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Lusty Life. At the core of so versatile a talent lies a deep satirical lode that links Bill Mauldin to the giants of caricature who arose in Europe two centuries ago. Actually, the art goes all the way back to the ancient Egyptian papyri, which bore lampoons of the high life of the times. But not until the 18th century, in a Europe boiling with life and endless political wars, did the art turn to the inexhaustible veins of political and social satire that are still being mined today.
In England, William Hogarth (1697-1764) chose the common man as his theme and produced an imperishable record of the lusty life all about him: his Gin Lane, a sermon on the evils of drink, has lost none of its thunder in 200 years.
In early 19th century Spain, Francisco Goya etched his famed Los Desastres de la Guerra, which still stands as the most vivid denunciation of war ever conceived. In France, Honoré Victorin Daumier refined the growing art with his clean lines and acid skill. It remained for a pugnacious young republic across the Atlantic to adapt caricature to journalism, thus giving the press an instrument of unparalleled immediacy and force.
Beyond the Smoke. U.S. editorial cartooning ripened swiftly. Not long after Benjamin Franklin roused the colonies against the perils of the French and Indian War with his Pennsylvania Gazette's famed segmented snake ("Join, or Die"), technological improvements in printing opened the way for more generous use of illustration. Inspired by similar periodicals abroad, a new journalistic genre arose — Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, Vanity Fair, Puck— that saw in the cartoon something more than mere illustration.
The career of German-born Thomas Nast, who worked for several of these magazines, typifies the U.S. cartoon's evolution into a journalistic weapon. Assigned to draw sketches in the field after Civil War broke out, Nast looked beyond the smoke to the battle's meaning. Such cartoons as "A Christmas Furlough," showing Union soldiers in touching domestic scenes, stiffened the North's spine at a time when the South seemed to be winning. This and other cartoons caused Lincoln to call Nast "our best recruiting sergeant."
But Nast reached his full stature only after the war in his relentless pursuit of William Marcy Tweed, corrupt and greedy boss of New York's Tammany Hall. Taking the Tammany Tiger as his symbol, Nast made himself famous—and Tweed infamous. Of his dozens of Tammany cartoons, none projected rawer power than the 1871 engraving in Harper's that showed the tiger clawing at the body of a woman (The Republic) and taunting the world with Tweed's own arrogant words: "What are you going to do about it?" Imprisoned in 1875, Tweed escaped and fled to Europe—into the hands of Spanish police, who recognized him from a Nast cartoon.