Loneliness

President Taft, as a cowboy, sits alone next to a campfire and a chuck wagon labeled “Stand-Pat or Bust.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1910-05-18

A lonely man with arms crossed and chin on his chest sits in a chair next to a small table with a shelf of books and his dog at his feet. On the table rests a tobacco pipe billowing smoke showing the faces of five beautiful young women that are just pipe dreams. Includes lyrics by Breton Braley about a man who does not know how to begin attracting a girlfriend.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-02-15

Charles W. Fairbanks, as Robinson Crusoe, sits on a rock labeled “Vice-Presidency” on the shore of a vast sea.

Comments and Context

The first cover of the first issue of 1906 had cartoonist Udo J. Keppler engaging in what must have been one of his favorite sports — ridiculing Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks for daring to have presidential ambitions. Looking ahead to 1908, he had sparse support among Republican faithful, and was absolutely shunned by President Roosevelt. The nominating convention, not the presidential candidate, had chosen the famously icy senator.

Tall, taciturn, and with bald pate and goatee as his few trademarks, the frustrated Fairbanks evidently appealed to Keppler as a target. In this cartoon the sour-faced vice president does not even have the paradisiacal island that Defoe’s hero occupied, and not even a Friday in sight.