In my new irregular series “True Stuff from Old Books”, I present unaltered excerpts from some of the books I’ve collected to use as Wondermark source material. In particular, I thought the cartoons below were apropos to the election season.

All three are from the 1911 collection Caricature: The Wit and Humor of a Nation in Picture, Song and Story, an anthology of sorts that’s a really wonderful peek into the psyche of the nation nearly a hundred years ago.

Click the images to enlarge!

Caption:

THE ART OF LYING IN MOOSE MEADOW.

STRANGER — “Is this an intelligent community?”

NATIVE — “Wa-al, lawyers say so when addressin’ a jury, an’ politicians when drummin’ up votes ; but I calc’late they are mostly lyin’ fer to win their p’int.”

Caption:

A PRETTY FIX.

Lady — “I give it up. I cannot fix on which of those two hats I like the better.”

Attendant — “Ah, then how is madam ever going to vote?”

(The above takes on an especially rueful tone when you consider it was written at the height of the suffragette movement, and the [male] cartoonist was probably not sympathetic to that movement’s aims. Likewise, see below.)

Caption:

ANIMAL NATURE SAME THE WORLD OVER.

“Ha, ha, ha! What do you think of the old suffragette trying to crow!”









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