Description: 1886 political cartoon Anarchism in the labor unions! This is a great color lithograph single sheet only, published in the April 21, 1886 issue of Puck, the most popular political humor magazine in America in the late 1800s. The print is over 130 years old! It measures 10.5 x 14 inches in size. It is in lovely condition, with its colors warm and bright. The artwork was done by Frederic Opper, one of Puck's regular staff artists. The page presents a two-panel cartoon with the title of: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE ANARCHIST NEWSPAPER BUSINESS. The separate panels lampoon the labor union press as reveling when things are going badly in the country, and being despondent when times are good for America. The top panel shows two bearded radicals sharing a toast while their paper, The Anarchist, is selling stacks of copies. On the wall are posters of "Anarchy" and "Powderly," the latter being Terence Powderly, who was then the leader of the Knights of Labor. A sign on the wall proclaims the anarchist saying, "Property is Theft." The caption below says: When Riot and Disorder Reign Business Booming. The bottom panel has the same newspaper staff dejected, as all their papers go unsold, and a bill collector is at the door. Its caption says: When Riot and Disorder are Quelled Business Busted. Elsewhere in the issue, a lengthy anti-union editorial commented on the subject of this political cartoon. It ran about 14 column inches of text, and a photocopy of those editorial comments will be included. Puck said, in part: It is hard on the working-man that he has so many friends. Everybody is his friend who can make a dollar out of it. . . . Curiously enough, the working-man never makes anything out of his professedand professionalfriends. They introduce bills in his behalf. . . . They get the bills passed. That is an easy thing to do. Any cheap politicianand most of our legislative assemblies are made up of cheap politicianswill vote for any bill that pretends to be in favor of the working-man, because he can thus induce the working-man to vote for him at the next election. . . . . . . . And that is the end of it for the working-man. . . . Sooner or later, it comes to nothing, as all impossible, impracticable laws must come to nothing; and nobody is benefited except the friend of the working-man, who gets his re-election, and has another chance to steal the peoples money. . . . and to increase the cost of government, thereby making necessary an increase of the taxes, a burden which falls upon the working-man. . . . There is a journalistic branch of the friend-of-the-working-man industry. The readers of this paper have heard, vaguely, from time to time, of incendiary sheets in demagogue newspapers. But they hardly realize the fact that scoresnay, hundredsof such journals existpapers that prey on the working-man, getting money out of his ignorance, his prejudice, is illogical, unreasonable hatred of the power that employs him, that pays for board and lodging, for his food and clothing. These papers feed and fatten on the laboring-man's misery. They flatter him as if he were a God. They tell him that property is theft, that every employer is a tyrant and a grinder of the faces of the poor. They incite him to strikes and boycotts. . . . In the editorial column they tell the working-man that he is the salt of the earth, and in the advertising columns, they take his last cent for advertising the strike and the boycott that throw him out of employment for weeks and months together. . . . One of these papers is the official organ of one or more trades-unions or labor-leagues. . . . But when trade is dull, when prices fall, when wages must fall with them. . . . These sheets come to the front to do their devilish workto feel the laborer with wild ideas of revolt against the immutable laws of commerce and manufacture. . . . to induce him to strike, and thereby to give himself over to enforced idleness, of which the attendant demons are Privation, Drink and Riot, and to drive him from his honorable position in the community to the place of the malefactor and common outlaw and enemy of society. Mr. Powderly has blown himself out at last, and dropped down, a spent rocket, among the sputtering demagogues of the Irons class. Powderly has brainsuneducated brainsthat have carried him a certain distance and can carry him no further. . . . Educationthat is the word, Mr. Powderly. Boycotting schemes will never help the working-man. . . . if you and those associated with you had that education, fifteen or twenty thousand men would not be out of work to-day in the Southwest, and six would be alive who to-day are dead. _gsrx_vers_1680 (GS 9.8.3 (1680))
Price: 16.95 USD
Location: Camp Hill, Pennsylvania
End Time: 2024-11-07T02:02:49.000Z
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