is very much

directly related to our online exhibition. who counts. i hope you'll all check it out if you have not done so already it's a great show and somehow incredibly relevant these days the show was originally planned to be a physical show at the mass historical society and as a part of that physical show, we had intended to dedicate one room to thomas nast the father of american political cartoon. obviously that didn't happen, but we did build an online exhibition as a companion website that explores the the life of thomas nast. this is a really fun project all the illustrations in it were done by local independent artists. so i hope that you will check that out if you have if you're interested in this program. that brings us to this evening's program which will include fiona deen tolerant and pat bagley.

will be speaking on the life of thomas next was a pioneer in american political cartoons. he created or popularized the republican elephant the democratic donkey and the modern depictions of santa claus while he helped create modern american visual culture. he also presented conflicting and sometimes disturbing depictions of african-americans. these two experts will help us better understand nast in his legacy fiona dean holland is the author of thomas nast the father of modern political cartoons. she holds a phd in american history from ucla and has been supported in her research by grant from the neh the guilder lerman institute the huntington library and the university of oxford. she now teaches in san diego, california. bagley is the longest continually employed full-time editorial cartoonist in america. he has created over 10,000 cartoons in the 40 years.

he's worked at the salt lake tribune. he has won dozens of awards. um, including being a finalist for the pulitzer prize and was just selected as the national cartoonist society as best editorial cartoonist of the year. so following their conversation, we will open it up for q&a, but we encourage everyone to use the q&a function at the bottom of their screen and i just point out that you can actually type in questions anytime during the program if it's particularly irrelevant to the subject being discussed. they might be answered or we'll try to get to them at the end. so without further i do i would encourage pat and fiona to join us. what we've been asked to do is to begin by talking about thomas nest both generally and in specific terms, and so we have some images of thomas nast beginning with a picture of nast himself. to show you this is my favorite

picture of thomas nas both because i think he looks particularly handsome in this picture. he was a person who was very humble in the sense that he was often self-deprecating, but he was also actually quite proud of his talent and happy with the celebrity that he earned in the 19th century, and i think that you see that in this picture how much funnies having he and his friend napoleon serenity who was a photographer used to sort of play dress up and take pictures and that's what's happening here. is that he put on this rough and a blanket and his posing for cerrone in his studios in new york. thomas nast um was a immigrant to the united states. he arrived in new york at six in 1846. and came with his mother and his sister. they left his native landau bavaria because his father was outspoken politically which turned out to be a family trait as it happened and had to leave

in anticipation of the revolution of 1848 and nastin his mother and sister made a life for themselves in lower manhattan and asked transformed himself in the course of the 10 years or so after his arrival in the united states. from really in some ways kind of a lost little boy into a really talented artist. he was not an academic person. he didn't love school. and by the time he was 13 or 14. he was basically on the streets every day. he had stopped going to school and he did things like he went to art galleries and talked to the owners into letting him sit around drawing what he saw in the paintings or collect admissions quarters at the door. and eventually at 15 he managed to get a professional position with a very precarious illustrated newspaper frank leslie's illustrated news. drawing and also working in the engraving room. and from there he went to several different places to work

ultimately landing at what would be his primary employer for much of the rest of his career harper's weekly, which was the most widely read the most popular illustrated newspaper of the time harper's weekly had an incredible circulation as high as almost 300,000 copies which since copies were passed from hand to hand and often posted in public places like pubs. many many more people than that saw it. so it was really quite an impressively widely read newspaper slash magazine and he became over the course of a couple of decades an anchor in that institution the face of that institution in some ways. he didn't write for it. but his cartoons were what everybody knew and they helped to shave the politics of the newspaper the politics of those decades. and beginning during the civil war era but really significantly in its aftermath between about 1868 and the early 1880s thomas

nast was a visual voice. if that's not mixing too many modes of communication for republican politics in the united states and for all kinds of issues important national issues related to reconstruction related to electoral politics to social change. um, and he pioneered a bunch of things about american political cartooning not least the editorial independence of political cartoonists, which is something that pat and i talk about later. i'm going to emphasize several things about nas that i think are particularly important for understanding nests position relative to voting. but first, i want to hand it over to pat because he also wants to make some remarks because now asked was the father of american political cartooning not the first political cartoonist to be influentially united states, but the first to really make a life out of it and to create a world for consumption of political cartoons as a form of politics and also as a form of visual

entertainment especially of satire he is a central figure for all political cartoonists in this country and so pat as influential widely read and appreciated political cartoonists. this is a person for whom against him. pat is in some ways in dialogue at all times. so pat, why don't you take it away and talk for a little while and and then i'll come back. thanks, fiona. you're you're absolute right about his centrality to american cartooning and you have to kind of understand what? a media was like back then because back then media and magazines or i'm newspapers and magazines. were the media they were everything. and newspapers around the country every city in america had three four five newspapers and usually they were projecting some political view a but all

these newspapers also had at least two or three cartoonists because you couldn't do photographs in the paper and he had to have somebody illustrate them. and so being a cartoonist back that was a viable thing to do today in america. i am competing with. the internet the facebook with twitter and you know all these memes that are going around back then they owned all of it and thomas nast was one of the best and he was huge. i mean, he was a rock star back then, you know everybody knew who nassed was. anyway, let's go and this is why he's so influential. this is why these images are so influential. let's go to the first. picture so get santa claus right you recognize santa claus. but before nest santa claus

could be skinny make it be tall many different versions of santa claus nast came from germany and he brought his own german version of santa claus to america and this is the santa claus that we still recognize today, you know fat and jolly, right? kind of a big deal there's another thing that he did. first politically so that we could recognize things and he was i could tell by the way he was cartooning. he was trying to figure it out, but he gave us his legacy of the elephant and the donkey. could we go to the next cartoon? okay, so there you see the elephant the republican vote. and there is a donkey wearing a lion's mane. bring like an --, right and that's the democratic party and then that all these other animals that represent different things, but he's still trying to work out and i can definitely

the relate to he's doing here. how about the next one? okay, there you see and that's not lincoln in the background fiona. do you remember what who that is? it's it's culture. yeah, sure. yeah. sure. but a republican and it says on the elephant pretty much led sleeping dogs lie, you know their economic plan seems to be okay. and this guy in the foreground thomas? bittered, is that right? he's trying to keep the democrats from doing something really economically dumb. you know pulling him back off from the cliff. let's go to the next one. again, here is an election where the republicans win but they get beat up really badly in the process. so anyway, he institutes he institutionalizes these images. of the elephant being the

republicans and the donkeys being the democrats. and we still use it today like for instance the next cartoon. this is my cartoon. and this is about the amy coney barrett confirmation. his democrats saying amy coney barrett is the elephant says what you mean catholic listen to this atheist bigot smear woman for her faith. in a duck isn't that's not i'm not oh, so now you're calling me a liar. look at me being persecuted. so it's it's a handy shorthand to use when you're doing cartoons. okay, let's go to the last one. okay, this is kind of personal. i'm here in utah, salt lake city, utah. and one of the things you have to know about nest is he was kind of anti-catholic. and so you hear here you see the capital dome? and on it is written religious

liberty is guaranteed. but can we allow foreign reptiles to crawl all over? us us and in the left you see this crocodile. calling up on top of the capital dome, but if you look at it sideways that mouth of the crocodile is kind of like the bishops miter. it's kind of like the pope's hat. okay, and on the right side? you've got that this is a the tabernacle in salt lake city is the shell of the turtle? and that's the mormon church. and this is kind of curious in a few ways like for instance. why are you calling the mormon church of foreign reptile? well, that's because back in the day back in the time when he was doing these cartoons. the mormon church the lds church was mostly made up of immigrants. and so i thought about you know

making. a turtle a representative of you know mormon utahans, but didn't quite work. but we have we'll have more to say about. nest and his view of the catholic church. later on, and that's the last slide that i've got. but like i say he worked with these images and he was developed developing them all the time some of them stuck. like the santa santa kind of stuck and the donkey and the elephant definitely stuck. this you know catholics being represented by crocodile and mormons being represented by a turtle didn't quite stick. okay back to you. well, so one of the things that the mhs is at the moment and

given their planning process has clearly been interested in for quite some time. is the question of voting and what i'm really thankful to them for tonight is the opportunity to talk about nest in that framework. because people are fascinated by nast but they're often interested in particular components of nasa's work. so i think we're all interested in santa at various times of the year because that iconography is all around us in this country and his contribution to it is essential. um, but voting especially voting that is heavily is fraught with significant consequences. that's something that's more iterative. it's sometimes more important to us and other times we take a breather from thinking about it. for now, that was an essential component of his thinking about american citizenship about what it meant to be part of the nation and about how decisions

are made where power lies. it's absolutely true what pat says about nast being a celebrity. he went to washington in the early 1870s. um, which was a very productive time for him professionally and personally he and his wife had several children in those years. and he was amazed himself. he wrote letters back to his wife saying i'm famous everywhere. i go people want to shake my hand and other people give me the side eye and of course didn't say side-eye, but that's what it was. he was at a party in washington in those years where carl shorts who was in the cartoon password earlier came up and essentially threatened him said to him like if you don't stop drawing me that i'm gonna call up the harper brothers and they'll fire you and nast being who he was cartoonists tend to be pugnacious. it's not a good idea to start a fight with a cartoonist. it will not go well for you and that's essentially said to this

senator try me bring it. and sure enough when the question was litigated in a bunch of letters back and forth between nast and nests editor george william curtis, who was the sort of person who had a lot of coffee dates with senators. um nests actual boss fletcher harper the man who was the owner and operator a publisher of harper's weekly his position was we're not in the business of making senators happy. we're in the business seeing on american politics and if senator schertz is unhappy, i guess that's his problem. and so nast was vindicated in this moment, but he said openly in conversations he had for a while. he engaged in a really popular form of lecture not unlike what we're doing tonight the lyceum circuit in which people who were prominent would tour the country giving talks and given that there wasn't a ton to do in the

evening in the 19th century, especially in the winter time, which was the season for these kinds of talks. and if those of you who are familiar with the chautauqua series, that's the same thing folks like thomas nest would show up in your town and they would give a lecture and everyone would go and pay a couple of dollars for the opportunity to listen to him talk in his case. he would do chalk talks where there would be a chalkboard and he would draw while he talked. and he used and he had a prepared set of remarks that he gave which he was extremely anxious about he wrote all kinds of letters home to his wife about how he hated it and it was horrible and he would give anything not to have to do it and could he tell them that he was sick and they would go home he was so nervous. um, and one of the things he said in this prepare we have the remarks they've survived and in archival collections and one of the things he says is he talks about um giving he talks about

how an exhibition of caricatures that he went to and how he walked around listening to people comment on their own caricatures on what they thought of being caricatured. and how unhappy it made people how they loved other people's characters and they laughed and i thought it was hilarious and then they got to themselves in this set of images and suddenly it was just not funny at all. and how dare they and so this is the world he lived in in which he produced an artistic product a political commentary that people loved that. they consumed widely that they celebrated him for but he also antagonized a ton of people and so for every fan, he also had an enemy. and it's true. also what pat says about shorthand images such as the ones we see on the screen right now one of the things political cartoonists do which patent i can talk about later is they they employ or they originate? images that we can all recognize instantly because one of the

benefits of political cartooning as opposed to political analysis in print i'm political analysis in in language is that you can look at the cartoon and get the point instantly. so for example, if we were to go back to the image from two pictures ago of the elephant this image. um, the point that nest was making here and he quotes as the caption one more such fight and i shall be undone the point. he's making is that sometimes a victory right a pyrrhic victory in this case. a victory is so hard-fought and hard wine that it's not really worth it it that you've harmed yourself. by what it took to to win and that was his view in this case. and so one of the things he's using here is a symbol that everyone who was his fan would recognize of the republican party and then he has created an image in which you understand without having to think about it without having to interpret what

you're seeing that the party is in trouble. that the party may have won but that victory is a problem for the future. and so the value of shorthand for cartoonists is now and was then that the viewer can get the joke just like that. and that's desirable. it's what makes political cartooning entertaining and and preferable for some folks or in some circumstances to reading an editorial right, which is longer. it requires you to really focus a cartoon can catch your attention amuse you and provoke you much more quickly and it does that in part because it knows that you will recognize some of these symbols. so i want to focus on and highlight because of the excellent online exhibit that the mhs has created in which and i should say before i go to that there is a whole section in the exhibit that talks about how cartoonists work what they do and it includes a discussion of the creation of symbols and the

ways that the milk images are used in cartooning. so if you're interested in cartooning in general and it's component parts, the mhs has created a subsection of the exhibit for you. but i want to focus in part on on four things. i think are important to know about nest when it comes to voting because that's really what the exhibit is about is. how cartoonists approach voting? and i do have a couple of images to show you but there are also images that are in the exhibit. that i think are important so i want to start by talking about voting as central to citizenship and this is a very provocative image of nas. i'm going to talk about in a minute, but i i not talking about it first so you can have a chance to look at it. oh, or we can look at something else. it's whatever that's good. that's good. it works. i'm i find this image really fascinating, but the first thing i want to talk about is how central mass thought that voting was to citizenship in the exhibit online the mhs includes a high quality image of a paired cartoon by nest shall i trust

these men and not this man? this was a cartoon from after the civil war in which nas essentially said why are we allowing confederates? particularly confederate leaders generals people like jefferson davis? why would we ever welcome those people back into full citizenship including voting rights? so he's commenting on the pardon policy under johnson. when we have not welcomed to full citizenship, which means voting rights black veterans and so shall i trust these men and has the confederate leadership coming to lady liberty and asking for forgiveness and then the the companion panel on the other side of harper's weekly showed her gesturing 2 standing next to her a black veteran who had lost a leg and in the image is the ballot box, which the mhs has featured as one of the core components of cartoon representations of voting and that is a good example of nest's view of voting as central to citizenship from his point of

view. you could not be equal within the united states if you are not free to vote and so he repeatedly created cartoons in which the right to vote was the right to be an american. so the second one which i think we see here in some ways and then i'll come back to this in a later one too. is that nast always emphasized that voting was potentially dangerous? he understood that to vote was to put yourself at the center of the action and because of that to vote meant that you were vulnerable to the opposition of other americans and that opposition might not be at the ballot box set up position might be deadly. and so one of the things you see here is a portrayal by him of a man who is ready and able to defend his right to vote. this is part of a series of cartoons that are about the effort to suppress the vote of black men particularly black

veterans during reconstruction, and it's very common in nascar news. you'll see it in the next one to show a black man who has been murdered to prevent his voting so you can see that here. this is called one vote less and in many cases the cap including this one the captions and the materials that are written into the cartoon are drawn from statements in southern newspapers. so if that's the case here with the richmond wig, so what nas did was he was shocked not only by the violence against black voters in the former confederacy. he was also shocked by the glee with which that violence was greeted in some publications in those states and so he often would simultaneously attack the vi. self and defend by extension the black voter and also attack the idea that this was desirable that this was the way that the white populations of those places were going to ensure their own right to vote.

was by suppressing the vote of black men. and so if we return to the previous slide one of the things you can see is there are many cartoons by nasty which we see black voters and sometimes their families too who have suffered so for example in the online exhibit there's patients on a monument which shows a black veteran at the top of a monument. the monument itself is covered in quotes from southern newspapers that celebrate the suppression of black voters and at the bottom of the monument is this man's wife and two children who are dead. this is a very different cartoon and one of the things i find really compelling about. it is nast's placement of this man right at the center. he's made some artistic choices that emphasize the potential violence in this image. the man looks directly at us for example with his eyes wide open. his finger is on the -- of his the of the gun, right he is ready to use that weapon.

and he's surrounded by the results of this racist violence. and so one of the things nast is saying very openly here which he often. he wasn't always this straightforward is that there's only so much violence anyone will tolerate before they defend themselves and that white americans needed to understand that voting was such a central component of american identity that black men would be moved probably to defend it and that when they did the fault in that the source that violence would not lie with them. but rather with what had been done to them. and i want to emphasize that he really believed in the centrality. of voting for citizenship, but he knew he always knew that voting was something that could come with a price and that voting was something that put you in a sights, so to speak of people who didn't want you to participate. third we have to confront and

this image is a complicated part of that the fact that nasts himself held racist views and so one of the things about nas that's really complicated. is that not only was he anti-catholic and anti-irish which went together sometimes and other times could be separated in his work. um, he was also not a believer in black equality. so he believe very deeply in the right of black americans black men to vote. he did not really support women voting in general. or really many of the other things about what women were asking for in the 19th century. so he was sometimes a passionate defender of the rights of black americans to be equals in terms of citizenship and to be equals socially to own land and to have safe families. but there are other instances in which and they are on the online exhibit in which asked portrayed black voters as ignorant as

easily led by the republican party and as sometimes people who are not yet fit for full citizenship including voting and so it's a balance in his work between the parts of his work which were groundbreaking for his time in their defense of equality and justice andtest. t test. test. test. test. test. test. test. f many of the concerns about voting and about its honesty which animated political discourse at that time and which continues to be a

concern for us today. that was a central part. he knew that not only could you prevent people from voting a form of corruption in voting, but that also you could manipulate systems of voting and his position was that all corruption and politics was a problem. he was very black and whiteness thinking in that regard and that in particular that voting had a kind of sacred nature and tampering with voting was something that was at the very top of the sins committed in the course of political corruption. so those are the four things that i think are the most important and i think they connect very meaningfully to what the mhs has done online and then so pat and i were planning for a little while to to talk with each other about cartooning and politics and then to entertain questions. so if i could ask our moderators, they they can take the screen down and pat and i can be visible if that's okay with everybody.

okay, so pat one of the things i wanted to ask you about. is that throughout his career as you know, thomas asked was? pressure constantly by people to back off. and he constantly received well-meaning suggestions. oh, yeah, and so so i'm curious since you are such a successful cartoonist and have been for so long how that balance works for you and what you think of nest's nest's efforts to establish editorial independence. you know, nothing has changed. by publisher has is part of the fabric of the community in utah and he's received a lot of pressure to reign me in. and i've got to say that he's he's done this right and then he said i can't i read him in.

and he's given me a lot of liberty to do what i need to do to be successful to be a good cartoonist and you mentioned that you know thomas nasty currently got a lot of suggestions where you should draw this and that and that i you know, almost every single day. somebody says do this cartoon and and you don't even have to pay me. but you know usually put a respond to is not, you know ideas for cartoons, but subjects for cartoons, you know, if somebody sends in an email and they say you should address this issue. i'll think about it go, you know, you may have something there. absolutely. i think it's your turn to ask a question. okay. okay. that's question. so a little well. thomas nast moved to new jersey, correct? and so this has got be a good.

25 30 years ago that i went to visit friends in new jersey and visit friends in new jersey and they took m captioning performed by vitac and it was actually for sale at the time. and it wasn't that expensive. it was a big house. but it was kind of run down. and i thought, you know, i could maybe get enough resources because it wasn't that much and the economy at the time wasn't that great. but i'm curious whatever happened to the mansion. i don't know if you know -- >> it's still there -- yeah, it's still there. it's in morristown. i'm looking at my book for a list of illustrations. because it's still there and it's a private home, but you can look at it. there is a museum in a home to him which contains many objects related to him.

but as i understand it, it is not the same house. i have a photograph of the house in my book -- i'm seeing if i can find it -- and he loved that house. he and his wife moved -- there we go. got to love technology. there's the house. >> there you go. >> yeah. it's a perfectly nice house. he and his wife moved there because he said he had been threatened by boss tweed, which his story was -- and it's hard to know how much this story was nasty and exaggeration and how much of it was absolutely true. but he -- his story was that he noticed some big, hulking folks lurking outside of he and his wife's house in harlem which was a village at the time. and was aware that was probably intimidation from the tweed

ring. and then a lawyer came for "t" and offered him a great deal of money if he would go on vacation to europe for, say, a year or two, which he declined. and then essentially said to him, well, if you won't take this offer to go on vacation, then things will not be good for you. and he was the type of person to respond to that by working twice as hard and hitting twice as hard. but he had a wife and small child and he was not inclined to put them in a position to be afraid. and so they moved to morristown and a few months later, the records are a little unclear, they bought that house and then he spent the next couple of decades fancying it up. and i don't mean fixing it up. doing things like go to the centennial in 1876 and buying -- as far as one can tell -- everything in sight. he bought a stair rail, he

bought fencing. i didn't know you could buy a fence out at a fair. but he did. and you can kind of see what the house would have been like if you look at some of his christmas illustrations that have backgrounds. because the backgrounds were drawn from his own home. and so when you see the christmas illustrations where there's a mantle and all this stuff on the walls, that's his house. and also there are in archival collections, there's an auction list. when he died, his belongings were auctioned. in these lists you get a sense of what this house must have been like. there are whole categories for suits of armor and daggers and silver cups. and so he filled it with interesting things that he liked to look at. >> he was a shopper. >> yeah. and then he used those things as props in his art. >> okay. >> many people are aware that the women in his cartoons are almost always his wife, sally,

who he would draw. and so he had various props in the house. if you see a cartoon and there's a suit of armor, probably that's a suit of armor that was in his house. and it was inspiring. he liked to surround himself with interesting-looking things. yeah, that house is still there. it looks like it's been fixed up. i think you missed your moment. >> you're talking about his wife sally. >> yes. >> and i think i remember this from your book. she was very elegant and he was kind of short and dumpy, is that right? >> he was. when they first were dating in 1860 and 1861, they -- there's a series of letter that survive between them where they refer to him as little piggy. and then when they went on honeymoon they went to niagra falls which was the hot thing to do for middle class couples at the time. and they wrote letters back to her parents. by that point, his family was

gone. they wrote to her mother. and she wrote the letter because her handwriting was elegant. whereas his handwriting was atrocious and his spelling was terrible. >> he's a cartoonist. >> well, that's true. but i think also when you -- he arrived at age 6 and spoke german, but he didn't read or write because he was too young and he went to school and everyone spoke english and he couldn't understand and he had a couple of bad experiences where, for example, he got spanked because another kid played a trick on him. and he just hated school. and so his education was very rich in the sense that he and sally read shakespeare and the newspaper every day. he had never learned to write, learned to spell. she wrote their letters. in the honeymoon letters, her beautiful handwriting, she's writing all of the stuff and

he's drawing little pictures. you can see it in the library. he's drawn these little pictures. in the pictures, she's tall and slender and elegant and he truly is a little troll. if you're familiar in "peanuts" the kid who always has a cloud of dirt around him, that's the way he drew himself. yeah, he was very self-deprecating in that regard. if you look at photographs of him, he was beautifully dressed. he was beautifully groomed. he was an elegant man. >> the whole self-deprecation thing appeals to me. >> yeah. yes. >> you have to accept that it can come back on you too. >> that's true. >> i remember -- sorry. i remember doing a cartoon where -- we have two newspapers in salt lake city, one owned by

the church and the tribune which i work for. and this is years ago. something happened and i thought, if this was the news, i would do this cartoon. but this happened to us. what should i do? you know, what's fair for the goose is fair for the gander, so i did the cartoon. i got to give it to my editors, we published it. >> this is one of the things about nast's career. when i said he fought for editorial independence. what i meant was, he didn't fight the external public. he had to fight inside of "harper's weekly" because his editor thought that what the editor wrote about politics and what nast cartooned should go together. there should be no light between them. given the two of them disagreed and were profoundly different man, there was no chance of that. and as long as fletcher harper

lived, fletcher harper protected nast and he was free to do what he wanted. unfortunately, fletcher harper's coincided with the election. one of the things that happened to nast is that right at the moment when the united states was one to its eyeballs in a controversy about who had won a presidential election, where there had been dishonest voting, which was alleged in several states and seems very likely that there was massive amounts of voter fraud in those states, and the question -- unresolved question for months ability who should be question next. at that precise moment, thomas nast effectively last his protector. and so he wanted to keep fighting, particularly he wanted to keep fighting for the rights of black americans in what was now the redemption south. the white democrats had taken back the state governments

ending reconstruction, ending efforts to help freed people, ending efforts to protect voting with federal soldiers and it looked like that was headed for a total dismantling of the agenda of reconstruction. and nast saw that and thought it was tragic and he wanted to stop it. but his editor took the position, which was taken by many members of the social elite at the time that they had basically tried to intervene and it had been a failure and that it was time to turn their attention to something else. and nast didn't want to do it. and they forced him to shut up. the reason they were able to do it is because the person who had been the protective hand for nast was gone. and so it's kind of tragic because that was the moment -- of all the moments that the united states really needed him,

he's famous for bringing down the tweed ring. but the tweed ring was just new york city. this was a national electoral crisis and in that moment one of the most powerful voices in american politics was basically silenced because an internal dispute at his newspaper over whether or not he should be able to say what he thought didn't go his way. >> tweed drew for "harper's," but he drew for other outlets as well? >> yes. he made a ton of money. but he was allowed to work elsewhere, not only as a cartoonist, but in other ways. in the chalk talks, he made like eight times as much money in a season doing chalk talks as he got from "harper's" even though his contract from "harper's" was really lucrative. he illustrated for almanacs,

calendars, christmas calendars, and illustrated books. they were published by the publishing outside. it wasn't always outside the family, so to speak. but they didn't control him. and repeatedly, that was his lever, was that he said, well, if you try to tell me what to do, i'll go somewhere else. and ultimately that is what happened. but i didn't work out for him. >> so a quick history of what happened. what happened to him? >> when he left? >> yeah. >> yeah. so he rage quit, as we call it today. again, after being told, no, we're not going to publish that, you can't do that. that was it. he was done. and the way he did it was, is that he sent the contract back to new york unsigned and that was a signal, right, go away.

i'm not working for you anymore. and for a little while he sort of coasted, right? i'm famous. i quit. everyone knows it. haha. and then he started trying to work in a more serious way. and his dream all along was to have his own paper. he thought if i'm my own boss, there will be nobody to tell me no. which was a good idea. that's true. >> cartoonists are really bad bosses. we're bad businessmen. >> bad businessmen, yes. and the other problem was that almost the moment that he rage quit from "harper's weekly" he lost a huge amount of money that he had invested in a fraudulent investment bank. so the same grant and ward, the same company that president grant had put all of his money in because his son was one of the named partners, the other named partner, ward, was a crook. and he ran away with all the money. that's one -- so for people who know the story of u.s. grant's

memoirs, he had to write memoirs because he was broke. nast had invested in that same bank. and he lost all of his money too. he was undercapitalized and he was a terrible businessman and the other problem was that tammany was resurgent and they controlled newspaper distribution. you can make the best newspaper in the world. people could want to buy it. if it can't be on the newsstand, if no one can get it, then you're out of luck. he was also terrible at selling ads. and so, you know, as a publisher he was no good. he did start a newspaper and it only ran for about seven months. the only complete set of it is in the university of minnesota in their archive. you can see it there. maybe they digitized it. that would be wonderful if they digitized it. one of the sad things about it, you can track the decline of his

talent. he developed a problem with his shoulder, like some tendinitis, probably, and by the time he was doing nast weekly, you could tell, he couldn't do the fine crosshatching. he couldn't keep a line going. he would start with a strong line and it would petter out. the perfection -- his arm trimabled. >> i have friends who had experienced the same thing. even today. >> it's interesting, i was reading a lot about illustrators in istanbul in the 18th and 19th centuries and one of the things it talked a lot about the strain on the eyes of illustrators prior to artificial light.

and i think it's interesting to think about the ways that artists engage in this activity and then their body has to cooperate. and in nast's case, it stopped cooperating. his mind was going like always but his arm and hand wouldn't do it. >> how old was he? >> he wasn't even 60. >> oh, oh, oh. you look at the quality of the work and the amount of the work and you can see how he wore himself out. >> during the height of the tweed campaign, during thectáwi height of the controversy, he was drying six cartoons, six cartoons a week, all of them this big. >> they're all incredibly detailed and -- >> yes. yes. incredibly detailed. we have time for questions? >> questions? >> yeah. it might be good to take some.

nast's life does come to a dramatic end, if you would like to touch on that. >> yes. nast -- he was out of money, really out of money and so he needed a job. and he had -- i noticed on your exhibit you talk about how much roosevelt had enjoyed his cartoons as a child. nast had defended roosevelt. when roosevelt was the commissioner of police in new york and was trying to shut down bars, nast had defended him, yes, shut down all the drinking on sunday. and that was one of the basis for their affinity. when nast was out of money, he called the new roosevelt administration and said "help." and they gave out diplomatic posts to all kind of people. brett heart got one in scotland which is kind of nice. i don't know if he was too late, you have to get at the front of the line, but he got ecuador which was famous for yellow

fever. he made friends, he was friends with the british consulate. his letters home to sally are pretty sad because they had a powerful love affair. he was sad to be separated from her, but he wouldn't let her come because it was dangerous. he was right. he got sick and got into his hammock on a monday and by friday he was gone. it's really sad. the worst part is that the state department never sent her a condolences telegram and she was very angry. >> i'll be right back. you talk amongst yourselves. >> we have a good number of questions. gerald wrote, i have two questions, was this this unique to nast. in the outline exhibition it says, in 1873, tweed was convicted of graft and served a

year in prison. sued by the state of new york, he fled to spain. could you expand on the circulation of these images through the atlantic and his impact outside the u.s. thanks so much for a fascinating talk. two questions was, the animals unique and a little bit more about the capture of nast -- >> of tweed. >> of tweed. >> no, it's totally not unique. one of the things that pat said which is absolutely true -- can i point out, the central figure in the figure behind pat's chair. nast did not invent the democratic donkey. animal imagery is commonplace. if anyone is familiar, for example, with the cartoonist joseph keppler or matt morgan, they would use stuff and sometimes they portrayed what

looks like nast as a monkey with a pencil in his tail. there's lots of animal portrayals. and a donkey is a much older image. it had been used for democrats for some time because of its other name, the jack ass. i don't know if there's actually a biological difference between the two. but in terms of symbolism, it's the same. but the elephant was his invention. he said he popularized and invented these images. the elephant was his creation and the donkey was not. but there are lots of examples in political cartooning both before nast and since where animals become the symbol of some quality. foxes for being wiley, and often birds and sometimes the symbol is a cultural association with the animal and other times it's a literary reference.

for example, tapo, right, they'll take something where there's a famous animal in some work of literature and transpose it into the cartoon. that's common for cartoonists. not everybody is fun to caricature and not all cartoonists like to caricature. there's various ways to do it. >> the other question was about the circulation of his cartoons threat, the atlantic world and internationally. >> we don't know much about that. one of the problems with ephemera like newspapers is they disintegrate. one of the stories which is in the 2007, i think, biography of tweed, which is a great book. if you haven't read it by ackerman. it's a story that tweed had them in his luggage for reasons nobody understands. and that's where they saw them. they were going through his luggage looking for contraband and they found these cartoons

and were like, who is this guy. that's one of the stories. so it's not necessarily the case. i don't know of any evidence that "harper's" was sending significant numbers of its copies overseas -- >> he was recognized from the cartoons. >> that's the story. and it's -- and it's hard to image why they would have pulled him from the customs line otherwise. and so it's -- and he was fleeing because he didn't want to be imprisoned. good reason. it ended up that it broke his health and he died relatively young. so one of the things is, we know that some people were reading "harper's weekly" in europe, probably americans overseas and other people who were interested in american politics. there's very little information that would help us to know how many copies went overseas, who was reading it exactly and what

they thought of it. >> we have a question from e.j. and just to point out. he was one of the artists who did the biography of nast that's on our website. and she was, since nast's cartoons were turned into printable images by an engraver. >> some of the images i'm referencing were in nast's weekly at the end. by then, they had different methods for printing images. there had been improvements in the technology that made it faster and easier. it was a different way of doing it. and then secondly they were working for him. and so -- and he didn't have a lot of money. and so the available inputs were just different. they -- there was some embellishment that happened early in his career. during the civil war there were several instances where war correspondents would send in drawings from the front and

that's would be the engraver. he would do the wood cut and he would put his own name on it. there's a book about them in which there's this very straight forward insult to nast deep in the book. because they despised him based on the fact that he plagiarized some of the images. they changed things, put in and took out things. but at this late stage in his career, he didn't have that kind of resource and i didn't quite work that way anymore. >> sorry? >> there's a question from clay for pat that i'm actually really interested in. and it's sort of for me, but it's sort of for pat. the question is about how we get to the more simple style of modern political cartooning. and i will say very -- even by the end of nast's lifetime, his

style was out of fashion. simplicity was in, a three-dimensionality that his lacked was in. pat, what do you think about this sort of more modern style in 20th century. >> it's always evolving and always changing. the cartoons during the 1950s, you would have a hammer and it was hitting a thumb. and the hammer would be the soviet union, and the thumb would be hungary. very, very basic kind of stuff. and then you get pat coming in from australia and he revolutionizes cartooning. instead of it being vertical, it's horizontal and it's funny and it's just brutal. but a single panel, right? and now we evolved into something which is more popular with the next generation which is kind of telling stories,

multipanel cartoons and none of them is right and none of them is wrong. cartooning is changing but it's still popular. >> okay. so we have time for maybe one or two more questions. the -- actually, i see the name of the person who wrote this. the person wrote, didn't nast develop a tendency to go in for more unflattering stereotype evoking caricatures of african-americans towards the end of his career? if i'm right about that, why do you think that happened? >> so i don't think that's true. i think you can find unflattering stereotypes of black americans and other people nast didn't like, such as catholicspz@a in general and ir catholics in particular throughout his career. in particular, there were moments in reconstruction when he drew images of black americans which likened them to

irish catholic immigrants which in nast's universe was as negative as he would ever get. so i would say that actually i don't think his racism was a function of getting older. i think his racism was a function of accepting lots of ideas that were all around him as true and he would become outraged on behalf of black americans when nasty things, terrible, violent things were done to them. but it's not because he had a profound belief in their equality. it was because it offended him for american values that he idealized to be violated by white people. he had a particular set of political and cultural commitments around american identity, which he had adopted for himself, in which he felt very strongly about, when those werepao9÷q4 violated by white p he got angry about that. but it wasn't the kind of compassionate, justice-oriented

empathy that you would hope for from a political commentator. some of his cartoons are beautiful in their defense of the black community. but others in the same era are often very negative. as he got older, i think he got more radical in some ways. in terms of gender, less so. he got more conservative. but in terms of politics, by the time he was in his 50s, he would just burn it all down. he really -- he really stopped compromising after a while. >> so we have a question for pat. this is from a person named bruce. he said, pat, my father was a cartoonist, one of our dearest family friends was warren king, a political cartoonist for the new york daily news. did you know him? >> i didn't. i've been doing this for over 40 years. 42 years now. when i started doing cartoons,

there were probably 250, almost 300 cartoonists in america who had the gig that i do. they worked for a newspaper and they did a daily, weekly cartoons. now we're down to 20. back in the day, there used to be a lot of us. going back to nast, there were lots of cartoonists. as far as having a daily newspaper gig, there aren't a lot of us left. you can still find us. it's just on the internet. and people are having to hustle to get their word across. it's out there and still vibrant. but the cartoons in newspapers is from a past era. it's from the nast era, right? and it had its day and it's still there, but political cartooning has gone to different venues. it's gone to twitter, facebook, and the internet. it's changed. >> i agree with that. people love political cartoons. they should go to twitter.

i know it may feel shallow, but the cartoons on twitter are deliciously vicious. >> i found a woman in salt lake city, she goes who is this person? i click on the bio and i find out she's from salt lake city. and her name is d.l. weeks. and she's worth looking up. younger than i am. which is not a stretch. but she's doing great stuff. >> thank you so much for this and i hope everybody, you've enticed everybody to see the exhibition. >> it's a great exhibition. >> thank you for having us. it was a real pleasure. weeknights this month, we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight, an evening of programs about the nation's fifth president, james monroe.

we started with a look at his relationship with george washington. why they shared a bond, the politics of the young nation drove a wedge between them. in this lecture, scott harris explains where things went wrong. watch tonight, beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. american history tv on c-span3. every weekend documenting america's story. funding for american history tv comes from these companies who support c-span3 as a public service. each week american artifacts takes viewers to historic sites around the country. the historic hay-adams hotel is