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177 C H A P T E R E I G H T Redpath and Wealth By early 1873 Nast’s position among Republicans could not have been higher. Their adoration “became something near idolatry,” Paine says. But for Nast, the previous few months had been both exhilarating and trying . As his star rose, Nast experienced all the pressures of success. Invitations arrived for social and political events, and professional opportunities abounded. James Parton, despite mourning his wife, took time to write Nast a congratulatory note. “Apply at once for the Paris consulship,” he urged Nast, “and please don’t get it!”1 Samuel Clemens, an old friend, wrote that the “pictures were simply marvelous.”2 Nast reveled in his fame. But he had been working nonstop for two years. He was exhausted. Thomas Nast was compensated on a per-cartoon basis in 1871 and 1872. As a result, the more he submitted to Harper’s the more he stood to earn. By the end of the year, more than 140 Nast cartoons, including 32 that appeared on covers, were published. According to Paine, Nast earned $18,000 in 1872, including the $1,200 he received in royalties from Nast’s Almanac , published by Harper and Brothers. The bulk of the income came from his cartoons and represented an enormous sum.3 The pace strained Nast’s imagination and his body, though. Cartooning was physically as well as mentally taxing. Nast also sketched constantly. So his hands, arms, and shoulders, as well as his brain, felt the burden of his work. By January 1873, he described himself to a friend as having fallen into a “slough of despond.” He wrote, “[I am] almost on the point of giving it up in despair for it seems as if I could not scratch up a particle of imagination or capacity to do anything . . . . I feel so stupid and listless.”4 On top of his work for the Weekly, Nast produced drawings for books. Harper’s Weekly was just part of the Harper brothers’ publishing empire. So when Harper and Brothers decided to offer the public a new printing of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, it turned to the famous illustrator already in their employ. His fifty-two drawings in the new edition helped make the volume, part of a series, particularly appealing. But the combination of illustrating books and his manic pace on the election cartoons 178Redpath and Wealth added strain to an already busy schedule. In late January, he was almost finished with the drawings.5 Frank Bellew experienced a similar postelection fatigue. He fell ill and was unable to work. When he needed money, Nast sent him twenty-five dollars. Nast’s need for rest prompted expressions of concern from friends and colleagues. Clemens suggested that Nast might join him on a trip to England in May. Curtis wrote in February, encouraging Nast to rest and hoping that “when spring comes perhaps I shall see you, with the other bulbs and flowers!” Parton was more blunt: Nast needed “rest and change” and should take Horace Greeley’s death as a warning. “It was forty years work and no play that destroyed him,” Parton argued, and Nast should put aside concerns about things like his mortgage and worry instead about his health. Turning the biblical injunction on its head, Parton appealed to Sallie —“‘Husbands, obey your wives’”—and urged her to force Nast to rest.6 Nast’s fatigue might have been lifted by the spectacle of the inauguration . As guests of Norton Parker Chipman, he and Sallie traveled to Washington to attend parties and see Grant take the oath of office for the second time. But it was cold, the city was crowded, and the president was in a gloomy mood. The Credit Mobilier scandal had been brewing since the previous fall, but by the inaugural it had become a national disgrace. Not only had the Union Pacific Railroad Company subverted the rules regarding federal contracting through the invented Credit Mobilier company, but congressmen involved in policymaking related to railroads accepted discounted stock. An investigation showed that they also tried to cover up their involvement, adding to the embarrassment. Chipman wrote on January 26 that it was “an exhibition of idiocy and cowardice!”7 Nast hardly commented on the scandal.On January 30 he wrote to Chipman that the “affair makes me sick,” but he lacked the “heart to touch it, as yet.”8 Because of his exhaustion, he...

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