Puck's Plan to Relieve the Country of Two Embarrassments—Give Grant the Surplus, and Let Him Spend It on a Little Court of His Own

Bernhard Gillam crowds this two-page *Puck* spread with Ulysses S. Grant enthroned in royal robes, scepter in hand, while named courtiers—Roscoe Conkling, Jay Gould, Henry Ward Beecher, John A. Logan, Simon Cameron, and others—fawn around a velvet cushion heaped with coins labeled "$150,000,000 Surplus – Result of Over-Taxation." A jester figure gestures toward the pile; a banner in back reads "Glory to the Ex-Decoy for Grant & Ward," a cutting reference to the Grant & Ward brokerage scandal then destroying the ex-president's reputation. The cartoon's argument is fiscal and personal: the federal surplus, wrung from overtaxed citizens, should not be a slush fund for a would-be imperial Grant and his machine cronies. Gillam's caricature relies on exaggerated ethnic physiognomies standard to 1880s illustrated humor—hooked noses, heavy jowls—deployed to mark figures as corrupt outsiders.