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Cartoon of Thomas Nast by de Grimm

Some time ago Mr. Nast and Mr. De Grimm entered into a competition for drawing cartoons. Mr. De Grimm won, and then drew this picture as a compliment to Mr. Nast, imitating his style, and executing this historic portrait.

It
is fitting as the year-end nears to discuss Thomas Nast, Harper’s
Weekly’s premier artist and perhaps the most influential political
cartoonist in American history. The
featured caricature appeared in the December 20, 1902 issue, along with
an obituary for the artist entitled, “The Great American
Cartoonist.” Over his 45-year
career, he drew more than 2200 cartoons and illustrations for Harper’s
Weekly, contributed work to several other periodicals, illustrated
books, and painted serious historical pictures.
The skill displayed in his work marked a turning point in
American political cartooning from a reliance on dialogue to an emphasis
on images. Nast originated many symbols including the Republican
Elephant and the Tammany Tiger, and popularized the
Democratic Donkey and the image of Santa Claus as a fat, jolly old man.
During the Civil War, Nast’s
memorable depiction of Confederate guerrilla raids and atrocities
reportedly led President Abraham Lincoln to call him the Union’s best
recruiter. Two of Nast’s 1864 cartoons were used effectively as campaign posters in Lincoln’s re-election bid. In fact, Nast’s cartoons played an important role in the
election of Republican presidents from Lincoln through James Garfield
(1880) and in the “Mugwump” (breakaway Republican) campaign for
Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884.
Nast, however, is probably best remembered for his influential
series of political cartoons in 1871-1872 that helped topple from power
New York City’s corrupt Tweed Ring, led by “Boss” William M.
Tweed.
Thomas Nast was born in Landau,
Bavaria (Germany), on September 27, 1840, and immigrated with his family
in 1846 to the United States, settling in New York City.
His talent for drawing manifested itself in his childhood, when
he sketched soldiers, firemen, actors, ships, and other scenes from life
in antebellum New York. Nast’s
portrait of Louis Kossuth, the famed Hungarian revolutionary, won praise
from his teacher and school principal.
Nast’s father was a musician who played in theaters, so his son
was exposed to the plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists at an
impressionable age. As an
adult, he integrated those characters and themes, especially
Shakespearean ones, into his art.
Nast became a professional
illustrator just as American journalism entered a new era in the 1850s
with the advent of periodicals combining general-interest content,
lavish illustration, and a national subscription base.
In 1856, Frank Leslie (born Henry Carter) hired the 15-year-old
Nast as a staff artist for his new weekly, Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated Newspaper, where the boy honed his skills and learned
how to etch on a woodblock. Nast also studied the work of cartoonists for Punch,
the British magazine, especially their use of symbolic figures like John
Bull and the British Lion. From
the satiric art of Honoré Daumier of France and, more directly, Leslie’s
campaign against adulterated (“swill”) milk, the young illustrator
realized that art could be used to illuminate social problems.
In 1858, Nast covered the
boxing championship in Canada between John Heenan and John Morrissey,
and the next year began laboring as a free-lance artist.
His first contribution to Harper’s Weekly, a three-panel
cartoon on police corruption, appeared in March 1859.
That fall, New York Illustrated News bought his sketches
of tenement-house poverty and John Brown’s funeral, and sent him in
early 1860 to England to cover the prizefight between Heenan and Thomas
Sayers. Those illustrations
displayed what became a Nast trademark of depicting recognizable faces
in a crowd. While in
Europe, he took the opportunity to travel with the army of Giuseppe
Garibaldi, leader of the Italian unification movement, providing the New
York Illustrated News and the London Illustrated News with
illustrations of the war.
Nast returned to the United
States in February 1861, and within days was sketching President-elect
Abraham Lincoln’s visit to New York City.
That fall, Nast married Sarah Edwards, a cousin of biographer
James Parton; the couple had five children.
Since Nast apparently was afflicted with dyslexia, his wife often helped him
write captions for his work. In
1862, Harper’s Weekly hired Nast to provide realistic
battlefield sketches (like his work on the Italian war), but he soon
proved more adept at political cartoons, which inspired Union patriotism
and denigrated the Confederate cause. General Ulysses S. Grant later recalled that Nast “did as
much as any man to preserve the Union and bring the war to an end.”
Although Grant may have exaggerated, the cartoonist’s work was
very effective as both Union and Republican Party propaganda during the
Civil War.
Following the Civil War, Nast
used his pen to caricature President Andrew Johnson as “ King Andy”
and condemn the Democratic president’s lenient
Reconstruction policy in his cartoons for Harper’s Weekly and
his illustrations for the satiric novels of David Ross Locke writing as
Petroleum V. Nasby. Nast’s
cartoons vividly portrayed the violence against black Americans
and, later, Chinese Americans, as well as urged
respect for their civil rights. In
1868 and 1872, the cartoonist placed his considerable influence behind
the presidential campaigns of his war hero, U.S. Grant, depicting the
Republican nominee’s 1868 opponent, Horatio Seymour, as a
pro-Confederate “Copperhead” and his 1872 rival, Horace Greeley, as
a befuddled hypocrite. During
this period, Nast also contributed illustrations to several books,
including Mary Dodge’s Hans Brinker (1866), an 1868 edition of
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, an 1869 version of Clement
Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, and Charles Henry
Pullen’s Miss Columbia’s Private School (1871).
With all Nast’s contributions
to American political caricature, it is his anti-Tweed Ring cartoons for
which he is most remembered. Tammany
Hall, the main Democratic political machine in New York City, became a
target of Nast’s cartoons in 1866, with the first caricature of Boss
Tweed appearing in 1869. In
July 1871, The New York
Times broke a news story alleging massive corruption by members of
the “Tweed Ring” in the form of inflated payments to contractors,
kickbacks to government officials, and other malfeasance.
The estimated total stolen from the public treasury was set at $6
million, but is today thought to have been between $30 and $200 million.
The Times’ exposé gave Nast additional ammunition to support his relentless campaign against the Tweed Ring in his Harper’s
Weekly cartoons. Portraying
Tweed and his associates as vultures and thieves, Nast’s
cartoons were instrumental in arousing public sentiment against the
Tweed Ring. Tammany Hall
candidates (except Tweed) lost in the election of November 1871, and
within a few months, Boss Tweed had resigned and the ring was being
prosecuted.
In 1872, Nast employed his talents to ruthlessly attack Horace Greeley, the Democratic presidential nominee who unsuccessfully challenged the reelection bid of the artist's hero, President Ulysses S. Grant. During the rest of the 1870s,
Nast used his cartoons to advance the temperance movement, chastise the
pope’s declaration of infallibility, and warn that
Catholics were trying to destroy
the public school system.
He also employed his art to endorse a return to the gold
standard—introducing the “rag baby” as a symbol of inflation
caused by unbacked paper currency (“greenbacks”); to call for
harmonious relations between labor and capital; and to denounce
socialism, anarchism, and other forms of political radicalism.
In 1884, Nast and Harper’s Weekly editor George William
Curtis broke with the Republican Party after it nominated James G.
Blaine for president, and lent their support to Democrat Grover
Cleveland. The
“ Mugwump” campaign hurt Nast’s reputation among his
Republican base.
Nast increasingly faced
competition from other talented cartoonists, such as Joseph Keppler of Puck. After leaving the staff of Harper’s Weekly in 1886,
Nast contributed to various publications (including a few cartoons for Harper’s
Weekly in 1895-1896), but failed in an attempt to run his own
periodical, Nast’s Weekly (1892-1893).
He concentrated in his later years on historical
paintings, such as Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox
Court House.
Nast had lost his savings in
1884 when the financial firm of Grant and Ward went broke as a result of
Ferdinand Ward’s fraudulent activities (his partner was former
president Grant’s son, Ulysses Jr.).
During the 1890s and early twentieth-century, the cartoonist had
difficulty earning a living, so he readily accepted President Theodore
Roosevelt’s offer in 1902 of an American consulship in Guayaquil,
Ecuador. Before he left for
the assignment, Nast drew a prophetic cartoon in which he confronts
“Yellow Jack” (yellow fever). Less than five months after arriving in Ecuador, he died of
the dreaded disease on December 7, 1902.
Robert C. Kennedy
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