Transcripts For CSPAN3 Political Cartoonist Thomas Nast 20170818

Kentucky university, as well as several years in the history departments Bates College and ucla. She finished her phd at ucla std she has spoken here on a numerous occasion, and spoke about euleulysses s. Grant. And now, fiona has written a book about thomas mast, the author of political cartoons published in 2013. It is my pleasure to welcome fiona. [ applause ] hi. I want to thank peter for invitinging me here, and ashley for all of the help she provided as i prepared to come and spend this hour with you. Im here to talk about thomas nas and what i want to do is to introduce him to you broadly at first and then talk a little bit more specifically about what the civil war did for thomas nast, because i think that it refined him in ways which were essential to his success later in life. So we will begin with the introduction and then move into three things that i think that the war really did for him. At lunchtime, i had a conversation with the attendee who observed that he found that this years Civil War Institute was focussed in an interesting way on the personalities and the effects of the war on real people. I think that this session going to be in keeping entirely with that observation. So thomas nast was born in landow, bavaria in 1840 and this is not a picture of him as a child. He emigrated to the United States in 1846 with his mother landing in new york, and they were political refugees and his father held liberal political views and with the revolutions leading up to the war of 1848 he was warned that he could get into trouble for what he believed. So he sent his family ahead of him in new york, and then he followed. He ban in new york with a rocky start. He was not a great student. His mother enrolled him in a local school, but because nast could not speak english at 6 years old having just arrived, he fell victim to a playful classmate who first directed him to get into a line and nast did not realize that it was the naughty line to get spanked. Oops. He went running home at lunch and told his mother that he would never go wac tole school and though literally not on that i dashgs but it is true, because nast did not en joy perennial education, and so in his teens he had given up on the concept of education. So instead, he went to work for frank leslie, and Frank Leslies illustrated news. He got this job that he was proud of for the rest of his life, and for some 15yearolds, it may ring some bells and he went to frank leslie and he said im an artist, hire me. And frank leslie had a lot of personality himself, and he was not unfamiliar with this kind of drama, but he was not taking nast terribly serious either, and so he set him a task in the classic greek tradition to go down to the water front and draw an image of the ferry that went across the river every morning. And the he did not really think that this kid was going to do it, and in fact, nast would draw in the backgrounds and observe what time the whistle blew that everybody got on the ferry and how it look and what he wanted to be in the illustration. And finally having sketched in the background and deciding on the framing he went one morning and produced this attractive and thorough sketch which he presented to frank leslie who was trapped by the hubris and had to offer him a job. And from that moment, he had to work steadily and though not only for steady people, and if you have studied you know that frank leslie did not aichb pay for people who worked for him which they the did not like very much. So he worked steadily first for frank leslie and the Sports Illustrated news and harpers weekly, and it is at harpers weekly that he developed his career that catapult ed him int fame and though fortune and it is a sad story, and if you care to hear about it, you can ask me later about a place in political art and history. In his time, he was the most famous cartoonist in america, and a widely like and admire and of course, the other part of it is feared and hated person. He could be delightful. He was childlike his entire life and so one of the people who he worked with and on of the the people who ran and owned the harpers fortune and the harpers weekly itself talked about how he came home to his brownstone in new york one day and he was hand iing the coat a the hat to the butler and you heard about him above him, and the brownstones are tall, and he heard what sounded like el fans running across the floor and he said to the butler, what is that infernal noise, and the fact is that thomas nast had come the speak to him, and not finding him home, he had gone up to the nursery and playing chase with all of the children around the house and causing this terrible noise and this is terribly typical of nast. He was playful, and people loved him for this kind of to per sew that na embraced all that is fup and entertaining in life. He produced illustrations, cartoons and christmas drawings for harpers until the 1880s and for your amusement, i pulled a few of the christmas illustrations, and people love these christmas illustrations to this day. You can see that there are some similarities here including his own children and backgrounds from his own home and more on that in a few minute, and more in the similarities of his oportrayal of santa is pretty consistent over time, and particularly the red cheeks and how chubby he is, and et cetera. These are so popular that today, were you inclined to do, so it was not difficult to obtain things like dessert plates or christmas ornaments that featured nasts christmas designs, and it is rare for a pop culture form to endure across so much time and space and beyond, far beyond the death of its kree yayer or the, but in this case, you can see that there is really no end to the pop yu l popularity of nasts christmas illustration, and unfortunately as exciting as nasts career was, it ended not with a bang but a whimper, and the fran kick pace in the early 1870s when he was defending president grant against to see czarism, and attacking the tweed ring and all of these things began to wear on the arm and shoulder, and so as a result he had to stop sometimes cartooning and the work began to decline in quality. It was less detail and 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 ha harpers weekly exploded into an open fight, and nast was starting to depart in the 1880s from the newspaper, and by the later 1880s, he had done so for good, and he tried to maintain his career by working for other papers, but that failed. Without the platform of a circulation of harpers week ly he was not able to the do it and he tried to build a career as a painter, and this san example and i will let you judge for yourself. And he tried to establish his own paper nast week areally which lasted a whopping seven months and you have to u call it a failure, and finally, really kind of desperate for the employment, and he turned to the connections in Theodore Roosevelts future, and here at last he succeeded winning a appointment to ecuador in july of 1902. If you have read my book, you know what is coming. By december, he was dead of yellow fever at age 62. His death left behind a nearly destitute wife, an eldest son who idolize and emulated his father, and worst or all for me and i realize it is shallow, but an author with an unfinished biography. That buyingographer arthur bigalow payne managed to come pleat the book two years after the cartoonists untimely death and when it appeared on the book shelves in 1904, the book attracted positive notice, and criticism as books often do. Among the critics was a contemporary of nast who disagreed with payne in some of his conclusions. Nas nast was not this man, insisted, a particularly original artist. He borrowed his best ideas from the other people, and he made a habit of illustrative plagiarism and i made that up, but call it that, and so worst of all, and this is the really, really insulting part, because he had not done anything in the civil war. Now, paip pushed back like you do on behalf of the person about whom you have written a biography and defending nast on multiple front, and some of them proving that nast was a cartoonist, and significant in general and not difficult at all, and touchier was proving that nast has worked in the field during the war like other ill strays or the had done like homer wince low homer wins low and other had dos enne. And he had worked in a building not known for big battles, but what happened is that contact re really mattered to him, and changed him. So that is why i think that if he were here today, he would be delighted to think of history as part of a Civil War Institute, because for him sh, the war was personal, a moral and national crucible, and it made him. If he were here, he would enthusiastically acknowledge that. So, what is it that the war provided to him . I would say that it provided him with three thing, and the first thing to appreciate is that on the cusp of the war nast was quite young. At the age of 20 years old, he was not even in the United States at that point. He had sailed off to england to cover an illegal boxing match and the stuff that he was attracted to at age 20, and from there he had not been paid for the work he had dope, and that is frustrating for him, and from there he sailed to italy, because he was attracted to garibaldi who had been a hero of his father, and then he traveled overland to germany in search of relatives and he hoped rich relatives who would leave him or give him money, and this did not work out. Finally back to england effecti effectively penniless where he boarded a ship in 1861 which is an interesting time, is it not, to arrive back to the new york city. He returned into a maelstrom of political conflict that period was characterized by and he had a little black book which was in the collection of the rutherford b. Library, and hopefully we can say that tep times fast. I can say it. It is a fun place, and they are very welcomeing. And one of things this the collection is the little black book and if you have something unfamiliar with this, men used to carry little books with contacts and addresses and frequently a little calendar to keep track of the appointments and this is what it is from 1860 to 1861 and you can read it and it is charming. Among that, he liked to keep track of the money and because he hardly had any. And sold an illustration, one dollar, and well done, sir. It kept track of the courtship of the woman he planned to marry named Sally Edwards and so he agreed to take her to church and she agreed to go again next week. In the calendar on the very last bit of it that he filled out undated, he wrote from the boat that when he got back to new york, he hoped to be able to sell some sketches about what he called the southern excitement. When you read it, it is interesting to see how innocent it sounds and how he had no idea what was happening and how important it was, and he returned to new york and more confident than when he had left. And he was preparing to ask this sweetheart Sally Edwards to be his bride, and spoiler alert, she said yes and they got married on his birthday and when you say, what did she look like, we dont have a ton of clearly a attributed images of sally nast, but one of the images of sally nast which is important is that he has a illustration of her and any chance you have a painting of a female figure, chances are that is sally. And when you see the small number of letters that exist from the lifetime, one thing that he would do is to have sally write the text and illustrate letters and he drew her into the letters. So it is certain that this is sally and the two oldest children, and so you can see this is someone that you would want to marry. And so having concluded the courtship, nast was ready for bigger and more complicated challenges that he had ever before tackled and the war was in that context, irresistible, and the public hunger for news about it as the war unfolded hel h ped to stabilize what had been a very, very strange and volatile illustrated news sector. And so nast was able to return to a steady job at harpers weekly which gave him a chance to use the talent to inform the public and returned to a future which seemed to him limitless, and perhaps the characteristics of 21 yearolds and in nasts case, it was not a misperception. I want it to be clear that it is not just that the war affected nast, but he knew in in the moment he would to this and he saw it as moment that would change who he was and what he would do. That is what made him so interested in it. He embraced the experiences that the war offered him and so what were the things that the war provided . I would say three broad category, and first, the war helped to shape the view of the good and the bad particularly when it came to leadership and patrioti patriotism. And secondly, the war sharp ene the focus on the issues of identity and citizenship for black americans and immigrants and particularly for the irish, and third, the war provided a period in nasts professional life when he slowly broadened the reach from illustration towards what you and i would recognize more readily as cartooning. We will go through each of those in turn, and then i will welcome questions. So if the we start with leadership, the war provided nast with a mini pantheon of historic heroic figures and so like a lot of cartoonists, he relied on a visual shorthand and cartoonists exaggerate villainy and other parameters. If you are familiar with with the overof steven seagal, he will break something or kick somebodys car and nothing bad that he wont do so in case the audience has somehow missed that this is in fact the bad guy. Cartooning is like that, too. And cartoonists rely on this very clearcut sense of who is on the right side of right, and who is on the side of wrong, and the war helped nast to see that by providing heroes to him, and cementing the set of people he had admire and people whom he thought was awful and whom he would rely on for many years either in spirit or those particular individuals and defined for what he felt that heroism and villainy was in the broadest of terms. One of his heroes throughout his life is this man who you knew. And in nasts life grant occupied a special place. To him, he was emotionalchannel and gratitude and affection that elevated grant in the war, and that swept over nast, too, and elevated him into the savior of the union and he never changed that. He honored grant for years and years for various things that grant did, first fort the role first for his role in the war, and in is the cartoonist in the left where you will see grant holding tout hand to robert e. Lee and later for the leader as the Republican Party and 1868 and moving forward from there and also for the work as president which is a period in which many people came not to see grant in this heroic frame anymore, but nast did not waiver in the conviction that grant was a hero. Grant was frequently employed by nast as an archetype of american manhood, and you can see this that is characteristic, that he would draw grant standing straight with the spine erect, and very handsome, and often the object of positive attention from the female symbol of justice, and et cetera. Here you can see the young woman is drawn from life from sally. Sometimes grant even appeared and this is true in the early 70s when the liberal republicans broke away as the rational adult in a city, and maybe even a nation of unpredictable children. N nasts edadmiration for grant w visible in all of his cartoons and for the rest of grants life and his own career, and it was two moments in which it was ground grounded in real life that are particularly valuable to point out or else, merely capturing my fancy because they are entertaining of nast, and so i legal the you what they are, an ne you can decide. In 1868, nast helped the republicans to nominate grant for president , and for the convention that year, nast was invited to paint the backdrop for the stage. So they had a curtain in front, a and behind that, there was a backdrop which nast had painted on the canvas and showed two pedestal pedestals. On one of the pedestals he painted u. S. Grant, and above the pedestals he painted the challenge match him. And the implication is that of course that it was impossible, because nobody could match the savior of the union. Once grant was the nominee, the election was effectively over. As grants nomination and his letter accepting the partys choice were read aloud, the curtain dramatically dropped and nasts paint iing was reveal an of course, everybody went wild and clapped and it was wild. And one thing that is entertain ing as a side note, it was reproduced and you can see from ha harpers weekly, and the image on the left is grant and you can see what i mean about the absence of exaggeration, and the attention to show grant sympathetically as an attractive masculine figure and on the right, the democrat candidate seymour who nast has done terrible things to in regard to the hair and if you can see the shadow that seymour was casting as if the hair was not diabolical enough. Batman. Yes, and is this the hero we deserve the question. Yes, so i included an engraving of seymour looking more normal so you could see how awful nast was to him. If you are able to see in the front, a at the very top, the caption on the front says matched, question mark, and of course, the implication is no nno, not at all, and that set of implications did not die in 1868 and some of you recall it was recycled in 1968 on the 1,100th anniversa on the 100th anniversary of another candidate who also used it successfully, and so the second time of nasts regard for grant was important to him occurred in 1852 when nast went to washington to observe the politics firsthand. That was thrill iing to him, because he wrote letters back and forth to sally. And if you are going to look for nast e fem more ra, you nknow te letters written by sally, because the handwriting is beautiful and the spelling is correct. Whereas, letters written to sally resemble a Chicken Scratch and spelled in phonetic and accented english which had me to read the archives out loud under my breath to the irritation of my neighbors. And he wrote back, it is amazing, and carl schertz came up to him at a Cocktail Party and threatened him and he said the sherzers are not going to allow you the continue to defame me and he said, yeah . And nast was correct, because the harpers backed him. And so he did receive an invitation with the president for lunchf and that was super exciting for him, and then he and grant got to be kind of ofriendly. This is important to nast. He really liked the idea that he was somebody who had made himself, and he recognized that in grant as he would in other men and became friends with mark twain and recognized the same life story in twain. And it extended the friendship of grant and extended to morristown, new jersey, much later after grant had left the presidency, and returning to the United States after his world tour. So when sally nast asked through thomas nast the grants what they would like to have for dinner the president replied that if they knew how sick he was of going to the fancy banquets can little bird they would give him something substantial. So they did. They served the former president corned beef and cabbage and they said that he liked it. I think that all of the hostesses like to believe that the guests enjoyed the dinner that they served, but in in case maybe they did. So he had a real life interaction with grant and he had an emphasis on his work and who grant was and what grant meant and the war provided other figures, too, and for example abe raham lincoln and who nas positioned as a an Eternal Father and to the best impulses, and the man who represented a desire for peace in the midst of war and resolve against all odds to ensure victory and also National Integrity and all of the things that lincoln articulated, and nast accepted those and critically believed in those in an emotional and meaningful way. And lincoln came to represent as well, the benevolent approval of changes in emancipation, and this is a very famous cartoon called emancipation. If you can see the red arrow, it refers to center piece of the cartoon in the arrangement with the circle in the middle is characteristic of nast in these years. In the Center Circle nast has drawn a sort of the idealized scene, and dad is enjoying bouncing the baby on the knee, and maybe the teenaged daughter a has a suitor in the back and mom is making tea on the Cast Iron Stove and looking happily over a all of this is a Abraham Lincoln with which is what the arrow points to. Lincoln was pointed as a partner of George Washington as a symbol of National Idealism and this is a cartoon from later where nas asserts a kind of the multi faceted and multi Ethnic National identity and krcreates this table presided over by uncle sam with the portrait where the celebrants are looking down are Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington and ulysses s. Grant and you can see what these symbols meant to be an american, and also the best in american lead leadership. Not everyone of course, and i should say that nast participated fully. One thing that cemented the position for lincoln is the lincolns untimely death. It seems to have been with one of the first instances in which nast channeled the artistic talents into morning in which he would do for many times in the years to come, and it would help to see lincoln in the many ways to see grant, and as a father to the nation, and also as a father whose absence made his position even more important, and more powerful. So not everyone is a hero, naturally, and somebody has to be batman. And for nast, this is Andrew Johnson and among other people, and you may recognize the image on the right which t. J. Styles used this morning as well. Nast delighted in make fun of president johnson as a villainous fool. And if there is something that nast did not like at johnsons feet, i would like to know what it is, and perhaps getting haircuts too frequently is something that he did not at tribute to johnson. And the perhaps the villain would be Nathan Bedford forest who served as a a ssymbolf of t violence of the war and the post war period and what he would have called the slavocracy and so Nathan Bedford forest pops up frequently post war as sort of the person of the boogeyman of the post war period and the changes that people are tri tyi to achieve in the United States. The important thing that i think in this category about the war is that it helped nast out the views off what americans had to expect from the leaders. He refined the views throughout the 1860s and 1870s and challenged by the politics of the 1880s which were kind of crazy, but nevertheless, it is clear that this is 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 the american identity and citizenship. For nas, the war produced two important important questions about who was and who was not american. These were important questions to nast. He was an immigrant himself and he had struggled to learn to speak, read and write english and imperfect process in some of those categories in his whole life and he hadal idealized the American Dream and the american fami family. He wanted to be somebody, and not just to be an american, but to be an american as someone thought of as iconic american, and truly and fundamentally american. And so this question of who gets to be american was important to him personally and professionally. And the first challenge that the war brought to that sense of the identity occurred in the summer of 1863 and here we encounter one of the things that characterizes nasts life which is a story that he told which is a little muddled which is common for him. And so he had been traveling, and trying to get here to gettysburg to get here to observe and report on and draw the battle. But instead, he ended up semi arrest and not entirely clear if he was arrested formally but held in the kus di of the provost marle shall, and he said that he had been traveling towards gettysburg and he had encountered his wifes english cousin john and they decided to go together until they were stopped by a union patrol. The union patrol searched johns bags and found a confederate flag, and according to nast that led to a number of uncomfortable questions of who was john and what they were doing, and nast protested that he was a journalist, and that he was doing nothing suspicious at all and he was neither a spy nor a cousin in law to the spy. And the problem is that when the army tried to verify who he was, and this is prefame, and so nobody knew who the little guy was and they cabled to harpers in new york, and all of the staff had gone away for break, and the person who had confirmed his employment Fletcher Harper had gone to the country house, and so nobody answered for days and so nast wrote a series of increasingly cranky letters to sally to talk about how he was stuck in this muddy camp. Ultimatel li shgly, he missed te of gettysburg and returned home to new york frustrated and frustrated. And so that was not the best time to get home, because no sooper ed th sooper no sooner had he gotten home, and the tax riots happened and the attacking and burning ofhe asylum, and also, there were many lynchings. So nast was sent down the look at what was happening, and he never forgot what he saw on those days, because the images were burned into his imagination. It helped to inform his an t antipathy towards irish immigration, because he had grown up in manhattan close to the five points neighborhood, and spent his entire childhood in the company of immigrants for german and irish, and this is not a new group for him at all, but it really shaped his life. It reappeared in the variations of his work and we have seen a couple of variations, but if you can look on the left there is the burning orphan asylum, and a man on the street lamp who has been lynch and below it is a stock character of the stable of the stereotypes and the irish thug, and that particular set of images appears over and over again. So i have this green thing. And ooh, look at that. So shiny, and all of that and almost exactly like that appears six, eight, or ten times over the next decade or so in his cartoon, and it became a kind of shorthand for the violence perpetrated for racist reasons, and violence perpetrated in the defiance of the state, et cetera. This event, this draft riot, and the experience of his, and his coverage of it as a professional, and it really complicated his view of the american identity as welcoming to all, and instead, he embraced not always, but sometimes with the really ugly venom the idea that some people were better suited to full citizenship than other people. The second really challenging set of events unfolded more slowly than the draft riots had and they had do with afric africanamerican africanamericans. Nast opposed slavery and celebrated the emancipation proclamation with enthusiasm as we saw in a previous slide and i will show you again in a minute, but as the war progressed and as the u. S. Troops began to display courage and patriotism, nast was more and more convinced that the status of black americans was a test of american morality and for the rest of his career, he would pair violence against the black people with the confederacy, and broad white supremist sentiment and with elements of the nation that he didnt like or that he felt would be oppress and he would assert in the cartoons the Citizenship Rights of black people in multiple dimensions particularly in regard to education, employment, Voting Rights and the right to safety, physical and familial safety. You can see here the question of whether slavery is dead or not, and you can also see in these cartoons that it is some of them pretty widely reproduced and the protests against some of the violence um posed upon the freed people in which reconstruction is attempting to change the role of black americans within social and political and economic life. So in the upper left, a very famous image of which the man asks is this a republican form of government and is this life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And in the center, a small image of the kkk and the white league shake hands and what it says there with the family kneeling is worse than slavery. The image on the right is rarely reproduced and few people have seen it, but it is interesting in the modern context, because the suggestion of the cartoon is that if black people are unable to achieve what they are entitled as citizens through the legal means and through peaceful change, they are likely to defend their lives and families and rights with violence. That is quite an unusual thing to see in his work or in other cartoons from this period, and in particular, it is unusual in that it seems kind of admiring, and that is that he seems that there is something manly and impressive about the fact that black men will take up the arms to not just defend the country, but themselves, and he believes that they have every right the to do. So i dont want to suggest that nast avoided stereotypeing or consid considered black americans the be the same as other american, because even a passing familiarity with the work would show that is not true at all. He routinely trafficked in stereotypes that are really, ra really awful. But he embraced in the war a vision of the nation that honored military service and sacrifice, that honored the sanctity of the family which is something emphasized in several dimensions of this image and for example, you can see on the left, the contrasts of the life under slavery with under the life that is under freedom, under emancipation, and some of the things that he emphasizes in the center part for example on the left is the families that is slavery, and then he shows a charming domestic scene where the mom is waving off the little boy going to public side with the puppy on the side, and that would have been wonderful fit actually happened. So there is a way in which nast interacted with the family which is significant, and the commitment to the gender ideology and the family ideals to the time period was expressed through his homes a hopes and dr black people. And so he felt that the people who were capable of the nations decision makings ought to do so. So nast spent his entire life trying to become an american. When you see the pictures of the home, and the santa claus pictures are almost always drawn from life in his house, and so when you see the pictures of his home, one thing about it is that it is clear that he is trying to create an americanized home, and a vision of what that is supposed to look like and he is trying to build it. If you are visiting morristown, new jersey, and you can see the details left behind from his lifshgs it is clear that he identified what he believed to be iconically american and then 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, and elegant and part of the family that was established in literary, and he wanted to marry into something that he thought would produce this american citizenship and identity for himself. His career reflects that, too. He did not choose to be an artist who painted scenes that were apolitical, and instead, he chose to comment on the american politic, and it is not an accident that he did so, because what he was trying to achieve is this americanness that he wanted for himself, and there could be nothing more american as an artist than the transform yourle talent into a tool to comment upon and even to shape what happened in the nation as a whole. Even his dress and reading habits. He always liked to dress up and look the part of a successful man. In particular ly with regard to grooming. I dont believe that he believed himself to look good, because when he drew himself in pictures of letters he drew himself as short, and fat and hairy, so if you are thinking about in the Charles Schulz cartoons and the kid who is dirty all of the time, and he seems to have thought of himself like that, and especially in any time that he drew in the letters of himself and his wife, and his wife would be tall and slender and lovely and well dredressed then a little piggy man next to her. And so he doesnt seem to but he went to a lot of trouble to look good, right . Because he was fulfilling this role, and his reading habits, and he and sally would read the papers together in the morning and in the evening. They read shakespeare and mcauley, and he had tried to are reproduce what he had lost in formal education, and produce this person that he thought was imnornt the United States, and even if you look at the love of filling his house with the Early Victorian knickknacks. You cannot believe what was in this house. And here with the image, you can see the boy lifting up to his stocking, and there is a bear skipped rug, and on the mantle you would be hard pressed to put down your glasses because there is no room, and the screen which Nobody Needed in the 1870s, and you can see with that when he died so little behind that the family were forced to action his belong in belongings. If you have a chance to look at the auction catalogs and some of which have been scanned in by archives, they are fun to look at, because we can only aspire that what you have left behind is titled daggers and coates of arm. And so i would like a medieval knight in my house, and thomas nast would have several. He would go shopping and buy all of the things and fill up the house, and it is partly, because he was visually stimulated by them, and being visually stimula stimulated is important for a cartoonist, but it is also important because he was filling this sense of himself with things. All of this. And reflected his effort to define himself and his identity, and the war pushed him to think more about what the 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 is maybe obvious and not so obvious in a particular cartoon and in the most fundamental sense it was like an incubator for nast, and he began as young and not employed an artist, but illustrator and he worked in part in the engraving room and the part he got the job was the guy who worked in ten graving room so network iing. And then initially he would send in drawings from the front, and he would make them into something that the magazine could use or just doing engraving work, and later in the course of the first couple of years of the war, the more he drew more and more often on his own, and grew the confidence and the seniority, and the skills were more obvious to earn, he began to produce imaginary scen scenes. So he would produce scenes where it is pretty clear that he was not there. With battles and units and other things, and that he had read about them, but he could make them real with the pencil, and this is one of the way s ths th started to move into the more independent employment with harpers weekly, and later still, the gift for storytelling led him to produce what we would now recognize as political illustration illustrations. Sentimental and political. If you were here for t. J. Stiles talk, one thing that he said about the talk talking about custer, it was a time and fulcrum and before the war people were so much more sentimental and so much more interested in the character personalities and so many more adjectives where after the war, he said, people were more technical, and modernity meant a impracticality that was not known for that period. And so in some ways, it is a perfect example of that, because he begins with the sentimental images like this one. Love. It is christmas. He gets to come home. It is wonderful. Right . Or this one, and a little drummer boy gets a letter. Or this one in which she prays for the safety of her soldier husband. So there are a sentimental illustrations, and are they political . Yes, of course. And there are clearly important assertions about the war and the American Values and the potential for a different future built into these, and sometimes they are openly part of the con f confed ra si and for him to open up the cartoons later that would show a clear and political and part san position. And the cartoons came last in this progression. By 1864, he was are regularly protusing the war that was a struggle and the most famous of them was this one, and the image so effective in 1864 that the republicans reprinted it as a campaign poster. And nast liked to brag and that is a complete sentence. But we can extend it. Nast liked to brag that he helped to ensure lincolns victory that year, and that this is something of which he was enormously proud. And what the images show as they are moving confidently and de s decisively towards the professional work that he had achie achieved maturity. And towards harpers he was talent and skill and enhanced by the intensity and the dur race, and yet, he had transformed n. 1861, nast was single, unemployme unemploymented, relatively foot loose and 20 years old until the autu autumn. He was funny and outgoing, but not firm in the opinions of the world. By 1865, he was a married father with a steady job and even a little bit of the fame thanks to the image, and he was in the middleful to 20s and approaching a moment where he had to understand who he was in order to the take the next step professionally. And he was a man by then who had identified heroes and villains and begun to ask difficult questions about what is it zenship come priced and what it embrace and who had found his artistic self, witty, cunning, opt mick tick and romantic at time, and for nast, the war shaped everything that the rest of his life would hold. Some of you were amused by that picture, and this is when he was in the 50s and he had become friends with a portrait photographer in new york, and he and ceroni would have dressup ceremonies and they would get together and nast would try stuff on and take pictures, and i love this, because he is beautifully groom and serious, and important person, and yet, there is this element of the play in him that is always a delight. I think that part of that was forged in the period that interest interests you all so much, and obviously, with a man whose personal output in the lifetime numbers in the thousands of illustration, and possible to skim over the surface of the work,ed a i welcome the questions about him which i will do my best to answer and i dont know if you have had this answer, but one of the things about studying the civil war is that it reinforces to you how little you know, and so if i can answer your questions, i will and if i am not able, i apologize in advance. Thank you. [ applause ] no fighting. Everyone will get a turn. Okay okay. Lee fisher from oxford, ohio, miami university. Considering what we have faced with today, compared to his lifetime, has, do you think in your professional opinion, that the digital age has lessened the ability of cartoonists to influence us . I dont think so, no. And that is probably partly influenced by the fact that i have come to know a few cartoonists and i love cartoonists and my social life is kconsumed with partly liking and watching cartoonist, and soy live in a healthy bubble and that feels healthy to me. But there are cartoonists whose work is important and celebrated by the community and i am thinking of pat bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune whose work i saw across the world on facebook the other day. So the cartoonists are having a great time. And that their work is relevant as ever. I think that the Digital Natives and young people for whom the Digital World is important. In theory, it would be a perfect audience for them, because the internet has had an effect on the visual culture and not terribly different of what illustrated magazines and newspapers did for people in the 1850s. There were not news sources in the 1830s or 1840s. You could get some sources that you would buy individually, and currier and yooifs produced a number of those, but it was not fast or cheap. And so that meant that in the 1840s, it was possible to put out a paper with incredible rapidity, and things that happened only two weeks ago. And americans loved it. These newspapers were sensational and sarcastic and they had jokes and poems and songs and lots of editorial content and became very important. It seems to me that process which happened so fast and profound is not unlike what has happened with the internet, and the peoples love of memes and political is a tisat ire has no anywhere and do i believe they should have political and financial independence, yes, but it is not going to happen. And he was living in new york city where there were many, many irish and many, many irish in the army early in the war when he had illustrated it, but had he portrayed the irish before the draft riots or what his opinion was of the irish before the draft riots . So yes, and no. The work that he had done when he was very young had to do with the skandles in the city, and the swill milk scandal in the 50s and that is swill milk adull ter rated in some way, because people got sick and die and so it is a form of fraud and so it appeared that he was sympathetic to working people in a broad category in that work. And at lot of the early work is so illustrative that you dont see in it an opinion and a lot of the early correspondence is deeply spotty, like little bits here and, there and so it hard to know. One of the Big Questions of the portrayal of the irish and the view of the irish has to do with the religious faith of most of the irish people in new york, because nast almost certainly was raised catholic, and responded to his young adulthood by rejebting that entirely, and one of the ways that he attacked irish people was by attacking their faith. It is a really curious thing to try to interpret somebody owho grew up in a neighborhood of immigrants and grew up in the faith of the people who he so derides and yet who has come to the set of opinions, and they are totally inconsistent with some of his other opinions about identity and race and citizenship. He is a complicated figure. And it is one cartoon from the tweed era that you asked about and in which he draws irish people in new york in a sympathetic way as victims of tweed, but often his portrayals were just totally out of keeping with what you would have 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, think of all in the family and archie bu bunker and people saw what they wanted to see, and archie was spouppose ed to be lampooning t bigot, but people at the time, and i remember people wearing tshirts go tell them, archie and the joke was lost op them and i think of Steven Colbert and i believe he is a Communications Professor at temple, and with colbert, people see what they want to see. And liberals see colbert as making fun of fox news whereas conservatives see colbert in that he is point iing out of course, the ridiculousness of the liberals, so that now turns us to nast and you made the point that he took a fair amount of credit for getting grant over to 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 this unintended consequence of affirming in some cases that the very beliefs that he was trying to challenge . So, there is parts of that question. One part is what do we know about the reception, and the answer is some, but not that much. So, for example, the articles about him were reprinted all over the country, and he had scrapbooks of that and he had a clipping service which is something they dont know if people do it anymore or maybe one of the modern online sites is the equivalent, but he had a large scrapbook of them, and when you go to look for it from the Public Library they start from the position we dont have that but they do. They will have it. And morristown has one, too, and when you open it up, he had all of the clippings of himself to look at to remind himself that he existed i guess. But based on that, it is very clear that he was widely read and celebrated in many parts of the country, and little bits of the history that reinforce it. Because when andrew bigalow first approached him about the biography, people had harpers weekly and passed it around and he knew that people loved cartoons and that is the pitch for im your biggest fan. When he stopped cartooning and at the period that he was fighting with his manager at the harpers weekly, there were protest letters of where is nast. So there is a indication that there was a wide reception and when he and the best example is when he did chalk talk and maybe you are familiar the choctaw series, and the other series, he was talked into going on tour, and he would do a chalk talk where they would put up a screen, and he would draw it. And it was sort of like whose line is it anyway and except with chalk. He was so freaked out by this, and he would write these letters home to the sally, and get me out of here. And i need to pretend that i am sick. And he made a ton of money for, that and you would not have thought that people would have come out in those numbers and paid to do this if he were not popular and so was he misunderstood . Well, it depends, because people d disagreed with a what he said and then hid it from him, and then thought it was terrifying. It is not the same as the examples that you gave, but i dont know fit is possible to determine it, and if we wanted to how go about it. I would like for you the comment for you to comment a little bit on his attack of the tweed ring and a little bit more of the political cartooning, because of the intricacy and the detail that is involved, and just the caricature, and the detail that was included in that artwork is fascinating fascinating. Well, what is interesting is that a lot of the early drawings are even more detailed. If you have a chance to look at them up close, they are more detailed than the later cartoon, but what is great about the tweed cartoons is that they combine a really developed talent for caricature with intense detail both with regard to details of the political scandal itself and with regard to the portrayal of the details visually, and then lastly something that is just intangible, right, a sense of humor and ability to make it funny so that like when you are wat watching a 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 peers. So the tweed campaign was an incredibly important moment in his lives and essentially he had three things that went together in the 2 1 2 years, and that is the attack on the tweed ring and the first time that he went out giving the lectures and confronted with how popular he was and how he was unprepared for it, and yet he knew it, but didnt know it and the defense of president grant in 1872 which is a period of great productivity of him, too, and emotional intensity, and all three of those things happened in a short time span and they were the things that made his career, and that really made him who he was. They were also what broke him. Because the problem with inspiration is that you cannot control it. I remember hearing a story many, many years ago about how faulkner had gotten up in the middle of the night and outlined a novel on the side of the bed and it was just there. Nas nast was like that. When he was productive in the tweed campaign, he would send to the harpers and by then in the process of moving to new jersey and he would send to the harpers like six or seven cartoons a week, and they were this week and as detailed as you would say, and this is the thing that really made his arm stop working within the next six or seven years and that he overdid it. And so it is both really admirable, and when you are looking at the cartoons how beautiful they are and complex they are in every way. It is also horrifying, because what you are looking at in the unfolding of the images is the destructive of this artists body in the pursuit of those, in that campaign against the political corruption. I think that if im not mistaken, i think that you need a reason to move to new jersey, but i think that it is the threats that what he said. And the threats to the family to move out of the and he was living in new york city. Yes, he was living yes. And moved to new jersey with his family. Yes. And so he really loves stories in which he was the important guy. And you have to be willing even when you totally convinced of his importance and deeply impressed by the talent and you have to be willing to take with a grain of salt how much lincoln loved him and grant loved him and everybody loved him. But he claims that he was visited by an attorney, and right away, this is a horrible story, right . And are you sure that this is a good idea attacking boss tweed. And nast is like, well, it seems like it is working out fine, and they said, wouldnt you be happier if you took a nice european vacation . Wouldnt that be fun to do with say 100,000 . And nast started to play and say it would be more fun with 200,000 . Oh, yeah. Do you think that 300,000 is too much, and he gets him up to 500,000 before stopping the game and saying, you have to government and this is the story that he was bribed, and when that didnt work, that threatened and people were lurking outside of the house, and that is what led him to, and first led him to buy the house, and the house they lived in the rest of new jersey and probably he believed that Something Like that happened and whether it actually happened is hard to know. The material left behind by nas t is so uneven and so little of it and so unpredictable, and knowinging what really happened is hard. And much of what is 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, talk, and take notes by payne, and that is great, but it means that a lot of nasts voice is in the story of the book both with the part that it supplies and the drama that is infused. So maybe some of it is real drama and some of it is wishful drama. Scott shraid over bloomington, indiana. He obviously, used the cartoons to advance or use them as a vehicle for his own politics of the day, and you mentioned that one political cartoon that is used in the part of the 1864 election as a propaganda piece, but is there any evidence that the Republican Party or anybody specifically asked him to draw certain cartoons or topics to advance an agenda other than his own personal agenda . There is lots of evidence that lots of people did that. People thought that the way that cartooning worked is that, hey, i have great idea, and you should make a cartoon about. This and all of the the things that make it annoying like in los angeles, the waiter want yos to sell you a script in one package and we know it because his wife was a biographer, and james parton wrote a couple of times about nasts process and one thing is that nast said i cant be inspired by him, i cant be inspired like that it doesnt work like that you cant point something out and have me create a cartoon. I have to feel it and i have to be interested in it so lots and lots of people tried either to inspire him in a particular direction and most problematic throughout his career, his editor tried to get him to stop doing certain things. On behalf of the Republican Party. Or in its interests depending on how you want to think about that and nast resisted all of that at every stage. He did not want people to give him ideas and he never wanted to be told no. The flip side of his fun personality is that he was donkeylike in his ability to dig his heels in and insist that he knew what was right. I think thats one of the things about him that fascinates people that its so clear in his work that hes really there. This is him. This is not somebody who is for hire. And this is not somebody who is reflecting the views of his employers for example or even the party of which hes a member. He believes these things. And i think thats one of the explanations for his unpredi 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 then he would create cartoons that were inconsistent with what he had done before. Thats one of the signals that thats really him in there. So in terms of explicit pressure, the closest thing youll get is the pressure brought to bear on him by George William curtis to stop. In the other direction everybody, all the time. Thank you. [ applause ] American History tv continues in primetime 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. Mead, and the experiences of escaped Union Prisoners of war. American history tv prime begins at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Coming up this weekend, on American History tv, on cspan 3, saturday, at 10 00 p. M. Eastern, the 1944 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 Hamiltons views of the national debt. Hamilton advised the creation of an energetic, efficient government, one that did one thing well, for as little money as possible. And that one thing was to protect americans lives, liberty and property from tyrants foreign and domestic. At 7 00 p. M. Eastern, new jersey residents and activists discuss the 1967 newark re bellian. There were 268 reports of sniper fire. Zero snipers were ever found. No evidence of any snipers. No gun shells other than the police gun shells. No footprints. No fingerprints, nothing was found. All by the three Police Forces that were operating. American history tv, all weekend, every weekend. Only on cspan 3. Next from the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute, confederate general braxton bragg, historian earl hess entitled his biography of the general, the mosthated general of the confederacy. He was general of the army of tennessee in 1862 and 63, mr. Hess on the successes and failures of the generals civil war campaigns. Im pleased to see were not going to hear crickets here because the topic of braxton bragg, who is the butt of all jokes, they always fall back on what, either braxton bragg, or george b. Mcclellan to get off their cheap jokes. But those cheap jokes