Puck (magazine) in the context of "Political machine"

A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when, in fact, there could be many.

False dilemmas often have the form of treating two contraries, which may both be false, as contradictories, of which one is necessarily true. Various inferential schemes are associated with false dilemmas, for example, the constructive dilemma, the destructive dilemma or the disjunctive syllogism. False dilemmas are usually discussed in terms of deductive arguments, but they can also occur as defeasible arguments.

Judge was a weekly satirical magazine published in the United States from 1881 to 1947. It was launched by artists who had left the rival Puck; the founders included cartoonist James Albert Wales, dime novels publisher Frank Tousey and author George H. Jessop.

John Samuel Pughe (3 June 1870 – 19 April 1909), was a Welsh-born American political cartoonist, best known for his illustrations for Puck magazine.

In this context, the term "the hyphen" was a metonymical reference to this kind of ethnicity descriptor, and "dropping the hyphen" referred to full integration into the American identity. Some contemporary critics of this concept, such as Randolph Bourne in his criticism of the Preparedness Movement, accused America's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of hypocrisy by showing the same divided loyalty in pushing for the "Special Relationship" that they refused to tolerate in others. Other contemporaries, like Bishop John Joseph Frederick Otto Zardetti, argued eloquently that there is no contradiction between American patriotism and loyalty to one's ancestral culture, religion, and heritage language. In a 1916 letter to the Minneapolis Journal, one Minnesota German-American suggested that his own people would willingly "abandon the hyphen", but only if "Anglo-Americans" did so first.

Bernhard Gillam (April 28, 1856 – January 19, 1896) was an English-born American political cartoonist.

Gillam was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire. He arrived in New York with his parents in 1866. He worked as a copyist in a lawyer's office, but switched to the study of engraving, and later, after some of his cartoons had appeared in the New York Graphic, turned to cartooning. His work appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, where he worked with Thomas Nast during James A. Garfield's campaign of 1880, and Puck magazine where he came under the influence of Joseph Keppler. Gillam also produced work for Judge, a magazine of which he became director-in-chief in 1886.

James Albert Wales (30 August 1852 in Clyde, Ohio – 6 December 1886 in New York City) was an American caricaturist. After leaving school, he apprenticed himself to a wood engraver in Toledo, but soon afterward went to Cincinnati, and thence to Cleveland, where he drew cartoons for the Leader during the presidential canvass of 1872. After working for some time in Chicago and Cleveland, he went to New York in 1873, and two years later secured an engagement on an illustrated newspaper. Afterward he was employed on Puck, in which some of his best works appeared. In 1881 he went abroad, and after his return he became one of the founders of Judge, and was for some time its chief cartoonist.

He specialized in antisemitic attacks ridiculing Jews. In 1882 he wrote about Jews in Judge:

The Mugwumps were Republican political activists in the United States who were intensely opposed to political corruption. They famously switched parties from the Republican Party by supporting the Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland in the 1884 United States presidential election. They switched because they rejected the long history of corruption associated with the Republican candidate James G. Blaine. Despite never formally organizing, the Mugwumps claimed that their influence was the reason that Grover Cleveland won a close election in New York, which in turn gave him enough electoral college votes to win the presidency. The jocular word "mugwump," noted as early as 1832 and applied to these activists derisively, is from Algonquian mugquomp, "important person, kingpin" (from mugumquomp, "war leader"), implying that Mugwumps were sanctimonious or "holier-than-thou" in refusing to be beholden to partisanship.

After the election, "mugwump" survived for more than a decade as an epithet for a party bolter in American politics. Many Mugwumps became Democrats or remained independents, and most continued to support reform well into the 20th century. During the Third Party System, party loyalty was in high regard, and independents were rare. Theodore Roosevelt stunned his upper-class New York City friends by supporting Blaine in 1884; by rejecting the Mugwumps, he kept alive his Republican Party leadership, clearing the way for his own political aspirations.