Joseph Ferdinand Keppler

“ Adapting Sydney Smith’s famous formula to modern American use, Puck said on January 18th, 1888:
“You may sit down, O well-protected Average Citizen! at your protected table, in your protected arm-chair; and button your protected coat about you, and dream that your protective tariff is a drain on the wealth of the English. But the fact remains that you pay every cent of the duties that you impose upon foreign goods, and that nobody is the worse off for the increased price, except yourself. ”

“ But the late Emperor of Germany was a King. He was King of Prussia before he was Emperor of Germany; and as King and Emperor he set up a standard of conduct by which few men would care to govern their lives. He tried to be a King, having a high conception of what a King should be, and, as far as in him lay the power, he was a King. At least, he was a mortal who strove hard to be more than other mortals, and who strove from a sense of duty. We may—and must—hold the effort futile ”

“ No agency of modern times has done more to send boys to the devil, to tempt unprotected women into squandering their subsistence, and to lure decent men from their daily duty by the temptation of illegitimate gain. At the best, every public lottery is a danger to the community; but of all public lotteries of modern times, the Louisiana lottery is easily the worst and most dangerous. At no time has it enjoyed the reputation of being even what is known as a square gambling game. An honest lottery—that is, a lottery honestly conducted—may be profitable to the people who get it up. ”

“ Then you can employ some other poor man, who would else go hungry; and you can treat him well and give him a chance to make money in his turn. That is the way of the world. It is not a bad way, if you take it bravely and cheerfully. If you refuse to take it in the right spirit, if you sulk and whine and call upon labor organizations to protect you, and cry for special legislation to right wrongs which you can’t even define—why, you will find it a pretty hard way. It is hard on shirks, idlers, skulkers, and men who do half-hearted work. But it is a way that is as old as the rising of the sun ”

“ A few weeks ago, the presiding officer of the United States Senate told his distinguished audience that no man was so mean or so obscure that he might not be President of the United States, now that Grover Cleveland held that place. Mr. Grover Cleveland was a lawyer in one of our smaller cities. He became, successively, Sheriff and Mayor of his town, Governor of his state, and President of the United States. In every office he has done his duty ‘in the old way of taking pains.’ He has had no hand in the corruption of political life; he has never been the pensioner of corporate monopolies. ”

“ However, this was the beginning of the great labor struggle that did so much to clear the minds of the people on the great question of the inter-relation of Capital and Labor. Puck’s forecast was almost prophetic. The editorial, which rebukes the greed of the corporations, points out that the strikes which they had precipitated could only serve to teach the workmen to abuse the right to strike; and goes on to say: “They are not more wise, more temperate, more just than their employers. The employers, having power, have misused it. They will likewise misuse power. ”

“ And now for twenty years the German government has been educating Michel, and Michel has been educating himself. While the government has been teaching him to read, and he has been teaching himself various things that are useful and interesting to any good citizen and patriot, there have been plenty of people who have devoted themselves to giving him what might be called an underground education. Recent events in Germany show that this part of Michel’s education has certainly not been neglected—at least, so far as the inculcation of the beauties of socialism is concerned.... ”

“ And on top of all that, to add gratuitous insult to wanton injury, you raise the price of tobacco, so that every man can have a daily reminder that you don’t care how hard you make life for him. Do you think of anything calculated to irritate and enrage the citizen which you have forgotten to treat him to? Do you wonder that you will sit in the next House with a total representation hardly more than half the size of the Democrats’ clear majority? ”

“ Puck said of Trades-Union tyranny on April 28th, 1886: “The boycott business is bad. But it is an extravagant, monstrous, impossible thing, that the laws of a free country must crush out, sooner or later. This other evil flourishes in secret and strikes at the laborer’s self-respect. ”

“ Is it not a disgrace, indeed, that we should talk about electing to the highest office in the nation a man of whom an honest, unprejudiced and unbiased journal has to say that although he is clever and strong, he has not an absolutely unblemished record?! ”

“ It is often a test of a cartoon’s worth to-day—its suitability as a wall-decoration. It is a natural and simple impulse that moves us to pin on the wall the picture that has pleased us. Readers of Puck who travel much in this country can not but notice how many people delight in pasting and pinning their favorite cartoons to the walls of their offices and workshops, and even of their dwelling-houses. A really popular cartoon is always sure of these humble but well-meant honors ”

“ It is, no doubt, a pleasant thing for a Senator to have the doors of the Senate-Chamber closed, and to smoke his cigar in lazy comfort while the reading clerk monotonously and perfunctorily, but as unobtrusively as possible, drones through the thousand and one articles of the treaty to which the law-maker is supposed to be giving his statesman-like attention in spite of the fact that its acceptance or rejection has been decided upon in party caucus weeks or months before. ”

“ Now that he has taken to talking, he is a thorough-going, zealous demagogue of the old-fashioned sort. ‘Vote for me,’ he cries to the lawless, the idle and the improvident, ‘and I will give you free rides and free land; and the police shall be muzzled, and all laws that you do not like shall be repealed. A contract shall no longer be sacred, and if any man has wealth, he shall share it with you. ”

“ Why, a statesman’s record should be as unblemished as a woman’s should be. And yet it is very possible that we shall find the man of whom this is said the very best man whom it is possible to put at the head of our Government in 1884. ”

“ We Americans have no use for Kings; and we have ideas as to popular government that King Wilhelm of Prussia, later Emperor of Germany, would never understand. But let us consider that it would be well for us if we had a few statesmen, among those who are governing us on speculation, who would look on their responsibilities as this dead European monarch did on his. ”

“ Keppler introduced into this country were peculiarly calculated to appeal to a receptive people, delighting in vigorous expression. For thevii German school carries the art and mystery of cartooning far beyond any of its rivals. The German conception of the cartoon not only involves a picture parable, it demands that the actors of the fable shall be so drawn as to display their characters in their lineaments, and it asks, moreover, that the allegory shall, if possible, take a distinctive dramatic form, suggestive, at least, of action, and not merely of position. ”

“ But the public does not know that the union which orders that the workman’s pay shall be so high also orders that it shall be no higher. When the union says to the employer: ‘You shall pay this man two dollars a day,’ it likewise says to the man: ‘You shall not receive more than two dollars a day. ”

“ Conkling’s attitude toward the new administration was dubious and peculiar.
Outside, in the cold Winter night, are the Democrats gazing hungrily into the lighted windows. The head of Mr. W. H. English, the defeated candidate for Vice-President, rises from a barrel, supposed to represent the large fortune which alone gave him any political standing. Mr. James Gordon Bennett appears in the character of a sportsman who has brought down a large owl-like bird having the features of Mr. John Kelly—the New York Herald was credited with having obtained the local victory over the Tammany leader. ”

“ THE OPENING OF THE CONGRESSIONAL SESSION. PUCK, December 7th, 1887.
186 There is a marvelous pregnancy of significance in this cartoon; as we can not but see when we think that, at the re-assembling of Congress in December, 1887, one of the first questions it had to confront was the question of the Surplus. The revenues of the government, especially those coming from customs duties, were so vast that an enormous, useless, cumbersome and dangerous surplus was steadily piling itself up in the United States Treasury. ”

“ If you take ten cents more of your employer, every man in the place must receive a proportionate increase in his wages, or you must give the ten cents back. If you do not obey us, we will fine you. If you will not pay the fine, we will turn you out of the union. We will not let you work in any office where there are union men. If you get work in a non-union shop, we will boycott you, we will boycott your fellow working-men, we will boycott your employers, we will boycott every man who sells you food or gives you lodging.’”
167
(larger) ”

“ ARBITRATION IS THE TRUE BALANCE OF POWER. PUCK, March 17th, 1886.
154 It should be distinctly stated that this cartoon is not to be regarded as having a general or abstract application. It appeared during the first street-railway strikes in New York; and the lesson it tries to teach was addressed especially to the corporations which, acting as common carriers and holding valuable franchises, were putting the public to great loss and inconvenience in carrying on a protracted struggle with their employees, wherein there was little doubt that right and justice were entirely on the workmen’s side. ”

“ It is humiliating and deplorable, but it is nevertheless true that many professional politicians of more or less reputation are carefully laying their plans of procedure in the event of the decease of the dying President, We will not wrong these gentlemen by saying that they desire his death; but it is scarcely decent to raise even a discussion on the most trivial matter connected with mere machine politics, before the vital spark has fled from the body of the chief magistrate. ”

“ And, now that he is dead, his people mourn a brave man gone; if they are to have Kings or Emperors to rule them in the future, they will go far before they find a better man of his kind.”—Puck, March 21st, 1888. ”

“ So, when President Garfield died, and Mr. Arthur, who had been an unpopular candidate for the Vice-Presidency, succeeded to the Presidential chair, two apparent probabilities interested the populace. It was assumed, of course, that a President must be a candidate for re-election and under such circumstances it was thought that in all likelihood Mr. Blaine would be far more powerful in the next convention than a President who owed his elevation to mere accident. ”

“ Henry George has come out frankly and made his canvass on the basis of an out-and-out alliance with the Anarchists. He no longer pretends to belong among the respectable reformers; he arrays his followers squarely and honestly against the law and the established order of things. ”

“ It is pretty hard for a practical politician and a strict party-man to toil away, day after day, editing a great paper and moulding public opinion at two or three cents per daily mould, and to see public opinion doing its own moulding all the time, in just the way it should not. ”

“ The fact remains that you pay for goods manufactured in this country the same price which you pay for foreign-made goods of the same grade; that price being greater than the fair price by the amount of the duty imposed. And, above all, the disgraceful fact remains that all these goods on which you pay a tax are brought to this country in English ships, sailing under the English flag, which take back, on their homeward trip, your American money, O Average Citizen! ”

“ PUCK, May 4th, 1887.
126 “How often all Europe goes into what we slang-loving Americans call a keniption fit over a political ‘incident!’ We don’t care to attempt an exact definition of the word ‘keniption;’ but we are quite willing to explain that an ‘incident,’ in European politics, means a small affair of great importance. A native peasant pokes his umbrella into a foreign ambassador’s eye—that is an incident. A foreign ambassador pokes his umbrella into a native peasant’s eye—that also is an incident. On such incidents the fate of nations hangs. ”

“ If the Democrats, after they have been long in power, become half as arrogant, selfish and neglectful of duty as you became, they will be turned out of their places, too, if the people have to fill their seats with Farmers’ Alliance candidates. ”

“ But between them they made a great deal of noise, and Puck did what he could to counteract their influence. With this cartoon on May 18th, 1887, appeared the following editorial advice to the laboring man:
“Don’t be a laboring man—that is, labor, but as an employer rather than as an employee. You have got to serve your apprenticeship to poverty—so has everybody else, except the comparatively few who inherit large fortunes. ”

“ These were not men who were in any way concerned in shaping the course of the government in matters of statecraft or policy; they were simply out for the spoils, as the phrase goes, and their undisguised eagerness was scandalous under the circumstances.
Puck said at the time, with more moderation than, viewed in the light of subsequent events, the occasion called for: “Whether presidents live or die, the game of politics goes on. ”