Your TR Source
New York Governor Benjamin B. Odell has not refused to run for reelection. New York City Mayor Seth Low may run for reelection as an independent.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1903-08-24
President Roosevelt writes his son Kermit to report on victories for the Republican Party in the last elections, especially beating William Randolph Hearst in New York State. Roosevelt and Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt are traveling to Panama, and Ted has come home from Harvard due to abscesses on his leg.
1906-11-07
A newspaper article describes the upcoming nuptials of Thomas Collier Platt and proposes that “old men” like Platt must save the human family from race suicide. The writer suggests that a few words of encouragement from President Roosevelt would be in order.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1903
A newspaper article speculates on who will be named the postmasters of New York City and Washington, D.C. In New York, postmaster Cornelius Van Cott died and the office is vacant. It has been reported for some time that President Roosevelt does not intend to reappoint John A. Merritt as the postmaster of Washington, D.C., despite Merritt having support from Senator Thomas Collier Platt and the late Postmaster General Henry C. Payne.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1904-11-10
Joseph B. Bishop sends President Roosevelt clippings in which he is inaccurately identified as a candidate for postmaster of New York City.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1904-11-13
Governor Roosevelt writes that he will breakfast with Senator Platt on Friday. However, on Friday, General Greene and Misters Witherbee, Fox, and Macfarlane would like to breakfast with Corinne Roosevelt Robinson. Roosevelt also mentions that Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt enjoyed her gift.
1899-12-02
Governor Roosevelt writes his sister to ask if he may dine at her home with various people, including Senator Platt, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Luke E. Wright, and George Haven Putnam. Roosevelt assures his sister that he can just as easily take them to dine at the Club instead.
1900-04-14
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.
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.
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.
President Roosevelt, wearing royal robes, holds on his shoulders a diminutive William H. Taft wearing a crown. Among the throng in the background are Charles W. Fairbanks, Leslie M. Shaw, Thomas Collier Platt, and Joseph Gurney Cannon.
Only two weeks previous, cartoonist Udo J. Keppler had drawn a cartoon showing the putative 1908 presidential aspirants among Republicans, drifting on a listless sea. The only man in a boat looking happy was William H. Taft. He still looks happy in this cartoon, portrayed differently, as a cherubic heir apparent.
Theodore Roosevelt stands at center, beaming, with several supporters (Elihu Root, Thomas Collier Platt, William H. Taft, Charles W. Fairbanks, Joseph Benson Foraker, and J. S. Sherman) and a bunch of hands pointing toward him. Caption: The sum and substance of the Republican platform.
In mid-term years of administrations in these days, state political parties often “endorsed” the president and his policies; or, of course, if out of the White House, would nod to the most recent positions of the parties. In 1903, Senator Joseph Benson Foraker of Ohio embarrassed his in-party Ohio rival Marcus Hanna by drafting an extreme, not generic, endorsement of President Roosevelt and actually promoted his renomination.
Thomas Collier Platt and Cornelius Newton Bliss, as police officers, receive “Hush Money” at the door of an “Insurance Co.” from Richard A. McCurdy. Standing in the window of the building are James H. Hyde, Francis Hendricks, and John A. McCall, among others. An insert labeled “Tenderloin Dive” shows police officers accepting a bribe.
In the Muckraking Era, the public became aware of the odious similarities, first exposed in critiques during the Gilded Age of the 1870s and subsequently, between street crime of the “Other Half” and corruption among the cream of society. Keppler’s cartoon depicts that situation with almost textbook clarity.
A group of formally-dressed men gather around a table for a banquet, as an old man labeled “Lost Reputation” departs and a cherub labeled “1906” arrives.
This is not a random group of men at a New Year’s banquet pictured by Joseph Keppler Jr. At year’s end, the double-page cartoon in Puck is another comment on the consequential news event that was the long-running and far-reaching New York State investigations into the insurance industry.
Thomas Collier Platt and Chauncey M. Depew appear in 16th century theatrical costumes in a scene from a Shakespearean play. Caption: Falstaff Depew (to Prince Hal Platt) — I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought.–King Henry IV.
Week by week in his magazine Puck at this time, cartoonist Udo J. Keppler was proving himself to be America’s foremost political caricaturist, perhaps the superior of his father who founded Puck; yet he is relatively obscure to history. This example is not a mere excuse to festoon two ugly faces on the weekly’s cover, but Keppler made a salient point, as per usual, about his political targets.
Politicians Henry Gassaway Davis, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles W. Fairbanks, Thomas Collier Platt, and Alton B. Parker shake hands with farmers outside a tent labeled “The New Farmers’ Alliance.” Caption: Find the real farmers.
Democrats and Republicans, capitalists, social reformers, political symbols, and others enjoy a summer outing at a park.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1904-08-17
In a battle scene, President Roosevelt is about to make a final charge on “Fort Democracy” labeled “Peace, Constitution, [and] Prosperity.” Performing various functions in Roosevelt’s camp are “Foraker,” “Morton” spying from a balloon, “Allison” raising a flag labeled “Up with the Trusts,” “Woodruff” attending to wounded T.C. “Platt,” “Higgins” and “Odell” with cans of money from a box labeled “Groceries N.Y. State,” “Cortelyou” sharpening a sword, “Shaw” with binoculars, “Bliss” and “Fairbanks” loading a small cannon labeled “National Committee Gun,” and “Rockefeller” with a hod full of money bags labeled “Standard Shot.”
Thomas Collier Platt, with his young bride, passes through the gates to the “Oldboys’ Hymeneal Paradise” where they are greeted by a “Reception Committee” of several old men labeled “Depew, Potter, Dewey, Flagler, [and] Woodford” and their young wives.
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.