"I Rather Like That Imported Affair" / Grant Hamilton

Grant Hamilton draws Theodore Roosevelt as a strutting caricature in Rough Rider kit—wide-brimmed cavalry hat, spurs, pistol at hip—touring a hat shop stocked with American presidential precedents: a U.S. Grant top hat, an A. Lincoln stovepipe, a G. Washington tricorn. Roosevelt ignores all of them. His finger points admiringly toward the centerpiece: a jeweled royal crown on a tall pedestal, its band reading IMPERIALISM, its placard reading Imported Hat — All the Style in Europe. The caption, "I rather like that imported affair," delivers the punch. Roosevelt's face is rendered with the exaggerated grin, dark complexion, and jutting teeth typical of the period's caricature vocabulary—physical mockery deployed as political diminishment. The argument is straightforwardly anti-imperialist: Roosevelt, for all his frontier theater, craves a European monarch's crown, betraying the republican tradition his predecessors' hats represent. Published during the 1904 presidential campaign, the cartoon belongs to Puck's persistent critique of Roosevelt's expansionist foreign policy and cult of executive personality.