1900 Cartoons of R.C. Bowman, part V

Step right up, gentlemen; now's your chance to Pe(e)k-in.

Exactly how is that city pronounced, since it has variously been transliterated Peiping, Pekin, Peking, and now Beijing? All I know is that the current spelling has the least potential for puns.

Russia (the head waiter): "No shirt waists allowed here. I will have to invite you gentlemen to leave."

Really, I'm only including this cartoon because my own cartoon this week didn't come together the way I'd envisioned it. Something about this cartoon eludes me. Apparently shirt waists were a big social problem in 1900.

Getting scorched.

There's a very similar cartoon to this one in the book showing the British lion in South Africa getting his tail scorched because of whatever China is dumping into the ocean.

The United States received the Philippines from Spain as a result of the Spanish-American War two years earlier, and there was plenty of domestic debate over what to do with the islands. According to the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. should have had no interest in territory in the Eastern Hemisphere; there was also nativist sentiment against opening up citizenship to all those non-white non-English-speaking people. Coming soon: more cartoons about the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.