participated in our 2017 student cam documentary competition. and student cam 2018 starts in september with the theme the constitution and you. we're asking students to choose any provision of the u.s. constitution and create a video illustrating why the constitution is important. next from the gettysburg college civil war institution the influence of political cartoonist thomas nast. from his popular christmas illustrations to depictions of the civil war. she talks about how the war transformed the political cartoonist. this is an hour. >> good afternoon. i'm peter car mikele. member of the history department at gettysburg college, i'm also the director of the civil war institute.

it's my pleasure to institute fee yoan nadean holland. she teaches in salt lake, utah. prior to her arrival at roll land hall she spent four years teaching at eastern kentucky university as well as several years in the history departments of bates college and ucla. many of us are familiar with joan, who she learned under, she is the author of a superb biography of grant. she completed her dissertation and it became a book, thomas nast, father of political

cartoons, it is my pleasure to welcome fionna. >> hi, i want to thank peter for inviting me here and ashley for all the help she provided as i prepare today come and spend this hour with you. i'm here to talk about thomas nast and what i'm going to do is to introduce him to you broadly at first and then talk about more specifically what the civil war did for thomas nast because i think it refined him in ways essential to his success later in life. we'll begin with an introduction and move into three things i think the war did for him. i had a conversation with an atte attendee who found this year's civil war institute was focussed on personalities and the effects of the war on real people and i think this session will be

entirely in keeping with that observation. so thomas nast was born in bah bavaria in 1840. he immigrated with his mother landing in new york, they were political ref few geos. in the years leading up to the revolution of 1848 he was warned he could get in trouble for what he believed. so he sent his family to new york for safety and then he followed behind them. nast began his life in netwow y with a rocky start. because he was unable to speak english at six years old he fell victim to a playful classmate who directed him on the first day of school to get in a line. nast did not realize that this

was the naughty line where you were going to get spanked. he went running home at lunch and told his mother he was never going back to school. that was in some ways true, nast did not enjoy education so he was constantly truant. by his teens he gave up on the concept of education and instead he went to work for frank leslie. he got this job in a way that he was proud of for the rest of his life. if you know any 15 year olds may ring bells he went to frank leslie and said, i am an artist, hire me. and frank leslie had a lot of personality himself so he was not unfamiliar with this kind of drama. but he wasn't taking nast serious. so he gave him a task to go down and draw an image of the ferry.

he didn't think this kid was going to do it. in fact, he went down for days and every days he would observe the gak grounds, drawing the backgrounds. he would observe what time the whistle blue, how blew and how he want it to look. and deciding on the framing he went and produced this attractive and thorough sketch. so he had to give him a job and so for the rest of his life he worked steady. if you know anything about frank leslie, you know he often didn't pay people who worked for him, which they didn't like very much. so he worked steady first for frank leslie and then for the new york illustrated news, for harpers weekly and it was at harper's weekly he built his

career. that was the thing that cat polted him into family and later fortune, but that's a sad story. in his prime he was the most famous cartoonist in america. 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. so one of the people that he worked with, one of the harpers that ran and owned the harper publishing fortune talked about how he came home to his brown stone in new york one day and was handing his coat and hat to his butler -- you know how brown stones areal and skinny. he heart what sounded like a herd of elephants. and said what is that noise. and the answer was thomas had come to speak with him and finding him not home he was plais playing chase with all the

children around the house. this was typical of nast. people loved him for this persona that embraced all that was fun and entertaining in life. he produced illustrations, cartoons and christmas drawings until the 1880s for harper's. people love these illustrations to this day. you can see there are some similarities here for example including his own children and backgrounds from his own home, more on that in a few minutes and some similarities in his por trarl of santa is consistent over time, particularly his red cheeks and how chubby he is, et cetera. these are so popular that today were you inclined to do so it's not difficult to obtain things like desert plates and christmas ornaments that feature his designs. it's rare for a pop cultural form to endure across so much

time and space and far beyond the death of its creator. in this case you can see there's no end to the popularity of his christmas illustrations. unfortunately as exciting as his career was it ended not with a bang but with a whimmer. his frantic pace in the early 1870s when he was defending president grant against charges of cesarism when he was attacking the tweed ring began to wear on his arm and shoulder. and 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 had made him so successful. and 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. he started to separate himself from the newspaper and by the late 1880s had done so for good. he tried to maintain his career by working for other papers but that failed. he tried to build a career as a painter, this is an example i'll let you judge for yourself. that failed, too. he tried to establish his own paper, nast's weekly which lasted seven months so i think we have to call that a failure. finally desperate to employment he turned to his connections in roosevelt's administration. here at last he succeeded. winning an appointment to ecckwi dor in july of 1902. if you read my book you know what's coming. by december he was dead of yellow fever, age just 62.

his death left behind a nearly destitute wife, an eldest son who idolized and emlated his father and worst of all for me and i realize that's shallow, an author with an unfinished biography. that buy on. fermanaged to complete his book, and when it appeared on bookshelves it attracted notice, it also attracted critics. there was a contemporary of nst who disagreed with him. he was not an original artist, he borrowed his best ideas from other people he made a habit of

plagiarism, i made that up but let's go with it. worst of all, he hadn't done anything in the civil war. now pain pushed back like you do defending nast on many fronts proving he was a cartoonist and significant in general was not a problem. touchier was proving nast had worked in the field was a little tougher. it's likely, it seems that nast had worked a little, had only limited contact though with the war itself. the war outside of new york's newspaper buildings a location not known for big battles. the thing i would say is that contact mattered to him, it changed him. that that's why if he were here today he would be delighted to

think of his work as part of the civil war institute. to him the war was personal. it made him. if he he were here, he would acknowledge that. so what is it that the war provided to him? i would say it provided him with three things the first thing to appreciate is that on the cusp of the war, he 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 was the kind of stuff he was attracted to at age 20 -- and he hadn't been paid for the work he did so that was frustrating to him. so from then tl he sailed to italy because he was attracted to the campaign to yuan fyuan fe the states. then he travelled to germany in search of relatives, he hoped rich relatives that would leave him money, that did not work

out. and then back to england effectively pennineless where h boarded a back back to new york city. he returned into this mall strom of political conflict that that period was characterized by. he had a little black book which is in the collection of the presidential library in freemont, ohio. one of the things they have in their collection is this little black book. for those of you who may be unfamiliar with this, men used to cary little books, which contained addresses, contacts of people they knew and a calendar so you could keep track of your appointments. that's what this was. and they have it and you can read it and it's charming. he liked to keep track of his money because he had hardly any.

it's very cute because he would write, sold an illustration, $1. well done, sir. it kept track of his courtship of the woman he want today marry. so it noted he took her to church and she agreed to go again next week. in that calendar, he wrote, from the boat 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, in retrospect. it's interesting to see how innocent it sounds. how he no idea what was happening and how important it was. he returned to new york, though, older and more confident that he had been when he left. he was preparing to ask his sweet heart to be his bride, spoiler alert, she said yes. they got married on his birthday. and he was ready -- we don't have a ton of clearly attributed

images of her. but one of the things that was adorable was he liked to portray his wife in his illustrations and paintings. so when you see a painting or illustration that has a female figure, chances are that's sally. so based on his drawings and his letters if you get a chance to see the small number of letter that is exist one of the things he would do is have sally write the text and he would illustrate the letters. it's almost certain this is sally and their two oldest children. as can you see this is someone one would certainly want to marry. nast was ready in 1861 for bigger more complicated challenges than he had ever tackled the war in that context was irresistible. the public desire for news about it stabilized 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 hissal tloent inform the public and return today a future which seemed limitless. which is characteristic of 21-year-old's but in his case it was not a misperception. he knew in that moment that the war would affect him and he welcomed that. he saw that 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 thing that is made him so interested in it. he embraced the experiences the war offered him. what were those things? i would say three broad categories. first the war helped to shape his view of good and bad, particularly when it came to leadership and patriotism. second it sharped his focus on issues of identity and citizenship for black americans

and immigrants, particularly the irish, and third it provided a period in his professional life where he broadened his reach from illustration toward what you and i would recognize as cartooning. so we're going to go through each of those and then i will welcome questions. so if we start with leadership. the war provided nast with a pantheon of heroic figures. he relied on a visual short hand. cartoonist exaggerate far beyond their normal parameters. that's part of the way they approach the images they create. you may be familiar with the fact that in steven se gal movies the guy is not a little bit bad he's as batd as possible he says all the bad words and kicks a puppies and breaks a car. there's nothing bad he doesn't

do just in case is t audience has somehow missed that this is, in fact, the bad guy. cartooning is like that, too. and cartoonist rely on this sense of who's on the side of right and who's on the side of wrong. the war helped nast to see this. providing this set of people he admired and people he thought were awful. he would rely on that for years. it defined what he thought heroism and villainny meant. the first hero was this man, who i think you know. u.s. grant occupied a special place. nast was a man with powerful enduring emotions. his work was successful because he channelled anxiouser and excitement into the drawings he produced. the same wave of gratitude and

affection, that swept over nast. so he messaged the general as the savior of the union and he never changed his mind about that. he honored grant for years and years for various things grant did, first for his role in the war, this is a famous cartoon at the end of the war, which you see grant 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 but nast did not waiver in his conviction. he was employed as an archetype of manhood. he would draw grant standing straight with his spine erect, very handsome. the object of positive attention

from the female symbol of the nation. here you can see this woman is drawn from life probably from sally. sometimes grant appeared -- this was true in the early '70s when the liberal republicans broke away -- as a rational adult in a city full of children. nast's admiration for grant was visible all the time. and it had two moments in which it was grounded in real life that are particularly valuable to point out or else merely capture my fancy because they are entertaining of nast. first in 1886 he helped the republicans to nominate grant for president. he was invited to paint the backdrop for the stage. so they had a curtain in front and behind that was a backdrop which nast had painted. it showed two pedestals he

painted grant on one, the other was empty because the democrats had not chosen their candidate. and above that he painted the challenge, match him. the implication was that was impossible. no one could match the savior of the union. once grant was the nominee the election was effectively over. as grant's letter of acceptance was read allowed, be the curtain dropped and the painting was revealed. one of the things about this that's entertaining as a side note it was reproduced, you can see this is from harper's weekly the image on the left is grant, you can see the attempt to show grant sympathetically as a kind of attractive masculine figure on the right the democratic candidate who nast has done bad

things, particularly with z regard to his hair. and you can see the shadow, as if the hair isn't enough -- he is a little batman like. is this the hero we deserve, that's the question. i included an engraving of seymour looking more normal. if you're able to see in the front at the very top the caption they've put on the top is matched question mark and the implication is no, not at all. that set of interactions didn't die in 1868. and some of you may recall that 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 was important for him occurred in 1872 when he went to

washington to observe politics firsthand, which he found thrilling. he wrote all these letters back to sally. if you go looking, there are letters by sally and letters written to sally. you know the letter is written by sally because the handwriting is beautiful and the spelling is correct. whereas letters written to sally resemble chicken scratch and are spelled in phonetic german accented english. which required me to read outloud to myself to the irritation of my neighbors. so he wrote back to her from washington and said it's amazing. he was so excited people came up to him at a cocktail party and threatened him. they said the harpers aren't going to let you defame me and he said, oh, ya. and nast was correct. the harpers backed him. he was in washington and received an invitation to lunch

with the president which was super exciting for him and that was followed by several further 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 because he recognized the story between them. it resulted in one visit to the grant home, after grant had left the presidency and he was returning to the united states after his world tour so when sally nast, through thomas asked what would the grants like for dinner, the president replied if they knew how sick he was of going to fancy banquets they would give him something more substantial. so they served the former president corned beef and cabbage. they think he liked it. they said he liked it.

i think all host ess like to believe their guests enjoy the dinner. but in this case maybe he did. so he had this real life interaction with grant and this emphasis on his work. but the war provided other figures, too. for example, abraham lincoln who nast prosituationed as a father. a man who desired peace in the midst of war and a resolve against all odds to ensure victory but also integrity, all of the things that lincoln articulated as goals of the war. nast believed in them. lincoln came to represent as well approve of some of the chases brought by emancipation. as you can see, that red arrow points to the fact that the centerpiece here of this cartoon and this arrangement with the

circle in the middle is characteristic of nast in these years. in the center circle he's drawn a 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 over all of this from above the man tell is abraham lincoln. he was also portrayed as a partner of george washington as a symbol of idealism. this is later when nast asserts a diverse national american identity. and creates this table in which the portraits on the wall that look down on the sell brants are abraham lincoln, george washington and grant. you get a sense how these men became to be symbols of what

nast believed it was to be an american and to be the best american loeadership. lincoln's untimely death cemented this for nast. it was one of the first instances he channelled his artistic talents to mourning. and it helped him to see lincoln in a way different than 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, more powerful. so not everyone is a hero naturally. somebody has to be batman. and for nast this was andrew johnson among other people. you may recognize the image on the right. nast delighted in making fun of president johnson as a villain

nous fool. if there was something he did not lay at johnson feet i would like to know what it is. perhaps getting hair cuts too frequently. another villain was nathan bedford forrest who served as a symbol of the violence of the war and postwar period. and so nathan bedford forest pops up periodically in his cartoons after the war as a person who is sort of the bog giman of the post war period and changes the people are trying to achieve in the united states. the important thing i think in this category was it helped nast to work out his views what about americans had a right to expect from their leaders. he refined those views in the late 1860s through the the 1870s

and found them challenged by the politics of the 1880s. but nevertheless it's clear 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 of who was and who was not american. these were important questions to him because he was an immigrant himself he had struggled to learn to speak, read and write in english and it was an imperfect process in those categories his whole life. he idolized the american dream and family. he wanted to be somebody. not just be an american but be an american that other people thought of as icon cli american, truly and fundamentally american. so this question of who got to be american was very important to him, personally as well as professionally. the first challenge that the war brought occurred in the summer

of 1863 and here we encounter one of the things that characterized his life which is a story he told which is a little muddled. which is very common for him. so he had been traveling trying to get here to gettysburg to observe and report on the battle. but instead ended up semi arrested. it's not clear if he was arrested formally and held for several days in the custody of the provos marshal. he said he had been traveling and he encountered his wife's english cousin john and decided to go together. the union patrol stopped them and searched john's back and found a confederate flag. nast protested that he was a journalist and he was doing nothing suspicious at all, he was neither a spy nor cousin in

law to a spy. the problem was when the army tried to verify who he was, this was prefame, they came to harper's weekly in sfwhoand all staff had gone away for the break and the person whose word would have affirmed employment had gone to his country house. so nobody answered these cables for days. so nast wrote increasingly letters to sally about how frustrated he was to be stuck doing nothing this muddy camp. ultimately he missed the battle of gettysburg and returned home to new york frustrated and disappointed. and, of course, that was not the greatest time to return to new york because no sooner had he gotten home than the draft riots brought four days of massive unrest to the city. including attacks on the homes of ablish nis the burning of the

colored orphan asiem lum. and many, many lynchings. nast reported on and drew images of this violence. 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 and it helped to inform his an ttipathy towards e irish. he grew up in manhattan very close to the five points neighborhood, he spent his entire childhood in the company of irish and german and other immigrants, so this was not a new encounter for him but it was powerful and 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've seen a couple examples of this but if you look on the left you can see he's drawn in the burning colored orphan asylum

and next to it a man on a street lamp who's been lynched and below it a stock character from his stable of stereo types, the irish thug. that particular set of images appears over and over again. i have this green thing -- look at that. so shiny. so all of that and almost exactly like that appears six, eight, ten times over the next decade or so in his cartoons and it came toob kind of shorthand for violence perpetrated for racist reasons, in defiance of the state, et cetera. this draft riot, his experience of it coverage of it as a professional it complicated his view of american identity as welcoming to all. instead he embraced, not always but sometimes with ugly venom, the idea that some people were suited to full citizenship than

other people. the second challenging set of events unfolded more slowly. they had to do with african-american. he celebrated the emancipation proclamation. but as the war progressed and particularly as the u.s. colored troops began to demonstrate courage and patriotism, nast became more convinced that the status of black americans was a test of morality. he would pair violence of the black people with elements of the nation he didn't like or he thought should be suppressed. he would also assert in many cartoons, the citizenship rights of black people in multiple i did mengs including with regard to education, employment, voting rights and the right to safety, physical and familial safety. you can see his question about

whether or not slavery is dead or not. you can see in these cartoons his protests against some of the violence visited upon free people during the years which reconstruction was attempting to change the role of black americans in social, political and economic life. in the upper left a famous image which the man asks is this a form of republican government as he kneels sup pli cant to got. a small image which thekkk shakes hands it says worse than slavery. the image on the viegt raright y reproduced but it's interesting in a modern complex because the suggestion is that if black people are unable to achieve what they are entitled as citizens through legal means and peaceful change they are likely to defend their lives, families

and rights with violence. and that is quite an unusual thing to see in his work or other cartoons from this period. particularly it's unusual in it seems quite admiring. he thinks there's something manly and impressive about the fact that black men take up arms not just to defend the country but to defend themselves and he seems to think they have every right to do so. i don't want to suggest that nast avoiding stereo typing. even a passing famility with his work shows that's not true at all. but he seems to have embraced during the war a vision of the nation that honored military service and sacrifice, honored the family. so for example you can see on the left contrasts the life under slavery with the life under freedom on the right after

emancipation. some of the things he emphasizes is the separation of families under slavery through sale whereas on the right he shows a charming doe waves off the little boy as he goes off to public school with his puppy by his side, which would be wonderful if that actually happened. so there's a way in which nast's interest in the family, which was significant, his commitment to the gentle ideology and to 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 it's clear he's trying to create this americanized

home. he has a vision of what that is supposed to look like and he has tried to build it. and if you visit morristown, new jersey, and you 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 reflects 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 of himself as that. and especially -- any time he drew in letters, himself and his wife, his wife would always be tall and slender and lovely and well dressed and there would be this little piggy man next to her. so he doesn't seem to -- but he went to a lot of trouble to look good, right, because he was fulfilling this role. his reading habits. he and sally would read the newspapers together in the morning and evening, they read shakespeare and mccauley. he was trying to produce for himself what he had lost through formal education, to

become this 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 this house. so in this image, you can see just a little bit, right? 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 hard pressed to put your glasses down because there's so much stuff in there. then there's a screen in front of the fireplace, 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 ever have a chance to look at the auction catalogues, some of which have been scanned in by archives, 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. like i would like to have a medieval knight in my house. thomas nast had several.

he would just go shopping and buy all these things and then fill up his house. and it's partly because he was 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 reflected his effort to define himself and his identity, and the war pushed him to think more about 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 fundamental sense, 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 more obvious to everyone, he began to produce what often was imaginary scenes. it's pretty clear he wasn't there, with battles, with units, other things. that 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. right. modernity, amok other things, meant a kind of practicality 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. because he begins with these very sentimental images like this one. love. it is christmas, he gets to come home. it's 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 built 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. so the cartoons came last in this progression. by 1864 he was regularly producing images that dramatized the war as a political struggle. probably the most famous of them is this one. an image so effective in 1864 that the republicans reprinted it as a campaign poster. and nast liked to bragg. that is a complete sentence. but we can extent 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 yet 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 his 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 a 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, witty, cutting, optimistic, romantic at times. so the war forged nast and shaped everything about what the rest of his life would hold. some of you were amused by this image. this is a much early image. he was in his 50s here. and he had

become friends with an early portrait photographer in new york. they would apparently have dress-up sleepovers where they would get together and nast would try stuff and then they would take pictures. he's beautifully groomed. he's very serious. he's an important person. and yet there is this element of play in him that is always a delight. i think that 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. it's been necessary to skim very lightly over his work. 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 ]

no fighting. everyone will get a turn. okay. >> lee fisher, from oxford, ohio, miami university. considering what we're faced with today compared to his lifetime, has -- do you think in 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 meant it was possible for the first time to put out a paper 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 memes and political satire has not gone anywhere. so i think i'm quite hopeful about it. 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 he did when he was very young had to do with the scandals in the city. for example, the swelled milk scandal of the 1950s. swelled milk is milk that has been adultered 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 as 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 has come to this set of opinions that are totally inconsistent with some of his other 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 see colbert as making 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 of 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 he existed i guess. based on that it is clear he was widely read and celebrated in many parts of the country. when albert bigelow payne approached nast wanting to write his biography, the story he told was that as a child in iowa

people had gotten "harper's weekly" and passed around copies of it. when he was a kid 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's nast? there is an indication there was this wide reception -- probably the best example is that when he did chalk talk -- you may be familiar with the talk, with behaviors 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" except with chalk. he hated this because he was so freaked out by public speaking he just wanted to die. he would write letters to sally like, get me out of here.

what if i pretend i'm sick? 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 misunderstood. many people who disagreed with him understood what he was saying and then hated him for it and then made fun of him and thought everything he did was terrifying. it is not quite the same as the examples that you gave, but i don't know it would be possible to determine that. and if we wanted to, how we would go about it. >> i would like for you to comment a little about his attack on the tweed ring. and a little bit more about his political cartooning. >> uh-huh. >> because of the intricacy and the detail that is involved. it's just not caricature. >> yes, that's true. >> but the detail that was included in that artwork is fascinating. >> well, and what's interesting is that a lot of these early drawings are even more detailed. if you get a chance to look at them upclose, they're even more

detailed than the latter cartoons. i think what's great about the car teens is they combine a really developed talent for caricature with intense detail. both with regard to the details of the political scandal itself and with regard to the portrayal of the details visually. lastly, something that is tangible, a sense of humor or and ability to make it funny, so like when you are watching political satire today you shake your head because it is funny 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. and essentially he had three things that went together in those years, about 2 1/2 years 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 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 like six or seven cartoons a week, and they were this big and as detailed 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 both really admirable when you look at those 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 campaign against political corruption. >> and i think, if i'm not mistaken, i think you need a reason to move to new jersey, but i think it was the threats. >> that's what he said. >> to his family. >> i mean -- >> he was living in new york city. >> yes. >> and he moved to new jersey. to raise his family. >> 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, this is a horrible story, right. who said, "are you sure that this is a good idea attacking boss tweet."

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 that be fun to do with, say, $100,000? and nast started playing. well, i think it would be more fun, 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 so little of it, it is so

unpredictable, 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 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 william curtis tried to get him to stop doing certain things on behalf of the republican party or in his interest, 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 his heels in 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 the same. 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 ]

our presentations on the civil war will resume in a moment as we continue showing you american history tv programs normally seen weekends here on c-span 3. coming up, historians discuss the impact of general braxton bragg, the commander of the army of tennessee, and called the most hated man of the confederacy. then a review of general robert e. lee's military strategy and battlefield leadership. followed by why president james buchanan is blamed for failing to avoid the civil war. and later, general henry hallic, the commander of all of president lincoln's armies. american history tv continues tonight in prime time

with recent civil war conferences. tonight, programs from day three of the gettysburg college civil war institute conference including discussions on union general george g. mean and the experience of escaped union prisoners of war. american history tv prime time begins at 8:00 p.m. eastern. >> coming up this weekend open "american history tv" on c-span 3. saturday at 10:00 p.m. eastern on "reel america." the u.s. office of war film why we fight, the battle of china. >> three facts must never be forgotten. china is history. china is land. china is people. >> on sunday at 11:30 a.m. eastern, political economy professor and author robert

wright on alexander hamilton's views of the national debt. >> many ha hamilton advised then of an energetic government, one that did one thing well for as little money as possible. that one thing was to protect american's lives liberty and property from tyrants foreign and domestic. >> at 7 p.m. eastern, new jersey residents and activists discuss the 1967 newark rebellion. >> there were 268 reports of sniper fire. zero snipers were ever found. >> zero. >> no evidence of any snipers. no gun shells other than the police gun shells. no footprints. no fingerprints. nothing was found. and yet 26 people were killed, one policeman, one fireman, the rest citizens, all by the three police forces that were operating.

>> american history tv. all weekend every weekend only on c-span 3. c-span's coverage of the solar eclipse on monday starts at 7:00 a.m. eastern with the "washington pos washington journal live in green belt, maryland. our guests are a nasa research space scientist. and the chief scientist at gl goddard. at noon eastern, we join nasa tv as they provide live views of the eclipse's shadow passing over north america. at 4:00 p.m. eastern, viewer reaction to this rare solar eclipse over the continental united states. live all day coverage of the solar eclipse on monday starting at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span and c-span.org. listen live on the fleet c-span radio app and this saturday, we'll take a look at preparations for the first solar eclipse over the united states in 100 years. plus, programs on the nasa budget, mars exploration and

more. beginning at noon eastern on c-span. >> next, from the gettysburg college civil war institute, confederate general braxton bragg. historian earl he is titled his biography of the general the most hated man of the confederacy. general bragg was the commander of the erm an of tennessee in 1862 and 1863. mr. hess now on the successes and failures of the general civil war campaigns. this is an hour. >> earl's going to speak to us today about a topic. i'm pleased to see we're not going to hear crickets here because the topic is braxton bragg who is the butt of all jokes and of course civil war histori histori historians. not a particularly humorous crew. they always fall back on what, it's either braxton bragg or george g. mccullen to get off their cheap jokes. those cheap jokes over time