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“The Only ‘Emergencies’ We Need Fear (?)”
Don Carlos Quixote and Sancho Tiptoe Panza on "The Path of Duty,"
The French Arms Investigation
Q. By Mr. Ames.--My object in asking the question I put was to show that the military men of the nation are not at all concerned, so far as the safety of the country is at stake, with reference to the small-arms!
A. By Col. Benet.--Not in the slightest degree.
Q. By Mr. Schurz.--You give it as your professional opinion as a military man, that the supply of small-arms in this country at the present moment is sufficient for all emergencies?
A. By Col. Benet.--I think so, emphatically.
Thomas Nast draws from Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote to
parody liberal Republican senators Carl Schurz of Missouri (left) as the title character
and Thomas Tipton of Nebraska (right) as his sidekick, Sancho Panza.
The cartoonist depicts the liberal Republicans' effort to malign the
administration of President Ulysses S. Grant by investigating alleged
illegal arms sales to France as a quixotic (i.e., unrealistic) attack on
windmills, as in the novel.
In February 1872, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had introduced
a resolution demanding an investigation into the charge that the Grant
administration violated the official neutrality of the United States
during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) by illicitly selling arms to
France. The preamble of the resolution assumed the guilt of the Grant
administration. The liberal Republican Sumner had long been a thorn in
Grant's side by opposing the president's foreign policy. The
president eventually orchestrated Sumner's removal as chairman of the
Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
The resolution sparked a heated debate in the U.S. senate, largely
between liberal Republicans dissatisfied with Grant and Republicans
loyal to the president. Press attention focused not on Sumner, but
on Schurz (as in this cartoon). The Missouri senator was a refugee
from the failed liberal rebellion in Germany in 1848, and was a leading
spokesman for the large German-American community. He was also a
key organizer of the liberal Republican movement which opposed Grant's
reelection. In January 1872, Schurz had issued a call for a national
convention of liberal Republicans, at which he presided in early
May. Nast, also German-born, detested Schurz for opposing the
cartoonist's hero, General (now, President) Grant.
A Congressional investigation into alleged arms sales to France
during the Franco-Prussian War was generally viewed as a tactic of
liberal Republicans to injure Grant politically in the eyes of the
American voters, particularly among German-Americans. Although the
Senate approved the resolution for an investigation, the debate on the
issue became acrimonious and personal. Senator Roscoe Conkling of
New York, Grant's chief supporter in the Senate, accused Schurz and
Sumner of conspiring with French agents. Both Schurz and Conkling
quite accurately painted the other as a pompous, preening ass.
As indicated by the excerpts in the cartoon's text, the Congressional
hearings did not produce any evidence of illegal sales or of a lack of
American military readiness. Following the end of the Civil War in
1865, the demobilization of the United States armed forces led to the
sale of $15 million worth of arms and materiel to various foreign
countries, for which all was
properly accounted in the official records of the Treasury. The
inquiry did not seem to have much of a political impact in the long run.
Robert C. Kennedy
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