Puck's Pyrotechnics—Fourth-of-July Fireworks Free to All

Frederick Burr Opper stages American political life as a pyrotechnics show: Puck bows before a "Fan Light" medallion bearing robber barons Vanderbilt, Sage, Field, and Gould, while a Black hand clutches what appears to be Bartholdi's unfinished Statue of Liberty torch—a pointed comment on whose labor built the monument and who remained excluded from its promise. The "Puck Office" pagoda at left deploys the era's routine Orientalist shorthand. Rockets scatter labeled caricatures: Grant and Arthur as spent Roman candles, Roscoe Conkling, Carl Schurz, Boss Kelly as "The Falling Tammany Star," and the Star Route postal-fraud scandal's Dorsey as a "Staggerer." The Tilton–Beecher adultery scandal gets its own burst. Opper packages Gilded Age corruption, ethnic condescension, and reformist glee into one gorgeous, merciless sky.