Puck Hopes — That Philadelphia Will Follow the Good Example of Brooklyn and New York

Louis Dalrymple's cover cartoon for Puck (Vol. XXXVI, No. 936) arranges three reform mayors in a triptych of civic virtue. At left, Robert E. Pattison sits in a chair labeled Mayoralty while a matronly figure labeled Philadelphia looms hopefully behind him. At center, William L. Strong of New York is attended by a robust Father Knickerbocker in colonial dress. At right, Brooklyn's Charles A. Schieren is flanked by a figure labeled Brooklyn. Each man clutches a scroll reading Reform. The joke is aspirational: Brooklyn and New York have already embraced good-government reform, and Puck—reliably anti-Tammany—urges Philadelphia to catch up. The personifications are gendered female in the sentimental allegorical convention of the period, presenting cities as women requiring steady male stewardship, a framing readers of 1895 accepted without irony.