The New Yorker, December 8, 1997 P. 84
A CRITIC AT LARGE about 19th century cartoonist Thomas Nast... Nast, the father of American cartooning, remains the greatest American imagemaker. An imagemaker is not always an artist. Even the best cartoons Nast produced, in the years from 1862 to 1886, when, as the staff artist of "Harper's Weekly," he was at once the country's conscience and its comforter, tend to be inelegant messes, meant to be read rather than really seen. When he took up easel painting, toward the end of his life, what he painted was conventional and uninspired... Nast invented the Democratic Donkey, the Republican Elephant, the Tammany Tiger, and the American Boss, the capitalist with a bag of money for a brain. Above all, he was the man who invented Santa Claus, taking a minor Central European folk saint, dimly recalled from his German childhood, and turning him into the personification of American Materialism, coming down the chimney and shaking with joy... Nast elevated the American cartoon, and had one of the most original lives of any American artist... Describes his propaganda for the North during the Civil War in the pages of Harper's Weekly, and his invention of Santa Claus as a byproduct, in 1862... Santa looks All-American now, but he still has a touch of the eighteen-sixties about him, as much as a Civil War artifact as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Describes Santa's roots as a 19th-century Republican... Describes how Nast helped Grant win the Presidency... After Grant won, Nast took on corrupt New York City politician Boss Tweed... Eventually Tweed fled New York for Spain, where he was captured by police using one of Nast's caricatures to identify him... Mentions the sad circumstance of Nast's death, after being offered a diplomatic sinecure by President Roosevelt in 1902 in fever-ridden Ecuador... In Daumier there is always an appeal to culture-even the most absurd of his connoisseurs is communing with some force greater than himself. But in Nast, American in this as in everything else, there is only an endless cycle of Christmas and corruption, Boss Tweed going for your throat, or Santa Claus coming down the chimney, and which one you get is mostly a question of how lucky you are prepared to be.
