Puck's Mid-Summer Outing at Harmony Park

This two-page J.S. Pughe color spread from Puck stages America's 1904 political landscape as a chaotic picnic. The left panel shows the fractured Democratic Party—a stout figure labeled Clevelanism and a harridan labeled Miss Democracy swinging an umbrella amid knife-wielding quarrelers, while a bucket advertises Ice Water 10¢ per glass. The right panel features a broadly caricatured Roosevelt in Rough Rider gear, a Tammany tiger lounging with ward bosses, and a sign reading No Shooting Allowed. A Black figure rendered in the degrading dialect-caricature standard to the era sits roasting something over coals—a reminder that Puck's satirical 'universalism' routinely excluded Black Americans from equal comic dignity. Together, Pughe argues that neither party offers genuine harmony: everyone squabbles, grifts, or grandstands.