Yes, Thomas Nast invented Santa Claus

For Christmas Eve, I give you Santa Claus, as created in America by Thomas Nast, the brilliant, edgy cartoonist for Harper's Weekly who almost single-handedly created the art of modern visual satire.

Nast's cartoons of New York City's untouchable corrupt Boss Tweed made Nast a unique national media star and political terror after they helped force Tweed's arrest in 1872.   Among other things, Nast created the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant, and pioneered personal attack politics.   But he had a soft side.

Born in 1840 in Alsace, son of an army trombone player, Nast came to New York as an 8 year-old, learned English from scratch, and soon exploded on the scene as an artistic prodigy just as the newest media technology -- graphic magazines -- was coming of age.  Barely in his 20s, he drew national fame for his sketches of Garibaldi's march through Italy, American Civil War battlefields, and dazzling sports events like prize fights and horse races.

Nast created the drawing on the right below for Harper's Weekly in 1863, at the height of the Civil War when thousands of families were split apart and husbands-fathers-brothers were being butchered on faraway battlefields.  It's simple sentiment made it a sensation and helped boost regular sales of Harper's into the stratosphere.   People posted copies of Nast sketches in saloons, kitchens, and storefronts.

Around this same time, Nast began making the old German fold legend Saint Nicholas a regular in his Christmas-time fare, gave him a fat belly, beard, sled, and mission to give presents.  Nast drew Santa visiting Civil War soldiers at the front, then on the home front climbing down chimneys, hugging children, stuffing stockings with presents, and the rest.  He made him a household name as well, as in the 1874 Harper's cover above.

Nast himself would make a fortune as the most famous illustrator in America, but then lose it in 1885 after investing his money in a Wall Street firm run by former President Ulysses Grant (Grant and Ward) that went belly up after being victimized by an embezzler.

Racist Cartoons

This week's now-notorious New York Post "monkey" cartoon -- the one showing two policemen standing over a dead monkey they've just shot and saying "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill" -- has raised storms of protest. Whether the artist intended the monkey as Obama or not, the implication is hard to miss.


The controvercy raises a deeper fact. Political cartoons in America have a long history of treading into racism, zenophobia, and bigotry. And some of the worst have come from our most celebrated, main stream journals.



Thomas Nast (above right), for instance, is celebrated as the brilliant young 1870s artist for Harper's Weekly whose ridicule destroyed the regime of New York City's Boss William M. Tweed -- easily the era's most corrupt pol. Nast became the most famous, widely-read, and politically influential graphic artist of the Nineteenth Century, able to sway elections and make or break Senators. But his cartoons seethed with bigotry, against Catholics, against Irish, against immigrants, against Democrats.



Before closing the book on the current controversy, here are a few samples. The point is not to make excuses for the New York Post. Rather, to me, it's the opposite. These examples show how dangerously easy it is for artists and journalists to let passions over today's hot spot issues get in the way of good sense. Editors have a duty to to work hard, not to censor talented artists, but to make sure they express themselves clearly -- and not to allow what might have started as a simple satire against the Stimulus Bill (obvious fair game) cross the line into ugliness.


As for Thomas Nast:
He enjoyeed portraying Catholic clergy is vile creatures, in this case as crocodiles.




















He consistently drew Irishmen as semi-human gorillas, never far from a whiskey bottle and shackled to political mahcines. (The fellow with the whip is Peter B. Sweeny, famed chieftain of New York's Tamman Hall from the Boss Tweed era.)



























And for political enemies like Tweed, he considered capitol punushment just fine: