PUCK, October 20th, 1886.
The part that Mr. Henry George played in the troublous days of 1886 was probably profitable to himself, and to no one else. He started in with a reputation of a sincere and high-minded philosopher somewhat in advance of his time, but the moment he got the Socialist nomination for Mayor of New York, he turned into as frank and downright a demagogue as ever tried to tempt a mob with promise of the pillage of the rich.
“We are sincerely pleased to see that Mr. 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. He was a sanguine theorist so long as he kept at book-making. 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I will give you free rides and free land; and the police shall be muzzled, and all laws that you do not like shall be repealed.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. The land of the rich shall be confiscated, and you may boycott to your hearts’ content.’ It may be doubted whether this is the right way to win favor with decent citizens; but it is Mr. George’s way of going to work.”
THE BIG BOYCOTT WINDBAG.
PUCK, April 28th, 1886.
The series of cartoons on the labor question which Mr. Keppler contributed to Puck during the years of 1886 and 1887 certainly attracted more attention, and probably did more to influence public opinion than any series of pictures that ever appeared in the paper. They were drawn at a time of great public excitement, when fools, fanatics and unprincipled adventurers were tempting honest laboring-men into all manner of lawlessness and improper use of physical force. The American public had for the first time been introduced to that ugly thing, the “Boycott,” and the Anarchists were seizing the opportunity afforded by the general agitation to spread their infernal doctrines among the working-men. Of course, under such circumstances, the air was full of the hysterical shrieks of the excitable people who thought that all law and order were to vanish from the face of the earth. The value of these clear and direct pictorial expositions was great indeed, in that time of trouble, doubt and perplexity.
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. It is part of such a tyranny as no employer or body of employers ever dared to dream of establishing. Every working-man who wants to do something, to be something in the world—something better than the spy-ridden slave of a secret society—should rise up to fight it. There is no need of general organization for this purpose. Wherever one brave man, or a handful of brave men, stands boldly up and insists on every man’s natural right to make his own price for his labor, to sell it for what he chooses to sell it for, a blow will be struck in the cause of the laboring man’s independence. And it rests with the laboring man to work out his own salvation.”