Michael Timlin Independent Study Final Project Essay Dr. Waller The History of American Political Cartoons The man who is seen as the father of so many things in America is also known as the father of American political cartooning: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). It is said that the very first American political cartoon is Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die,” an image of a snake severed into parts representing the colonies. The image was at made at the onset of the French and Indian war at a time when the American colonies needed to unite against growing instability, and was used by Franklin to support his intercolonial association plan in Congress. But its message would be used to promote colonial unity during many American revolutionary events, such as the Stamp Act of 1765 and again during the American Revolution of 1776. In newspapers and handbills throughout the revolution Franklin’s snake became the first American political cartoon to help shape the opinion of the public and the constitution of its democracy. Franklin’s “Join or Die” was the beginning of the political cartoon as a tool of American politics, but none such cartoonist has ever achieved the mythical status of perhaps the most influential and successful political cartoonist of all time, Thomas Nast (1840-1902). As all Americans were forced to do during the U.S. Civil War, artists had to pick sides and took up pen and ink to help fight. Many political cartoons were produced on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, southern cartoons show Lincoln in a variety of unflattering visages and racial slurs abound, while northern cartoons show Lincoln as a savior and shows the southern Americans as being dim-whitted. But no artist had such an impact on the politics of the Civil War period than Thomas Nast. Nast was born in Germany and moved to America when he was six years old. He studied at the National Academy of Design and was an admirer of Leech and Tenniel, prominent political cartoonists of the time. By the time he was fifteen he was making trips to Europe to cover boxing matches and even military campaigns for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. At age twenty the outbreak of Civil War spurned Nast to become a Northern supporter, and he began working for Harper’s Weekly which at the time had become a very Pro-North publication. He produced many cartoons that showed his dislike of corrupt politicians, his distrust in the government as a whole, and his dislike for the treatment of the vanishing native American population of his time. Nast even exhibited paintings of a “political cartoon” nature at galleries in Boston and New York during his career. But the reason Thomas Nast has to be named the most important political cartoonist of our time lies in the story of Nast and Boss Tweed, leader of the Tammany political during the 1860s. Boss Tweed was known as an exceptionally corrupt politician, and during the 1860s Thomas Nast started a political cartooning campaign against Tweed that would be the main factor in bringing tweed to justice. Nast created cartoons that displayed all facets of the Tammany party corruption and enraged the public far beyond any editorial of the day. Tweed went so far as to offer a bribe Nast, and also tried to buy out Nast’s publisher, the New York Times, but both attempts failed. Eventually Nast’s cartoons led to Tweed’s incarceration and trial, in which he was found guilty of 104 counts of fraud and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Tweed’s famous words before his arrest were: “I don’t care what they print about me, most of my constituents can’t read anyway-but them damned pictures!” Thomas Nast had proved that in the arena of politics, the pen might not only be mightier than the sword, but mightier than an army. The two cartoonists I studied in this essay, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Nast, are cornerstones in the world of American political cartooning. In a country where democracy and freedom of the press have given way to unparalleled freedom of expression, these men were frontiers who were able to use the power of the shape and the line to convey messages that shaped our country.