1 Tyack, David B. “Onward Christian Soldiers: Religion in the American Common School,“ in History and Education: The Educational Uses of the Past ed. Nash, Paul (New York: Random House, 1970): 212–255; McAfee, Ward M. Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Jorgenson, Lloyd The State and the Non-Public School, 1825–1925 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987).Google Scholar

2 See Streicher, Lawrence “On a Theory of Political Caricature,“ Comparative Studies in Society and History 9: 4 (July 1967): 427–445; W. A. Coupe, “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11:1 (January 1969): 79–95; Johnson, Isabel Simeral “Cartoons,“ Public Opinion Quarterly 1:3 (July 1937): 21–44; Vinson, J. Chal “Thomas Nast and the American Political Scene,“ American Quarterly 9:3 (Autumn 1957): 337–344; Cuff, Roger Penn “The American Editorial Political Cartoon—a Critical Historical Sketch,“ Journal of Educational Sociology 19:2 (October 1945): 87-96; Lively, James K. “Propaganda Techniques of Civil War Cartoonists,“ Public Opinion Quarterly 6:2 (Spring 1942): 99–106; Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson Press, 1981); Stephen Becker, Comic Art in America: A Social History of the Funnies, The Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sporting Cartoons and Animated Cartoons (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959); Nevins, Allan and Frank Weitenkampf, A Century of Political Cartoons: Caricature in the United States from 1800-1900 (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1944). Coupe suggests that historians often overestimate the power of cartoonists, including Nast (see p. 82).Google Scholar

3 Leonard, Thomas C. The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford Press, 1986); Keller, Morton The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865–1818 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Although it does not directly address Nast in a systematic way, McAfee's, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction deserves mention in this body of scholarship as well.Google Scholar

4 For example, Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast and McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction. More recently, see Thomas, Samuel J. “Mugwump Cartoonists, The Papcy, and Tammany Hall in America's Gilded Age,“ Religion and American Culture 14:2 (Summer 2004): 213–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 113 and cover; Walch, Timothy Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1996), 171; Morris, Charles America Catholic (New York: Times Books, 1997), 66; McAfee, Religion, Race, and Recontruction, 48, 153, 193.Google Scholar

6 Morris, America Catholic, 66.Google Scholar

7 Walch, Parish School, 171.Google Scholar

8 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 48 153, 193.Google Scholar

9 In fact there has been no major progress on Nast since Keller's 1968 book. Jorgenson and more recently McAfee provide excellent scholarship on educational politics of the period in general, however. See also, Fraser, James W. Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multi-Cultural America (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1999).Google Scholar

10 Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, 159–162.Google Scholar

11 Paine, Albert Bigelow Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York: MacMillan Company, 1904). Paine's biography is the best and most comprehensive source on Nast's life. Harper's included brief biographies of Nast as his popularity increased. See Harpers Weekly May 11, 1867, January 21, 1871, August 26, 1871, and March 15, 1873.Google Scholar

12 For an overview of Anti-Catholicism and its relationship to nativism in the 1850s, see Higham, John Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 [1955] (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 3–11. On the connection between European and American turmoil, see McGreevey, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 19–25.Google Scholar

13 Dolan, Jay P. In Search of An American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 47–70; Jorgensen, The State and the Non-Public School, 125–132.Google Scholar

14 Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, 159–160 claims Nast was Protestant without citation, but Nast's most comprehensive biographer, Paine, equivocates on the issue and offers evidence to suggest that he was raised Catholic—or at least his parents sent him to what sounds like a Catholic church in Germany and what was certainly a Catholic school in New York. See Paine, Thomas Nast, 6, 14.Google Scholar

15 The Register of St. Peters Episcopal Church in Morristown, New Jersey recorded the baptism, confirmation, and marriage of Sarah Edith Nast. Baptism- May 30, 1888, Confirmation June 3, 1888, Marriage- September 26, 1891. The Episcopal Church would be the best choice for a culturally Catholic German who hated the politics of the papacy—as opposed to a Lutheran church, for example, or a Catholic one.Google Scholar

16 “Thomas Nast,” Harper's Weekly, August 26, 1871.Google Scholar

17 See, for example, Nast's characterization of Ben Butler as a satanic genie in “The Cradle of Liberty in Danger,” Harpers Weekly, April 11, 1874.Google Scholar

18 On anti-Catholicism and liberalism see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom. Ray Allen Billington argued that anti-Catholicism was more of a social phenomenon which dated back to the early settlement of the colonies. See The Protestant Crusade: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: MacMillan, 1938). See also, Franchot, Jenny Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).Google Scholar

19 See Grimsted, David American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), for an interesting argument on how to understand riots in context. See also Bernstein, Iver The New York City Draft Riots: The Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

20 There are many examples in Harper's. Nast's first anti-pope cartoon came on Feb. 9, 1867, his first anti-New York City government cartoon on that same day, and his first Irish gorilla on April 6. See also Paine, 106–123. On changes over time in late nineteenth-century newspapers’ depictions of Irish Americans, see Perry Curtis Jr. Apes and Angels, The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971). Curtis has noted a tendency among immigrant cartoonists, such as Nast, to overcompensate with strongly anti-immigrant art and rhetoric (96).Google Scholar

21 Curtis, Apes and Angels, 1–22, 29.Google Scholar

22 Ibid, 29.Google Scholar

23 Ibid, 58–67. Thomas, “Mugwump Cartoonists.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Nast, Thomas “The Greek Slave,“ Harper's Weekly, April 16, 1870.Google Scholar

25 Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class [1991] (New York: Verso, 1995), 134.Google Scholar

26 Nativist attacks on the Irish varied in their brand of hostility. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness (p. 133), outlines scholarship explaining the various modes from racial to moral.Google Scholar

27 Dormon, James “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The “Coon Song” Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” American Quarterly 40: 4 (December 1988): 450–471; Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 11A (March 1975): 3–28.Google Scholar

28 See “Colored Rule in a Reconstructed State,” Harper's Weekly, March 14, 1874; “The Commandments in South Carolina,” Harper's Weekly, September 26, 1874.Google Scholar

29 Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image“; Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology.”Google Scholar

30 Curtis, Apes and Angels, 15.Google Scholar

31 Arnesen, Eric “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,“ International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 60 (Fall, 2001): 3–32. This special issue of International Labor and Working-Class History contains a number of informative articles exploring the concept of “whiteness.” See also Noel Ignatieff, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar

32 Many historians have noted this phenomenon. See Perkinson, Henry J. The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865–1990 [1968] (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991), 13.Google Scholar

33 For example, a November 6, 1869 cartoon entitled, “Democratic Platform Made Easy,” includes 17 panels describing failures of the Democratic Party; not one mentions public schools.Google Scholar

34 Perko, F. Michael A Time to Favor Zion: A Case Study of Religion as a Force in American Educational Development, 1830–1870 (Ph.D. diss, Stanford University, 1981).Google Scholar

35 Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 113–114; Pratt, John Webb Religion, Politics, and Diversity: The Church-State Theme in New York History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 196–197.Google Scholar

36 Pratt, Religion, Politics, and Diversity, 198; Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 114.Google Scholar

37 Harper's Weekly, January 22, 1870.Google Scholar

38 In an April 16 cartoon entitled, “Foreshadowing coming events in our coming schools,” Nast offered his readers a vision of the threat in action: public school students being taught that the Pope is infallible, while a priest sweeps away academics and the Holy Bible.Google Scholar

39 Examples of the enemy's strength abound. For an example of weakness, see Nast, Thomas “A Dangerous Game: An Old Fable with a Modern Application,“ Harper's Weekly, May 14, 1870. As they do in the fable, the aroused bees chase away the bears.Google Scholar

40 Curtis, See Apes and Angels, and Press, The Political Cartoon, for examples.Google Scholar

41 Nast, Thomas “The Flower of the Flock Leaving the Fold,“ Harper's Weekly, October 30, 1869. The Harper's feature on Hyacinth came on October 16, 1869.Google Scholar

42 “The Clergy and Politics,” Harper's Weekly, February 18, 1871, 131.Google Scholar

43 Paine, Thomas Nast, 158–160.Google Scholar

44 Lawrence, Eugene “The Priests and the Children,“ Harpers Weekly, Sept. 30, 1871, 915.Google Scholar

45 Ibid.Google Scholar

46 The 1875 reprint no longer included Tweed.Google Scholar

47 On the development of republican ideology in American education see Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).Google Scholar

48 Mabee, Carleton Black Education in New York State, From Colonial Times to Present (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1979), 193–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic.Google Scholar

50 Appeal of the Trustees of Ward One against the Board of Education, Reply of the Board of Education. Appeals Case Files of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, series B0496-78, B0496-78A, New York State Archives (hereafter referred to as appeals). The official title of the board was Board of Public Instruction. But in this case, as in that of New York City, I have used the term Board of Education for the sake of clarity. In fact, residents of the city at the time used the term Board of Education as well in legal documents.Google Scholar

51 Seaton, C.W. Census of the State of New York for 1875, (Albany: Weed and Parsons, 1877), 28.Google Scholar

52 Unnumbered appeal filed 2/7/1872, entitled Board of Trustees of Ward One vs. Board of Education of Long Island City.Google Scholar

53 Trustees vs. L.I. City Board of Education, statement of William Sieberg. The Board also fired an Irish teacher, O'Grady, P.J. who appealed to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. See unnumbered appeal filed 8/11/1871.Google Scholar

54 “Reply of the Board of Education” from unnumbered appeal filed 2/7/1872.Google Scholar

55 See all three appeals cases from Long Island City, 1872.Google Scholar

56 Appeal of the trustees, testimony of Sieberg.Google Scholar

57 Appeal of the trustees.Google Scholar

58 Point number 38 in appeal of the trustees.Google Scholar

59 Appeal of the trustees, testimony of SiebergGoogle Scholar

60 Lawrence, Eugene “Hunter's Point—Compulsory Education,“ Harper's Weekly, December 23, 1871.Google Scholar

61 Ibid.Google Scholar

62 Eugene Lawrence: “The Bible at Hunter's Point,” Harper's Weekly, January 6, 1872; “The Bible in the Schools,” June 29, 1872; “Romish Ingratitude,” July 13, 1872, Hunter's Point—Romish Politics,” August 17, 1872; Thomas Nast, “Romish Ingratitude,” July 13, 1872, “Romish Politics—Any Thing To Beat Grant,” August 17, 1872.Google Scholar

63 John Higham argued for a distinction between nativism and anti-Catholicism, although in terms of the latter he does not clarify the difference between Nast's anti-“political Romanism” and a more straightforward bigotry. See Higham, Strangers in the Land, 12–34.Google Scholar

64 November 23. “It's all very funny to you,” the caption read, “but what am I to do now?”Google Scholar

65 For an in-depth exploration of the absence of religious controversy in the common schools of New York State, see Benjamin Justice, “Peaceable Adjustments: Religious Diversity and Local Control in New York State Common Schools, 1865-1900” (Ph.D. diss, Stanford University, 2002).Google Scholar

66 From January to October, Harper's ran near weekly articles on popish plots and school politics, 33 in all, in Nast's absence.Google Scholar

67 Harper's Weekly: Reinhart, C.S. “The Unseen Signal of the Jesuits,“ March 15, 1873; Reinhart, C.S. “The New Romish Crusade Against Liberty and Law,“ March 29, 1873. E.S.L., “The Public Schools,” April 12, 1873. August 30 featured two non-Nast cartoons roasting the former board of education, accompanied by an article entitled “A Defense of Tweed and Sweeny's Educators.” Reinhart, C.S. “A Foreign Demand,“ September 27, 1873.Google Scholar

68 The New Board of Education,” Harper's Weekly, April 12, 1873.Google Scholar

69 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction.Google Scholar

70 Harper's Weekly covered the proposal on April 3, April 10, April 17, April 24, and May 1, 1875.Google Scholar

71 Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, 105–106.Google Scholar

72 See Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Adverising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); Manring, M. M. Slave in a Box: the Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).Google Scholar

73 Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, 220.Google Scholar

74 “Colored Rule in a Reconstructed State,” Harper's Weekly, March 14, 1874; “The Commandments in South Carolina,” Harper's Weekly, September 26, 1874.Google Scholar

75 See “The Civilization of Blaine,” Harper's Weekly, March 8, 1879.Google Scholar

76 Roediger, See Wages of Whiteness, 133–156; and Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White.Google Scholar

77 Baker, David P. “Schooling All of the Masses: Reconsidering the Origins of American Schooling in the Postbellum Era,“ Sociology of Education 72: 4 (1999): 197–116; Ravitch, Diane The Great School Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 405; McGreevey, Catholicism and American Freedom, 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

78 Nast, Thomas “The Good For Nothing in Miss Columbia's Public School,“ Harper's Weekly, November 4, 1871.Google Scholar

79 Leonard, Power of the Press, 123.Google Scholar

80 October 5.Google Scholar

81 Vinson, “Thomas Nast and the American Political Scene,“ 344.Google Scholar

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83 Kemnitz, Thomas Milton “The Cartoon as a Historical Source,“ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4: 1 (Summer 1973): 81–93, 84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

84 Keller, Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, 159–162. Keller paints Nast's cartoons as reflecting the artist's own fear and paranoia. I see him as being much more calculating than that, particularly given his mercurial relationship to the schools, and their frequent service to some other master. Nast played to fears, and incited them, to be sure.Google Scholar