Gulliver Morton unter den Riefen im Senatorenland.

Nineteenth-century cartoonists felt sure that audiences would easily grasp references to Jonathan Swift’s popular satire, Gulliver’s Travels, published a century earlier. In this cartoon, which appeared in both the German and English-language versions of Puck in 1889, Charles J. Taylor plays on Gulliver’s experiences with the Brobdingnagians, giants who treated him like a toy. Taylor’s Gulliver is Levi Parsons Morton, one of America’s leading bankers, who had just been elected vice president on the Republican ticket headed by Benjamin Harrison.

As vice president, Morton had the responsibility of presiding over the Senate, but the senatorial giants considered him a political novice and looked down on his clumsy attempts to wield the gavel on their debates. As the cartoonist anticipated, neither President Harrison nor the Republican senators thought much of Morton’s abilities, and they unceremoniously dumped him from the party’s ticket in the next election.