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The Democratic National Convention |
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“Bringing the Thing Home—(Dedicated to the Baltimore Convention)” |
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Source: Harper’s Weekly |
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Date:
July 13, 1872, p. 548
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Click to see
a large version of this cartoon |
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Complete HarpWeek Explanation:
“Bringing the Thing Home—(Dedicated to the Baltimore Convention)” was
published in the July 13, 1872 issue and was on the newsstands July 3, almost a
week before the start of the Democratic National Convention. It was clearly
intended to exert maximum divisive effect on Southern delegates coming to
Baltimore. The Tribune quickly pointed out (on the first day of the
convention) that the caption beneath the cartoon had not appeared in Greeley’s
newspaper on the given date, and implied that Harper’s Weekly had
committed an intentional forgery. Two weeks later an editorial in Harper’s
Weekly (dated July 27) noted that the quotation had been taken from the
Tribune of May 1, 1861, three weeks after Fort Sumter had been fired upon,
rather than the incorrect date (November 26, 1860) set under the cartoon.
In the cartoon, Nast’s harsh, malicious image depicts Horace Greeley smirking
over the anticipated miseries of defeated Confederate soldiers returning home
after losing the Civil War. They find their land devastated, their homes
destroyed, and their families suffering in abject poverty and despair.
Undeterred by the cartoon’s message, desperate Democrats accepted the entire
Liberal-Republican platform at their own convention, which Greeley could view
with guarded satisfaction as a necessary step forward. Nast, however, perceived
this coalition as a cynical repudiation of virtually everything for which the
Tribune editor had stood previously.
This Nast cartoon figured in at least two large broadsides (posters) during
the 1872 campaign. The Republican State Central Committee of Georgia issued
one, accompanied by numerous Tribune editorial extracts on a variety of
inflammatory subjects. The Republican National Committee distributed 1˝ million
copies of another single-sheet piece of campaign literature, particularly
targeting the South, in the final weeks of the campaign. It consisted of Nast’s
wood engraving on one side and 25 excerpts from Tribune editorials and
Greeley’s other writings and speeches on the other side. The cartoonist later
concluded that this satire of Horace Greeley gloating over the devastation of
the post-war South was one of the most effective he had ever drawn.
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