1873 Mystick Krewe Comus Darwin’s Missing Links booklet Mardi Gras parade MKC

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1873 Mystick Krewe Comus Darwin’s Missing Links booklet Mardi Gras parade MKC:
$1650.00

Awesome and very rare1873 Comus Mardi Gras ball program, in booklet form, from their infamous parade titled “The Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of the Species”.
This 40 page booklet features about 30 detailed and highly satirical sketches by the famous Carnival designer Charles Briton depicting reconstruction-era politicians and government officials caricatured as various “missing links”:
The parade proceeded in clusters of revelers accompanied by the stanzas of a poem about the romance of finding a mate. The papier-mâché costumes, the first to be constructed in New Orleans rather than in Paris, followed elaborate designs by Swedish-born designer Charles Briton. Many of them depicted ordinary animals and plants, but the most notorious costumes lampooned recognizable political figures of the day: carpetbaggerGovernor Henry Clay Warmothas a snake,Union General Benjamin Butleras a hyena, and Lieutenant Governor C. C. Antoine as a monkey.The parade was accompanied, somewhat incongruously, by the brass band of the US Army’s 19th Infantry, which occupied New Orleans after theCivil War, and by the carpetbagger-friendly New Orleans Metropolitan Police, whose chief was satirized in one costume as a dog.The Missing Links parade farcically sent up both Reconstruction politics and Darwin’s theory of evolution (depicting the scientist himself as a donkey).
Measures approximately 8.25"x6".
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