The Wasp — 1891 — page 455: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page is primarily **advertising**, featuring various San Francisco businesses (liquor dealers, insurers, shipping merchants, pianos, etc.) from what appears to be a late 19th-century publication. The one substantive content is **"Rockefeller's Prayer,"** a poem by Charlotte Perkins Stetson with an accompanying illustration. The satire targets **John D. Rockefeller**, the oil magnate, depicting him at prayer asking God how to spend his vast wealth. The poem's ironic point: Rockefeller's prayer reveals moral blindness—his wealth accumulated from exploiting workers, yet he asks how to use it charitably. The satire suggests his fortune is obscene and his piety hollow. References to "surplus gold," the widow's cruse, and concern for "the poor" underscore the hypocrisy of extreme wealth coexisting with poverty.