Puck's Plan to Relieve the Country of Two Embarrassments—Give Grant the Surplus, and Let Him Spend It on a Little Court of His Own

Bernhard Gillam crowds this two-page Puck spread with Ulysses S. Grant enthroned in royal robes, scepter in hand, while named courtiers—Roscoe Conkling, Jay Gould, Henry Ward Beecher, John A. Logan, Simon Cameron, and others—fawn around a velvet cushion heaped with coins labeled "$150,000,000 Surplus – Result of Over-Taxation." A jester figure gestures toward the pile; a banner in back reads "Glory to the Ex-Decoy for Grant & Ward," a cutting reference to the Grant & Ward brokerage scandal then destroying the ex-president's reputation. The cartoon's argument is fiscal and personal: the federal surplus, wrung from overtaxed citizens, should not be a slush fund for a would-be imperial Grant and his machine cronies. Gillam's caricature relies on exaggerated ethnic physiognomies standard to 1880s illustrated humor—hooked noses, heavy jowls—deployed to mark figures as corrupt outsiders, a nativist visual shorthand the magazine routinely used and modern viewers should recognize as such.