Illustration showing a large hand labeled “LAW” holding up by the collar newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, with view of New York City in the background. Caption: Why not make a clean job of it while we’re at it?
comments and context
Comments and Context
This cartoon’s title probably also refers to the aggressive urban clean-up campaigns inaugurated in 1894 under George E. Waring, reform mayor William L. Strong’s Sanitation Commissioner — a post he first offered to Theodore Roosevelt. Waring’s squads of street-cleaners were dubbed “White Wings.” Cartoon subjects Pulitzer and Hearst were publishers of, respectively, the World, and the Journal and the American in New York City. Dalrymple played on the papers’ names by titling them the Whirl and the Infernal. They were the largest-circulation papers in New York as well as in the nation, and their rivalry gave birth to the Sunday comic supplements, whose character the Yellow Kid, variously the star of each paper, gave rise to the term “Yellow Journalism.” The publishers each helped to foment the Spanish-American war, adding Cuban atrocity stories to their routine urban sensationalism. Ironically, in 1917, when Puck was failing, William Randolph Hearst purchased the magazine from Udo J. Keppler, son of its founder.
