Mother Goose to Date

Grant Hamilton casts Democratic presidential nominee Alton B. Parker as Little Bo Peep — straw hat, pinafore, pink bow — seated on a boulder marked ESOPUS (his Hudson Valley hometown). He grips a crook ribboned GOLD STANDARD while a flock of sheep labeled GOLD DEMOCRATS streams toward a pasture reading DEMOCRATIC FOLD — FOUR YEARS OF CLOVER, their rumps tagged VOTE. The nursery-rhyme caption turns reassuring: the sheep wander but will return on their own. The political argument is gently mocking rather than savage — Parker, a gold-standard conservative, need not campaign hard because disaffected Gold Democrats will drift back to the party regardless. Published three weeks before the election Parker lost badly to Roosevelt, the cartoon captures Puck's ambivalence: not hostile to Parker personally, yet skeptical that passive confidence could reunite a Democratic coalition still fractured since Bryan's silver crusade of 1896.