Puck's Political Hunting-Ground — How He Has Made Game of the Politicians

Joseph Keppler casts Puck — the magazine's cherubic imp-mascot — as a triumphant hunter standing over his bag. Two hounds wearing collars labeled Wit and Satire flush and maul prey whose faces belong to recognizable Gilded Age figures: James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, George M. Robeson, and William E. Chandler lie dead or writhing in the dirt. A frog in the marsh almost certainly lampoons Benjamin F. Butler. Most pointed is the sky: a raptor bearing Jay Gould's face clutches a woolly sheep — the public's wealth — while Satire gives chase beneath the Capitol dome. The composition argues that *Puck*'s ridicule is the one weapon capable of bringing low both corrupt party bosses and predatory monopolists simultaneously. No ethnic caricature appears here; Keppler reserves that era's uglier visual vocabulary for other plates.