Hatred of the Trusts.

The most volatile political issue at the turn of the century was the growing power of enormous corporations. Prominent publishers, including Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, used their papers to campaign against the trusts as the enemy of their readers, the common people. The reelection in 1900 of Republican president William McKinley meant that little would be accomplished to curb the centralization of economic power that came, the trusts' opponents argued, at the expense of the industrial worker and the farmer.

The Journal Cartoonists Get Rough.

Hearst's New York Journal had an outstanding staff of political cartoonists, an art form just then coming into its own. Homer Davenport began in 1900 to draw President Mc Kinley as the stooge of the millionaire industrialist Mark Hanna, drawn wearing a suit of dollar signs. McKinley...