No More of Those Hideous Monuments!

Bernhard Gillam crowds the double-page spread with a rogues' gallery of what Puck considers aesthetic embarrassments: bronze and stone statues labeled Seward (Madison Square), Custer (West Point), Farragut, Lafayette, Jackson, Lincoln, Garfield, Hamilton, and Bolivar, among others, jostle in a chaotic park landscape while the Washington Monument is rendered as an industrial smokestack and Bunker Hill as a blunt obelisk. Puck—depicted as a small, impish white figure—seizes Uncle Sam's arm and steers his gaze toward an inset sketch proposing the unfinished New York State Capitol be rededicated as a Grant Free Institute, honoring the recently deceased Ulysses S. Grant with something grander than another clumsy bronze. The caption reads: Let Us Have a Memorial of General Grant that will be Worthy of a Great Nation. The cartoon is pure civic-aesthetic argument dressed as comedy: American public statuary is graceless and redundant, and the nation's greatest soldier-president deserves better than the same embarrassing treatment.