"Statesmen, No. 118, 'Anything to Beat Grant,'" Vanity Fair, July 20, 1872. Chromolithograph.

     Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, was an eccentric social reformer who advocated temperance, western expansion, women’s rights, and amnesty for Confederate soldiers, and opposed slavery and monopolies. In 1872, he was nominated by Liberal Republicans and endorsed by the regular Democratic convention as the candidate to run against Ulysses S. Grant, who was seeking a second term in office. Greeley’s candidacy was controversial. He was denounced as a traitor and crank. Thomas Nast’s Harper’s Weekly cartoons of him were particularly vicious. During Greeley’s campaign, Nast was the first American artist invited to contribute color caricatures to Vanity Fair, a fashionable London magazine. Greeley had published What I Know of Farming: A Series of Brief and Plain Expositions of Practical Agriculture as an Art Based upon Science in 1871, providing the source for one element of Nast’s lampoon.

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