The Golden Age of American Political Cartoons

By Tom Culbertson, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center

[Note: What follows is a selection from a recent exhibition on Gilded Age political cartooning at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, a sponsoring institution of SHGAPE and this journal from their inception. As the essay explains, the Hayes Center's first-rate research library includes many sources for scholarship on this craft, which thrived during the late 1800s. In this illustrated essay, Hayes Center director Tom Culbertson, an avid scholar of political cartooning, provides background information on major personalities of Gilded Age political cartooning, their publications, politics, mindset, and techniques. Appearing in weekly magazines, frequently filling a full page and printed in color, drawn in copious detail and finely engraved, Gilded Age cartoons represented a lavish, at times gaudy form of political expression to which this six-by-nine inch, black-and-white journal cannot do justice. Teachers and scholars routinely use such cartoons to illustrate other points without much thought to the circumstances of their drawing and printing. Superficially familiar, these cartoons take on new life when seen in their original form and setting.]
The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center staff created the exhibit The Golden Age of American Political Cartoons, which ran from August 2007 to May 2008. The purpose in part was to demonstrate the power and creativity of late nineteenth-century political cartoons. We also hoped to provide useful background information on the most popular cartoonists, their publications, and their political, business, artistic, and technological environment. Gilded Age historians have made liberal use of political cartoons to illustrate their published works and to punch up classroom lectures, but they often know little about the context in which a cartoon appeared. Our exhibit, a selection from which appears in this essay, fills that gap. Even though the exhibit has closed, the Hayes Center library maintains an extensive collection of some of the premier Gilded Age periodicals to employ cartoonists, including a complete run of Harper's Weekly and Puck as well as significant runs of Judge, the New York Daily Graphic, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.	1
Figure 1: John Kelly of New York's Democratic Tammany Hall machine and New York Republican boss Roscoe Conkling had the dubious fortune to grace cartoonist James A. Wales's cover for the first issue of The Judge, Oct. 29, 1881.
A combination of technical, market, political, and cultural factors enabled political cartooning to reach its peak of craft and influence during the post–Civil War decades. In these years, engraving and printing techniques grew inexpensive enough that magazines could afford routinely to run elaborate engravings, with no real competition yet from photography. Most historians would concur that the formative figure of Gilded Age political cartooning was Thomas Nast, who began drawing for Harper's Weekly just after the Civil War. Nast demonstrated that cartoons could be a powerful force in shaping public opinion. His unrelenting attack on Tammany Hall and his destruction of Horace Greeley during the 1872 presidential campaign paved the way for rival cartoonists who eventually eclipsed him.	. . .