Thomas Nast Portfolio
"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.