“The Tammany Tiger Loose,” Harper’s Weekly,
November 11, 1871, p.1056-1057. Wood engraving.

     In 1871 the Republican New York Times ran a scathing
series of exposés of corruption in the Tammany Hall-controlled Democratic administration of New York City, and Harper’s Weekly and Thomas Nast quickly joined the campaign. A bloodthirsty Tammany mascot has mauled the Republic, symbolized by Columbia,having broken her shield, the ballot, through corruption. The rotund emperor, Tammany Boss William Magear Tweed, enjoys the spectacle, sitting among otherwell-known Democratic politicians. The allusion to the historic slaughter of innocent Christians in Roman arenas—Rome now being the center of Catholicism—was particularly powerful, as was the way Nast drew the rampaging tiger looking directly at the reader, clearly its next victim.

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