THE UGLIEST PRESIDENTIAL CARTOON IN AMERICAN HISTORY - 1872

[Warph]

Mark Twain credited cartoonish Thomas Nast with winning the election for Grant, not so much by promoting Grant as by destroying Horace Greeley, a man whom Twain acknowledged was a good man, but the wrong man.

Nast is often praised as a genius, but with his Harper's 1872 cartoons he lapsed into work that would only be equaled by Soviet cartoonists generations later. He drew Greeley as a monster and a lunatic, a bitter demented figure. There was Greeley cavorting with the Irish (whom the Republicans of the day took a dim view of), with the Tweed Gang and of course, Greeley, who had been a prominent abolitionist, was accused of murdering black people in this cartoon.

The theme is rather contemporary. Greeley is accused of racism for wanting to roll back Federal troops from the South. If you think this theme debuted in 1972. Try 1872.

But that's not considered the ugliest cartoon that Nash drew of Greeley. That would be this one:


Here Greeley is paying homage to the ghost of John Wilkes Booth over the grave of Abraham Lincoln. And because Nash was nothing if not subtle, Lincoln's tombstone reads, "The Manner of His Death Is Known to All".

And since Nash still thought that Harper's readers might by some chance fail to grasp the meaning of a cartoon in which Greeley is clasping the hand of Lincoln's killer over a grave with that message, he also inserted a pamphlet into Greeley's pocket titled, "What I Know about Wilkes Booth", which accuses a Presidential candidate of serving as an accessory to the murder of Abraham Lincoln.