homas Nast was perhaps the most influential political cartoonist in American
history. 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 is probably best remembered, however,
for his influential series of political cartoons in 1871-1872 that helped topple
from power political “Boss” William M. Tweed and his corrupt Tweed Ring of New
York City.
Thomas Nast was born in Landau, 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, abundant illustration, and a national subscription base. In 1856,
Frank Leslie 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 conflict.
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.
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 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 the fraudulent activities of Ferdinand Ward (whose
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.