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221 C H A P T E R T E N Conflict with Curtis “I cannot do it. I cannot outrage my convictions.” —THOMAS NAST, quoted in Paine, Thomas Nast “My feeling is that the country feels that there has been rather too much bayonet.”—GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, quoted in Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast By 1876, Thomas Nast had every reason to rest on his laurels. His personal income was substantial, his fame was widespread, and his position at Harper’s Weekly seemed unassailable. No one could have predicted that by the end of 1877 Nast’s ongoing conflict with editor George William Curtis would become a public clash, destroying Nast’s relationship with the magazine and with the Harper family. Nast continued to work for Harper’s for another ten years, but the teamwork that characterized the paper in the 1860s and early 1870s was absent, and the ill feeling meant that Nast no longer communicated easily with the Harpers or Curtis. Nast withdrew more and more to his home in Morristown, and his attempts to secure a contract with another magazine or to collaborate with publishers and authors were frustrated by a mystifying series of rejections. After 1877, Nast’s star was on the wane, and he was increasingly bitter about his inability to recapture the magic he had experienced during his glory years at Harper’s. A long time forming, the fight between Nast and Curtis had its roots in both personal and professional differences. The two men agreed on many things. They both valued honor in public life, decried hypocrisy and avarice , and believed that American government could be both highly moral and impressively efficient. The corruption of government, whether on the local level or the national, aroused both men to indignant fury.They agreed, as well, on the need for civil service reform, although Curtis fought harder for the latter. Differences eventually overwhelmed similarities, however. At the root of the clash was that Curtis believed public life should be genteel. He found Nast’s cartoons offensive for two reasons. First, they at- 222Conflict with Curtis tacked public men in personal ways. Caricature took a man’s face and body and exaggerated his flaws until he appeared ridiculous.The black and white dichotomy of the cartoon universe cast men either as angels or devils, with hardly any room for the kind of complexity that Curtis saw in a public servant like Senator Charles Sumner. Second, Curtis objected to Nast specifically . The cartoonist’s editorial independence challenged Curtis’s role as political editor of the weekly. Curtis felt that his editorials ought to set the paper’s policy. Nast should then cartoon in conjunction with that policy. In essence, Nast’s work should reinforce what Curtis wrote, not contradict— and certainly not reject—it.1 For many years Nast and Curtis maintained a kind of polite standoff. Fletcher Harper protected Nast and guaranteed his editorial independence. Curtis remained political editor, and his essays expressed the paper’s positions with force and elegance. In the wake of Rutherford B. Hayes’s controversial election in 1876, Curtis disagreed with Nast over the new president’s southern policy. Nast wanted to attack the withdrawal of federal troops from the South as an abandonment of the freed slaves. Curtis wanted to approve the president’s policy so that Hayes could use his political capital for other policies, notably an attack on the spoils system. Working behind the scenes, Curtis convinced the younger Harpers to support his position. The struggle provided a tense undercurrent to the more public discussion of the election and its outcome. It was only with the death of Harper, in 1877, that Curtis found he could assert his power. After that, Nast’s relationship with Harper’s Weekly never recovered. As the election of 1876 approached, “Caesarism” persisted. Democratic control of the House made the contest for the White House even fiercer than usual. More, the success of the Democrats in 1874 showed the potential value of the third-term question. So it kept coming up, and Nast kept attacking those who fretted about Grant’s plans. He delighted, for example, in suggesting that James Gordon Bennett Jr. of the New York Herald, motivated entirely by a personal animosity for Grant, was acting blindly, ignoring the facts. In “Homo-Phobia,” he hammered home the point with a series of slogans on the wall behind Bennett, pictured seated behind his desk. Grant appears on a...

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