Visit HarpWeek.com
 

 Election Results

 “Our Artist’s Occupation Gone”
  Source:  Harper’s Weekly
  Date:   November 23, 1872, p. 920

Click to see the previous version of this cartoon...

Click to see the previous version of this cartoon

Complete HarpWeek Explanation:
In the November 23, 1872 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Nast offered up a self-caricature in a lament to the end of the campaign. The disgruntled cartoonist wonders, “What am I to do now?”  Nast stands isolated in the foreground, while behind him a crowd rejoices in front of The New York Times building, where placards proclaim Grant’s “Grand Victory,” the destruction of “The Senatorial Cabal,” “Sham Reform Exposed,” and in tiny characters, “H. G. Gone West,” an allusion to Greeley’s famous advice to enterprising young Americans:  “Go west, young man, go west.”  At the upper-left, an announcement on the Tribune office building reads “The Greeley Triumph Postponed.” After two years of intense professional exertion during the anti-Tweed and anti-Greeley campaigns, it is hardly surprising to learn that Nast was exhausted.  He would take a six-month leave-of-absence from Harper’s Weekly in 1873.

Greeley arrived at the Tribune office on November 6, 1872, the day after the election, to resume his old job as editor.  The next day, he published a “card” announcing his return and declaring that the newspaper would henceforth be independent and nonpartisan.  That statement was Greeley’s final contribution to the journal he had founded 31 years earlier.  He was eased out of the editorship by interim editor Whitelaw Reid, a fact predicted in a Nast cartoon of October 12, 1872 (note the center image in the bottom panel).  Reid’s action was motivated as much out of concern for Greeley’s deteriorating mental and physical health as for the disastrous effect his presence was feared to have on the newspaper’s future.

Horace Greeley died on November 29, 1872, and his funeral on December 4 was attended by a large gathering of national, state, and local leaders, including President Ulysses S. Grant and Chief Justice Salmon Chase.  Harper’s Weekly editor George William Curtis delivered one of the eulogies.  Nast, however, found himself the object of another round of editorial abuse for having allegedly added to Greeley’s woes and accelerated his demise.  In a typical commentary, the Philadelphia Evening Telegram of December 6 chastised Nast for “recklessly slandering Horace Greeley” with “cruel satire” and “savage personal attacks which went far beyond the bounds of harmless fun and not infrequently plunged into downright indecency and blasphemy.”

Not all the final reviews, though, were negative.  Among his personal papers, Nast preserved an unidentified, undated clipping from a Boston newspaper, circa mid-November 1872.  It characterized him the equal of the great 18th-century British illustrator William Hogarth, singling out the American cartoonist’s “amazing fertility” combined with “his brilliant execution.”  At the modest age of 32, Thomas Nast had reached the pinnacle of his career.

Nast continued working for Harper’s Weekly for 14 more years, drawing cartoons on a plethora of often-controversial subjects and thereby leaving an insightful chronicle of politics in late-nineteenth-century America.  Among other causes, he used his pen to agitate against the ill treatment of American Indians, the ban on Chinese immigration, the alleged threat to public schools from the Roman Catholic Church, and the feared under-funding of the American military.  Some of the caricatures would be memorable, but Nast would never again attain the level of artistic achievement generated in 1871-1872 during his battles against Boss Tweed and Horace Greeley.

Ironically, it was Nast’s own bolt from the Republican Party that proved his professional undoing.  In 1884, he and editor George William Curtis broke with the GOP when it nominated the supposedly corrupt opponent of reform, James Blaine, for the presidency.  Together, they backed the candidacy of Democrat Grover Cleveland.  Their action undermined Harper’s Weekly base of Republican support and lost popularity for Nast himself.  The cartoonist was only 44, but his work thereafter went into decline.  Nast had lost most of his savings as a victim in a Wall Street swindle in early 1884.  He stopped working for Harper's Weekly at the end of 1886, but contributed a few cartoons to the publication in 1895-1896.  In 1902, he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to be the U.S. consul in Ecuador.  Less than five months after arriving there, Nast died of yellow fever on December 7, 1902. 

 

 
 
 

Website design © 2001-2005 HarpWeek, LLC
All Content © 1998-2005 HarpWeek, LLC
Please submit questions to webmaster@harpweek.com