Puck's Gallery of Celebrities—The King of A-Shantee

Frederick Opper's single-panel cartoon depicts two Irish immigrants inside a ramshackle shanty: a man seated on an overturned washtub and a woman standing nearby amid squalid domestic clutter. The punning caption—'The King of A-Shantee'—collapses 'shanty' (the slum dwelling) with 'Ashanti' (the West African kingdom), equating Irish poverty with African 'savagery' in a single slur. Both figures are rendered with the grotesquely simianized features standard to anti-Irish caricature of the 1870s–80s, a visual vocabulary borrowed from physiognomic pseudoscience to argue that Irish Catholic immigrants were racially unfit for American citizenship. Puck routinely deployed such imagery during peak Irish immigration, reflecting nativist anxieties about Tammany Hall political power and urban overcrowding.