Harper’s Weekly November 25, 1876
Note from the editor: This week we are especially fortunate to feature (beneath his regular cartoon) the words of Thomas Nast, famed illustrator for this magazine, on the capture, extradition, and delivery of one William Tweed to federal authorities here in New York City. A wizard with the cartoonist’s pen, Nast here sets his words to paper for the first time about the crook his drawings for this magazine helped take down…
Dear reader (a term of address which, I confess, is new to me),
Here’s the story, as straight as I can tell it (with some bits imagined, which I hope you’ll indulge):
I had to move to Jersey a few weeks after the Tammany man came. He appeared on my Harlem doorstep and told me (in so many words) that I really ought to go abroad—to Europe, preferably—to take some art classes, to round out my cartooning technique. He offered me $100,000 to go. I told him I wouldn’t do it for under $500,000. That’s when he realized that I was pulling his leg. That he couldn’t force me out of this country that easily. That’s the moment he knew that I I knew he was a Tammany man.
But still I moved—out of my beloved city, at least, if not out of my beloved country. I had to—out of fear for my life and that of my family—all because of a couple of impassioned sketches I jotted down in the name of good government and the rule of law. I was punished either for having opinions or for having a pen. Or both.
My first cartoons of Mr. Tweed started popping up in Harper’s in 1869, when he was very much the Boss. I started drawing him because I wanted to puncture that “Boss” like a balloon—I thought that bringing him down to Earth, reminding the good people of New York City, of America, that he was no more and no less than one William Magear Tweed: moneybag-headed, diamond-flaunting, corpulent as a cow, well, I thought that would mean something. I wanted to sear those images into the minds of every damned Irishman from Brooklyn to the Bronx. I hoped my contribution would go some way toward ending Tweed’s corrupt reign over the city. Those millions of soot-flecked Irishmen-at-the-bottom-of-it-doing-the-real-work, they couldn’t read but they could see my pictures. Tweed’s thumb over the city, that diamond ring, the gem for the heart. They would understand. And just maybe then they’d stop voting the Democratic ticket. I often have to hold my tongue when writing about the Irish, but I will acknowledge that somewhere deep within them there is a sense of right and wrong, papally mediated or not. Probably it was bludgeoned into them by Spenser and Cromwell: a knowledge of good rapped into them by the evil of the English schoolmaster’s ruler. But the Irish of New York are controlled by the worst among them—the Tweed Ring.
I grew up in Bavaria, where there now reigns a real Boss. His name is Ludwig II—the Mad King. He lives in a fairytale world and spends the peasants’ money as if it were magic pixie dust. He built Neuschwanstein Castle—it’s the loveliest castle in Europe. But even now, in my comfortable new suburban home, I can hear the way stomach growled twenty years ago. I know the groaning rumble in the stomachs of the innocent which is the anthem of real Boss Rule, when it becomes uncheckable. My parents did not want for me to grow up in the land of patrons and princes, bosses and brigands. They took us to America. Poor souls; they believed.
Neuschwanstein will never be built in America while I draw breath—no Rockefeller or Carnegie will ever nab enough to bankroll that eternal Boss-dom of quiet stomachs, full pews, and frequent funerals. The one who has come damn near the closest—with his Fifth Avenue penthouse and his Greenwich mansion and his daily swims in the coffers of the municipality, is William Tweed. So I decided to stop Tweed before he added turrets and tapestries to Tammany Hall and proclaimed himself not just Boss, but King. That’s when and why I started drawing him. Tweed had gotten away with everything for so long—luck of the damn Irish. Not to quote myself, but what I was going to do about it?
***
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
Two Spanish men, skin the color of ripe olive trees, toil on the roadway. Their brows glisten and their arms ache. Today they are re-tiling the cobblestones down by the wharf. Tomorrow it will be something else, coopering rioja for export to New York, perhaps. Or installing electric lights. Whatever pays. And whatever brings Spain into the future, I suppose.
“La cara es familiar” says the taller one. “Pero quizás no es él.”
“No, es el hombre en la foto.”
They were pointing at a robust orb of a man, not exactly sailor-shaped but wearing the livery of that profession. He was straining to tie a difficult rope on an outbound ship in the wharf. The Spanish heat squeezed his balding head and deflating body. Yes, William (née Boss) Tweed grunted and groaned in a Cadiz dockyard. His once-delicate hands—which formerly ladled caviar and greased the palms of public works contractors—were bleeding against the tough hide of the rope. He looked queasy, out of place. The two Spanish men remarked on the fat sailor’s distinctive features.
“Sí, sí, recuerdo la nariz”
“Y su sonrisa. De culpa. Sonrisa de monstruo.”
Tweed the Monster finished tying the rope. He lumbered down the gangplank onto the dockyard and picked up a guano crate. The ship’s first mate yelled at him to hurry. He wheezed back up the gangplank onto the ship. The men’s eyes followed him the whole time.
They nodded to each other and then they put down their trowels and walked to the police station.
***
Incidentally, the king of Spain was not like Ludwig II or Boss Tweed, not a mad despot or an avaricious aspirant to that position. He was the young, erudite, beloved Alfonso XII, whose name and numerals may have harked back to medieval times, but whose worldview was cosmopolitan and whose mind was always on the future.
He contracted tuberculosis and, in 1885 he died at age 27. Spain mourned him.
***
Tweed had gotten to Spain through a series of steps that another pen should describe. You’ll get only the rudimentary version for me—after all I’m just the cartoonist. I didn’t write a single one of the Times articles that really took down Tweed. I wasn’t the one who found the Tweed Ring ledger that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the graft of Tammany. I didn’t prosecute him in a court of law, or find him guilty like twelve of my peers did. I didn’t do the real work of arresting him in Spain and extraditing him back to the United States. I didn’t slam shut the door to his cell in Ludlow Street Jail with that last satisfying clang. My contribution to the cause of justice in New York and in America was quite small. I did the only thing I could do to honor that little boy who went hungry in Bavaria, the land where riches gathered dust in state coffers and the fruits of labor rotted in the pockets of patrons and castle-builders. It’s how I said to my city: you will always mean what you were supposed to mean—today, tomorrow, and forever.
I merely drew some pictures.
And now that I’m putting down my writer’s pen after this brief assay at the harder art, I’ll pick my draftsman’s pencil up again next week.
Until then,
Thomas Nast
By Zachary Partnoy
