People Puck Would Like to Introduce: Professor Münsterberg of Harvard to Truth

Oliver Herford's cartoon for Puck stages a comic introduction: a pompous, bald, heavy-jowled professor—rendered with the broad Germanic caricature typical of the era, exaggerating Münsterberg's immigrant identity through thick features and stiff formality—holds a globe under one arm and raises a lecturing finger toward a nude female figure seated on a well's edge. She represents Truth, peering back through a small telescope with cool skepticism. Between them stands a small winged Puck in academic robes, playing intermediary. The joke targets Hugo Münsterberg, Harvard's celebrity psychologist, who had become controversial for his outspoken pro-German sympathies after World War I began. Puck suggests that for all his professorial authority, Münsterberg had never actually met Truth.