1938.04.07 “What – No More Rabbits?”
by Lucius Curtis “Lute” Pease, Jr. (1869 -1963)
14 x 18 in., crayon and ink on board
Coppola Collection
Pease was a cartoonist for the Newark Evening News from 1914 to 1954 and received the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He was a miner in Alaska for 5 years before beginning a career in art. He was an illustrator for the Oregonian and famously interviewed Mark Twain. From his retirement in 1954 until his death in 1963, he devoted himself to fostering his skills as a painter of portraits and landscapes.
Describing FDR’s economic plans as pulling a rabbit out of his hat was common. In Time’s January 1935 coverage of FDR’s new tax proposals, they phrased it this way: “Others insisted he did. [He had] by pulling a 1935 rabbit out of his 1933 hat … playing the smartest kind of politics to cut the ground from under the Longs, the La Follettes, the Coughlins…”
After early New Deal programs brought signs of recovery from the Great Depression, 1937 brought a sharp economic downturn (the “Roosevelt Recession”). Many Americans, once hopeful, began to feel that the New Deal had lost momentum and that Roosevelt’s earlier “rabbits”—his flurry of alphabet agencies and bold policies—were no longer working.
In a newspaper article on April 6, 1938, Rep. Maury Maverick (D-TX), who would coin the term gobbledygook in 1944, famously stated, "Now we Democrats have to admit that we are floundering. We have pulled all the rabbits out of the hat, and there are no more rabbits."
Many Americans, once hopeful, began to feel that the New Deal had lost momentum and that Roosevelt’s earlier “rabbits”—his flurry of alphabet agencies and bold policies—were no longer working. Editorials and cartoons began portraying Roosevelt less as a miracle worker and more as someone out of tricks. A recurring cartoon trope was Roosevelt as a magician fumbling with an empty hat. Journalists referred to the President’s new programs as attempts to pull “yet another rabbit from the hat,” often with skepticism.
Time again applied the metaphor in their July 3, 1939 issue, when FDR launched a major $3.86 billion credit program aimed at public works, electrification, and infrastructure: “He suddenly produced from his magical hat the long‑awaited Great White Rabbit of 1939 … before the true size and nature of this rabbit could be assimilated by Congressional minds…”
