"Gross and Uncomplimentary Exaggerations"

Thomas Nast’s impression of Rep. James B. Weaver’s struggle to get the House to vote on his Greenback financial resolutions as reprinted in A Call to Action.



As Rep. James B. Weaver struggled in the winter of 1880 to get a vote on his Greenback financial resolutions in the House, the matter suddenly became fodder for mirth.

Harper’s Weekly, the influential magazine of news, opinion and literature, featured a cartoon caricature of Weaver on the House floor making the case for the Greenback program to a chamber full of uninterested and unhappy lawmakers.

The sketch by Thomas Nast elevated the legislative battle into a topic of national conversation, but not in a way Weaver liked.

Nast portrays Weaver as an ass in Roman garb. Bored and disconsolate lawmakers cover their ears. The speaker’s back is turned. The caption, “I shall sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid,” comes from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” and is uttered by the comic character Bottom the Weaver. At Weaver’s feet is a book entitled “A Midwinter’s Night Dream.”

The drawing was not flattering. It was not intended to be.

Ridicule was Nast's stock in trade, art historian J. Chal Vinson has written. Nast employed it with tremendous effectiveness during as the United States emerged from the trauma of civil war. An ardent Unionist who rose to fame with his war-time caricatures, Nast remained a loyal servant of the Republican cause until 1884.

Nast made the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey famous symbols of the two parties, helped bring down Boss Tweed in New York and mercilessly lampooned Horace Greeley in the editor's ill-starred 1872 presidential campaign. By 1880, Nast stood at the height of his influence and built a fortune totaling $125,000.

Nast’s rendering of Weaver as an asinine buffoon braying about Greenback monetary policy reflected the conventional wisdom of the day – and immediately became a topic for discussion on the House floor.

Weaver tried to turn it to his advantage by pretending to defend the honor of House Speaker Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania.

“A gross misrepresentation is going all over the country through the figures of a cartoon by Nast, which represents the speaker with his back toward me,” Weaver told the House on March 1. “That is not a fact.”

Rep. James A. Garfield, the Republican leader from Ohio, seized the opportunity to mock both Weaver and the Democratic speaker, Samuel Randall of Pennsylvania.

“Which figure represents you?” Garfield inquired. Drawing on his command of scripture, Weaver responded with a reference to a story from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Numbers.

“The large figure with the long ears, of course, represents me. You know that the ass in the Bible saw the angel before Balaam, his rider, saw him.”

Weaver seems to have been conflicted about the image. His decision to include it in his memoir and manifesto, A Call to Action, suggests that he found it, at some level, flattering. But his description of the drawing – “a scurrillous travesty” – also indicates that Nast’s sting continued to irritate a full 12 years after the cartoon was published.

“Prominent caricaturists were employed by the monopoly organs to fill the illustrated weeklies with gross and uncomplimentary exaggerations of the author and the scope of his resolutions,” Weaver wrote. “The imaginative genius of Nast was called upon to swell the volume of misrepresentation and ridicule.”

Satirizing Weaver and the Greenbacks may have been one of the few things Nast and the management at Harper's could agree on as the 1870s drew to a close. Harper's publisher George William Curtis wanted less vitriol from the cartoonist. Nast became disillusioned with the Republican Party, and ultimately broke with the GOP when it nominated James G. Blaine in 1884.

"In the essence of Nast's success was the ability to communicate ideas in graphic form," Vinson has written. "His cartoons for the most part were not illustrations of captions, dependent on writing for their impact. His figures never needed an identifying tag. The force of the work was in the drawing itself."

There was no mistaking what Nast thought of Weaver or the Greenback monetary program.

Sources:

Mitchell, Robert B. Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver. Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2008.

Vinson, J. Chal. "Thomas Nast and the American Political Scene." American Quarterly (9), Johns Hopkins University Press (Autumn 1957).

Weaver, James B. A Call to Action. Des Moines, 1892.

Going for the Gold

At the age of 79, after a lifetime that included service as a Union Army general in the Civil War and a term as governor of Illinois, Democratic Sen. John M. Palmer might well have basked in the role of elder statesman.

Instead, he ventured into the world of presidential politics at the head of an ill-starred third-party campaign for the White House in 1896.

Palmer was the candidate of the National Democratic Party, a creation of conservative supporters of President Grover Cleveland who could not abide the Democratic ticket headed by William Jennings Bryan.

The split in the party followed a tumultuous and unhappy return to the White House by Cleveland in 1892. Shortly after he took office, the Panic of 1893 swept through banks, investment houses, factories and farms, creating economic chaos that dominated his second term.

In 1894, Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to suppress the Pullman strike organized by Eugene V. Debs. Legions of unemployed workers loosely organized as an “army” by Jacob Coxey marched on Washington demanding relief. In the congressional elections of 1894, Republicans routed Democrats and regained control of Capitol Hill.

Two years later, when Democrats met in Chicago to choose their presidential candidate, the party nominated Bryan, whose support for free-silver, among other things, made him anathema to the conservative financiers who backed Cleveland and favored the gold standard.

The rebuke in Chicago was an ignominious end for Cleveland, whose victory in 1884 made him the first Democrat to win the White House since before the Civil War.

So-called Gold Democrats met in Indianapolis in September and selected Palmer as their presidential candidate. To balance the impact of having a former Union Army general at the top of its ticket, the Gold Democrats picked Simon Bolivar Buckner, 73, the Confederate general who surrendered Fort Donelson to Ulysses S. Grant, as Palmer’s running mate.

The Gold Democrats adopted a platform that cast their defection from the Bryan ticket as a high-minded defense of principle.

“This convention has assembled to uphold the principles upon which depend the honor and welfare of the American people in order that Democrats throughout the Union may unite their patriotic efforts to avert disaster from their country and ruin from their party,” the Gold Democrats declared.

Cleveland pronounced himself pleased with the ticket, but others were less enthusiastic. “You would laugh yourself sick could you see old Palmer,” Kenesaw M. Landis, the future commissioner of baseball, wrote to a friend. “He has actually gotten it into his head he is running for office.”

“A Splendid Ticket – Don’t Vote for It,” declared the New York Sun. The New York Times was marginally more supportive.

“The Democrats of this state have always been for sound money,” the Times observed in its tepid endorsement of Palmer. “The platform of the Chicago assemblage was a radical departure from Democratic doctrines, and the Chicago ticket stands for Populism, not Democracy.”

The Times’s endorsement came on Sept. 30, but by then, the campaign between Republican William McKinley and Bryan had evolved into a clear-cut battle between the bimetallism favored by Bryan and the hard-money policies favored by the GOP. Hard-money Democrats were an irrelevancy.

The Gold Democrats, one study has concluded, represented the last gasp of classic 19th-century liberalism – with its emphasis on minimalist government, free trade and hard money – in the Democratic Party. The Gold Democrats’ “efforts to defend these values ended in almost complete failure.”

When the votes were counted, the Gold Democratic ticket received 132,871 votes – an insignificant fraction of the more than 13 million presidential ballots cast that year. It would be the only time since 1860 that the Times endorsed a third-party candidate. Palmer’s showing in the fall gave the paper little reason to do so again.

Sources:

The New York Times, Sept. 30, 1896

"Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classic Liberalism," David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. The Independent Review, Vol. 4, No. 4, Spring 2000, pp. 555-575.

The Campaign of 1896: The Presidential Campaign, Cartoons & Commentary. Created by Rebecca Edwards and Sarah DeFeo. http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html