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February 6, 2003
Toasting Thomas Nast at OSU
By R.C. HarveyAny decent editorial cartoonist must have more freedom and audacity than is likely to be good for the digestion of his supervisors, Draper Hill quipped, launching his presentation at the Thomas Nast symposium held at Ohio State University.
For a good portion of his career at Harper?s Weekly, Nast enjoyed that sort of freedom, Hill told me later?"at least until Fletcher Harper died in 1875."
Hailed, customarily, as the father of American political cartooning, Nast was not just one of the most passionate reformers of the 19th century but an accomplished pictorial journalist, and both these guises were displayed during the symposium on December 7, the centennial of the cartoonist?s death.
Nast died in 1902 while serving in a backwater consular post in Ecuador, a man forgotten by almost everyone except Secretary of State John Hay, an admirer, who had convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to give Nast the government job.
Nast had arrived in the U.S. at the age of six in 1846, shipped to these shores by his father, a musician in a Bavarian regimental band who soon joined his family in New York, seeking social freedom and economic opportunity. It was a fortuitous time for growing up in New York, said Morton Keller, author of "The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast" (1968), the other of the two symposium speakers sponsored by OSU?s Cartoon Research Library, Department of History, School of Journalism and Communications, and Friends of the Libraries.
In an overview of Nast?s career, Keller observed that the New York of the 1850s and 1860s had taken the cultural leadership away from Boston and was a hotbed of journalistic enterprise, nurturing scores of newspapers and magazines. It was thus a media center and a "breeding ground" for middle class young Americans of a reformist bent. Nast was fifteen when he fell in with this crowd, joining the staff of Frank Leslie?s Illustrated Newspaper, then the New York Illustrated News and, eventually, Harper?s Weekly, the platform for the most spectacular of his work during the Civil War and the decades immediately thereafter.
Originally, Nast was not so much a pictorial reporter as he was an interpreter of wartime sentiment for Harper's, and, Keller said, as the hostilities went on, both the artist and the paper became more political, more reformist?more Republican. And Nast?s drawings acquired a distinctly political patina. When the Civil War ended, Keller said, neither the North nor the South had faced up to "the implications of the War," the great social challenges that had to be met. Instead of racial equality, racism flourished, and Nast realized that Reconstruction in the South was undermining the deeper meaning of the War.
Nast remained committed to the humanitarian causes that had animated the Republican Party during the War, and as the leadership of that Party seemed to abandon those causes after the War, he felt increasingly betrayed and attacked both the liberal wing of the Republican Party and the Democrats. Nast?s great crusade against the Tweed Ring of New York was "rooted," Keller said, in his opposition to the Democrat Party?s attitudes about Reconstruction. And Nast?s infamous anti-Catholic, anti-Irish cartoons were aspects of the same distrust of Democrat "attitudes that seemed antithetical to a proper resolution of post-Civil War issues."
As the opposing elements of the Republican Party fumed at each other, the power of the Party waned, and it was during the off-year election of 1874 that Nast, recognizing the decline, first deployed the now-familiar symbol of the Grand Old Party (at first, dubbed "the Republican Vote") as an elephant?in this instance, a huge but cumbersome and stumblingly ineffectual beast, precisely what the disillusioned Nast believed his Party had become. By 1884, Nast, too, had abandoned the good fight: he equated Blacks and the Irish as "ignorant voters," and by 1890, Keller said, Nast?s issue?human rights?had been perverted and left behind, and Nast had "turned 180 degrees."
Following Keller to the podium, Hill?Nast historian, James Gillray biographer, retired Detroit News editorial cartoonist, and former AAEC president?avoided traversing the same Nast landscape Keller had visited: instead, Hill conducted a slide-show tour of one of the least-illuminated nooks of Nast?s life, his reporting of the Italian campaign of national liberation in 1860. Joining Garibaldi and his Red Shirts on their march from Sicily through southern Italy to Naples, the cartoonist sent back to journals in New York and London his pictorial dispatches of one of the great adventures of romantic patriotism.
Hill's slides included not only copies of some of Nast's pictures and of others? paintings of Garibaldi and his band but photographs of Nast at the time and of landmarks along Garibaldi?s route, which Hill had traced in a pilgrimage to Italy several years ago.
After the presentations at the OSU Faculty Club, the symposium adjourned to the Cartoon Research Library?s Reading Room, where a special exhibit of Nast cartoons (including several originals) was on display and comestibles were served.
The symposium?s proceedings, the presentations of Keller and Hill, amply illustrated, will be published by CRL in the Spring of 2003. Copies are $15 postpaid. To obtain one, send a check payable to Ohio State University to the Cartoon Research Library, 023L Wexner, 27 W. 17th Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1393.
