The situation, which this cartoon, published in Puck of August 31st, 1881, commemorates after a peculiarly forcible fashion, is too unpleasant to invite further comment than is absolutely necessary to explain it. During the latter part of the Summer of 1881, while President Garfield lay dying from an assassin’s bullet, certain politicians of a peculiarly coarse fibre were unwilling to wait for his death to make their arrangements for the distribution of the spoils of office under his successor. 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. 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. Although his presumptive, or, to use a monarchical term, his apparent successor has acted throughout in a manly and modest way, there are political friends of his whose demeanor has not been distinguished by the sympathy and consideration that, at least, might be expected on such an occasion.”
UNCLE SAM’S LODGING HOUSE.
PUCK, June 7th, 1882.
In 1882 (June 7th), when “Uncle Sam’s Lodging House” was drawn, the Irish “patriots,” who were trying to free their country by exploding dynamite in public places, had made this country their base of supplies, and were especially active in New York and Chicago. Their lawlessness created much excitement, and if it had not been that there was more bluster than performance about their pernicious liveliness they might have involved us in a war with Great Britain, in which we should certainly have lacked the moral support of our own conscience. These gentry did not relish the stand Puck took in the matter, and their threats of reprisal by dynamite were frequent. The rate of letter postage had some time previously been reduced from three to two cents.
