Puck's Own Yorktown Celebration

Joseph Keppler's centennial-of-Yorktown cartoon stages a mock military parade in which Puck himself, astride a wooden hobby-horse Pegasus, reviews a ragged column of American public figures rendered as bumbling soldiers. Keppler caricatures them with the broad physical distortions standard to Gilded Age political cartooning: oversized heads, slack postures, protruding bellies. Roscoe Conkling carries a 'Third Term' banner, linking him to Grant's failed 1880 bid; Henry Ward Beecher rides horseback, a dig at the scandal-tainted minister; Jay Gould, Vanderbilt, and Field represent rapacious capital pressed into comic uniform. At rear, a crumbling float labeled 'Our Army' and a rotting hulk labeled 'Our Navy' skewer American military neglect—precisely while foreign dignitaries in a grandstand flying French and German flags watch the embarrassing spectacle. The joke is national self-congratulation exposed as hollow pageantry.