Thomas Nast was
perhaps the most influential 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. |