In 1904, Parsons was elected to first of three consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1905-1911).  In 1906, President Roosevelt successfully maneuvered to place Parsons as president of the New York County Republican Party over the candidate of “Boss” Thomas Platt.  Parsons worked closely with Roosevelt to carry out the president’s wishes and to ensure him the loyalty of county Republicans.  In 1907, Parsons crafted an odd political alliance between New York Republicans and supporters of maverick publisher William Randolph Hearst, which ended in the electoral failure depicted in the featured cartoon.  In January 1910, Parsons surprised political observers by resigning as county chairman of the New York Republicans, and that November lost his bid for a fourth congressional term in a year that saw the Democrats regain control of the House. 

At the end of his term in March 1911, Parsons resumed his law practice in New York City, but remained active in Republican politics by serving as a delegate to state and national conventions through 1920.  Relations with his party became strained when his support for the League of Nations led him to back the Democratic presidential candidate in 1920, James Cox, over the Republican nominee, Warren G. Harding.  During World War I, Parsons served as a lieutenant colonel on the staff of General John Pershing.  He was a member of several prominent clubs, and active in charity work, serving as the president of the Greenwich Settlement House, the Memorial Cancer Hospital, and the Board of Trustees of Canton Christian College.  He died in 1926 from wounds suffered in a motorcycle accident.

Theodore Elijah Burton was born in 1851 in Jefferson, Ohio, the son of a Presbyterian minister.  After receiving a public school education, he attended Grand River Institute (Ohio) and Grinnell College (Iowa) before graduating from Oberlin College (Ohio) in 1872.  He read law at a firm in Chicago, and was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1875, commencing a practice in Cleveland.  In 1886, he was elected as a Republican to the Cleveland City Council, and in 1888 to the U.S. House of Representatives.  Two years later, he lost a race for reelection to Democrat Tom L. Johnson, but returned to Congress in 1894 for the first of eight consecutive terms in the House (1895-1909).  As chairman of the Committee on Rivers and Harbors (1898-1908), he pushed for real improvements to the nation’s ports and waterways, while standing firmly against pork barrel legislation.  Respected on both sides of the aisle for his intelligence, hard work, and fairness, Harper’s Weekly described him (1907) as “the kind of man whom people ask to ‘referee’ things—whether it be a baseball game or a factional fight in the party.”

By 1907, Burton had set his sights on replacing Joseph Foraker in the U.S. Senate, but President Roosevelt convinced him to try to unseat Tom L. Johnson, Burton’s old rival who was then mayor of Cleveland.  Burton lost (as caricatured in this cartoon), and Harper’s Weekly speculated that his political career might be injured, but the Ohio legislature elected him in January 1909 to replace Foraker in the U.S. Senate.  In the Senate, Burton supported the policies of President William Howard Taft, and backed his fellow Ohio Republican against his former “boss,” Theodore Roosevelt, who ran for president on the Progressive ticket in 1912.  Stung by criticisms of his controversial stances in favor of the Payne-Aldrich tariff and neutralization (non-fortification and international access) of the Panama Canal, Burton declined to seek reelection in 1914.