The Rising Tide

Grant Hamilton's cover caricature depicts New York Governor Benjamin B. Odell Jr. submerged to his chin in a churning wave explicitly labeled "Popular Indignation," with "New York" and "Albany" visible on the shoreline behind him. A rope labeled "Contracts" tethers his ankle to a half-sunken barge marked "$255,000,000 Barge Canal," keeping his feet off the bottom. A crowned, grotesque fish lurks in the murk below—a stock Boss-and-corruption symbol of the period, rendered with the broad ethnic grotesquerie common to Gilded Age political cartooning, where machine politicians were routinely drawn as monstrous or simian figures. The argument is direct: Odell's corrupt handling of the Erie Canal enlargement project has tied him to a financial scandal so heavy it is drowning him, and the New York electorate's anger is the rising water doing it.