The Bosses of the Senate

Keppler's most famous indictment, and one of the enduring images of the Gilded Age. Along the back wall of the Senate chamber loom a row of giants, bloated men whose bodies are money bags, each labeled for a trust: sugar, steel, copper, oil, iron, tin. Below them the actual senators sit small at their desks, dwarfed and attended. Over one door a sign reads "Entrance for Monopolists"; the "People's Entrance," at the upper left, is marked closed. The argument needs no caption beyond its title: the millionaires' combinations, not the voters, own the upper house. It ran as the trusts were consolidating and decades before senators were popularly elected, and it fixed the picture of a government bought and held by concentrated wealth.