Caricature and Other Comic Art Part 32

Interest and pride blind its judgment. In Jackson's day the distinction between the right and the wrong politics was not so clear as in Jefferson's time; but it was, upon the whole, the same struggle disguised and degraded by personal ambitions and antipathies. It certainly called forth as many parodies, burlesques, caricatures, and lampoons as any similar strife since the invention of politics. The coffin handbills repeated the device employed after the Boston ma.s.sacre of 1774 in order to keep it in memory that General Jackson had ordered six militiamen to be shot for desertion. The hickory poles that pierced the sky at so many cross-roads were a retort to these, admitting but eulogizing the hardness of the man. The sudden breakup of the cabinet in 1831 called forth a caricature which dear Mrs. Trollope described as "the only tolerable one she ever saw in the country." It represented the President seated in his room trying hard to detain one of four escaping rats by putting his foot on its tail. The rat thus held wore the familiar countenance of the Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren, who had been requested to remain till his successor had arrived. It was this picture that gave occasion for one of John Van Buren's noted sayings that were once a circulating medium in the lawyers' offices of New York.

"When will your father be in New York?" asked some one. The reply was, "When the President takes off his foot."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Brains of the Tammany Ring. (_Harper's Weekly_, October 21st, 1871.)]

Then we have Van Buren as a baby in the arms of General Jackson, receiving pap from a spoon in the general's hand; Jackson and Clay as jockeys riding a race toward the Presidential house, Clay ahead; Jackson receiving a crown from Van Buren and a sceptre from the devil; Jackson, Benton, Blair, Kendall, and others, in the guise of robbers, directing a great battering-ram at the front door of the United States Bank; Jackson, as Don Quixote, breaking a very slender lance against one of the marble pillars of the same edifice; Jackson and Louis Philippe as pugilists in a ring, the king having just received a blow that makes his crown topple over his face.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "What are the Wild Waves saying?" (_Harper's Weekly_, July 9th, 1870.)]

Burlesque processions were also much in vogue in 1832 during the weeks preceding the Presidential election. To the oratory of Webster, Preston, Hoffman, and Everett, the Democracy replied by ma.s.sive hickory poles, fifty feet long, drawn by eight, twelve, or sixteen horses, and ridden by as many young Democrats as could get astride of the emblematic log, waving flags and shouting, "Hurra for Jackson!" Live eagles were borne aloft upon poles, banners were carried exhibiting Nicholas Biddle as Old Nick, and endless ranks of Democrats marched past, each Democrat wearing in his hat a sprig of the sacred tree. And again the cultured orators were wrong, and the untutored Democrats were substantially in the right.

Ambition and interest prevented those brilliant men from seeing that in putting down the bank, as in other measures of his stormy administration, the worst that could be truly said of General Jackson was that he did right things in a wrong way. The "shin-plaster"

caricature given on the following page is itself a record of the bad consequences that followed his violent method in the matter of the bank.

The inflation of 1835 produced the wild land speculation of 1836, which ended in the woful collapse of 1837, the year of bankruptcy and "shin-plaster."

To this period belongs the picture, given on a previous page, which caricatures the old militia system by presenting at one view many of the possible mishaps of training-day. The receipt which John Adams gave for making a free commonwealth enumerated four ingredients--town meetings, training-days, town schools, and ministers. But in the time of Jackson the old militia system had been outgrown, and it was laughed out of existence. Most of the faces in this picture were intended to be portraits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Shin-plaster Caricature of General Jackson's War on the United States Bank, and its Consequences, 1837.]

Mr. Hudson, in his valuable "History of Journalism," speaks of a lithographer named Robinson, who used to line the fences and even the curb-stones of New York with rude caricatures of the persons prominent in public life during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren.

Several of these have been preserved, with others of the same period; but few of them are tolerable, now that the feeling which suggested them no longer exists; and as to the greater number, we can only agree with the New York _Mirror_, then in the height of its celebrity and influence, in p.r.o.nouncing them "so dull and so pointless that it were a waste of powder to blow them up."

[Ill.u.s.tration: City People in a Country Church.]

The publication of Mrs. Trollope's work upon the "Domestic Manners of the Americans" called forth many inanities, to say nothing of a volume of two hundred and sixteen pages, ent.i.tled "Travels in America, by George Fibbleton, Esq., ex-Barber to His Majesty the King of Great Britain." In this work Mrs. Trollope's burlesque was burlesqued sufficiently well, perhaps, to amuse people at the moment, though it reads flatly enough now. The rise and progress of phrenology was caricatured as badly as Spurzheim himself could have desired, and the agitation in behalf of the rights of women evoked all that the pencil can achieve of the crude and the silly. On the other hand, the burning of the Ursuline convent in Boston was effectively rebuked by a pair of sketches, one exhibiting the destruction of the convent by an infuriate mob, and the other a room in which Sisters of Charity are waiting upon the sick. Over the whole was written, "Look on this picture, and on this."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Why don't you take it?]

The thirty years' word war that preceded the four years' conflict in arms between North and South produced nothing in the way of burlesque art that is likely to be revived or remembered. If the war itself was not prolific of caricature, it was because drawing, as a part of school training, was still neglected among us. That the propensity to caricature existed is shown by the pictures on envelopes used during the first weeks of the war. The practice of ill.u.s.trating envelopes in this way began on both sides in April, 1861, at the time when all eyes were directed upon Charleston. The flag of the Union, printed in colors, was the first device. This was instantly imitated by the Confederates, who filled their mails with envelope-flags showing seven stars and three broad stripes, the middle (white) one serving as a place for the direction of the letter. Very soon the flags began to exhibit mottoes and patriotic lines, such as, "Liberty and Union," "The Flag of the Free," and "Forever float that Standard Sheet!" The national arms speedily appeared, with various mottoes annexed. General Dix's inspiration, "If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot," was the most popular of all for several weeks.

Portraits of favorite generals and other public men were soon added--Scott, Fremont, Dix, Lincoln, Seward, and others. Before long the satirical and burlesque spirit began to manifest itself in such devices as a black flag and death's-head, with the words "Jeff Davis--his Mark;"

a gallows, with a man hanging; a large pig, with "Whole Hog or None;" a bull-dog with his foot on a great piece of beef, marked Washington, with the words "Why don't you take it?" The portrait of General Butler figured on thousands of letters during the months of April and May, with his patriotic sentence, "Whatever our politics, the Government must be sustained;" and, a little later, his happy application of the words "contraband of war" to the case of the fugitive negroes was repeated upon letters without number. "Come back here, you old black rascal!"

cries a master to his escaping slave. "Can't come back nohow," replies the colored brother; "dis chile contraban'." On many envelopes printed as early as May, 1861, we may still read a prophecy under the flag of the Union that has been fulfilled, "I shall wave again over Sumter."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Popular Caricature of the Secession War.

(From Envelopes, 1861. Collected by William B. Taylor, Postmaster of New York, and presented by him to the New York Historical Society.)]

Such things as these usually perish with the feeling that called them forth. Mr. William B. Taylor, then the postmaster of New York, struck with the peculiar appearance of the post-office, all gay and brilliant with heaps of colored pictures, conceived the fancy of saving one or two envelopes of each kind, selected from the letters addressed to himself.

These he hastily pasted in a sc.r.a.p-book, which he afterward gave to swell the invaluable collection of curiosities belonging to the New York Historical Society.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Virginia Pausing.]

We should not naturally have looked for caricature in Richmond in April, 1861, while the convention was sitting that pa.s.sed the ordinance of secession. But the reader will perceive on this page that the pencil lent its aid to those who were putting the native state of Washington and Jefferson on the wrong side of the great controversy. This specimen appeared on the morning of the decisive day, and was brought away by a lady who then left Richmond for her home in New York. The rats are arranged so as to show the order in which the States seceded: South Carolina first, Mississippi second, Alabama and Florida on the same day, and Virginia still held by the negotiations with Mr. Lincoln. This picture may stand as the contribution of the Confederacy to the satiric art of the world.

Few readers need to be informed that it was the war which developed and brought to light the caricaturist of the United States, Thomas Nast.

When the war began he was a boyish-looking youth of eighteen, who had already been employed as a draughtsman upon the ill.u.s.trated press of New York and London for two years. He had ridden in Garibaldi's train during the campaign of 1860 which freed Sicily and Naples, and sent sketches of the leading events home to New York and to the London _Ill.u.s.trated News_. But it was the secession war that changed him from a roving lad, with a swift pencil for sale, into a patriot artist, burning with the enthusiasm of the time. _Harper's Weekly_, circulating in every town, army, camp, fort, and ship, placed the whole country within his reach, and he gave forth from time to time those powerful emblematic pictures that roused the citizen and cheered the soldier. In these early works, produced amidst the harrowing anxieties of the war, the serious element was of necessity dominant, and it was this quality that gave them so much influence. They were as much the expression of heart-felt conviction as Mr. Curtis's most impa.s.sioned editorials, or Mr. Lincoln's Gettysburg speech. This I know, because I sat by his side many a time while he was drawing them, and was with him often at those electric moments when the idea of a picture was conceived. It was not till the war was over, and President Andrew Johnson began to "swing round the circle," that Mr. Nast's pictures became caricatures. But they were none the less the utterance of conviction. Whether he is wrong or right in the view presented of a subject, his pictures are always as much the product of his mind as they are of his hand.

Concerning the justice of many of his political caricatures there must be, of course, two opinions; but happily his greatest achievement is one which the honest portion of the people all approve. Caricature, since the earliest known period of its existence, far back in the dawn of Egyptian history, has accomplished nothing else equal to the series of about forty-five pictures contributed by Thomas Nast to _Harper's Weekly_ for the explosion of the Tammany Ring. These are the utmost that satiric art has done in that kind. The fertility of invention displayed by the artist, week after week, for months at a time, was so extraordinary that people concluded, as a matter of course, the ideas were furnished him by others. On the contrary, he can not draw from the suggestions of other minds. His more celebrated pictures have been drawn in quiet country places, several miles from the city in which they were published.

The presence in New York of seventy or eighty thousand voters, born and reared in Europe, and left by European systems of government and religion totally ignorant of all that the citizens of a free state are most concerned to know, gave a chance here to the political thief such as has seldom existed, except within the circle of a court and aristocracy. The stealing, which was begun forty years before in the old corporation tea-room, had at last become a system, which was worked by a few coa.r.s.e, cunning men with such effect as to endanger the solvency of the city. They stole more like kings and emperors than like common thieves, and the annual festival given by them at the Academy of Music called to mind the reckless profusion of Louis XIV. when he entertained the French n.o.bles at Versailles at the expense of the laborious and economical people of France. Their chief was almost as ignorant and vulgar, though not as mean and pig-like, as George IV. of England. In many particulars they resembled the gang of low conspirators who seized the supreme power in France in 1851, and in the course of twenty years brought that powerful and ill.u.s.trious nation so near ruin that it is even now a matter of doubt whether it exists by strength or by sufferance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TWEEDLEDEE AND SWEEDLEDUM.

(_A New Christmas Pantomime at Tammany Hall._)

_Clown (to Pantaloon)._ "Let's blind them with _this_, and then take _some more_."

Tweed's Gift of Fifty Thousand Dollars to the Poor of his Native Ward.

(_Harper's Weekly_, January 14th, 1871.)]

What an escape we had! But, also, what immeasurable harm was done! From being a city where every one wished to live, or, at least, often to remain, they allowed New York to become a place from which all escaped who could. Nothing saved its business predominance but certain facts of geology and geography which Rings can not alter. Two generations of wise and patriotic exertion will not undo the mischief done by that knot of scoundrels in about six years. The press caught them at the full tide of their success, when the Tammany Ring, in fell alliance with a railroad ring, was confident of placing a puppet of its own in the Presidential chair. The history of this melancholy lapse, from the hour when an alderman first pocketed a quire of note-paper, or carried from the tea-room a bundle of cigars, to the moment of Tweed's rescue from a felon's cell through the imperfection of the law, were a subject worthier far of a great American writer in independent circ.u.mstances than any he could find in the records of the world beyond the sea. The interests of human nature, not less than the special interests of this country, demand that it should be written; for all the nations are now in substantially the same moral and political condition. Old methods have become everywhere inadequate before new ones are evolved; and meanwhile the Scoundrel has all the new forces and implements at his command. If ever this story should be written for the instruction of mankind, the historian will probably tell us that two young men of the New York press did more than any others to create the feeling that broke the Ring. Both of them naturally loathed a public thief. One of these young men in the columns of an important daily paper, and the other on the broad pages of _Harper's Weekly_, waged brilliant and effective warfare against the combination of spoilers. They made mad the guilty and appalled the free. They gave, also, moral support to the able and patriotic gentlemen who, in more quiet, unconspicuous ways, were acc.u.mulating evidence that finally consigned some of the conspirators to felons' cells, and made the rest harmless wanderers over the earth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Who Stole the People's Money?"

(Thomas Nast, in _Harper's Weekly_, August 19th, 1871.)]

Comic art is now well established among us. In the ill.u.s.trated papers there are continually appearing pictures which are highly amusing, without having the incisive, aggressive force of Mr. Nast's caricatures.

The old favorites of the public, Bellew, Eytinge, Reinhart, Beard, are known and admired, and the catalogue continually lengthens by the addition of other names. Interesting sketches, more or less satirical, bear the names of Brackmere, C. G. Parker, M. Woolf, G. Bull, S. Fox, Paul Frenzeny, Thomas Worth, Hopkins, Frost, Wust, and others. Among such names it is delightful to find those of two ladies, Mary M'Donald and Jennie Brows...o...b... The old towns of New England abound in undeveloped and half-developed female talent, for which there seems at present no career. There will never be a career for talent undeveloped or half developed. Give the schools in those fine old towns one lesson a week in object-drawing from a teacher that knows his business, keep it up for one generation, and New England girls will cheer all homes by genial sketches and amusing glimpses of life, to say nothing of more important and serious artistic work. The talent exists; the taste exists. Nothing is wanting but for us all to cast away from us the ridiculous notion that the only thing in human nature that requires educating is the brain. We must awake to the vast absurdity of bringing up girls upon algebra and Latin, and sending them out into a world which they were born to cheer and decorate unable to walk, dance, sing, or draw; their minds overwrought, but not well nourished, and their bodies devoid of the rudiments of education.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "On to Richmond!"--The Peninsular Campaign. (1862.)

_M'Clellan._ "You must coax him along: conciliate him. Force won't do. I don't believe in it; but don't let go. Keep his head to the rear. If he should get away, he might go to Richmond, and then my plans for conquering the Rebellion will never be developed."

_B-lm-t._ "Hold fast, B-rl-w, or he _will_ get to Richmond in spite of us; and then my capital for the European market is all lost."

_B-rl-w._ "I've got him fast; there's no danger. He's only changing his base to the Gun-boats."

_B-lm-t._ "Look out for that letter to the President which you wrote for him. Don't lose that."

_B-rl-w._ "No; I have it safe here in my pocket. When his change of base is effected, I will make him sign the letter, and send it to old Abe."]

There is no country on earth where the humorous aspects of human life are more relished than in the United States, and none where there is less power to exhibit them by the pencil. There are to-day a thousand paragraphs afloat in the press which ought to have been pictures. Here is one from a newspaper in the interior of Georgia: "A sorry sight it is to see a spike team, consisting of a skeleton steer and a skinky blind mule, with rope harness, and a squint-eyed driver, hauling a barrel of new whisky over poor roads, on a hermaphrodite wagon, into a farming district where the people are in debt, and the children are forced to practice scant attire by day and hungry sleeping by night."

The man who penned those graphic lines needed, perhaps, but an educated hand to reproduce the scene, and make it as vivid to all minds as it was to his own. The country contains many such possible artists.

A novel kind of living caricature has been presented occasionally, of late, by Mr. William E. Baker, of the famous firm of sewing-machine manufacturers, Grover & Baker. At his farm in Natick, Ma.s.sachusetts, Mr.

Baker is fond of burlesquing the national propensity to convert every trifling celebration into a banner-and-bra.s.s-band pageant. A great company was once invited to his place to "a.s.sist" at the naming of a calf. At another time, the birthday of a favorite heifer was celebrated with pomp and circ.u.mstance. In the summer of 1875, several hundreds of people were summoned to witness the laying of the corner-stone of a new pig-pen, and among the guests were a governor, military companies, singing clubs, members of foreign legations, and other persons of note and importance. The enormous card of invitation, besides being adorned with pictures of high-bred pigs in the happiest condition, contained a story showing how pigs had brought on a war between two powerful nations. This was the tale:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Christmas-time--Won at a Turkey Raffle. (Sol Eytinge, Jun., _Harper's Weekly_, January 3d, 1874.)

"De breed am small, but de flavor am delicious."]

"By the carelessness of a boy in 1811, a garden-gate in Rhode Island was left open; two pigs entered and destroyed a few plants. The day was hot, the pigs fat, and when attempts were made to drive them out, the characteristic obstinacy of the animals occasioned such violent exercise as to cause their death. A quarrel ensued between the owner of the pigs and the owner of the garden, which, spreading among their friends, resulted in the election of the opposition candidate--Howell--by one majority to the United States Senate, by whose vote the motion to postpone until the next session further consideration on the question of declaring war was defeated by one majority; and by the vote following it war was declared with Great Britain in 1812, although Howell was opposed to and voted against it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "He cometh not, she said." (M. Woolf, in _Harper's Bazar_, July 31st, 1875.)]

This story was ill.u.s.trated by excellent wood-cuts. The account of the festival, given in the _Boston Advertiser_, is worth preserving as a narrative of the most costly, extensive, and elaborate joke ever performed in the United States. Since kings and emperors ceased to amuse their guests with similar burlesques, I know not if the world has witnessed "fooling" on so large a scale.

"On Sat.u.r.day" (June 19th, 1875, two days after the Bunker Hill Centennial) "the invited guests repaired to the Albany Railroad Depot.

The nine-o'clock train took out the Fifth Maryland Regiment, which had been invited, and the Marine Band of Washington, also a delegation of the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, South Carolina.

"The next train took out their escort, the Charlestown Cadets, Company A, Fifth Ma.s.sachusetts Regiment, Captain J. E. Phipps, the corps missing the train; a large number of invited guests, including Governor Gaston, his aid, Colonel Wyman, Colonels Kingsbury and Treadwell, and other representatives of the State House, General I. S. Burrell, First Brigade, and a great many officers of rank of the different military organizations of the State in uniform.