Women

President Roosevelt sits beside a woman labeled, “Democracy,” and looks at her adoringly. Caption: “Do you know, Theodore, we’re getting better acquainted every day!”

comments and context

Comments and Context

President Roosevelt evolved toward policies that were first advanced by Populists and Democrats; in a nation’s normal political life, ideas that seem shocking are often modified by their proponents, and likely just as often the logical elements of those ideas become palatable to opponents. In Roosevelt’s case, his natural bent as a reformer brought him to address palliatives once considered beyond the pale. But — among other objections — as long as a man with, in Roosevelt’s opinion, the shallowness of William Jennings Bryan led the Democrats, he would never jump parties.

Photograph of the women’s pit toilet with the stall door open at Halliday Well in the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Creation Date

1967-10-21

Photograph of a Squaw Creek pit toilet in the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Creation Date

1967-11

The Laurel Ledger prints an article discussing Senator Tillman’s criticism of the removal of Laura A. Hull Morris from the White House. The article speaks highly of President Roosevelt and also describes where a “woman’s place” should be, claiming that if Morris had been in her place “attending to her duties at home” rather than “trying to influence the government in her hen-pecked husband’s behalf,” there would not have been an incident.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906-01-20

Chief Sylvester encloses a list and description of arrests from February 1903 to December 1905 that involved women with questionable mental states.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906-01-19

A court jester entertains a young woman wearing a crown on her head, sitting on a large stone bench.

Comments and Context

Carl Hassmann, whose work at Puck virtually consisted of two themes — dark and brooding disasters that threatened domestic or international peace; or poster-like decorative or frivolous designs. Puck‘s 1906 Easter cover was assigned to Hassmann, the Viennese immigrant, and he produced a variant on Puck‘s traditional Lenten themes of suppressed social abandonment, or Easter’s notice that social strictures were loosed (never a religious subtext).

In this cover drawing, to reinforce the point, a jester — not the devil — instructs an American Girl in a gown patterned with hearts, not crosses.

Vignettes lightheartedly depict Irish domestic servants being pampered and coddled by their employers in efforts to keep them happy and happily employed, chiefly, by taking their minds off their domestic duties by providing pleasant distractions.

Comments and Context

A Puck centerspread cartoon — the home, approximately once a month, of multiple genre gags on a social (not political) topic, occasionally merged two themes. In the example, artist S. D. Ehrhart falls back on two cliches frequently used by cartoonists — interestingly, social trends headed in opposite directions at the time.

Many middle-class families considered having at least one domestic servant an irreducible sign of respectability. Until different social norms, and labor-saving appliances for housewives, were asserted, cooks were common in households. Also common: they were difficult to keep (at least in cartoonists’ eyes) and keep happy, and often were Irish immigrants happy to work for modest wages. Other stereotypes — they were often romanced by policemen on the local beats (frequently Irish immigrants too) or ice deliverers. Hence Ehrhart’s hyperbolic suggestions to keep the cook satisfied on summer holidays.

Santa Claus kisses a young woman on the cheek, framed by a holly wreath.

Comments and Context

The versatile cartoonist Carl Hassmann, resting from his stark depictions of impending doom, reprises his cover-artist role from the recent Thanksgiving holiday: a cheery, poster-like composition. A holly wreath is obligatory, but his Santa Claus waits not for a mistletoe.

Hassman was an Austrian immigrant who returned to Vienna after several years of drawing for Puck. In his fatherland he was know more as a painter, and those sensibilities are evident in his pen-and-ink work for Puck.

A domestic servant carries a large platter with a roast turkey raised above her shoulders to keep it away from a dog anxious for a taste.

Comments and Context

The relative newcomer on Puck‘s artistic staff in 1905 was Carl Hassmann, who by this date, Thanksgiving of 1905, had established himself as a cartooning Grim Reaper, usually drawing realistic portrayals of dirty corruption or impending disasters. So this holiday cover — a placement lately reserved for Rose O’Neill, Frank Nankivell, or Louis M. Glackens — proved his versatility. As with many magazines of the day, an Art Nouveau “poster look” addressed readers; a pleasant design (of course non -political at holidays) and featuring the era’s inevitable version of a Gibson Girl.

“The American Girl,” attractive, assertive, and independent, was a staple of magazine covers, posters, and advertisers of the era since Charles Dana Gibson introduced the “type” in cartoons in Puck‘s rival cartoon weekly, Life, in the 1890s.

A beautiful young woman emerges from a church on Easter. A cluster of well-dressed men, all eager for her hand, are waiting. Two of the men turn away a devil figure dressed in red. Caption: Who hath not owned, with rapture smitten frame, / The power of grace.–Campbell.

Comments and Context

Once again at Eastertide, Puck turns its attention not to the Passion or Resurrection of Christ but — as most magazines and newspapers did for thematic material between Lent and after Easter — to social freedom before Lent, restrained socializing during Lent and Holy Week, and a return to courtship and the social whirl after Easter. It was the common thematic preoccupations of cartoons, poems, short fiction, and even editorials in the time.

Here, Ehrhart’s “girl” — Puck‘s answer to the Gibson Girl who dominated the cartoons in its rival weekly Life — no sooner leaves church than she is besieged by suitors young and old, foreign and domestic. She even has admirers among cadets and fops. What devotion to purity could not effect during Lent — that is, rejection of the devil — is employed in the pursuit of the Spring Girl: banishment of evil intentions.

A large crowd of men and women, all wearing formal evening clothes, and the women draped with stunningly sparkling jewels, are at a ball given by “Mrs. Gaster.” Caption: Central office at Mrs. Gaster’s Ball.

Comments and Context

Puck magazine and others, especially as the Muckraking Era dawned, criticized the excesses of the wealthy society denizens of the Conspicuous Consumption class. In fact the Gilded Age — the term having been applied by the eponymous, scathing novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 — was dying. Its gaudy death throes were exemplified in ostentatious events like the ball depicted by cartoonist Albert Levering. The “400,” the exclusionary term coined by the social arbiter of the wealthy in the 1880s in his Social Register, was more commonly seen by the public as the Idle Rich, and worse, instead of model citizens.

One of the most famous parties of the era was given a dew weeks before Levering’s blistering portrayal was published. One of society’s most frivolous moguls was the 29-year-old heir of the Equitable Life Insurance fortune, James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959). Newspapers and magazines — and magazine cartoonists, as here — were agog at the obscene display of jewelry and trappings of privilege.

A fashionably dressed young woman is being escorted by a rabbit and a young child dressed in a red suit. The woman looks back over her shoulder at three unhappy monks standing outside a stone church or monastery.

Comments and Context

Puck scarcely took second place to any of its contemporary weekly or monthly rival magazines when holiday themes and seasonal issues took prominence. In Puck‘s early and purely political years, comments on Lent, Easter, and Christmas were highlighted less, frequently relegated to back pages. But during the Belle Epoque, and when Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Japonisme, and the “poster style” of advertisements and covers predominated, Puck was a player.

Louis M. Glackens, a mainstay of Puck‘s staff from this time until 1914 (and then a pioneer animated cartoonist), contributed many covers like this: fanciful themes; solid compositions; underlying lightness; and handsome coloring. His brother William was a major figure in the Expressionist artistic movement, a member the so-called Ashcan School, one of “The Eight.”

During an intermission or after a “Comic Opera at Mrs. Van Varick-Shadd’s,” a large crowd of men and women wearing formal evening clothes look with chagrin at three women wearing short red dresses, who have secured the attentions of several young men. A painted scene in the background shows nude women cavorting at the seaside.

Comments and Context

One of Puck‘s social crusades, increasingly in the new century, was skewering the upper class — not for its excesses nor frivolity nor shallowness, but for its malignities: divorce, corruption, and scandal. Other publications like the cartoon weekly Life made similar criticism, but not as scathing, largely in Life‘s case because its editors and cartoonist Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the Gibson Girl and society drawings) were members of high society.

These new thematic preoccupations were birthed in roughly measure by the growing decadence among America’s rich, and the spirit of the times; after the turn of the century, American editors and writers, and some politicians, developed Social Consciences. It was a time of muckraking about business; Naturalism in literature and Expressionism in art — noticing the underbelly of American life; and political reform manifested by insurgency and progressivism.

At center, Father Knickerbocker, a symbolic figure for New York City, welcomes Santa Claus to the underground of New York City. The surrounding vignettes show Santa distributing Christmas presents and planning for next year. The “Angel of Peace” is hoping for an end to the hostilities between Japan and Russia.

Comments and Context

At the center of Samuel Ehrhart’s collage of Christmas-themed gags is Uncle Sam and Father Knickerbocker (the New York City counterpart of Uncle Sam), rather overshadowed by a subway station resembling a palace. All of New York, and indeed the nation, was fascinated by the new subway system. It had opened its rail lines and station on the October 27, 1904, just before the presidential election. When the campaign was over, and the gaudy St. Louis World’s Fair closed in early December, the nation turned its eyes to a virtual Eighth Wonder of the World: miles of underground tracks in America’s biggest city.

In fact there had been intercity trains in New York, but they were all surface or elevated trains. Predictably in a city usually ruled by the corrupt Democratic machine Tammany Hall, the elevated train system was open to corruption, monopoly control, and disputes over fares. In fact both municipal parties, and the city’s judiciary, participated in corrupt acts related to the trains. Some of the young Roosevelt’s crusades in the New York State Legislature were involved with monopoly control (often orchestrated by Jay Gould) and judges receiving bribes for their decisions.

A fashionably-dressed young woman ice skates on a pond in a park. She is being admired by several men and boys standing on the left, while on the right four women, a golfer, an automobile driver, a party-goer, and a hunter, trudge through the snow to await the arrival of summer. Old Man Winter blows a frigid blast over the scene from the top.

Comments and Context

The girl of the hour in Ehrhart’s cover cartoon would seem to have the emphasis on the word “hour” — that winter sports, and ice skating assisted by Old Man Winter, is enjoying its portion of the social and sporting calendar.

From the perspective of more than a subsequent century, however, the value of this cartoon lies in the emphasized word “girl.”

Santa Claus reviews his list, his bag of gifts next to him, while sitting in an automobile that is being driven by two women standing on the back, dressed like chauffeurs.

Comments and Context

As with Puck‘s Thanksgiving Number cover a few weeks previous, the magazine used a holiday-themed special issue to be pictorial rather than political on newsstands. This had been the trend in the weekly’s design for at least a decade, but students can note the nature of the decorative covers.

Not merely decorative or lavish (for instance, with “fifth colors” of gold ink on occasion), the cartoonists of Puck reflected the era’s nurture of increasingly independent and assertive women in society. Embodied mostly in the work of Charles Dana Gibson and his Gibson Girls in the rival Life Magazine, the “American Girl” exuded independence, pride, athleticism, and — never far — romance.

A young woman with a shotgun over her left shoulder carries a dead turkey.

Comments and Context

By 1904, the cartoonist L. M. Glackens (brother of prominent American Impressionist painter Louis Glackens, one of “the Eight”) executed many of the magazine’s holiday and seasonal covers in the era’s best poster-like traditions.

This handsome cover is impressive for its composition and color, but notable too for what it tells subsequent readers about the social mores: it is an “emancipated women” of the time, assertive and proud and solo.

At center, fashionably dressed women admire a statue of a horse. Surrounding vignettes show women’s fashions, contrasting an automobile to a horse, the latest in horse fashions, and a horse-owner’s nightmare about failing to win a ribbon. Caption: Fashion’s shrine – horse show week.

Comments and Context

In the manner of many nominal sporting events before (like America’s Cup competitions) and since, New York’s annual horse show by 1904 had became a place to see and be seen. High-society luminaries — the “400” — communed, competed for attention, and attracted the press and the curious.

As cartoonist Samuel Ehrhart often did in Puck center-spreads for holidays and social events, he here lampooned the frivolous aspects (with the cartoonist’s permissible liberties and exaggerations) of the annual horse show. Why the reporters taking notes, lower left, are all caricatural Jews is lost to history, except for Jewish prominence in the millinery, clothing, and haberdashery lines.

A fashionably dressed young woman sits on the edge of a pool, fishing.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1904-08-17

An elderly woman labeled “Tariff Revision” angrily shakes her umbrella after being left standing on the railroad station platform as the “Republican Special” departs in a cloud of dust. Two men standing on the back of the last car are laughing at her.

Comments and Context

This Puck cover cartoon by Joseph Keppler Junior was drawn at the time the Republican National Convention met in 1904 and nominated President Roosevelt for reelection. It addresses several matters in the news, or several aspects of one issue: tariff reform.

The Democratic Party of this generation, since President Grover Cleveland devoted 100 per cent of his 1887 annual message to the high tariff and governmental surpluses, consistently advocated low tariffs or free trade.