Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Classic cartoon: Nast on the Irish

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Mike Peterson Published: July 7, 2011 1 minute 4 comments

I'm tied up for the next few days with some workshops for middle-school journalists, so will be posting some of the classic cartoons I used to show high school students in a presentation on the topic.

The presentation began with the Nast cartoon of the Tweed Ring that I posted here a few days ago. However, I reminded them that, admirable as his major role in the takedown of Tweed and his cronies, he did it as a Republican pitbull, and not everything he did in that role was admirable.

Then I'd show them this 1872 cartoon, in which Horace Greeley and an "Irish Roman Catholic Invader" discuss the need to get the Bible out of the public schools. Greeley is shown as a befuddled old man, the Irishman is an apelike character, outfitted with a Fenian "Erin go Bragh" button in his lapel, a pistol in his belt and a bottle in his back pocket. Everything he owns is in a bundle at his clodhopper-clad feet, because he has nothing to offer and has only arrived and is already telling us how to run our country, as the evil, scheming priest eavesdrops in the background and a brave lad gamely pledges to stand up for Christian America.

Back in the 1990s when I started doing this, I had to explain the partisan press, how each town would have a Democratic and a Republican paper, and coverage was slanted to the politics of each paper. By the time I wrapped up that part of my life, in about 2006, the explanation was much simpler, thanks to Fox News and MSNBC.

Things haven't become any more civil in the ensuing half-decade, and I sometimes wonder what the kids who sat in those auditoriums think as they watch the flow of sewage that passes for political dialogue these days.

Here's another Nast from that same period. Harper's Weekly ran this two days before the election, when the Irish Catholic Francis Kernan was running for governor of New York on the Democratic ticket. Kernan kneels before the Pope, ("Our Foreign Ruler (?)") pledging "I will do your bidding, as you are infallible."

The Irish Catholic community in America despised Harper's Weekly and Thomas Nast, and I would tell the kids that it put me in a quandry, since I hate what he did to my ancestors, but admire his artistry. I compared it to the way you could admire an athlete for his sports prowess but not his personal life.

Yes, it's a little more complex than that, since Nast used his professional talents to draw this stuff. But he was still a great artist. And a real S.O.B.  I thought it was a good way for kids to begin to deal with the realities of adult life.

And pass the NYS Regents, in which they were much more likely to be asked about Nast and Tweed than about Nast and the Irish.