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265 C H A P T E R T W E LV E Nast’s Weekly and Guayaquil In the aftermath of the election of 1884, Nast was exhausted. He took some pleasure in a visit from his friend Mark Twain, who was in Morristown for a stop in his lecture tour with George Washington Cable. The lecturers dined with the Nast family, enjoying fresh oysters. Twain enjoyed them so much, in fact, that Nast offered him seconds. “Don’t care if I do,” replied the humorist. Thirds? “Come to think of it, I believe I will.” Eventually, five servings were consumed. “Look here, Nast,” Twain remonstrated, “I didn’t know you had an oyster ranch in your cellar.” He could eat no more, he admitted . Spying some pretty apples, though, he asked, “Are there any more apples in this house? Cause if there is, I’d like one.” In his thank-you note, Cable mocked the hard work of touring: “Our wives at home can hardly keep back the tears for thinking of their ‘poor husbands, working so hard.’ (Don’t you tell).” It was the kind of entertaining Nast loved best.1 Entertaining friends offered a pleasant respite from personal and professional worries. Nast’s passionate contributions during the election masked a private drama of disastrous proportions. One day in early May 1884, Nast opened the newspaper to find that Grant and Ward, the firm in which Nast had invested most of his fortune, had failed. He lost everything but his Morristown home. Ferdinand Ward, it emerged, had been a crook all along. The company had no holdings. It was a giant Ponzi scheme. Former president Grant, whose son was the Grant in Grant and Ward and who had invested heavily in the firm, was devastated and broken—financially and personally. The president struggled to make right his debts, but nothing could really save him from the consequences of the failure. Grant, like Nast, had been essentially innocent when it came to investment. The cartoonist commented on the scandal with “The Tape That Entangles Both Large and Small,” a drawing that showed three men entangled in ticker tape.2 Though Nast did not yet know it, his financial troubles had only just begun.3 In order to increase his income in the wake of the Grant and Ward failure , Nast embarked on a new lecture tour in late 1884, traveling with a speaker and his son, Thomas Nast Jr. The speaker provided the audience 266Nast’s Weekly and Guayaquil with narration while Nast drew the pictures. This helped to alleviate Nast’s terrible stage fright and freed him from having to write a speech. To Nast’s disappointment, although the tour was a success, it was less remunerative than those of 1873.4 He returned to Morristown, produced a cartoon on Cleveland’s struggle to institute reforms in national government, and tried to relax. But politics continued to inspire. Nast’s tendency to become overwrought and extreme during presidential elections showed in his postelection cartoons as well. In late November, he had Cleveland brokering a peace between black and white men in the South. In the last issue of the year, his Christmas spirit again overrode caution. On the cover of Harper’s Weekly Nast posed a pair of southern men, one black and one white, beating their swords into ploughshares. “Proclaim Liberty,” the caption optimistically directed .5 In the New Year’s issue of Harper’s, Nast wished for a bright future for president-elect Cleveland.6 Curtis and the Harpers failed to share Nast’s optimism, however. The same issue contained an editorial about the divisions within the Republican Party. Blaine’s loss had “done nothing to repair the breach” caused by the “bitter” disagreements among Republicans. Facing a substantial loss in revenue thanks to their stand in 1884, and still widely criticized, Curtis and the Harpers looked with concern upon the coming year.7 Nast’s optimism continued into the early spring of 1885. Cleveland’s inauguration prompted Nast to speculate on the end of the abusive spoils system and the advent of a new level of civil service reform. In one cartoon, he showed Cleveland overseeing “Ft. Honesty” and wielding the club of reform. In another, the president was shown “dusting” out the corrupt officials and keeping only the best men—among whom the White House cook apparently numbered.8 By late spring, however, Nast’s attention began to fracture. The health of...

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