Although he met with great success, Mr. Nast had such a
distaste for the work that he could not be induced to try another
season. At first he had stage fright in the worst form.
When he was to make his first appearance in a country town
in Massachusetts--Peabody, I believe--he asked Mr. Redpath
to go with him, and, when he arrived at the hall,
said: “Now, Redpath, you got me into this scrape and you
will have to go on the platform with me.” Mr. Redpath,
who never had that sort of fever, readily enough consented,
and sat on a chair close behind the artist. He said that Mr.
Nast was so nervous that he dug his nails into the reading
desk. A few months afterward, Mr. Nast faced a New York
audience in Steinway Hall as jauntily as if he had been a
veteran comedian.
At the time that Horace Greeley became a candidate for
President of the United States, it was said that Mr. Nast’s
cartoons killed the great editor. Be that as it may, we remember
in that campaign Mr. Nast’s cartoons attracted universal
attention--Horace in the old white coat with the Gratz
Brown card appended to his coat-tails; and this was the way
that card came there.
Mr. Nast had prepared a cartoon of a number of the candidates
on the ticket, with Greeley at the head. It had been
sent into the engraver’s room, when somebody remarked to
Nast that he had omitted the name of the Vice-President.
“Oh,” he said, “is somebody a candidate for Vice-President?
Oh, yes; Brown of Missouri.”
He simply wrote the name and tacked it to the coat-tail of
Greeley, and that went through the papers.
Brown of St. Louis was a delightful man. He signed the
pledge after he was nominated for Vice-President, but during
the campaign tour in the East it was reported that Brown drank
too much at a banquet in New Haven, and the Good Templars’
Society telegraphed to some persons in New Haven to
ask whether the report were true. Word came back that they
did not know whether he were drunk or not, but he ate butter
on his watermelon. One of the cartoons had Brown as Bacchus
a-straddle of a big watermelon, in the act of buttering
a slice.
Another and possibly even a more telling one was the cartoon
which depicted Mr. Greeley as consuming his own broth--that
is, feeding himself from a bowl filled with the denunciations
and criticisms he had, during his long career as the
leading Whig and Republican editor of the United States,
fulminated against the Democratic party and its policies. As
he was that party’s nominee the point was obvious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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