John Adler shares the visual truth of his new book on “America’s Most Influential Journalist” – Thomas Nast
By Anne W. Semmes
John Adler – decades long resident of Riverside – has a mammoth new book, weighing in at five pounds, that packs in a powerfully illustrated truth in its 800-plus pages. It’s there in its title, “America’s Most Influential Journalist – The Life, Times and Legacy of Thomas Nast.”
“It is right there,” says Adler, “because nothing in writing, no editorial remains in people’s heads very well, but Nast’s pictures did. And he was a sequential cartoonist, so he would bang and bang and bang, always with a little different form, but on the same point. And he swung five presidential elections, 1864, 1868, 1872,1876 even though he didn’t like Rutherford Hayes…and 1884. What other journalist could possibly be a major influence on five victorious presidential elections?
“Lincoln called him, ‘his best recruiting sergeant,’ because his cartoons had showed the Southerners as really doing horrendous things, and that drove people to enlist in the Union Army. Lincoln recognized that. Grant said, ‘He was elected by the sword of Phil Sheridan (Union General Philip Sheridan) and the pencil of Thomas Nast.’”
How John Adler came to recognizing the impact of Thomas Nast who lived between 1840 and 1902 and brought to us his legacy symbols of the Republican elephant, Democratic donkey, Uncle Sam, and a fat, jolly Santa, is a story in itself.
Adler, about to turn 95, first excelled in advertising in the 1960’s with an innovative tracking model that measured the effectiveness of advertising that was featured in The New York Times. Lured by an ad in the Times selling 60-plus copies of the magazine Harper’s Weekly stretching across the 19th and 20th centuries – and surely hosting many an ad, Adler purchased them. “This was the illustrated newspaper of record for all those years.”
He proceeded then to set those volumes aside, “like Rip Van Winkle” until age 65, when as “a retirement hobby” he manually indexed them. That resulting database, created with the costly expense of scores of experts, became HarpWeek. now found in the Library of Congress and over 500 university and college libraries around the world, including as a gift to the Greenwich Library.
Inspired by Harper’s Weekly coverage of Lincoln and the Civil War, Adler chose to create that as a separate database that would win him the 2003 Lincoln Prize – one of only two given for a database rather than a book – by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, founded by Lew Lehrman of backcountry Greenwich and the late Richard Gilder. His prize included $50,000 and a handsome Saint-Gaudens bust of Lincoln. Adler would then spend the next 11 years writing about the impacting illustrative art of Thomas Nast in those Harper Weekly’s.
“He’s born in Landau, Germany,” tells Adler of Nast. “He comes over here when he’s five years old, knowing no English, and speaks with an accent, and has a tough childhood in New York. And he was no good in school. He had dyslexia. And dyslexia is really a handicap, except when you’re drawing backwards on wood blocks – maybe it’s not such a big handicap. Disney and da Vinci were dyslexic too.”
“He dropped out of school when he was 13. He worked for two artists who trained him.” At age 15 he applies to engraver/publisher Frank Leslie and his Illustrated Newspaper. “Leslie followed politics and decided to initiate a scandal called ‘Swill Milk’…which is poisoned milk. The distilleries in New York took their swill, the leftovers, and fed it to the cows who were stabled next door. The cows ultimately died. The milk was poisoned. The children drank the milk, the children died. And Leslie raised the scandal. So, Nast was involved in some of the illustrations and some cartoons…Nast saw how dirty politics was.”
Nast would evolve into “as much of a patriot as anybody could be,” says Adler.
`With the onset of the Civil War, Nast was “very much for the Union…He saw Lincoln, and he admired Lincoln, so he was against slavery. And then he got very much pro-Black. And after Lincoln was shot, and Andrew Johnson took over, and Johnson started to go after the Blacks, he went after Johnson.”
Adler shows on his wall a favorite Civil War poster with its cartoon that appeared in Harper’s Weekly just prior to the 1864 presidential election. In his book Adler calls it “The single most important and influential cartoon that Nast ever drew.” The cartoon is entitled “Compromise with The South” and depicts “an arrogant, exultant Jeff Davis shaking hands with a crippled Union soldier who…humbly accepted it…A black family in chains despaired behind Davis.” So affective was the cartoon Lincoln’s reelection managers added a heading of “A Traitor’s Peace,” followed by a listing of “The Rebel Terms of Peace.” More than a million copies were made as campaign posters. Coupled with three recent Union victories, “the poster had a huge effect on the electorate,” writes Adler.
Out of the 1000 cartoons and illustrations he features in his book, Adler gives full measure to the “Boss” Tweed scandal that is spelled out effectively in the cartoon entitled “Who Stole the People’s Money? Do Tell…Twas Him,” where all fingers are pointed at Tweed. The Tammany Hall/Tweed story is laid out in three chapters showing Nast’s lampooning part in bringing Tweed down. William Marcy “Boss” Tweed hung out for years with his cronies at Indian Harbor and elsewhere in Greenwich. We have Tweed Island to remember him by.
“The other thing you see is the detail in Nast’s cartoons – he has 40 characters in a cartoon,” tells Adler. “And Shakespeare was taught in school, so he knew Shakespeare, so he used Shakespeare more than 100 times in his cartoons. They can’t compare to what’s being done today.”
Adler concludes, “So the reason I wrote the book is not because he was such a wonderful cartoonist. There are probably people with better techniques in England or maybe France, but nobody had the impact that he had.”
And how does Adler view today’s political cartoons? “Tame.”
