This cartoon shows a jumble of congressmen sprinkled across the page. Sketches like this likely first arose from newspaper illustrators sitting in the Press Gallery with time on their hands. Members often had time on their hands, too, and starting in the 1870s newspapers skewered the Representatives with images of them reading, sleeping, and ignoring their colleagues’ speeches. The little collections were sometimes portraits and sometimes parodies. In this instance, for example, all the viewer can see of future Speaker Nicholas Longworth is his bald pate, a lampoon but probably also an accurate rendition of what the artist saw from up in the gallery. Closer to true political cartoon, the powerful and ambitious Speaker Champ Clark appears in a toga as the emperor “Champorius Clarkus.”
