Called the “Father of the American Cartoon,” Thomas Nast created the political symbols for both of our major American political parties.
Born in Landau, Germany in 1840, Thomas Nast came to New York City with his mother and sister when he was six-years-old. His father joined them three years later.
The first neighborhood they lived in was a little rough, so Mrs. Nast relocated her small family to the William Street neighborhood. This was a fortunate move because their next door neighbor was a man who made crayon sticks in his home. Crayons are easily broken and sometimes the colors don’t come out right, and this man would give the rejects to young Thomas. With an unlimited supply of free crayons, Nast drew and drew and drew some more. Every day he saw something new on the streets of New York City, and he just had to draw it.
Like many immigrants, Nast had a hard time adjusting. Schoolyard bullies would pick on the short, heavy kid with the thick accent. Once he had a run in with the law because he was caught ripping a picture out of a poster pasted to the side of a building. As a public school student, he was a failure. But when it came to drawing and the world of art, Thomas Nast was a complete and total master.
When he was a teenager, his parents gave up on formal schooling and enrolled him in an art school. There Nast received encouragement from his instructor and from several other artists. And the more he studied, the more he practiced, the better he became.
Financial problems in the family forced Nast to look for employment, so he went to Frank Leslie and asked for a job on his newspaper. Leslie’s name isn’t widely known today but in 1855, when newspapers didn’t have photographs because the technology hadn’t been invented yet, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was very big. The publication with its wood block prints allowed Americans to see the current events they were reading about. And Nast going to Leslie and asking for a job was kind of like someone standing up at a stockholder meeting and asking the president of Ford Motor Company to make him a division manager.
Leslie looked at Nast, a chubby 15-year-old teenager, and didn’t take him seriously. To get rid of him, he told Nast to go down to the Christopher Street dock on the Hudson River and draw the crowd waiting to board the ferry.
On Sunday afternoons, well-to-do New Yorkers used to cross the river to spend a pleasant afternoon at Elysian Fields, a well-known resort in New Jersey. With sketch pad in hand and a fist full of pencils and crayons, Nast went to the ferryboat landing to draw all of the people inside. He drew gentlemen in their vests, coats, and top hats. He drew ladies in their bonnets and beautiful silk dresses. He drew clumps of people rushing to catch the ferry. To add depth, he drew the figure of a small boy running in the foreground. To add contrast, he drew a white dog scampering in front of a group of people almost hidden by shadow. And in the background and up over the crowd, he sketched the sides and massive beams of the ferryboat landing.
When Leslie saw the sketch, he was so impressed he hired Nast on the spot.
With the new job there were new skills to learn, and Nast worked hard to learn them. And the harder he worked, the better he became. He was sent overseas twice as a correspondent, and the second time he returned to the States was just before the outbreak of the American Civil War.
Once the war began, Nast changed his style. He no longer drew pictures of actual events, but created patriotic images that appealed directly to the emotions of the reader. In one double-page illustration, entitled “Christmas Eve,” a Union soldier sits by a campfire looking at a portrait of his family and dreaming of home, while next to him, in another panel, his wife looks out of a window at home. She is praying for her husband while behind her their two children sleep securely, knowing that they are protected by their soldier father. One battle-hardened colonel, sitting around his own campfire on Christmas Eve, said he cried when he saw the picture.
After the war, Nast changed style again and became the most important political cartoonist of his age. More than anyone else, Nast was the artist who gave us our national and political symbols. He created the donkey for the Democratic Party and the elephant for the Republicans. Along with another major cartoonist, he put a beard on a tall, lanky Uncle Sam.
Most of all, Nast created the Santa Claus that we know today. Before Nast, Santa was a thin, sour looking man. Nast started drawing Santa as a round, jolly man who brought presents and toys.
Like hundreds of thousands of immigrants before and since, Thomas Nast brought his considerable talents and abilities to this country, and we are much better for it.