Puck's Political Hunting-Ground — How He Has Made Game of the Politicians

Joseph Keppler casts Puck — the magazine's cherubic imp-mascot — as a triumphant hunter standing over his bag. Two hounds wearing collars labeled Wit and Satire flush and maul prey whose faces belong to recognizable Gilded Age figures: James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, George M. Robeson, and William E. Chandler lie dead or writhing in the dirt. A frog in the marsh almost certainly lampoons Benjamin F. Butler. Most pointed is the sky: a raptor bearing Jay Gould's face clutches a woolly sheep — the public's wealth — while Satire gives chase beneath the Capitol dome. The composition argues that Puck's ridicule is the one weapon capable of bringing low both corrupt party bosses and predatory monopolists simultaneously. No ethnic caricature appears here; Keppler reserves that era's uglier visual vocabulary for other plates.