1906 Puck Political Cartoon of the World Deluged by Postcards

This is a 1906 Puck magazine political cartoon satirizing the 'Great Post Card Craze' of the early 1900s. At center, Uncle Sam, representing the United States Postal Service, is drowning in a sea of postcards. This, however outlandish it may seem, is not hyperbole. 'Official United States Post Office figures for the year ending June 30, 1908 cited 667,777,798 postcards mailed in the United States. With the central image, Puck artists effortlessly captured the reality of the postcard craze in the United States. Uncle Sam is, of course, surrounded by four other vignettes, which feel like clear overstatements of the public obsession with the 3 x 5 pieces of card stock. On the upper-left, a stand has been set up to sell postcards to polar explorers arriving at the North Pole. The image on the upper-right presents dispensers attached to palm trees in the middle of the Sahara, so that Bedouin traders and nomads can 'purchase' a souvenir postcard to remember their trip using a date! The third view, on the bottom-left, is Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on his island, contemplating how in the world he will manage to send all the souvenir cards he has to his family back home, while the last, and most extreme, is a new arrival in hell asking Satan and one of his minions where he could find the writing room so he could send a few postcards home.

The Great Postcard Craze of the early Twentieth Century

It is believed that the first picture postcard was a hand-painted design on a card sent by Theodore Hook in London to himself in 1840, most likely as a practical joke on the postal service, since the image was a caricature of workers in the post office. From there, the postcard went through several different evolutions before becoming a more common feature of life in the 1880s. Picture postcards were sent from the Universal Exposition in Paris, where visitors could send a postcard of the Eiffel Tower from the top of the Tower itself.

The craze began to take off in the United States following the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Cards were handed out as souvenirs at the Exposition as a means of advertising, after that, however, the Post Office was the only entity in the country that was allowed to print postcards until May 19, 1898, when Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act. Then the postcard went through several different evolutions before the 'divided back' postcards were introduced in 1907.The Golden Age of Postcards peaked in 1910, when tariffs were put on the importation of German cards, and ended in 1915, when the worldwide postal service was disrupted due to World War I.

Why Postcards?

Postcards became popular because they were cheap and easily acquired. It was possible for anyone to amass an intriguing collection of intellectually stimulating postcards, which was not possible with art or books. Eager collectors would place advertisements in newspapers, requesting that correspondents send cards with interesting images on them. Not everyone believed that this craze was good for society, however. Puck feared that postcards would be the death of polite letter writing and magazine reading, while religious organizations about the deleterious effects of the 'picture postcard plague'.

This cartoon was published by Puck Magazine in an issue published in late 1906.