Today being the Florida Primary, I’ve picked two Puck magazine front cover cartoons by artist Frederick Burr Opper, one each representative of the current two G.O.P front-runners. Which cartoon I feel matches which current candidate, is so obvious, I need not specify.

Above (and unfortunately including a racist caricature which is not really part of the point of the cartoon), we see the eternal image of a ridiculously wealthy politician, attempting to pass himself as the common man. The Bogus Workingman and His Lonesome Boom, depicting General Benjamin Franklin Butler, of the Greenback/Anti-Monopoly Party, appeared on September 10th, 1884 cover of Puck. Butler’s usual dress hangs in the rear, next to his vault of bonds, while railroad stock, monopolist fees, and “tools for exhibition purposes” litter the floor.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view them in detail, and read the captions.

Below, from the cover of the July 16th, 1884 issue, depicting the hypocrisy of the “Grand Old Republican Party of Moral Ideas”, decrying “The Three Last Speakers of the Untrustworthy and Disreputable Democratic Party” (portraits on back of wall), while the three most recent Republican speakers were known for far worse corruption. Front and center is shown eventual 1884 Republican Party Presidential Nominee, James G. Blaine, known nationally as “The Liar from Maine”, whose various issues of corruption and impropriety lost the Republican Party the presidency for the first time post-Civil War.

Doug Wheeler

NYPuck ElectionComics