Pan-American Puck

S. D. Ehrhart's cover for Puck's Pan-American Exposition special shows two allegorical women reaching toward each other across a lagoon, with a domed exposition hall rising behind them. The figure on the left, Columbia, wears a red-and-white striped skirt and a star-spangled blue cape — a living American flag. Her counterpart, labeled "South America" on her skirt, is rendered darker-skinned, dressed in a serape-style wrap and a wide sombrero with pompoms — a composite caricature collapsing an entire continent's peoples into a single Mexican-tinged stereotype, typical of period American illustration that routinely flattened Latin American identity. The handshake invitation reflects the genuine diplomatic optimism behind the 1901 Buffalo Exposition, a showcase for inter-American trade and solidarity, even as the image's visual hierarchy — a tall, pale Columbia extending welcome downward to a shorter, exotic figure — encodes the paternalism driving U.S. policy in that same moment.