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What I Know About... // Gratz Brown Nametag // Anything To Beat Grant // This Is Not An Organ // Clasp Hands Over The Bloody Chasm // Go West, Young Man, Go West

Besides Nast’s mastery of caricature, knowledge of classic literature and mythology, inventive mind, and impish sense of humor, the incorporation of catchphrases and symbols into his cartoons was one of his most effective, and sometimes devastating, techniques.  That skill is nowhere on better display than in his images of Horace Greeley.  This website features Nast’s Greeley cartoons organized by four catchphrases—“What I Know About…”; “Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm”; “Anything to…”; and “Go West, Young Man, Go West”—along with two symbols—the Gratz Brown nametag and the organ that was not an organ.  Nast’s relentless use of these epithets and emblems merged into a negative public image that helped bury the candidacy of Horace Greeley.

Appearing in Greeley's letter accepting the Liberal Republican presidential nomination, the phrase was a call for sectional reconciliation, but in Nast's cartoons it became a symbol of the candidate's compromise of his principles.

July 20, 1872, p. 573
“Old Honesty”

August 3, 1872, p. 596
“Baltimore, 1861-1872”

August 3, 1872, p. 605
“Diogenes Has Found the Honest Man—(Which Is Diogenes and Which Is the Honest Man?)

August 24, 1872, p. 652
“It Is Only a Truce to Regain Power (‘Playing Possum’)”

September 14, 1872, p. 713
“The Next Thing in Order—Any Thing! Oh, Any Thing!”

September 21, 1872, p. 732
“Let Us Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm”

September 28, 1872, p. 745
“Circumstances Alter Cases”

October 12, 1872, p. 785
“More Secession Conspiracy”

October 19, 1872, p. 804
“H. G. ‘Let Us Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm’”

November 23, 1872, pp. 912-913
“Clasping Hands over the Bloodless (Sar)chasm”

 



 

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