With a week-and-a-half to go before the 2010 mid-term elections, record amounts of money are being spent on television adverting, 90%+ of it from anonymous corporate sources, their specific motives and agendas kept hidden from the American public. This, thanks to the recent ruling of our conservative activist Supreme Court, which threw away election reforms dating back to those of President Teddy Roosevelt, designed to reduce the influence of corporations buying elections in favor of candidates who would do the bidding of those corporations. The Supreme Court has brought us back to days such as that depicted in the below 1896 Presidential Election newspaper cartoon, depicting G.O.P. Presidential candidate William McKinley, his progress to the White House funded by Wall Street and Trust (Corporate Monopoly) money. (The cartoon is from a scrapbook of cartoons, so, specifically which newspaper it came from, I do not know.)

The anonymous corporate funding of campaign ads this year, is nearly all being used for attack ads against Democrats, in support of Tea Party / Republican candidates. These corporations have identified who will look after their interests first, and American citizens somewhere lower.

Click on any picture, to open a larger version.

Back in the day, corporate lawyers attempted to use the Constitution to protect the corporate buying of the government. An argument which lost after Teddy Roosevelt. The same argument that a century later, our Supreme Court, dominated by conservative activist Republican-appointees who knew the ruling would favor their own political ideology, supported - destroying one-hundred years of hard fought reforms.

Below left, by artist Herbert Johnson in the Philadelphia North American newspaper, and reprinted in the May 1912 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Below right, a similar and earlier cartoon, this time with Teddy Roosevelt holding a big stick labeled “For the People’s Rights”, who is clearly not buying the argument from the trusts/monopolies and corporation senator holding up the Constitution, that Corporate money-as-speech overrules the rights of the People. From the August 1, 2025 book Cartoons by W.A. Ireland, reprinting works by cartoonist Billy Ireland, which had appeared in the Columbus Evening Dispatch.

Below, Trophies of the Seven Year’s War, by cartoonist Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, from his March 1910 collection The Education of Alonzo Applegate and Other Cartoons — depicting a different triumphal parade than we started with at the top — showing Teddy Roosevelt at the end of his Presidency, parading his captured prisoners, with the Trusts/Monopolies at the head of the line, and monopolists such as Morgan and Rockefeller just behind. T.R. was the leader/founder of the Progressive Republican movement. Senator and failed GOP Presidential candidate John McCain, for years presented himself as a maverick reformer in the mode of Teddy Roosevelt — up until he decided that the only way to capture the GOP nomination, was to dump the positions he had for years taken. Today, we hear little of such talk from McCain, having been cowed by the rants of Tea Party favorite, Glenn Beck, who has made “Progressive” a dirty word amongst conservative extremists, via Beck’s resurrection and popularization of long ago discredited John Birch Society conspiracy theories — presented as his own. (For Beck’s connection to John Birch Society ideology, which the Tea Party has now wrapped itself in, click here.)

Below, from the same 1910 “Ding” Darling collection, as soon as Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency was over, conservative Republicans (such as Utah’s Senator Cannon, depicted here) were immediately trying to tear down T.R.’s reforms, to let loose again politics’ pigs, given such labels here as “Machine Politics”, “Special Privilege” and “Spoils System”.

Click here to find previous posts involving Election Cartoons.

Doug Wheeler

ElectionCartoons Financial Reform