into the water and the story is nobody is looking for them. what happens? they drown, they die of dehydration, sharks eat them. it is a horrible story. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q & a. next from the get ease burg college civil war institute, a look at the influence of cartoonist. fiona deans hal loron shows his work. she talks about how the war transformed the political cartoonist. this is an hour. >> good afternoon. i'm peter carmichael, a member of the history department here at gettysburg college, also the director of the civil war institute. it is my pleasure to welcome fiona deans halloran.

prior to her arrival at roland hall she spent four years teaching 19th century american history at eastern kentucky university as well as several years in the history department's college and ucla. she finished her ph.d. at ucla and studied under joan wahl. many of us are familiar with joan. joan has spoken here on a number of occasions, and of course she is the author of a superb biography of ulysses s. grant. under joan fiona completed her dissertation which became a book. that book is "thomas nas, the father of modern political cartoon cartoons," published in 2013. it is my pleasure to welcome

fiona. [ applause ] >> i want to thank peter for inviting me and ashley for the help she provided as i prepared to come and spend this hour with you. i'm here to talk about thomas nast, and what i'm going to do i think is to introduce him to you broadly at first and then talk a little more specifically about what the civil war did for thomas nast. i think that it refined him in ways which were essential to his success later in life. so we'll begin with an introduction and then move into three things that i think the war really did for him. at lunch time i had a conversation with an attendee who observed that he found that this year's civil war institute was focused in an interesting way on personalities and the effects of the war on real people. i think that this session will be entirely in keeping with that

observation. so thomas nast was born in bavaria in 1840. this is not a picture of him as a child. he immigrated to the united states in 1846 with his mother, landing in new york. they were effectively political refugees. his father held liberal political beliefs and in the years leading up to the revolution of 1848 he was warned he could get in a lot of trouble for what he believed, and so he sent his family to new york for safety and then he followed behind them. nast began his life in new york with a bit of a rocky start. he was not a great student. his mother enrolled him in a local school, but because nast was unable to speak english at six years old, having just arrived, he fell victim to a playful classmate who directed him on the first day to get into a line. nast did not realize until it was too late that this was the naughty line where you were going to get spanked.

oops. he went running home at lunch and told his mother that he was never going back to school. although not literally true on that day, that was in some ways true. nast did not enjoy formal education and he was perennially trunt. by his early teens he had given up entirely on the concept of education, and instead he went to work for frank leslie of "frank leslie's illustrated news." he got this job in a way he was proud of for the rest of his life, and which if you know any 15 years olds may ring bells. he went to frank leslie and said, "i am an artist, hire me." frank leslie had a lot of personality himself so he was not unfamiliar with this kind of drama, but he wasn't really taking nast terribly seriously either, so he set nast a task to go down to the waterfront and draw an image of the ferry that went across the river every

morning. he didn't think this kid was going to do it. in fact, nast went down for days and every day he would observe the background, drawing the backgrounds. he would observe what time the whistle blue whenever everybody got on the ferry and he looked to decide what he wanted to put in the sketch. he went one morning and produced a very attractive and thorough sketch he presented to frank leslie, who was trapped and had to offer the young man a job. from that moment nast worked for the rest of his life steadily, although not always for steady people. if you know anything about frank leslie, you may know one of his problems was he often didn't pay people who worked for him, which they didn't like very much. so he worked pretty steadily, first for frank leslie and then for the "new york illustrated news" and it was at "harper's weekly" that he built his career. that catapulted him into fame

and for a while fortune, although that's a sad story. if you care to hair it, ask me about it later. and a place in political art and history. in his prime he was the most famous cartoonist in america, and he was a widely-liked and admired and, of course, the other side of that is feared and hated person. he could be delightful. he was child-like his entire life. one of the people that he worked with, one of the harper's who ran and owned the harper's publishing fortune talked about how he came to his brown stone one day and he was handing his hat to his butler and he heard above him what sounded like a herd of elephants running back and forth across the floor. he said to the butler, what is that infernal noise. the answer was that nast had come to speak with him and not finding him home had gone to the nursery and was playing with the

children. he was extremely playful and people loved him for this kind of persona that embraced all that was fun, entertaining in life. he produced illustrations, cartoons and christmas drawings, and for your amusements i pulled a few of the christmas illustrations that people love to this day. you can see there's some similarities here, for example, including his own children and background from his own home. more on that in a few minutes. and his similarity in his portrayal of santa is pretty consistent over time, particularly as red cheeks and how chubby he is, et cetera. these are so popular today, were you inclined to do so, it is not difficult to obtain things like dessert plates and christmas ornaments for yourself that feature nast's christmas designs. it is rare i think for a pop cultural form like illustration to endure across so much time and space and beyond, far beyond

the death of its creator, but in this case you can see there's kind of no end to the popularity of nast's christmas illustrations. unfortunately, as exciting as nast's career was, it ended not with a bang but with a whimper. his frantic pace in the early 1870s when he was defending president grant against charges of size cesarism, when he was attacking and all of the things he did began to wear on his arm and shoulders. as a result he had to stop sometimes cartooning and his work began to decline in quality. it was less detailed, less precise. he lost a little bit of what made him so successful. then in the late 1870s, a long brewing conflict between himself and his editor at "harper's weekly" exploded into an open fight, and nast began to feel dissatisfied with his position at harper's. in the mid 1880s he finally started to depart, separate

himself from the newspaper, and by the later 1880s had done so for good. he tried to maintain his career by working for other papers, but that failed. without the platform, the circulation of "harper's weekly" wasn't able to do it. he tried to build a career as a painter. this is an example. i will let you judge for yourself. that failed, too. he tried to establish his own paper, "nast's weekly" which lasted a whopping seven months, so i think we have to call that a failure. finally, really kind of desperate for employment, he turned to his connections in theodore roosevelt's administration, seeking something to support him and his family. here at least he succeeded, winning an appointment to ecuador in july of 1902. if you have read my book you already know what is coming. by december he was dead of yellow fever, aged just 62. his death left behind a nearly

destitute wife, an eldest son who idolized and emulated his father, and -- worse of all for me, and i realize that's shallow -- an author with an unfinished biography. that biographer, albert bigelow payne, who you can see consoled himself by playing billiards with mark twain, managed to complete the book two years after the untimely death of nast. when it appeared in 1904 it attracted notice. it attracted criticism as books often do, and among the critics was a contemporary of nast who disagreed with payne in some of his conclusions. nast was not, this man insisted, a particularly original artist. he borrowed his best ideas from other people, he made a habit of

illustrati illustrative plagiarism, and worse of all, this is the worst part, he hadn't done anything in the civil war. payne pushed back like you do on the person you have written a biography, defending nast. some were easy, proving that nast was a significant cartoonist. what was touchier was proving that nast worked in the field like others had done in the war. it is likely that nast indeed worked a little. he had only limited context with the war outside, a world outside of new york city's buildings, an area not known for battles. the thing is that context mattered to him, it changed him. if he were here today, he would be delighted to think of his story as part of a civil war institute. for him, the war was personal in

moral and national crucible. it made him. if he were here, he would enthusiastically acknowledge that. what is it that the war provided to him? i would say it provided him with three things. first thing to appreciate is that on the cusp of the war nast was quite young. at the end of 1860 he had just turned 20 years old and he wasn't even in the united states at that point. he had sailed off to england to cover an illegal boxing match -- this is the kind of stuff he was attracted to at age 20. from there -- and he hadn't been paid for the work he did, so that was frustrating to him. so then from there he sailed to italy because he was attracted to the campaign to unify the italian states. then he traveled over land to germany in search of relatives, he hoped rich relatives, he hoped rich relatives that would leave him or give him money. this turned to work not out. back to england, effectively

penniless where he boarded a ship for new york in late 1861, which is an interesting time to arrive back in new york city. he returned into this political conflict that period was characterized by. he had a black book that is currently in the collect of rutherford b. hayes presidential library in ohio. perhaps we can say it ten times fast. it is a fun place, they're very welcoming. they have in their collection this little black book. for those that may be unfamiliar with this, men used to carry little books in their pockets which contained addresses, contacts of people that they knew and sometimes it had a calendar in it, frequently it had a little calendar to keep track of your appointments. that is what it was for 1860-1861. you can read it. it is charming. he likes to keep track of all of his money because he had hardly any. he would write down, sold an

illustration, $1. well done, sir. he kept track of his courtship of the woman he hoped to marry, sally edwards. so he noted that he took her to church and that she agreed to go again next week. it was pretty cute. in that calendar on the very last bit of it that he filled out, undated, he wrote from the boat that when he got back to new york he hoped he would be able to sell sketches about what he called "the southern excitement." when you read it, of course, in retrospect it is interesting to see how innocent it sounds, how he really had no idea what was happening and how important it was. he returned to new york though older and more confident than he had been when he left. he was preparing to ask this sweetheart, sally edwards, to be his bride. spoiler alert, she said yes. they got married on his birthday. he was ready -- just in case you're like, what does she look like? we don't have a ton of clearly attributed images of sally nast,

but one of the things about nast that was especially adorable is he likes to portray his wife in his illustrations and paintings. when you see a painting or illustration that has a particularly attractive or admirable female, chances are that's sally. if you get a chance to see the very small number of letters that exist from his lifetime, one of the things he would do is have sally write the text and he would illustrate the letter. he often drew her into the letters. it is almost certain this is sally and their two oldest children. you can see it is someone one would want to marry. having successful concluded his courtship -- nast was ready in 1861 for bigger and more complicated challenges than he had ever before tackled, and the warp in that context was irresistible. the public hungered for news about it as the war unfolded, helped to stabilize what had been a strange and volatile illustrated news sector. so nast was able to return to a

steady job at "harper's weekly" which gave him a chance to use his talent to inform the public, and he returned to a future which seemed to him limitless, which perhaps was characteristic of 21 year olds but it certainly in nast's case was not a misperception. in order to be clear it is not just that the war affected nast, he knew in that moment that it would do so and he welcomed that. he saw this as a moment in his life that was going to change who he was and what he was able to do. that was one of the things that made him so interested in it. he embraced the experiences that the war offered him. so what were those things that the war provided? i would say three broad categories. first, the war really helped to shape his view of good and of bad, particularly when it came to leadership and to patriotism. second, the war sharpened his focus on issues of identity and citizenship, both for black americans and for immigrants, particularly the irish. third, the war provided a period

in nast's professional life when he slowly broadened his reach from illustration toward what we would recognize more readily as cartooning. we're going through each of those in turn, and then i will welcome questions. so if we start with leadership, the war provided nast with a kind of mini pantheon of historic -- excuse me, heroic figures. like a lot of cartoonists, nast relied on a visual shorthand. cartoonists exaggerate heroes and things beyond their parameter. if you are familiar with steven segal, you have already encountered this. you may be familiar with the fact that in steven segal's the guy is as bad as can be. he kicks a puppy and there's nothing bad he doesn't do in

case the audience somehow missed this is, in fact, the bad guy. cartoons are like that, too, and cartoonists rely on this sense of who is on the side of right and who is on the side of wrong. the war helped nast to see that by providing heroes for him, cementing the set of people who he admired and whom he thought were awful that he would rely on for many years, either in spirit or particularly with those individuals. it defined in some ways what he thought heroism and villainy meant in the broadest terms. so the first hero and the one that throughout his life was the most meaningful to him was this man, who i think you know. if mast's work, u.s. grant occupied a special place. mast was a man with powerful, enduring emotions shall and his work was so successful in part because he channelled anger and excitement and enthusiasm into the drawings he produced. so the same way, for example, gratitude and affection which elevated grant in the nation's

eyes at the end of the war, that swept over nast, too. he imagined the general as the savior of the union and effectively he never changed his mind about that. he honored grant for years and years for various things that grant did. first, for his role in the war. this is the very famous cartoon at the end tv war of the war in you see grant on the left reaching out his hand to robert e. lee. later, for his leadership of the republican party in 1868 and moving forward from there, and also for his work as president, which was a period in which many people came not to see grant in this heroic frame anymore, but nast really didn't waiver in his conviction that grant was a hero. grant was frequently employed by nast as an arcetype of american manhood. he would draw grant standing straight with his spine erect, very handsome, often the object of positive attention from the female symbol of the nation,

colombia or justice, et cetera. here you see this young woman is probably drawn from life, from sally. sometimes grant even appeared, and this is true in the early 1870s when the liberal republicans broke away, as a rational adult in a city or maybe even a nation full of unpredictable children. nast's admiration for grant was just visible all the time in the cartoons he produced for the rest of grant's life and his own career. it had two moments in which it was grounded in real life that are particularly valuable to point out i think, or i'll merely capture my fancy because they're entertaining and characteristic of nast. i will tell both to you and you can decide what you think. first, in 1868 nast helped the republicans to nominate grant for president. for the convention that year nast was invited to paint the backdrop for the stage. they had a curtain in front and in behind was a stage -- the

other was empty because the democrats are not yet chosen their candidate. above the pedestal nast painted the challenge, match him. the implication, of course, was that that was impossible, no one could pass the savior of the union. once grant was the nominee, the election was effectively over. as grant's nomination and his letter accepting the party's choice were read aloud, the curtain dramatically dropped and nast's painting was revealed. of course, everyone went wild, it was wonderful. one of the things about this that is kind of entertaining as a side note is that it was reproduced -- you can see this is from "harper's weekly" and the image on the left is grant. and you can see the attempt to show grant as an attractive, masculine figure. on the right, the democratic candidate seymore, who nast has done bad things to particularly with regard to his hair.

if you look at the shadow seymore is casting, as if the hair wasn't diabolical enough -- indeed, is this the hero we deserve, that is the question. i included a engraving of seymore looking normal so you can see how nasty nast was to him. if you see right at the top, the caption put on the top is matched, question mark, and of course the implication is, no, not at all. that said of the interaction didn't die in 1868, and some of you may recall it was recycled in 1968 on the 100th anniversary of that election by another candidate who also used it successfully. so the second time that nast's regard for grant entered real life and the part that was emotionally important occurred in 1872 when nast went to washington to observe politics

firsthand, which he found thrilling. he wrote all of these letters back to sally. if you go looking for nast, there are letters written by sally and to sally. there's not many of either. you always know the letter is write by sally because the handwriting is beautiful and the spelling is correct. whereas, letters written to sally resemble a chicken scratch and are spelled in phonetic german accented english, which sometimes required me in archives to read the letter out loud under my breath to the irritation of my neighbors. he wrote back to her from washington and he said, oh, it is amaze in. he was so excited. people came up to him, carl schwartz came up to him at a cocktail party and threatened him. he thought it was the greatest thing. he said, the harpers are not going to let you continue defaming me. he said, oh, yeah? he was correct. the harpers backed him. he received an invitation to

lunch from the president which was super exciting, and it was followed by other invitations and he and grant got to be friendly. this was important to nast. he liked the idea that he was somebody who made himself and he recognized that in grant as he would in other men. he became friends with mark twain, partly because he recognized the same life story in twain. it extended, this friendship between grant and nast with at least one visit by the grants to nast's home in new jersey, much later after grant left the presidency and he was returning to the united states after his world tour. when sally nast, through thomas nast, asked the grants what would they like to have for dinner, the president replied, if they knew how sick he was of going to fancy banquets with little birds they would give him something more substantial, and they did. they served the former president corned beef and cabbage and they said he liked it. you know, i think all hostesses like to believe that their guests enjoy the dinner that

they are served, but in this case maybe he did. so he had this real-life interaction with grant and he had this emphasis in his work on grant and who grant was and what grant meant. but the war provided other figures, too. for example, abraham lincoln, who nast positioned as kind of an eternal father to the nation's best impulses, a man who represented a desire for peace in the midst of war and a resolve against all odds to ensure victory but also national integrity, all of the things that lincoln articulated as goals of the war, nast accepted them uncritically and believed in them in an emotionally meaningful way. he came to represent as well benevolent approval of some of the changes brought by emancipation. there's a famous nast cartoon called "emancipation." the red arrow points to the fact that the center piece of this cartoon in this arrangement with the circle in the middle is very

characteristic of nast in these years. in the center circle nast has drawn a sort of idealized family scene in which dad is enjoying bouncing the baby on his knee and maybe the teenage daughter has a suitor in the back and mom is making tea on the cast iron stove and looking happily over all of this from above the mantle is abraham lincoln, which is what the arrow points to. lincoln was also portrayed by nast as a partner of general -- excuse me, george washington as a symbol of national idealism. this is a cartoon from later in which nast asserts a kind of multi-facetted diverse ethnic identity. he creates a table presided over by uncle sam in which the important trats that look down are abraham lincoln, george washington and ulysses s. grant. you get a sense of what nast

believed it meant to be an american and of the best in american leadership. not everyone, of course -- and i should say that nast participated very fully. one of the things that cemented this position for lincoln was lincoln's untimely death, and it seems to have been one of the first instances in which nast channelled his artistic talents into mourning, which he would do many times in the years to come. it helped him to see lincoln in a way slightly different from the way he saw grant, that is to see him as a father to the nation but also a father whose absence made his position even more important, even more powerful. not everyone is a hero, naturally. somebody has to be batman. for nast, it was andrew johnson among other people. you may recognize the image on the right, which was used this morning as well. nast delighted in making fun of president johnson as a villa

villainous fool, untrustworthy, power mad, corrupt. if there was something bad nast did not lay at johnson's feet, i would like to know what it is. perhaps not getting haircuts too frequently is something. this was nathan bedford forest who served as a symbol of the violence of the war and of the post-war period, the violence of what nast would have called slave-ocracy and its persistence as well. nathan bedford forest pops up periodically in nast's cartoons after the war as a person who is the boogie man of the post war period and the changes that people are trying to achieve in the united states. the important thing i think in this category about the war is that it helped nast to work out his views about what americans had a right to expect from their leaders. he refined those views, of course, in the late 1860s, throughout the 1870s and found them challenged by the politics of the 1880s, which were kind of

crazy. but, nevertheless, it is clear that this was his first serious political philosophy, and it was formed during the war and shaped by what happened in the war. that brings us to a second category that has to do with american identity and citizenship. for nast the war produced two important questions about who was and who was not american. these were important questions to nast. he was an immigrant himself. he had struggled to learn to speak, read and write in english, and it was kind of an imperfect process in some of those categories his whole life. he had idealized the american dream and the american family. he wanted to be somebody, not just to become an american but to be an american other people thought of as iconically american, essentially truly and fundamentally american. this question of who got to be american was very important to him, personally as well as profession allegely. the first challenge that the war brought to that sense of american identity occurred in

the summer of 1863. here we encounter one of the things that characterizes nast's life which is a story he told which is a little muddled, which was common for him. he had been traveling, trying to get to gettysburg to observe and report on and draw the battle, but instead ended up semi-arrest. it is not entirely clear if he was arrested formally and held for several days. he said he was traveling to get ease berg and encountered his wife's english cousin john and they decided to go together which they did until they were stopped by union patrol. they searched john's bag and found a confederate flag. according to nast this lead to uncomfortable questions about precisely who john was and what they were doing. nast, of course, protested that he was a journalist and he was doing nothing suspicious at all, that he was neither a spy nor cousin-in-law to a spy. the problem was that when the

army tried to verify who he was -- and this is pre-fame. nobody knows who this little guy is. they cabled to "harper's weekly" to new york, and all of the staff had gone away for a break and the person whose word would have affirmed his employment, fletcher harper, had gone to his country house. so nobody answered these cables for days. so nast wrote a series of increasingly cranky letters to sally about how frustrated he was to be stuck in nothing, in this muddy camp, and also he missed the galgbattle of gettys and returned home to new york frustrated and disappointed. of course, that was not the greatest time to return to new york because no sooner had he had gotten home than the draft riots brought four days of massive unrest to the city, including a tax on the homes of abolitionists, the sacking and burning of the color orphans

asylum and violence on policeman. he reported and drew images for "harper's weekly." he was sent down to look at what was happening and he never forgot what he saw on those days. the images were burned into his imagination. it helped to inform his antipathy toward the irish for the rest of his life. he had lots of experience with irish. he grew up in manhattan close to the five points neighborhood. he spent his entire childhood in the company of irish and other immigrants, so it was not new but it shaped what he thought about irish immigrants for the remainder of his life. it reappeared in his work on various occasions as well. we have seen a couple of examples of this, but if you look on the left you can see that he has drawn in the burning colored orphan asylum and next to it a man on a street lamp who

has been lynched and below it a stock character from his stable of stereotypes, the irish thug. that particular set of images appears over and over again, so i have this green thing -- oh, look at this, show shiny, right? all of that and almost exactly like that appears six, eight, ten times over the next decade or so in his cartoons. it came to be kind of a shorthand for violence perpetrated for racist reasons, violence perpetrated in defines defines -- defiance of the state, et cetera. his experience of this as a professional complicate it his view of american identity as welcoming to all. instead, he embraced -- not always, but sometimes with really ugly venn only tom, the t some people were better suited to full citizenship than others.

the second unfolded more slowly than the draft rye other and they had to do with african-american. nast opposed slavery and supported the emancipation proclamation with enthusiasm. as the war progressed and as the colored troops began to demonstrate courage, he became that the status of black americans was a test of american morality and for the rest of his career he would pair violence against black people with the confederacy, with elements of the nation he didn't like, he thought should be suppressed. he would assert in cartoons the citizenships of african-americans including with the voting rights, education and the right to physical safety. you can see his question about whether slavery is dead or not. you can see in these cartoons,

and some of these are widely reproduced, his protests against some of the violence exhibited upon freed people during the years in which reconstruction was attempting to change the role of black americans within social and political and economic life. so in the upper left, a famous image in which the man asks, is this a republican form of government, is this life, liberty and the pursuant of happiness, as he kneels over the body of his dead family. in the center, a small image in which the kk shakes hands and the image says worse on slavery. the image on the right is rarely reproduced. many have not seen it. it is interesting in a modern context because the suggestion of the cartoon is if black people are unable to achieve what they are entitled as citizens through legal means and through peaceful change, that they are likely to defend their lives, their families and their rights with violence.

that is quite an unusual thing to see in his work or in other cartoons from this period, and particularly it is unusual in that it seems kind of admiring, that is that he thinks there's something manly and impressive about the fact that black men will take up arms, not just to defend the country but to defend himselves. he seems to think they have every right to do so. i don't want to suggest nast avoided stereotyping or considered black americans to be the same as all others, because even a passing familiarity of his work would show it was not true at all. he routinely traffic in stereo types that were really awful, but he seemed to embrace during the war a vision of the nation that honored military service and sacrifice, that honored the sanctity of the family, which is something in this image. on the left you can see the left contrasts the life under slavery with on the right the life under freedom after emancipation. some of the things he emphasizes in the center part, for example

on the left, is the separation of families under slavery through sale, whereas on the right he shows a charming, domestic scene in which moms leads off the boy as he goes to his public school with his puppy by his side, which would be wonderful if it actually happened. there's a way in which nast's interest in the flame, which was significant, his commitment to the gender ideology and to the family ideals of his time period was expressed through his hopes and dreams for black americans. the fundamental idea for him was that people who are capable of participating in the nation's decisionmaking ought to do so. nast spent his entire life trying to become an american. when you see pictures of his home and the santa claus pictures are almost always drawn from life in his house. so when you see pictures of his home, one of the things about it is that he trying to create an americanized home. he has a vision of what it is

supposed to look like and he tried to build it. if you visit morristown, new jersey and see some of the details left behind from his life, it is clear that he identified what he believed to be iconically american and then tried to make a life for himself that looked like that. his family was the same. he did not seek out a person like himself to marry. instead he sought out a woman better educated than himself, elegant, part of a family that was established and literary. he wanted to marry into something that he thought would produce this american citizenship and identity for himself. his career reflect that, too. he didn't choose to be an artist who painted things that were apolitical. instead, he chose to comment on american politics. it is not an accident that he did so because what he was trying to achieve was this american-ness that he wanted for himself. there could be nothing more american as an artist than to transform your talent into a tool to comment upon, even to shape what happened in the nation as a whole.

even his dress and reading habits, he always liked to dress up. he liked to look the part of a successful man. in particular with regard to grooming, he actually believed himself to look good because when he drew pictures of himself in letters he almost always drew himself as short, fat and hairy. if you think about in the charles schultz' cartoon, the kid who is dirty all the time, he seems to have thought himself. when you drew in letters, his wife was tall and slender and lovely, and then there was a little piggy next to her. he went to a lot of trouble to look good because he was fulfilling this role. he and sally would read the newspapers together in the morning and evening, they read for shakespeare and mccauley. he tried to produce what he lost through formal education, to become a person he thought was worthy of being important in the united states. even if you look at his love of

collecting and filling his house with victorian era nicknacks, you cannot believe what was in his house. from this image you can see a little bit. the little boy is nailing up his stocking which is the focal point, but he is standing on a bear skin rug and on the mantle you would be heart perezed to put down your glasses. then there's a screen which nobody needed in the 1870s. more and more, when you look at the santa cartoons, you see that. when he died he left so little money behind his family were forced to auction his belongings. if you have a chance to look at the auction catalogues, they're fun to look at because we can all only aspire to a life in what you leave behind has to have an entire category for daggers and a different one for coats of arm. i would always like to have a medieval knight in my house. he had several. he would go shopping and buy

these things and fill up his house, and it is part because he was probably visually stimulated by them, and being visually stimulated is important for a cartoonist, but it is partly because he was filling this sense of himself with things. all of this reflect his effort to define himself and his identity, and the war pushed him to think more about a what that identity meant and for whom it meant those things. the third category is his transition from illustration into cartooning, and this is a little shady because the distinction is one that may be obvious, and sometimes it isn't so obvious in a particular cartoon, but in the most fundamentals i think the war was an incubator for nast. he began the war as an employee, young, really not employed as an artist so much as an illustrator. he partly work in the engraving room. the way he got the job was he knew the guy that ran the engraving room, so networking. initially he would preproduce other men's drawings. people would send in drawings and he would make them into

something that the magazine could use or he would be doing engraving work. later in the course of the first couple of years of the war as he drew more and more often on his own, as he gained confidence and seniority, as his skills became obviously, he would produce scenes. it would be clear he wasn't there with battles with units and other things, he may only have read about them, but he could make them real with his pencil. so that's one of the ways that he started to move into a more independent employment with "harper's weekly." later still, his gift for story telling led him to produce what we would now recognize as political illustrations. they were sentimental but also political. if you were here for the talk this morning, one of the things he said when he was talking about custer is it was a time, like a fulcrum. before the war people were so much more sentimental, so much more interested in character personality, there were so many more adjectives.

whereas, after the war he said people were more technical. it meant a kind of prak tick cat and logic that wasn't characteristic of the antebellum period. in some ways, nast's work during the civil war was an example of that. he begins with a sentimental image like this one. it is christmas, he gets to come home. it is wonderful, right? or this one. the little drummer boy gets a letter. or this one in which he prays for the safety of her soldier husband. so there are sentimental illustrations. are they political? yes, of course. there are clearly important assertions about the war, about american values, about the potential for a different future bit into these. sometimes they're openly hostile to the confederacy. these were a middle step for thomas nast, between his work showing readers what happened and his later cartoons that

would assert a clear political, usually partisan position. by 1864 he was regularly producing images that dramatized the war pass a political struggle. probably most famous of them is this one. it is so effective in 1864 that the republicans reprint it as a campaign poster, and nast liked to brag -- that is a complete sentence, though we can extend it. nast liked to brag that he helped to ensure lincoln's victory that year. this is something of which he was enormously proud. what these images show as they move confidently and decisively towards the kind of look and the tenor of his post-war work is that he had achieved professional maturity, that in the war he had been nurtured at harper's, his talent and skills enhanced by the work he had done, by the intensity and duration and he had transformed. in 1861 nast was single, unemployed, relatively foot

loose and 20 years old until the autumn. he was funny and outgoing, but he was not especially firm in hills opinions about the world. by 1865 he was a married father with a steady job and even a little bit of fame thanks to this image and in the middle of his 20s. he was approaching the moment when he had to understand who he was in order to take the next step professionally. he was a man who by then identified heroes and villains, who had begun to ask difficult questions about what citizenship comprised and who it embraced, and he found his artistic self -- opinionated, cutting, witty, optimistic, romantic at times. so the war forged nast and shaped what the rest of his life would hold. some of you were amused by this image. this was in the early '50s and he had become friends with an early portrait photographer in new york. they would apparently have

dress-up sleep overs where they would get together and nast would try stuff and have pictures taken. he is buttely groomed, very serious, he is an important person, and yet there is this element of clay in him that is always a delight. i think part of that was forged in the period that interests you all so much, and obviously with a man whose personal output in his lifetime numbered in the thousands of illustrations. i welcome questions about him, which i will do my best to answer, though i don't know if you have had the experience, but one of the things i like about studying the civil war is that it constantly reinforces how little you actually know. if i'm unable to answer your questions, i will apologize in advance. thank you. [ applause ]

>> lee fisher, from oxford, ohio, miami university. considering what we're faced with today compared to his lifetime, has -- do you think in your professional opinion that the digital age has lessened the ability of cartoonists to influence us? >> i don't think so, no. it is probably partly influenced by the fact that i have come to know a few cartoonists and i love cartoonists, and so my social media life is characterized in part by constantly following and liking cartoonists. i probably live in a cartoon

bubble which feels very healthy to me. there are cartoonists working today whose work is incredibly important and celebrated by the communities. i'm thinking of pat baggily at the salt lake tribune whose work i saw reproduced by somebody from across the world on facebook the other day. i think cartoonists are having a great time and that their work is as relevant as ever. i think digital made young people for home the digital world is important, in theory would be a perfect audience for them because the internet has had an effect on our visual culture that is not terribly different from what illustrated newspapers and magazines did for people in the 1850s. there were not illustrated news sources in the 1830s or 1840s. you could get illustrations, usually you would buy them individually and, you know, from courier & ives produced lots of those, but it wasn't cheap or fast. whereas with the advances in presenting technology in the

1840s and 1850s made it possible to put out events with incredible rapidity, things that happened only two weeks ago. americans loved it. they had jokes, poems and songs and lots of editorial content and it became important. it seems to me that that which happened is not unlike what happened with the internet, and people's love of satires has not gone anywhere. do i think political cartoonists should be paid ten times as much as they make and should have total editorial independence? yes, but that i don't think is going to happen. thank you. >> he was living in new york city where there were many, many irish and there were many, many irish in the union army early in the war when he was illustrating it. had he ever portrayed the irish in any way before the draft riots or was there an indication of what his opinion was before

the rye other. >> some of the work had to do with the spoiled milk scandal of the 1850s, which is milk adulterated in some way and people got sick and died from consuming this so it is a form of fraud and perfectly awful. it is clear he was sympathetic to working people as a broad category in that work. a lot of his early work though was so illustrative you don't see in it an opinion, and a lot of his early correspondence is deeply spotty, like little bits here and there. so it is hard to know. we -- one of the big questions about his portrayal of the irish and his view of the irish has to do with the religious faith of most irish people in new york, because nast almost certainly was raised catholic, and responded to his young adulthood by rejecting that entirely. one of the ways he attacked irish people was by attacking their faith, and it is a really curious thing to try to

interpret somebody who grew up in the neighborhood of immigrants, grew up in the face of the people he so derived, and yet come to this set of opinions that are totally inconsistent with some of his oats opinions about identity, race and citizenship. he is a complicated figure, and it is hard. there is one cartoon from the tweet era in which he draws -- in which he draws irish people in new york in a sympathetic way as victims. but i mean often his portrayals were just totally out of keeping with what you would otherwise see in his work. he could be quite bifurcated in that way on other subjects, too. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> so when we think of political satire today, i think of "all in the family" and archie bunker in which people saw what they wanted to see. archie was supposed to be lampooning this bigot, but it

turned out many people at the time -- i remember even people wearing tee shirts saying, "go tell 'em, archie," and the joke was lost on them. i think about stephen colbert and the communication professor at temple that did an interesting study that in colbert people see again what they want to see. liberals seaco bee colbert as m fun of fox news, whereas conservatives see him as pointing out the ridiculousness of liberals. that turns us now to nast, and you made the point he took a fair amount of credit for getting grant over the hump. do you have any sense, if it is even possible, to gauge how people received his work and, in fact, did it have an unintended consequence of affirming in some cases the things he was trying to challenge?

>> so there's parts to that question. one part is what do we know about the reception. the answer is some, but not that much. so, for example, articles about him were reprinted all over the country and he kept scrapbooks of that. he had a cutting or clipping service which i don't know if people did anymore, maybe one of the online reputation sites is the modern equivalent of that. he has all of these scrapbooks which they have at the new york public library, and don't believe them when they say, we don't have that because they totally do. they always start from the position, we don't have that. they do have it. they will show it to you. morristown has one, too. you can open them up and he literally put all of these clippings about himself in these scrapbooks to remind himself, i guess, that he was gifted. based on that it is clear he was widely red a widely read and celebrated in many parts of the country. when albert bigelow payne approached nast to write his biography, the story he told was that as a child in iowa people

got "harper's weekly" and passed it around when he was a kid and he remembered the christmas cartoons. so that was his pitch for, i'm your biggest fan. when he stopped cartooning during the period he was fighting with editors at "harper's weekly" there were protest letters. people wrote to say, where is nast. there is an indication there was this wide reception -- probably the best example is that when he did chalk talk -- you may familiar with the talk, with dyslexia behavior in general, he was talked into going on tour and he would do a thing called a chalk talk where they would put up a screen and he would draw whatever the audience wanted. so sort of like "whose line is it anyway" exempt wicept with c. he hated this because he was -- they loved it. he made a ton of money doing this. so you wouldn't think, people

wouldn't have come out in those numbers and paid money to see him do this were he not popular. now, was he misunderstood? it depends on what you mean by that. many people who disagreed with him understood what he was saying and then hated him for it and made fun of him and thought everything he did was terrifying. it is not quite the same as the example that you gave, but i don't know it would be possible to determine that. if you wanted to, how we would go about it. >> i would like for you to comment a little about his attack on the -- and a little bit more about his political cartooning because of the intricacy and the detail involved just on caricature and in the artwork was fascinating. >> what is interesting is a lot of the early drawings are even

more detailed than the later. what is great about the 2003 cartoons is they combine a really developed talent for caricature with intense detail, with regard to the political scandal itself and with regard to the portrayal of the details visually. lastly, something that is tangible, a sense of human or and ability to make it funny, so like when you are watching political satire today you shake your head because it is fun aye but it is awful, it is funny but it is awful. he was able to do that and that distinguished him from his peers. the tweed campaign was an incredibly important moment in his life. essentially he had three things that went together in those years, about two-and-a-half year which was the attack on the tweed ring. the first time he went out giving lectures and was confronted by how popular he was, which he was kind of unprepared for. he knew that but yet he didn't know it. third was his defense of president grant in 1872, which also was a period of great productivity for him and

emotional intensity. all three of those things happened within a very short time span, and they were the things that made his career, that really made him who he was. they were also what broke him, because the problem with inspiration is that you can't control it. i remember hearing a story many, many years ago about how falkner had gotten up in the middle of the night and outlined a novel on the middle of the wall next to the bed because he couldn't help himself, it was there and he had to write it down. nast was like that. when he was really productive during the tweed campaign he would send to the harper's, in the process of moving to new jersey, and he would spend to the harper's six or seven cartoons a week, and they were this big and as detail as you say. that is the thing that really made his arm stop working within the next six or seven years, was that he overdid it. so it is bobbth really admirabl when you look at the cartoons and see how beautiful and complex they are in every way, and then it is also horrifying because you look at it and what you are seeing in the unfolding

of those images are the destruction of this artist's body in the pursuit of that cam tain again -- campaign against political corruption. >> i think you need a reason to move to new jersey, but i think it was the threat -- >> that's what he said. i mean -- >> he was living in new york city. >> yes. >> and he moved to new jersey. >> yes. so he really loved stories in which he was the important guy, and you have to be willing even when you're totally convinced of his importance and deeply impressed by his talent, you have to be willing to take with a grain of salt some of the things he says about how much lincoln loved him and grant loved him and everybody loved him, but he tells this story in which he claims he was visited by an attorney -- which right away it is a horrible story, right? who said, "are you sure that this is a good idea attacking,"

and nast was like, it seems to be working out fine. then he said, wouldn't you be happier if you took a nice european vacation, wouldn't it be fun to do with, say, $100,000? and nast started playing -- well, i think it was more, like $200,000. yeah, yeah. do you think $300,000 is too much. he gets him up to $500,000 before stopping the game and saying, dude, you got to go. so this is the story he told, was that he was bribed, and when that didn't work threatened, that people started lurking outside his house. that's what led him to -- first they rented a house and then they bought the house that they lived in for the rest of his live in new jersey. probably he believed that something like that happened. whether it actually happened it is hard to know. the material left behind by nast is so uneven, there's some little of it, it is so unpredictability, that knowing what really happened is hard. much of what's in the payne book is personal testimony. they would sit together at the

players club in new york around the fire and, you know, drink and talk, and that's great except that that's means that a lot of nast's voices in the stories in that book goes with the benefits that provides and with some of the dangers that that poses. i think we all want to believe that our lives are infused with drama, and some of that is real drama and some of that maybe is wishful drama. >> hi, scott schrader, bloomington, indiana. nast obviously used his illustrative abilities to advance or to express, use them as a vehicle for his own opinions on the politics of the day. you mentioned that the one political cartoon which was used part of the 1864 election as a propaganda piece only, is there any evidence that the republican party or others specifically asked him to draw certain cartoons or certain topics to advance agenda other than his own personal agenda? >> well, so there's plenty of evidence that lots of people did that, that everyone thought that

the way cartooning worked was you would send him a letter and say, hey, i have a great idea and you should make a cartoon about this. so all of the things about los angeles that make it annoying when your waiter wants to sell you a script in one package, and one of the reasons that we know is because his wife's cousin was a biographer, james parton, and he wrote about the process. one of the things that nast said to him was i can't be inspired like that, it doesn't work like that. you can't tell me something and have me create a cartoon. i have to feel it and be interested in it. so lots and lots of people tried to either inspire him in a particular direction, and most problematic throughout his career, his editor george edward curtis tried to get him to stop doing certain things on behalf of the republican party or in its interests, however you want to think about that. nast resisted all of that at every stage. he did not want other people to give him ideas and he never wanted to be told no. so the flip side of his fun

personality was that he was donkey like in his ability to dig in his heels and insist that he knew what was right. i think that's one of the things about him that fascinates people, is that it is so clear in his work that he's really there. this is him. this is not somebody who's for hire, and this is not somebody who is reflecting the views of his employers, for example, or even the party of which he was a member. he believed these things, and i think that's one of the explanations for his unpredictability and his inconsistency, is that like everyone his views changed sometimes or sometimes he considered a particular example different from other moments that you and i would think were kind of insane. so he would create cartoons that were inconsistent with what he had done before, and that's one of the signals that that's really him in there. so in terms of explicit pressure, the closest thing you will get is the pressure brought to bear on him by george curtis to stop, but in the other direction, everybody all the

time. thank you. [ applause ] >> friday night on american history tv, day three of the get ease burg college civil war conference.

work, of course, do the charity work, and then sit down and write your book. he will speak to us today about a topic and i am pleased to see we are not g t