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“Go on! You ask ’em! They can’t do more than refuse”

“Go on! You ask ’em! They can’t do more than refuse”

A donkey carries the “Democratic Dough Bag” and an elephant carries the “Republican Dough Bag” as they walk down “Wall Street,” seeking campaign funding for the upcoming presidential election.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Welsh immigrant J. S. Pughe was Puck Magazine’s go-to animal cartoonist, whether in political cartoons — typically the Democrat donkey and the Republican elephant, but a wide menagerie in his political bestiary — as well as interior, black and white gag cartoons. All the humor magazines (and journals featuring cartoons as respite from text columns and advertisements) enjoyed cartoons with anthropomorphic animals, bugs, and birds in human situations. T. S. Sullivant was the best and most prominent of these cartoonists; in this period he drew for Judge and the Hearst papers. Pughe was Puck’s answer to Sullivant, even to the style of drawing characters with exaggerated, large heads.

The return of Rip Van Winkle

The return of Rip Van Winkle

An elderly man labeled “The Law,” with a long beard and holding a broken gun labeled “Fines,” peers at a group of bloated criminals standing and sitting on the porch of “The Jolly Grafter’s Inn, Successor to Ye Stern Justice” who are laughing at the old man before them. Those on the porch are labeled “Big Offender, Respectable Crook, Handy Judge [with a glass of] Judicial Favors, Corporate Lawyer [with mugs of] Legal Aid, Tax Dodger, Special Privilege, Insurance Grafter, Corrupt Business, Rail Road Merger, [and the] Oil, Coal, [and] Beef Trust[s].” On a table is a newspaper labeled “The Daily Graft,” and growling at the man is a dog labeled “Subsidized Press.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

Puck had fought cheek-to-jowl with reform politicians, Muckraking journals, and President Roosevelt over most of the recent years, week after week. In this crowded center-spread cartoon, J. S. Pughe expressed the utmost cynicism about laws and regulations that were hard-fought and hard-won in 1906.