Overview

There are three principal reasons why readers should buy this biography: To understand and appreciate the clever artistry and wit of America's best-ever caricaturist and most influential journalist To obtain a first-hand pictorial view of nineteenth century political history during the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. To reference over time - via the unique, manually-created Index - people and currently discussed topics like inflation, immigration and ethnic/religious/racial issues, portrayed visual with context. Thomas Nast's was the first journalist who didn't own his paper to play a major role in shaping public opinion. However, he could not have done so without the quality, consistency, financial strength and resultant reach and dominance of Harper's Weekly, the country's leading illustrated newspaper. Its circulation exceeded 100,000 during the Civil War, reached as high as 200,000 in the course of major election campaigns' and came close to 300,000 at the height of his 1871 victory over Boss Tweed and his Ring of thieves. Including passalong readership, Nast's cartoons always had half a million to a million or more viewers, a key factor in his influence. During his quarter-century career at Harper's Weekly (1862-1886), Nast published almost 2,200 illustrations and cartoons. Its tabloid-size pages (16 x 11 inches) enabled him to cram as many as 40 recognizable characters into a double-page cartoon. Overall, he caricatured 450 different people. Adding clout to his illustrations and cartoons, almost half of them were on large pages: 404 covers, 425 single pages and 130 double-pages (16 x 22 inches). Nast generally led public opinion rather than followed it. Like most political cartoonists and editorial journalists, he was far from objective. Almost always, he preferred to be against a person or a cause, so he could serially pound the negatives - except when it came to his idol, President Ulysses Grant, whom he treated much too leniently. While repeating his basic message again and again, Nast varied his presentations in order to keep his content fresh and interesting. To engage and persuade his audience, Nast effectively created a new visual language replete with symbols, caricatures, allegories, satire, puns and repetitive slogans. His readers understood his ocular shorthand, comprehended the minute details which more subtly reinforced his frontal attacks, and were familiar with his Shakespearean and other literary references. All that was woven into the context of Nast's cartoons, which his fans and his haters instantly absorbed. Today it's difficult to appreciate his value as a visual historian without fully understanding the who, what and why of each one - and their serial effectiveness. Accordingly, each of the 800 cartoons and illustrations from Harper's Weekly and the 200 from other publications and sources (including sketches and paintings), has its characters identified and its content and context explained. The 100 cartoons by other artists that dealt with the same subject received the same explanatory treatment. In summary, the thousand fully explained political cartoons covering the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Gilded Age make this book unique; there is no better visual satirical record of the six presidential campaigns and seven administrations: Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and Cleveland. The Index adds a useful reference capability to track Nast's characters (Grant), topics (Christmas) and issues (inflation) over three decades. Journalists, historians, politicians, educators, cartoonists and anyone interested in the visual history of the last half of the nineteenth century will find this book both enjoyable and invaluable.

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9780578294544

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Reviews

"""This book is both magnificently illustrated and beautifully written. I of course had known of Thomas Nast's powerful illustrations and their impact on 19th Century political figures from Ulysses Grant to the Tweed Ring. But I had no idea of the breadth of his reach, the intricacy of his art, and the genius of his entrepreneurship. This is a book whose every page I will turn and then go back to again and again."" -Paul Steiger, Executive Chairman of ProPublica, Former Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal ""John Adler, who brought us the invaluable digital resource HarpWeek, has now produced an outstanding biography that chronicles the life and times of the 19th century's preeminent popular artist. America's Most Influential Journalist and Premier Political Cartoonist fulfills our long-deferred need for a comprehensive biography of Thomas Nast, the towering figure in the history of political cartooning in the United States. Prodigiously researched and closely observed, this study offers us an unsurpassed compendium of Nast's work and succeeds in capturing the man in all his dimensions, commitments, and passions. At the same time, through Adler's sharp eye and detailed guidance, it illuminates the contexts, representations, meanings, and purposes of Nast's extraordinary images. An informative introduction to those unfamiliar with the man and his times, even the most-informed reader will find cartoons and accounts they have not previously encountered. An impressive achievement, Adler's book fills a previously yarning gap in the historiography of American politics and visual culture."" - Joshua Brown, professor of history emeritus, former director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, The Graduate Center, City University of New York"

Author Information

"After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1949 - with an MBA but without any history courses under his belt - John's principal business experience was as a management consultant and entrepreneur. As an amateur historian, his consulting expertise paved the way for this book, and his actual road led through advertising. More than fifty years ago, he started AdTel, Ltd., a marketing research business, which used novel dual-cable television to break new ground in measuring television advertising effectiveness and testing new products. By 1972, John had conducted several hundred meaningful tests, and became interested in the history of American advertising. One day, he answered a New York Times ad for the sale of some duplicate annual volumes of Harper's Weekly - America's de facto ""newspaper of record"" from 1857 to 1912 - and soon found himself the owner of a complete set of fifty-six volumes. Their sixteen lineal feet languished, mostly untouched on their custom-built shelves, for about twenty years. As a retirement hobby, John decided to have all 2,912 issues manually indexed. That included 173,000 ads, but it was the 10,000 cartoons and 65,000 illustrations by artists like Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington that really caught his attention. John's new company, HarpWeek LLC, manually indexed, scanned and retyped all 73,000 pages of Harper's Weekly over twelve years, with a staff of as many as fourteen historians working on it. HarpWeek, his proprietary digital database, has been licensed to more than 500 academic institutions and public libraries worldwide. For this, and another database called Lincoln and the Civil War, John was awarded the 2003 e-Lincoln Prize in history. When he delved deeper, the artistry and political impact of Thomas Nast's cartoons and illustrations totally captured his interest. Consequently, John had the indexers prepare a chronological listing of all Nast's work, including their size and location within each issue. With help from the late Draper Hill, a political cartoonist and Nast historian, John was able to identify 445 of the 450 people whom Nast drew and have them indexed by name, topic and literary source, if any (e.g. Shakespeare by play and character). These unique and exclusive compilations, along with relevant text, provided a complete visual record of Nast's quarter-century at Harper's Weekly. With them and the contextual HarpWeek database for a backbone, reporting and fleshing out Nast's life and work objectively became much more doable. A valuable by-product was the ability to determine with precision, his several lengthy absences from and returns to the periodical, and to explore in depth what he was doing in between. John also commissioned several specific lengthy articles from Draper Hill, and shorter essays from eight knowledgeable university professors on their Nast-related specialties (e.g. fine art, Shakespeare, Christmas). In 2008, John published (with Draper Hill) Doomed by Cartoon: How Thomas Nast and The New-York Times Brought Down Boss Tweed and His Ring of Thieves. John is a snowbird who resides in Sarasota, FL (winter) and Greenwich, CT (summer). He has special kudos for Richard West who advised on and edited this biography; Cheryl Tomas who typed dozens of drafts and did the layouts, and Greg Weber who created and managed the HarpWeek database as well as the ThomasNast.com website promoting this book."

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