Bernhard Gillam | 1856–1896

Political Focus

Gillam’s cartoons captured the central conflict of the Gilded Age: unprecedented wealth for a small elite built on the labor of workers struggling to make ends meet. Works such as The Protectors of Our Industries (1883) depict industrial titans lounging atop “millions,” supported—literally and figuratively—by anonymous, exhausted laborers. His satire laid bare how protectionist policies, political patronage, and corporate influence insulated the powerful while sharpening inequalities.

He also exposed federal scandals like the Star Route Frauds, using allegory and exaggeration to show how justice was often blindfolded by design. In an era when cartoons were front-page political weapons, Gillam’s work shaped public debate with a historian’s eye for structures of power.

Life & Work

Bernhard Gillam, born in England and raised in the United States from 1866 onward, emerged as one of the sharpest political cartoonists of late-nineteenth-century America. After early work for Leslie’s Weekly and the New York Graphic, he moved to Harper’s Weekly and then joined Puck in 1881, quickly becoming a leading voice in the magazine’s visual campaign against political fraud and party machines. Trained in the high craft of chromolithographic satire, Gillam worked in the same fast-moving world as Thomas Nast while developing a style that foregrounded clarity, caricature, and public accountability.