Senatorial Round House

Nast imagines the U.S. Senate as a locomotive roundhouse run entirely by railroad machinery. The central figure — a human body topped by a smokestack-and-boiler head, steam venting from the crown — gestures imperiously from a chamber floor strewn with a dropped bill (legible as a regulatory measure). Behind him, similarly machine-headed senators lounge at desks, one slumped backward, another leaning indolently in a chair, all puffing smoke. At left, a podium bearing the shield "Rail-Road States of America" replaces the Senate dais, and a clock reads "Rail-Road Time." The argument is unambiguous: the Gilded Age Senate has been wholly captured by railroad interests, its members transformed into corporate engines rather than elected representatives. Congress had just failed to pass meaningful railroad rate regulation — the Interstate Commerce Act would not arrive until 1887 — and Nast indicts legislative servility with cold mechanical precision.