Puck’s valentines for 1894
At center, Uncle Sam and President Cleveland shake hands, with a portrait of Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii, in the background. The surrounding vignettes feature a cast of characters, identified or referred to in the text as “Croker,” “Parkhurst,” and “Tammany” reform, “Iago Manley” and “Othello Reed,” “Peffer, Lease, Dana, Pulitzer, [and] Depew,” Harrison sitting in his over-sized top hat, and Thomas Collier Platt turning a crank that manipulates George R. “Malby” as “Speaker” of the New York State Assembly, David B. Hill sitting in an over-sized “Senatorial Chair N.Y. State,” and “McKinley” dressed as Napoleon I, riding a “War Tariff” rocking horse. Each scene includes “Valentine” text, such as this for “Peffer” and “Lease,” each holding papers labeled “Speech”: “From bleeding Kansas’s wind-swept plains, / Where whiskers take the place of brains, / You come with all your verbose strength / Of speeches of unending length. / Here, take the hint Puck gives – resign! / Let Mary be your Valentine”; and this for McKinley: “McKinley Bill! McKinley Bill! / Why do you ride that hobby still? / The cause of pool, combine and trust, / And idle mill-wheels red with rust. / Mistaken Man! We’ll never pine / For you to be our Valentine.”
Collection
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Creation Date
1894-02-14
