The Centerfold: Puck Takes on Power

Open a copy of Puck to the middle and the argument hit you in full color. The centerfold, a double-page chromolithograph printed by a process slow and costly enough that most weeklies never attempted it, was the magazine's heavy artillery. Where a newspaper offered gray columns of type, Puck offered a Senate lined with money-bag giants, an oil trust drawn as an octopus, Death perched on an iceberg. These were not illustrations of the news; they were arguments made entirely in pictures, built so that a reader who caught only the drawing still got the point. The gallery collects nineteen of them, most from the magazine's own bound volumes. Some name a villain outright, Aldrich as a spider, Blaine chased across a year-end scroll. Some mark a milestone or ask readers to give to charity. A few carry the ethnic and nativist caricature that ran through American humor of the period, and they are shown here as they were drawn. Together they form the record of a magazine that believed a picture, printed big and in color, could move a vote.