"Polly Got a Cracker" by Charles Nelan, Philadelphia North American, May 16, 1903.


A frenzied parrot is blasted by an explosive that has a label reading public opinion.
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In 1903 political cartoonist Charles Nelan's caricatured Pennsylvania governor Samuel Pennypacker as a parrot mouthing the words of his cousin, Republican U.S. Senator Matthew Quay. Pennypacker was so furious he ramrodded an anti-cartoon bill through the Pennsylvania legislature, which drew him into an acrimonious war with many of the state’s newspapers and resulted in an explosion of public indignation; the subject of this political cartoon also by Nelan.