"A Visit to the Republican Pig Pens," 1899

My colleague Eileen pointed me to the multimedia histories available at the Ohio State University Department of History. One of the political cartoons there with pigs in it was this one, "A Visit to the Republican Pig Pens," which comes from The Verdict, a pro-Democracy and anti-McKinley paper, on 24 July 1899. Hanna is, of course, Mark Hanna, the Ohio industrialist who managed McKinley's 1896 presidential campaign. I'll leave it up to the rest of you Gilded Age historians to make sense of the rest; after all, I'm really an early 19th century guy...

This will be the last post for about a week, as I'll be traveling to give a paper at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts meeting in Portland, Maine. I'm looking forward to some real fall weather, that's for sure...

Pigs & Anti-Chinese Racism in 1880 San Francisco

My colleague Eileen shared this image with me from the San Francisco Wasp, a satirical paper founded by Czech immigrant Francis Korbel in 1876. (Yes, this is the same guy behind Korbel champagne, oddly enough). Many of the Wasp's cartoons supported nativism and anti-Chinese racism, including "Devastation" from volume 5, August-December 1880 (above), which depicts Chinese immigrants as pigs with Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingmen's Party, illustrated as an ineffectual scarecrow. To learn more about the Wasp, check out Richard Samuel West's The San Francisco Wasp: An Illustrated History, published by Periodyssey Press. Another version of "Devastation" with a lot more wear and tear can be found on the Library of Congress "American Memory" site here as part of their "The Chinese in California, 1850-1925" exhibit.