These ten political cartoons from the San Francisco Examiner are satires of Republican politics during the presidential election of 1900. They also highlight the important role Ohio played in national politics in the nineteenth century. William McKinley was a native of Niles, Ohio who lived much of his life in Canton. Mark Hanna was from Cleveland. While running for a second term in the White House, McKinley, a man with a quiet conciliatory manner, was often overshadowed by his flamboyant running mate, Theodore Roosevelt. After gaining fame as the hero of San Juan Hill during the Spanish American War, Roosevelt was later elected governor of New York. Political bosses were unable to control Roosevelt and so propelled him into the powerless office of vice president. Hanna, portrayed as "Nursie" in the cartoons, was an industrialist and financier who supported McKinley's campaign. "Papa," the head of the unhappy family, represents "the Trusts," the monopolies that dominated the American economy in the late nineteenth century.

Cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper was born in Madison, Ohio in 1857. He left school at the age of 14 to become a printer's apprentice for the Madison Gazette and also drew cartoons. Eventually he moved to New York, where he worked for both Leslie's Magazine and Puck before he went to work for William Randolph Hearst. It was during his tenure with Hearst that he drew the "Willie and his Papa" series. The "Willie" cartoons were effective in their cumulative effect and heaped almost constant ridicule on McKinley, Roosevelt, and Hanna. Later in his career, Opper created such cartoons as Happy Hooligan and Alphonse and Gaston. Opper has been called the Dean of American Cartoonists and is considered one of the founding fathers of the medium.

The ten examples shown are from the OSU Cartoon Research Library's run of 111 newspaper clippings from the "Willie and his Papa" series that are part of the larger San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection that was purchased by the library in 1998

The popularity or notoriety of "Willie and his Papa" is evidenced by the fact that the Cartoon Research Library holds three variants of this series in addition to the clippings in the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: the Western Newspaper Union reprinted sixteen cartoons from the series in a newsprint flier (perhaps for distribution to potential voters who did not subscribe to one of Hearst's papers); Grosset & Dunlap published a hardback reprint volume featuring ninety-three of the cartoons; and an unknown fan of Opper's collected newspaper clippings from the series into a leather-bound album, complete with the title page and prefatory note cut from the Grosset & Dunlap volume and pasted into the album's first pages.