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Greeley's Campaign Falters |
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“The Key-Note of the Campaign” |
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Source: Harper’s Weekly |
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Date:
September 28, 1872, pp. 752-753
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Click to see
a large version of this cartoon |
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Complete HarpWeek Explanation:
September found the Greeley presidential campaign to be a deeply dispirited
enterprise of weirdly dissimilar factions, the leaders of which were hoping
against hope to bring down the incumbent Republican war-hero in the White House,
U.S. Grant. Nast’s “Key-Note of the Campaign” (dated September 28; published
September 18) is a virtuoso display of portrait caricature amidst a carnival of
depression, alarm, frustration, fury, nausea, and mortification. A central
point of the cartoon is that the plans of the Liberal Republican progenitor,
Senator Carl Schurz (seated at the piano), have gone seriously awry. Schurz had
been exceedingly surprised and disheartened by Greeley’s nomination at the
Cincinnati convention, but had stoically joined the campaign.
The idea for the cartoon had been suggested after the Liberal Republican
Convention by the Cincinnati Evening Post (May 15). The newspaper
reported journalist Samuel Bowles’s account (originally published in the
Springfield Republican) of a meeting of Liberals in a private home. All
were dejected after the Greeley win and Charles Francis Adams loss of the
nomination. “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…” Nast willingly incorporated the idea into his cartoon,
“Played Out!” (dated June 15, published June 5). The scene was
transferred from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C., and Schurz’s musical piece
became an attack on Grant.
The cartoonist returned to the “Played Out” theme three months later with
“Key-Note of the Campaign.” The New York Times commented (September 19)
that the latter cartoon “is perhaps superior in point of elaboration and careful
grouping to anything which has yet been produced by the great American
caricaturist. A more perfect gallery of portraits could not be arranged… Face,
expression, and pose are equally characteristic and unmistakable…” Although
Nast would not have been aware of it when completing the plate for “Key-Note” in
early September, Greeley would be out of town on a campaign tour during most of
the time the cartoon was in print. Thus, the candidate’s absence gave
additional punch to Nast’s study of dissension in the ranks of Greeley’s
followers. |
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