements of Western intellectual heritage like Greek mythology. The contextual background of this political cartoon by J. S Pughe might have been evident to many readers in 1905. In one of ancient Athens’ most durable myths, the Second Task of Hercules was to conquer the multi-headed monster Hydra.
Among the Hydra’s malign aspects were poisonous breath and blood, and the regenerative ability to grow two heads where one would be severed. To confront this challenge, and so he could proceed past Hydra’s lair at the Lake of Lerna on his journey, Hercules enlisted his nephew Iolaus. Shunning his club, sickle, and other weapons, Hercules took up his sword and instructed Iolaus to use a smoldering firebrand to cauterize the wounds with the poisoned blood as Hercules decapitated each ugly head.
A troop of senators, as Confederate soldiers being led by an officer on horseback labeled “Trusts,” march down a street past the house with “Barbara Fritchie” labeled “Dingley Tariff” leaning out the window, waving a flag labeled “High Protection.” Caption: “Who touches a hair on yon swelled head / Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
The reference-point of cartoonist Pughe’s cartoon is the famous poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, “Barbara Fritchie.” The legend about the old lady is almost certainly apocryphal — the Union patriot who waved her stars and stripes as occupying Confederate forces rode by her house in Frederick, Maryland.
History is magled a little further in the attempted metaphor. The old gal in the cartoon represents the Dingley Tariff, a protectionist act passed in 1897. But it would not sense that she would taunt the troops on her street: the trusts, and the Republican depicted senators were all high-tariff proponents.
An old man labeled “Mormon Hierarchy”, wearing a coat of stitched together fragments of cloth labeled “Polygamy, Mormon Rebellion, Resistance to Federal Authority, Blood Atonement, Murder of Apostates, [and] Mountain Meadow Massacre,” stands outside the door to the “U.S. Senate” and places a puppet labeled “R. Smoot” inside the Senate chamber.
This cartoon was drawn at the commencement of the first trial in the United States Senate of Reed Smoot of Utah, elected the previous year but challenged over his status as a prominent “Apostle” in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As a Mormon he was scrutinized over policies and controversies surrounding the denomination. Polygamy supposedly had been outlawed — a major concern of Americans — but Smoot himself had a mother who was the sixth of his father’s simultaneous (“plural”) marriages. Smoot was seated by the Senate, but trials continued for four years.
The “sins” or offenses and controversies surrounding Mormonism are emblazoned on the coat of the elder holding Smoot as a puppet.
Marcus Alonzo Hanna, as an old sailor sitting on a box on the dock, smokes a pipe and watches a ship labeled “Ship of State” sail out to sea. Caption: “Smash m’ gaff! Who’d ‘a’ thought the old ship could sail like that, without me?”
Senator Marcus Alonzo Hanna (R-OH) also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1903 — honors, enough, perhaps, for many men. But Hanna, an industrialist who entered politics as the virtual amanuensis of William McKinley, his sites had been set higher. For one thing, history (largely through cartoons by Opper, Davenport, et al., depicting “Dollar Mark” as the power behind the throne of McKinley) has distorted Hanna’s role in Republican politics. He was an organizer and financier, and well positioned to run McKinley’s two presidential campaigns.
Hanna famously opposed Theodore Roosevelt’s vice-presidential nomination in 1900 (“Don’t you all realize there is only one bullet between that madman and the White House?”) and when Roosevelt did become president, Hanna let it be known that he had presidential ambitions himself… perhaps to deny the reformer Roosevelt much traction in the job.
Legislators drop bills labeled “Bluff Legislation, The Original Trust Buster, Combination Crusher, [and] Anti-Trust Bill” into a barrel labeled “Receptacle for Anti-Trust Bills” before entering a building labeled “Congress.” They have chosen to hope for reform without having to take action. In the background, a trash-collector is dumping another barrel labeled “Receptacle for Anti-Trust Bills” into a cart.
Cartoonist Ehrhart’s cynicism is seen not in the discarded bills and their grand-sounding titles, but the indifference with which the ostentatiously dressed lawmakers toss them away. The rich, by implication, were in league with monopolists and were insincere trust-busters. Things were changing in America; only a decade earlier, few politicians even pretended to be anti-monopolists.
Seven men dressed as Roman senators are labeled “T.C. Tillman, Lodge, Stewart, Morgan, Quay, [and] Hoar.” George F. Hoar is speaking to the others while pointing at a diminutive President Roosevelt standing in their midst. Caption: Senator Hoar’s Decree–Hereafter, when he wants to talk, let him ask us and say “please.”
At the time of this cartoon, Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts was having one of his perennial dust-ups with President Roosevelt. Their intra-party clashes had begun in 1889, when Roosevelt was appointed to head the Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt always considered Hoar to be honest and acknowledged him as distinguished, but in private correspondence referred to him as a silly and self-absorbed Mugwump. Hoar, a Republican, was nevertheless an ardent anti-imperialist, and in this context he took up the cause of Apolinario Mabini, Filipino insurrectionist. Old and feeble, Mabini was nevertheless denied return to the Philippines from exile unless he declared allegiance to the American-backed administrations there. Hoar was a thorn in Roosevelt’s side on the issue, and the senator went public with his disdain for the young president. In Pughe’s cartoon, one of the senate’s leaders, observing the denigration of Roosevelt was Hoar’s fellow senator from Massachusetts — Henry Cabot Lodge, probably Roosevelt’s closest friend.
George F. Hoar, Carl Schurz, David B. Hill, and former Massachusetts Governor George S. Boutwell place their “Anti-Expansion Speech” at the feet of a huge American soldier holding a rifle and the American flag, while opposite them Filipinos place guns and swords at the soldier’s feet. Caption: The American Filipinos and the Native Filipinos will have to submit.
Pughe’s cartoon is a diplomatic portrayal of a rather diplomatic cessation of hostilities and American military withdrawal from the Philippines, where insurrection had raged, with brutality on the “Filipino” and American sides almost from the moment of Spanish surrender in 1898. Senator George Frisbie Hoar (R-MA), the most prominent Congressional opponent of the “pacification” by American troops, had demanded investigation of American atrocities. In 1902 an American Marine was tried for the murder of 11 Filipinos; and an American general was convicted of ordering the death of all males over 10 years old on one of the Philippine islands (he was verbally reprimanded, returned to the United States, and discharged). On July 4, 1902, President Roosevelt ordered the full and complete pardon and amnesty to all Philippine citizens and rebels. This cartoon appeared between the surrender of the last rebel leader and the announcement of United States troop withdrawal.
Timothy L. Woodruff is chained from behind to rocks labeled “Petty Ward Politics, Dadyism, [and] Guden Job,” making it impossible for him to reach a bunch of grapes on a vine labeled “United States Senatorship” hanging just beyond his grasp. The U.S. Capitol is in the background.
Timothy Woodruff, New York Lieutenant Governor under Theodore Roosevelt, was one of several New York State Republicans in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century who had competing ambitions within the state (gubernatorial, senatorial, and presidential) and therefore clashed in intra-party squabbles. Governor Benjamin Odell, who was elected governor after Roosevelt — Woodruff being the only New York to serve as lieutenant governor under three different governors, Frank S. Black; Roosevelt; and Odell — sought to remove minor office-holders in Kings County, including a sheriff named Gruden and allies, the brothers Dady, all of whom were tainted with scandal and defied a court order issued by Supreme Court Justice William Gaynor. Woodruff allied himself with that trio, to his discredit, at least in the eyes of Puck. The style of dress assigned by cartoonist Pughe casts Woodruff as a common ward-heeler. Roosevelt’s position regarding Woodruff and Odell was delicate, as both were generally competent and honest, and both were consistently strong supporters of him.
President Roosevelt addressing the Senators
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1905-11-07
“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.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1900-01-10