It seems 10 years of Union occupation didn’t diminish New Orleans’ loathing of Ben Butler. This neat Mardi Gras float design shows they’d moved on from chamber pots to other forms of effigy. Note the eponymous Spoons!
In 1873, Mardi Gras revelers from the Mistick Krewe of Comus — unversed in this newfangled evolutionary theory and angry at the Northern interlopers — dressed up as the “missing links” between animals, plants, and humans. Therefore, you had frightening human-grape and human-corn hybrids running around and fauna baring the faces of Ulysses S. Grant, other hated politicians, and Darwin himself.
