Thomas Nast Portfolio
“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.