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“Carl Is Disgusted with American Politics”
Uncle Sam. "Look here, stranger, there is no law in this country to compel you to stay."
Following
press reports that Senator Carl Schurz, leader of the breakaway Liberal
Republican Party, was dismayed by the presidential campaign of 1872,
cartoonist Thomas Nast, a fellow immigrant from Germany, reacted
unsympathetically by pointedly suggesting the senator return to the
fatherland. The artist shows a disheartened
Schurz, who has been pining for his German homeland by playing "My Heart
is at the Rhine." Uncle Sam, smoking a cigar like Republican
nominee Ulysses S. Grant, explains to Schurz that he is not legally
bound to stay in the United States. Visible through the door is an
ocean liner and an advertisement announcing: "Steamers to
Germany/Nearly Every Day/Passage Cheap."No one had done more to
create the national Liberal Republican movement of 1872 than Carl
Schurz, a U.S. senator from Missouri. For several years, he and
other reform-minded Republicans had become dissatisfied with the
administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877). Their
opposition was provoked by administration scandals, the president's
expansionist foreign policy, his seeming resistance to civil service
reform, and their desire to move beyond the issues of Reconstruction.
On January 24, 1872, Schurz judged the Grant administration to be
irredeemable and issued a call for a national convention of liberals to
nominate a candidate for president.
Schurz chaired the Liberal Republican Convention, which convened in
Cincinnati on May 1, and delivered the keynote address in which he
envisioned a new era of reform in America. He was shocked,
however, when delegates rejected his presidential candidate, diplomat
Charles Francis Adams, and nominated Horace Greeley, the maverick editor
of the New York Tribune. To make matter worse, Schurz's
main political foe in Missouri, Governor B. Gratz Brown, was nominated
for vice-president. However, the senator stoically campaigned for
the Greeley-Brown ticket, which was also endorsed by the Democratic
Party in July (notice the poster on the right).
Nast used the motif of Schurz at the piano in several cartoons.
The artist may have been inspired by news reports of a post-convention
meeting of Schurz and other disappointed supporters of Adams'
candidacy: “Mr. Schurz was unable to speak, but going to the piano, played with
the skill of the accomplished amateur he is ... There was not a dry eye ... in
the whole company …”
By
the late summer, Schurz's
sentiment that things had gone seriously awry was shared by other
leaders in the Greeley campaign. In this cartoon, the lower-right
poster proclaims that North
Carolina had voted Republican in the early state elections. It
foretold the gloomy fate of the Liberal Republicans in the upcoming presidential election. That
November, Grant won a second term by defeating Greeley 286-66 in the
Electoral College and 56%-44% in the popular vote.
In
1875, the Missouri legislature declined to elect Schurz to a second term
in the U.S. Senate, and he resumed work as a journalist. In 1876,
he returned to the Republican fold to support the candidacy of
Rutherford B. Hayes, and was rewarded by President Hayes with an
appointment as secretary of the interior (1877-1881). In 1884,
Schurz again broke with the Republican Party to support the
presidential candidacy of Democrat Grover Cleveland. Schurz served
as editor of Harper's Weekly from 1892 to 1898, and then took a
leading role in the anti-imperialist movement.
Robert C. Kennedy
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