The scab’s appeal to Justice
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.
