Illustration shows Uncle Sam in a tree, chased there by the Russian Bear which is standing at the base of the tree; Uncle Sam has dropped his rifle labeled “U.S. Duty on Russian Sugar.”
Caption:
As the tariff-war must end
Uncle Sam (to Russia) — Don’t shoot! I’ll come down!
Source: https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.25550/
Puck, July 31, 1901
After posting an old Puck political cartoon in another comment, I thought I’d go take a look at the archive at the Library of Congress. They have high-resolution TIFF scans of a ton of them, so I thought I’d have fun skimming through them, maybe compress a couple of them as webp, and throw 'em up here.
Given that we’re arguing about the merits of tariffs today, just like back when McKinley was in office and doing his tariff thing, seemed germane.
Puck is an American humor magazine that ran until 1918; I’ve enjoyed some of its political cartoons before.
It’s a bit overwhelming to have half my home page full of them - would’ve been fun to have a trickle of them spread out over days. But thanks for sharing them, and especially for adding alt text for all of them!
For context, I don’t actually think that the sugar tariff wound up getting dropped, in fact, at least not fully.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinley_Tariff
The Act removed tariffs on sugar, molasses, tea, coffee, and hides but authorized the President to reinstate the tariffs if the items were exported from countries that treated U.S. exports in a “reciprocally unequal and unreasonable” fashion. The idea was “to secure reciprocal trade” by allowing the executive branch to use the threat of reimposing tariffs as a means to get other countries to lower their tariffs on U.S. exports.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c13856/c13856.pdf
Table 6.4. The fate of reciprocity treaties, 1840–1911
1901, Russia, Senate rejects
An Overview of U.S. Sugar Policy
Barriers to imports of sugar have been employed nearly since the republic’s founding; a tariff on the product was first passed in 1789. Duties remained in place almost continuously save for a four-year period from 1890 to 1894, but modern-day sugar protectionism can be traced back to the 1934 passage of the Jones-Costigan Amendment. This legislation, passed as an emergency measure to provide assistance to sugar farmers and later incorporated into the Sugar Act of 1937, had as its key provisions domestic production quotas, subsidies, tariffs, and import quotas, all designed to restrict sugar supplies and boost prices.
