"Boss" Tweed, corrupt Tammany chief of the 1860s, raised little objection when muckraking reporters prowled city hall. What the papers wrote had no meaning, Tweed liked to boast; his constituency was illiterate. The only criticism that ever bothered or threatened him, the Boss confessed, was "them damn pictures."
Thomas Nast's editorial cartoons were worth fearing; the savage caricatures showed Tweed variously as a vulture, a bag of money and, when Nast had sufficiently aroused the civic conscience, a felon in prison stripes.
A century of history has brought little change. Corruption is still ubiquitous—but so, happily, is the editorial cartoon, grinning out from banks of gray prose. In about 16 square inches, that journalistic institution still manages to encapsulate crises, expose pretensions and eviscerate swollen egos—all with a few well-drawn strokes. Two new paperback editions underscore the point. On the far side of history, Thomas Nast: Cartoons & Illustrations (Dover) reveals a mature artist whose work could exhibit the bite of Daumier and the mordant wit of Twain. His meticulous crosshatching created three ineradicable symbols: the Democratic Donkey, the Republican Elephant and the Tammany Tiger. Nast's gentler conceptions of John Bull, Uncle Sam and even Santa Claus are the ones that most artists still sedulously ape. On the near side, Herblock 's State of the Union (Viking/Compass) presents the dean of contemporary cartoonists, Herbert Block, drawing—and quartering—his favorite quarry: Government waste, pomposity, fat-cat lobbyists, and last and by all means lost, the Nixon Administration.
Between these two masters, a hundred years' worth of artists have passed in review. A few remain in the memory because of a Pulitzer Prize or an anthologized work; the bulk have been forgotten. Yet anyone who peruses ancient journals knows that if nothing is as old as yesterday's news, nothing seems fresher than its editorial cartoon. In satirizing events and event makers, the cartoon refines material until only the ridiculous essence remains. Circumstances impossible in the real world are staged upon the cartoonist's proscenium: the politician comes face to face with his broken promises, hypocrisy assumes a human face, fingers are pointed, blame is fixed, responsibility attached to recognizable figures.
Such onslaughts have their liabilities. The cartoon's first obligation is to be pithy; faces and facts may be stretched to fit a gag. Editorial artists work best against rather than for something, and not every issue is as black and white as the drawing proclaims. That lack of shading and subtlety obviously influenced New York Times Founder Adolph Ochs when he kept sketches from his paper's editorial page—a tradition that is maintained today. "A cartoon," Ochs is said to have complained, "cannot say 'On the other hand.'" On the other hand, a cartoon can do what prose cannot.