The Democratic Microbe

Election year, 1904, and Puck puts the Democratic Party under the microscope. The centerpiece is a magnified disc swimming with microbes, each given a caricatured face and a diagnosis, "Free Riot," "Fakes," "Fake Silver" and the rest, the internal contagions the magazine blamed for the party's disorder. A figure in academic gown, the lecturer, points to the slide. The caption supplies the lecture: "Gentlemen, we have here the most dangerous germs in the body politic." Though Puck leaned Democratic in its early decades, by the 1900s it turned a cold eye on the Bryan wing and its free-silver enthusiasms. Germ theory was fresh news to the public, and Puck borrowed the new science to diagnose a party it thought had made itself sick.