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Print shows Robert Green Ingersoll speaking from a stage in an auditorium filled with an audience whose heads are half-dollar coins. Dangling from a cord at the edge of the stage is T. De Witt Talmage as a marionette or wooden toy, with one hand pinned to the Bible.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1882-05-03
Benjamin F. Butler is a laborer standing next to a box of “Tools for Exhibition Purposes,” with “Butler’s Valet” next to him. At the valet’s feet are papers labeled “R. R. Stock [and] Monopolists’ fees” and behind him is a safe labeled “Bonds.” Butler is holding papers labeled “Speech.” Through a window is seen a tattered man standing next to signs that state “Grand Butler Mass Meeting” and “Please Keep Order and Don’t Crowd.” Caption: Butler (to his valet) – “Keep an eye on the valuables, while I go out and address the mass-meeting!”
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1884-09-10
At center a man speaks on the floor of the House chamber while other legislators attend to their own business. The audience in the gallery above strains to hear without realizing that the process of legislation takes place in committee rooms and not on the House floor. Caption: A sample session in these days of legislation in committee rooms. Just a little side-show for the gallery.
Albert Levering’s brilliant and complicated cartoon — he seemed incapable of ever designing a simple or uninteresting drawing — provided readers with a humorous but actually fairly realistic depiction of “action” on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Except for relatively few visitors to the House galleries through the years, it was not until C-SPAN that citizens could see how realistic this scenes was. Alternatively, how empty the House chamber often is during debates.
A large hand labeled “Special Privilege” has its thumb poised to squash a typical Independence Day celebration. A large crowd is listening to a man making a speech from a platform where others are sitting and a man is waving an American flag. Fireworks are going off in the background.
Puck Magazine might almost have patented the design of cartoons as this, “Independence Day,” by Udo J. Keppler. He, and especially the weekly’s newest cartoonist, Art Young, drew several striking center-spread cartoons composed of two parts in one image frame, capturing a blatant contrast or contradiction in society.
At a Fourth of July celebration, a man stands on a large podium reading the “Declaration of Independence” before a cheering crowd. He is sandwiched between two large figures wearing robes and crowns labeled “Predatory Wealth” and “Predatory Labor.”
A recurring theme in Puck Magazine through the years was the Scylla and Charybdis represented by Big Business and Big Labor — not merely their bigness (the view of some latter-day Jeffersonians) but the real and potential abuses flowing therefrom. Joseph Keppler, Senior, founder of Puck, and his son Udo J. Keppler, the artist of this cartoon, perhaps more than other cartoonists, maintained this critique through the years.
A large businessman labeled “Centralized Wealth” uses candle snuffs labeled “Control of Credit, Control of Bank Deposits, Control of Transportation, Control of Public Utilities, Control of Food Supply, Control of Natural Resources, Control of Business, [and] Control of Wall Street” to extinguish candles labeled “Initiative, Untainted Success, Ambition, Independence, [and] Individualism.” An insert shows Puck talking to a socialist speaker. Caption: Puck (to Socialist orator) — Sit down! You don’t have to talk. This large person is making socialists faster than you can make them!
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
1911-01-18
Theodore Roosevelt asks Walter Hines Page not to invite him to any events where he will be required to speak. He will gladly come afterwards to go over the plant.
1910-07-13
Francis Henry Appleton writes to President Roosevelt on behalf of the Essex Institute in Massachusetts, asking him to persuade Secretary of State John Hay to lecture at the Institute’s Nathaniel Hawthorne celebration.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1904-02-04