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This 1891 Judge magazine cartoon pokes fun at Chicago’s over-the-top campaign to secure the World’s Fair. The “average Chicago man” is shown buried under booster slogans, puffed-up pride, and frantic political pressure—every pocket stuffed with propaganda, every sign insisting the city must win. It’s satire aimed at civic ego and the way power structures hype themselves into inevitability. More than a century later, the joke still lands.
Whenever politicians treat public institutions as tools to boost their own image—or when local power brokers insist that their interests are everyone’s interests—this kind of satire becomes timeless.
This 1891 Judge magazine cartoon pokes fun at Chicago’s over-the-top campaign to secure the World’s Fair. The “average Chicago man” is shown buried under booster slogans, puffed-up pride, and frantic political pressure—every pocket stuffed with propaganda, every sign insisting the city must win. It’s satire aimed at civic ego and the way power structures hype themselves into inevitability. More than a century later, the joke still lands.
Whenever politicians treat public institutions as tools to boost their own image—or when local power brokers insist that their interests are everyone’s interests—this kind of satire becomes timeless.