Thomas Nast

The Father of Modern Political Cartoons

Fiona Deans Halloran

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780807837351
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

Thomas Nast (1840-1902), the founding father of American political cartooning, is perhaps best known for his cartoons portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast's legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly magazine. Throughout his career, his drawings provided a pointed critique that forced readers to confront the contradictions around them. In this thoroughgoing and lively biography, Fiona Deans Halloran focuses not just on Nast's political cartoons for Harper's but also on his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics and highlights the many contradictions in his own life: he was an immigrant who attacked immigrant communities, a supporter of civil rights who portrayed black men as foolish children in need of guidance, and an enemy of corruption and hypocrisy who idolized Ulysses S. Grant. He was a man with powerful friends, including Mark Twain, and powerful enemies, including William M. "Boss" Tweed. Halloran interprets Nast's work, explores his motivations and ideals, and illuminates Nast's lasting legacy on American political culture.

Chapter One
From Five Points to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News

Thomas Nast enjoyed the knowing wink. To his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, he told a version of his early life. Another version, more complete but less charming, lay within the reach of any knowing reader. Between the two lay not only Nast’s experiences, insofar as they can be reconstructed, but also his lingering discomfort with the world that produced him. By the time Nast, born September 27, 1840, won his first job, he knew more of New York’s streets than he cared to admit. But the streets forged him. In his work as an artist and a political analyst, Nast’s New York remained a potent force throughout his life.

Albert Bigelow Paine published his biography of Thomas Nast in 1904.¹ It was the outgrowth of a series of conversations between Paine and Nast begun at the turn of the century at the Players Club, a Manhattan gentleman’s club. The two men, Paine, forty-one years old to Nast’s sixty, met when Paine provided Nast with a copy of his first book. Nast complimented the novel and invited Paine to join him before the fire, where the two enjoyed a long talk. Paine had been an admirer of Nast since childhood, and the cartoonist enjoyed his enthusiastic praise. Nast asked whether Paine would agree to write his biography, and Paine agreed.

Paine began to meet with Nast, examine his papers, and compile information about his life. Many of the stories in Paine’s earliest chapters recount memories found nowhere in Nast’s extant papers, and their tone and pacing suggests a conversation rather than a documentary source. Paine used no footnotes, so determining the source of many of his quotes is impossible, but a reader can hardly help forming the impression that much of the material on Nast’s childhood came directly from the artist. In addition, the small number of printed interviews and biographical sketches published during Nast’s lifetime are consistent with the facts as they appear in Paine’s book, but they lack the detail provided by Paine. Virtually the only information available regarding Nast’s first fifteen years appears in the 1904 biography.² Nast’s voice emerges through Paine’s text, and the Paine book represents Nast’s life story as Nast chose to tell it.

Thomas Nast was the last child of Appolonia Abriss and Joseph Thomas Nast. The elder Nast played the trombone in the Ninth Regimental Band at Landau, in the kingdom of Bavaria.³ Nast’s birthplace, the Red Barracks, is now a part of the University of Landau. Information about his family is difficult to find, but a few facts are known. Nast was the only boy in his family when he was born, but there apparently had been two older brothers, both of whom were dead. Visits to their graves lingered in Nast’s memory enough for him to mention the smell of the box hedges (planted to outline each grave) to Paine almost sixty years later.⁴ A sister survived, apparently Nast’s only sibling. Despite Nast’s deep commitment to family later in life, this sister appears briefly in Nast’s earliest memories, then disappears forever from his life story.⁵

Many of the memories Nast provided to Paine at the turn of the century reflect an early childhood of great warmth and pleasure. In recognition of the toy soldiers Nast fashioned from the wax his mother provided, women in apartments upstairs lowered cookies to him on a string. At Christmas, a kindly, bearded gentleman in a fur coat played the part of Pelze-Nicol, or St. Nicholas, walking from door to door distributing sweets to children. Nast’s memories of Landau all seem to have been suffused with a sense of dreamy nostalgia. However, not all of Nast’s childhood experiences could have been so positive.

In 1846, political uncertainty in Bavaria intruded on the Nasts. The commanding officer of the Ninth Regiment warned Joseph Thomas Nast that he should leave the area before his politics caused trouble. Bavaria, like much of Europe, faced a struggle between a highly educated, politically liberal reform movement and the entrenched power of the aristocracy and military. These tensions erupted in revolution all across the continent in 1848, and Joseph Nast’s political beliefs, too freely expressed, might have posed a problem. In response to the warning from his superior officer, Joseph Nast decided to leave Bavaria. According to Paine, the senior Nast joined an American merchant marine vessel. Appolonia Nast, six-year-old Thomas, and his sister departed for Paris, where they found places on a ship bound for New York.⁶

Despite a bout with what may have been malaria, Thomas Nast weathered his transatlantic voyage well, arriving at the Verrazano Narrows in midsummer. His first view of New York was impressive enough to prompt the decisive child to comment that he was “glad he came.”⁷ Appolonia Nast found her family a home on Greenwich Street, on the west side of Manhattan Island, and enrolled Nast in an English-speaking primary school.⁸ Unable to understand the language, Nast found the experience terribly confusing. He remembered other children “mischievously” directing him hither and thither, including a boy who sent Nast to line up with other children who were about to be spanked. Unable to explain himself, Nast endured a spanking with the others. He rushed home at lunch and refused to return to school. Mrs. Nast, hoping to find a more congenial place for her family, moved east to William Street.

At his new school, Nast spoke German with students and teachers. Even so, he concentrated more on drawing than on academics, using crayons given to him by a neighbor. Not only did he draw at school—his “desk . . . was full of his efforts and the walls of the . . . house on William Street were decorated with his masterpieces”—but he also pursued opportunities to draw throughout the city.⁹ Fires attracted his attention, and he often chased the engines of Company Six when they left the station to fight a fire.¹⁰

Nast’s family re-formed in 1850, when Joseph Nast finally returned from the sea. He found work with the Philharmonic Society and the band at Burton’s Theatre. Thomas went with his father sometimes, drawing the band in his sketchbook. His sketchbook seems to have been the only object of much interest to Nast in this period. Although he attended two German-speaking schools and an “academy” on Forty-seventh Street, none could hold him for long. Nast’s parents hoped that he could become a better student, but their hopes were eternally frustrated. By 1854, Nast convinced his parents that art was the only path for him.

From this point on Nast studied drawing and painting. His first formal training was with Theodore Kaufmann, a German American painter who taught young artists in his studio on Broadway. Paine implies that Kaufmann took Nast as a pupil in part because of their shared German heritage. Although the German immigrant community in New York was large, widely distributed, and constantly shifting, it supported German-speaking schools and churches, bars, and newspapers.¹¹ These community organizations suggest that Nast’s parents may have hoped for a friendly reception for their talented son. All his life, Nast struggled to be punctual, civil, and focused, but there is no mention of these challenges with regard to his study with Kaufmann, who became Nast’s first mentor. Rather than a struggle, artistic study seems to have been pure pleasure for Nast. Kaufmann taught Nast to copy great works in local museums and to draw from life in the studio. He learned techniques for drawing, painting, and composition from peers, masters, and the simple repetition of studio work.¹²

Lessons with Kaufmann alone did not satisfy Nast for long, however. After only six months, Nast moved on.¹³ Like many artists, he sought training in a variety of venues. He moved on, first to other mentors, then to classes at the Academy of Design on Thirteenth Street.¹⁴ As part of his training, he, along with other students, visited local museums and galleries, copying the paintings hanging there. Nast especially liked the paintings in the collection of Thomas Bryan, a wealthy New Yorker. Copying the works on his easel, Nast attracted admiring attention. Bryan noticed the young artist, and helped Nast earn pocket money by allowing him to collect the entrance fees of visitors. Nast enjoyed his training at the Academy, and his sideline at the museum was lucrative, but he sought a more permanent position with a steadier income and new artistic challenges.¹⁵

Illustrated weeklies offered both. Like newspapers in their content and appearance, periodicals like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News and Harper’s Weekly differed from newspapers in a few respects. First, they relied directly on illustration to supplement written content. Second, they included fiction, fashion, health information, and poetry in addition to news. Finally, like magazines, the new weeklies served purposes other than disposable news delivery. For example, they frequently printed drawings, lithographs, and engravings intended for display on the walls of readers’ homes, similar to today’s poster art.¹⁶ Nevertheless, weeklies directly addressed news, printing sensational stories alongside reports on domestic and foreign political affairs. Because of this ambiguity, and because contemporaries used the two terms interchangeably, the words “magazine” and “newspaper” both apply to these publications.

The first illustrated weeklies, founded in 1851, were Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion and the Illustrated American News. On December 15, 1855, Gleason’s employee Frank Leslie, born Henry Carter, founded Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News.¹⁷ Leslie’s became an immensely popular paper, with circulation of 160,000 in 1860 and a sixty-year lifespan. Only Harper’s Weekly, founded in 1857, matched it. However, when Nast noticed Leslie’s, it was still brand-new, vying for readers in an environment of cut-throat competition. The paper sold for ten cents, contained a variety of materials, and relied directly on illustration for its sensational content.¹⁸ Readers devoured the illustrations of city fires, scenes of local life, and portraits of dignitaries.

Leslie’s employed two kinds of men to create illustrations: artists and engravers. First, the artist drew the scene, either from life or memory. Then, provided with the sketch, an engraver (or, later, a team of engravers) carved the drawing onto a block of soft wood. The block was used to print the illustration, and the engraver required substantial skill to carve it. Illustrations, then, emerged from a physical and creative interaction between artists and engravers. Both brought specialized skills to the print room. Frank Leslie, his newspaper growing constantly, needed talented young men to create illustrations for the paper. He recruited them from other periodicals, sought them among local artists, and hired them when they appeared on his doorstep. In 1856, Thomas Nast became one of those men, at the tender age of fifteen.¹⁹

Even at the end of his life, Nast bragged about the way he talked his way into the job with Leslie. He simply presented himself to the owner, offered sample drawings to demonstrate his talent, and insisted on a job. Leslie hesitated but allowed Nast to take on a trial assignment: drawing a ferry on a busy morning. James Parton, a historian and a cousin of Nast’s wife, told Paine that Leslie never intended to hire Nast. Leslie told Parton that he “gave him the job merely for the purpose of bringing home to his youthful mind the absurdity of his application.” But Nast surprised the editor, producing an excellent drawing with energy, exactitude, and engaging detail. Like most of the editors of his generation, Leslie worried about profit. Recognizing Nast’s talent, and despite the boy’s age, Leslie hired Nast for four dollars a week.²⁰

With the job at Leslie’s, Nast’s childhood effectively ended. He remained employed full time from 1856 until he left Harper’s Weekly in 1887. It is here, then, that we can pause to examine critically the themes of Nast’s version of his early life and its omissions. The themes interconnect, and they are suggestive of some of the contradictions in his later work. The omissions indicate the past Nast preferred to ignore. Emphasized most powerfully in Nast’s personal history were a set of ideals that Nast believed to be at the heart of the American dream. Secondarily, a romanticized version of Nast’s immigrant community and his family undergirded his narrative. Finally, the glaring omission of any open discussion of his family’s religious faith and the ethnic content of his childhood neighborhood point toward the complexity of his later views regarding many ethnic, religious, and political groups.

For Nast, the American dream was a tangible fact, not an interpretative framework. While historians associate the term and concept with the twentieth century, the conviction that American national identity carried with it economic and educational opportunities and the possibility of property ownership far predates the term itself. Nast’s personal allegiance incorporated both American nationalism—particularly as opposed to Confederate nationalism—and German ethnic identity. In his life and work, Nast both embraced his immigrant status and insisted upon the essentially American nature of his politics and loyalty.²¹

As his artwork was to make clear, Nast believed quite literally that an American had freedoms and opportunities denied to the vast majority of the world. He would have defined the American dream with reference to these opportunities, much as he defined his own narrative by emphasizing them. The story of his childhood points directly to the possibilities available to immigrant children. Two examples illustrate this point. First, there is the question of Nast’s literacy. He stated outright that he could speak no English when he arrived. Although his mother transferred young Nast to a German-speaking school, he never thrived academically. Rather than interpret this in negative terms—as confusing, frustrating, or limiting—Nast chose to emphasize instead his artistic talent. School was irrelevant, in this reading, because what mattered was Nast’s ability to transform the vibrancy of the city around him into beautiful, commercially useful illustrations. Second, the confusion of the streets around him was made not threatening but exciting, not dangerous but stimulating. The scenes he witnessed on the street provided Nast the raw material necessary for any artist.

Rather than the scene of poverty, crime, and violence that the city often was, he remembered it as the rich vein of experience from which he could draw to advance his own interests. Specifically, his practice of following fire wagons points to this interpretation, because rather than remembering the devastation of fire in a neighborhood of wooden homes, Nast recalled the excitement of running after the wagons, the heroism of the firemen, and the pleasure of creating drawings of their exploits.²² Clearly, a powerful sense of opportunity and optimism suffused Nast’s personal narrative. It was central to how he understood his own childhood, and how he explained his rise from obscurity to fame and wealth.

By emphasizing the opportunity available in America, Nast did not completely erase his own immigrant experience. Instead, he controlled it by romanticizing it. The fears we can imagine accompanying his experiences of a new school, a foreign language, and a new group of classmates subsided in telling the amusing story of Nast’s undeserved spanking. The classic immigrant problem of housing—overcrowding, dirt, danger from the environment and one’s neighbors—reappeared as an exciting environment full of kindly strangers. Nast left out his immediate neighbors in favor of emphasizing his relationships with prominent German artists like Theodore Kaufmann. Likewise, he chose not to remember the angry clashes between immigrants and “native” Americans, emphasizing instead his role as protégé to the wealthy art collector Thomas Bryan.

To be a German immigrant was to buy German cakes at the corner store, to attend a German school, and to apprentice with a Germa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• THOMAS NAST
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One From Five Points to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News
• Chapter Two Early Work and Training
• Chapter Three Travel to Europe and Sallie
• Chapter Four Compromise with the South
• Chapter Five Falling in Love with Grant
• Chapter Six Tweed
• Chapter Seven The Campaign of 1872
• Chapter Eight Redpath and Wealth
• Chapter Nine Access and Authority
• Chapter Ten Conflict with Curtis
• Chapter Eleven The End of an Era
• Chapter Twelve Nast’s Weekly and Guayaquil
• Conclusion Legacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index