Nearly every monthly issue of Cartoons Magazine featured pages on the abuses, and battles against, unfettered, monopolistic corporate power. In 1912 U.S., regulations to attempt to reign in the abuses which the people well knew, had only recently been passed. Politicians and officials who want to implement those regulations, struggled with other politicians and officials, still in the corporations’ pockets. Having first hand experience with the worst aspects of Capitalism, the people wanted these these abuses restrained; today, we’re being taken back to evils once contained, by politicians again in the pockets of Wall Street (or who in some cases, are of Wall Street itself), touting nonsensical ideological cures to a public ignorant of what they’re unleashing.

From Cartoons Magazine‘s July 1912 issue, above, we have the Coal Trusts — coal operators who sans regulation, openly colluded with each other to hold the public hostage to whatever price they could squeeze out of them; below, we have the J.P. Morgan Company (yes, the same company today involved in one of the most recent Wall Street scandals), buying control of coffee supplies, then manipulating the coffee market to jack up the price.

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

Artists above include Fred Morgan, Boardman Robinson, and Arthur G. Racey; below, John Campbell Cory.

Doug Wheeler

Financial Reform