Historians generally have a pretty high opinion of Thomas Nast, the famed 19th Century illustrator and political cartoonist. I teach college-level U.S. history from a textbook which features a wonderful image from Nast. It shows two soldiers outside a building entitled "The Temple of Liberty." The soldiers are standing on a drawbridge, barring the entry of a Chinese immigrant.
The caption reads, "E Pluribus Unum (Except the Chinese)." The drawing was selected to show how Nast was on the right side of the racist debate over Chinese immigration in the early 1880s which led to the horrific Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a measure which not only restricted Chinese immigration, but barred the naturalization of Chinese people already in the country.
That Thomas Nast fellow was one progressive dude. Whether he was standing up for the rights of a despised immigrant group or exposing the depredations of corrupt political machines, Thomas Nast (an immigrant himself, from Germany) was one of print journalism's earliest crusaders, a courageous man who spoke truth to power.
Of course, to make that conclusion, you have to willfully ignore the fact that he was a bigot who may have defended the rights of Chinese immigrants, but was somewhat less enthusiastic about newcomers from Ireland, particularly those of the Catholic persuasion.
Nast is in the news these days because he is among a large number of New Jersey residents who have been nominated for the state's Hall of Fame. As this newspaper noted last week, members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the Garden State have launched a campaign aimed at blocking Nast's election to the hall, arguing, with a good deal of merit, that Nast's blatant slanders of Irish Catholics in the decades after the Civil War should disqualify him.
The AOH is absolutely right to call attention to Nast's racist caricatures of Irish Catholics. Far too many historians, journalists, and students think of Nast as a high-minded crusader against corruption and injustice, and as a beloved icon who created the character of Santa Claus based on the story of St. Nicholas.
More than a decade ago, the prominent journalist Adam Gopnik wrote a long, worshipful profile of Nast, calling him "the father of American cartooning," which he certainly was. But Gopnik chose to ignore, or explain away, the appalling content of some of Nast's most-famous cartoons, which were designed to whip up hatred of Irish Catholics in New York.
The AOH pointed to just one of those images, a cartoon which showed bishops as crocodiles wading up to America's shores, ready to pounce on Protestant children. But that was just one example of Nast's bigotry. Most of his political cartoons, including those which helped bring down Boss Tweed, the Irish are portrayed as violent, knuckle-dragging apes.
What's more, as a journalist, Nast was no better than some of the fabricators who have stained the profession's reputation in recent years. One of Nast's most-famous anti-Tweed cartoons quoted the Boss saying, as a challenge, "What are you going to do about it?" The implication, of course, was that Tweed was so arrogant that he believed nobody could bring him down. The quote has been used repeatedly to illustrate Tweed's (and Tammany's) cynicism.
There's one problem, and it has escaped most of Nast's admirers. Tweed never uttered those words. Tweed's biographer, Kenneth Ackerman, concluded that Nast simply made up the quote.
Nast's record actually is even worse than the AOH has revealed, at least thus far. On July 12, 1871, state militia fired on Irish-Catholic civilians gathered along 8th Avenue in Manhattan to protest an Orange day parade by the city's Irish Protestants. Sixty-two civilians were killed and a hundred were wounded. Twenty-eight of the dead were Irish-Catholic immigrants. Three militia men and one police officer also died in the violence.
The city was stunned. But in Harper's Weekly, a notoriously anti-Catholic organ, Nast celebrated the carnage with an illustration showing the figure of Columbia (labeled "law") with a whip in one hand and her other hand at the throat of an ape-like Irishman. The caption read, "Bravo! Bravo!"
Two questions come to mind: Why have Nast's admirers chosen to ignore his bigotry? And should that bigotry disqualify him from a place of honor?
It's hard to answer the first question, unless one assumes (perhaps with reason) that anti-Catholicism is considered an acceptable flaw. AOH members in New Jersey have the answer to the second question: A very loud "yes."
They very likely are right, but it is important to remember that this nation has chosen to celebrate many people who harbored prejudices which we would regard as unacceptable today. From slave-owning presidents to racist athletes to anti-Semitic journalists, our heroes and icons tend to be deeply flawed - as we all are.
If racism disqualified baseball players from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, the hall would be a very lonely place. The images of two slave-owners adorn Mount Rushmore. One of journalism's 20th Century saints, H.L. Mencken, was a virulent anti-Semite.
The AOH is right to call attention to Nast's bigotry. But members should remember that Nast would hardly be the first flawed American to be placed on a roll of honor. And he won't be the last.
