One of the things that I would emphasize with students are the abundance of political cartoons that are produced in the first two decades of the 20th century. Mainly because this is a moment when the mass circulation of daily newspapers has reached its full potential and is reaching hundreds of thousands of customers in each city locale and also across cities.

This cartoon, which is called "The Dirty Pool of Politics," and what it shows is a fashionably dressed woman with an elaborate hat and very up-to-date and trendy clothes with a shovel, and she's shoveling dirt in front of her as she goes and the dirt is characterized as "White Slavery," Graft, Food Adulteration—and these are problems of the city, of the moment. And the point of the cartoon—which says, "Can we clean it? Give us a chance"—is to talk about how women are imagined as having a greater instinct for cleaning, a greater commitment to it, and investment of it, a set of skills and experiences that allows them to be, not only the cleaners of their own homes, but municipal housecleaners. This is a very prominent theme by the 1890s and by 1900, when suffrage becomes once again on the public consciousness and you see the merging of the two kind of rival suffrage associations—the NWSA [National Woman Suffrage Association] and the American Women's Suffrage Association—the national and the American. This is what they're going to, in a large part, base their rationale on.

So instead of what we had seen for most of the second half of the 19th century, which was an emphasis on the human right to political participation that should be shared equally by men and women, so a principle, you see a change in tactics. Not that many of the suffragists actually gave up thinking along those lines, but they certainly switched rhetoric to something they felt would be more practical, more pragmatic, and some historians have used the term expedient. The one closest to hand was the idea that women are responsible for the home and in an industrialized context the home is no longer a private domicile that a woman has control over the quality of. So if you want to be able to clean up your home, if you want—one of the things in this cartoon was food adulteration, you want to make sure that the meat that your serving your children is healthy and not rotten, that the fruit is clean and hasn't been soiled by being sitting out in an open market, if you want to make sure that the water coming into the home does not have disease in it, does not have airborne or waterborne diseases. All of those things [are] going to require the woman to actually step out of the private sphere and into the public sphere and have some political participation and some influence and control.

So this cartoon shows you right at the beginning of that movement the opportunity that women are seizing upon. To say we require the vote in order to be the traditional mothers and homemakers that we agree we primarily are. It's a very powerful and very effective and strategic argument and a cartoon like this says it in a very short punchy way.

One of the things I might demonstrate for students is to how to read the document visually. So not only how to look at the caption and think about the context and talk about the politics of the moment, but also to really look at the visual. And I emphasized at the beginning of my description that this woman is very fashionably dressed. And what that should raise for students are questions of class and also questions of how women needed to portray themselves in public in order not to violate not only the traditional idea that they are the domestic managers, but also that they need to look attractive.

So one of the other things that suffragists by the early 20th century figure out and manage to get a hold on to is that they're going to be much more publicly effective if they come across as appealing, attractive, fashionable, rather than militant in a specific way, meaning hostile to the role that women play as ornament. So you see the combining of these two things—that you can be a political person who seems to be stepping out of her sphere and not unattractive to men, and not uncaring about one's appearance. And also that this is an issue that upper-class women can grasp hold of and find an investment in, in addition to their philanthropy, in addition to their charity work, they can see political participation as something that aids them in that. Because it's not—it is their home that is at issue, but it's also poor women, immigrant women, women who have recently migrated to cities who live in tenement slums whose water is choleric, whose garbage is right outside their door—homes where they don't have any control over the quality. So, I think that cartoon says a lot and you can talk to the students for a long time about all the different aspects of this.

One of the things I would also point out and that the students are usually struck by are the demon-like figures of Food Adulteration, Graft, White Slavery, Bribery—that these are the evils that plague our society at the moment. These are the things that threaten the nation, they threaten industrial production, that these are key important issues. But if you look closely at what they are, they're also a lot about two things. Political corruption, so the idea also is that women might be more moral because they come from a sphere that is imagined as uncompromised by capitalism. So they can come in with not only fresh eyes and a fresh perspective, but they are also treading on a kind of conventional idea that has grown in the minds of many for the past century that women bring a moral sensibility. So they wouldn't stand for corruption and bribery.

White Slavery is kind of thrown in there, and that might be something that you might also talk to students about—it might take you a little bit off topic, but this is how I would keep it on topic. White slavery is the notion that women—white women—rather than black people, the whiteness there is very key, are being taken across state lines, are being forced into prostitution, being forced into sex slavery. And again this is imagined as a woman's issue, because women are thought to care about the lives of other women and about the moral turpitude or the moral character in general of society at large. So there's a lot you can do with a very concise image if you really take a look at it and mine it for all the different dimensions that it presents.

One of the reasons that I think that this is a key issue is that of course there's also an anti-suffrage movement. And it's not made up only of men who can't see past the idea that women will be their helpmates and be there for them when they get home from work—it's also made up of a good number of women—a significant portion, especially of upper-class women, who feel—who agree that women might have to step out of the private sphere into the public sphere but they want to do so much more carefully. They're much more circumspect about official roles in the public sphere, particularly the vote. And here's the logic to that—and there is a logic to that, it's not simply a misogynist or diluted or consciousness problem, it’s a logic of the argument of being a social housekeeper and the moral force in society. If your moral character comes from being protected from the public sphere, it comes from being solely responsible for the care of children and loved ones in the family unit, then the fear is that if you step too far outside of that, you yourself will lose those qualities. So what anti-suffrage women argued is that women should take responsibility for households other than their own, for the community and maybe the city at large and that there were roles for them to do so. There were professional occupations such as social worker, there were reasons to do that, but that the ballot went too far. The ballot put them in the same position as men and might actually erode the special qualities that they brought to the question of something like public health. So the public health campaign is central to the Progressive era, it becomes central to the tug of war between women over whether or not to support suffrage or not.

I was really stunned by the other half of Reconstruction, which we never paid any attention to, which was the money debate. There was a huge debate about money during the same time—these were these great issues: what do we do about the ex-slaves and what do we do with the money? Because the North used greenbacks to finance the Civil War; they didn't want to tax people, so they just printed money, they made it legal tender. I think 240 million dollars in greenbacks, which are purely paper money—they have no value other that what people are willing to believe is in them. And they're very successful during the war: they don't cause a lot of inflation, they allow Lincoln to prosecute the war without having to raise taxes, and keep the sort of massive dissent under control.

But after the war what do you do with them? That's an interesting question. One argument is you just get rid of the greenbacks—they're not real money; they don't have any real value; they're a lie; they're a fraud and a cheat. "Burn 'em," some people would say. "Contract them" and—they call it contracting the currency—"bring 'em back in and burn 'em, destroy them and go back to real money," which at the time was supposed to be gold. And the other argument is that we need more paper money—money is just a social convenience—it's whatever we say it is, and we should get rid of gold. The document comes out of that debate—it comes out of this debate about the nature of money.

And as I started to look at it, I got really fascinated by that question. I mean, why not use paper money? What's the argument for gold? And when I started to read the arguments for gold, they became really fascinating and absurd. I mean they're superficially rational. Economists in the 19th century would go through this long rational explanation about prices and supply and demand and then you'll finally get to the core of the metaphor, which is gold just is valuable, because it is. And that's always there: it just is. And sometimes they'll say, God made it to be money. And they'll say this; I see this again and again: God made gold to be money. Okay, this is the money, this is going to be burned for heat, I mean it's really…it's that clear. And there's this what you'd have to call a fetish about gold. That it has this magical value—that's independent of what people think—it just has this magical value. And I got really interested in that question.

So this Nast cartoon was produced as part of the attack on paper money. Nast was a really strong hard-money guy, and he referred to paper money as the "rag baby," that was his name for it. Cause paper money was also referred to as "rag money." It was made out of rags—old rags, rags and trash, and inflated paper trash he'd say. This was part of an argument against paper money. And it's a really good expression of the gold standard position. It's a really strong expression of the gold standard position. And because Nast is good, it's pretty coherent.

What does it embody? Well in this thing the rag baby cannot embody a real baby. He's pointing out the futility of trying to embody qualities in things they don't have. And it's connected to forms of economic prosperity—like this is a house and lot—these are symbols of economic success. Or this is a cow, which I think refers to farming—you know it refers to the sentimental symbolic place farming has in American life, it's where real values are, it's where real work comes from. This is money by Act of Congress, this is milk by Act of Congress—you can't feed yourself on pure paper—it's not a rag baby, but a real baby. So it became a really good embodiment of the problem of substituting signs for things. And it seems like a pretty straightforward, and generally commonsensical point of view. I mean you can't hand a baby a milk card and get a baby to drink it. I mean it's a witty expression of that.

But because of the structure of it, with the signs, it's really also, I think, critique of advertising in the 19th century, and the emerging culture of mass sort of…signage—advertisements, placards, billboards, competing signs. It's also a comment on the chaoticness of post-Civil War life. And so it's not just commenting about money, it's also commenting about, what would you call it? The virtualness of industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism is increasingly virtual, where you market something as a chair that looks like a handmade chair but it's actually stamped-on pressed and there are 20 thousand of them. The watch looks like it's gold but it's actually plated in some new technological process. There's a quote from Henry Ward Beecher where he says that we live in a culture of lies—lying flour in our bread, our clothes are lies: they look like things they're not. And it's partly a commentary on that commercial world. And it uses money as the door to open that kind of critique.

One of the things that's unconsciously revealed here is a certain amount of anxiety about reproduction. Why choose a rag baby? Why choose to embody it that way? A baby in some ways is a symbol of concreteness. It's a new life but it's made out of two other forms of life, and its unimpeachably real. It's the symbol of a kind of realness, and the idea of declaring something a baby which isn't a baby, is kind of the ultimate expression of the arrogance of people. You can't create life—life is the most basic thing you can't make—and you can't make a baby out of parts or pieces. So it has something…it's not unlike Frankenstein—it seems to me it has some of that same concern about generation and reproduction.

So one of the things I'd say is that it's not an accident that he chose a rag baby. And you could say, it has a lot of values; on the one hand it mocks children's fantasy play, and it says that paper money is a child's foolishness, sort of a foolish childish act.

It was the most naked, I think, and frank description of the gold standard position. You can't substitute paper for the real thing. An idea can't be a thing. A thing has to be something material. But of course, in fact, it's an economy where a house and lot is just a piece of paper. And in fact, the ownership of the house and lot is purely a fictional paper title. Ownership doesn't exist physically, it only exists in law. It only exists in custom. And for the purposes of the market a paper representation of a house and lot is exactly as good as a house and lot. So that was sort of interesting to me. The cow—obviously you can't milk a piece of paper, but you can buy and sell symbolic cows which are nothing more than pieces of paper. And from the perspective of the greenbackers, the money itself is an embodiment of all these other tangible physical goods, which are part of the United States. So it seemed like a nice way to get at both a really strong expression of the gold standard position and some of the incoherences of it at the same time.

The first thing I'd ask them is why did he choose to make paper money into a rag doll? What are the rhetorical strategies of this thing? And the claim that paper money is a rag baby is an interesting claim to make; I mean why does he choose to symbolize it that way? Why not call it, you know, a scarecrow? Why a baby? Why a rag baby? And then I'd ask why would he want to have it in the form of this weird impossible situation of a shelf with signs put around it. I would want to ask them why the argument takes that form. Try to get them to say, "Well, maybe it has something to do with the commercial street, and the world of signs and advertising.”

If I had to describe a methodology, I'd say you have to have some factual context. You have to understand why certain terms appear. You have to know what's going on in the era the document appeared in, but beyond that you want an attitude of skepticism about the rhetoric, about the strategies of argument the document makes. You want to be able to question not just the points the argument makes, but the means by which the arguments get there. The more complicated way to say this is you don't just want the answer to the question—you want to know what does asking that question do? What effects does asking that question produce; what kind of outcomes does that question always point towards?

The first thing I do when I'm talking about reading images is I say there's absolutely nothing in an image that can be taken for granted. And if you're going to read it, you have to go sector by sector. You have to ask the "why" question about every piece of an image. Why is this particular thing here and not somewhere else? Why do you choose to draw it this way? You have to really interrogate images. I mean that's the basic method I want to bring when I'm using an image. There's nothing in it that's a product of chance—well, if there is something in it that's a product of chance it might be more interesting than the things that are in there deliberately.

The first thing they'd want to do is take careful notes, either on paper or mentally, about what the thing depicts and how it depicts it. And sometimes just writing it down is a big help. You know, it's a baby and it's in front of…I find when I'm taking notes, that when I write down the image I often learn a lot about it. So the first thing they want to do is give it a careful formal study of the structure of the thing—what is it depicting and how?

You have to have some sense of what the historical references are. So if they see this as railroad stock, they would have to investigate something about railroad stock and feelings about the railroad in the 1870s. They'd have to discover some sense of historical context. But I'd also want to know something about Nast. Particularly because he's such a…there's so much stuff by Nast, and he has such a strong influence. He's a very powerful artist. I would want them to investigate how else Nast depicted babies; how else he depicted money; how he depicted business and finance in general. So I'd want them to have some sense of the author, and the author's characteristic forms of…his rhetorical tricks—the author's characteristic rhetorical style. And how does this deviate from his characteristic style.

I would ask them to look for other iterations of that phrase. You know, where else does "rag baby" show up and who else uses it? Well, one thing I'd ask them to do is look at how else Nast drew babies. I mean what else did Nast do with babies and how else did they appear in his work. Did he sentimentalize them as the exact opposite of this? Or, how were babies depicted in the popular culture generally? And I think the answer usually is they're highly sentimentalized. They're the objects around which real feeling is generated, and the objects that represent genuineness. So I'd ask them to contextualize it—what is the context of babyhood?