On visiting the Old Print Shop in New York, where lessons for the present abound in printed images from America’s political past.
A few months ago, our guest editor, Thomas Jayne, suggested I visit Robert Newman of the Old Print Shop with a view to writing an article on prejudice in prints, especially those issued by Currier and Ives. Always ready for a bit of controversy joined to social justice, I was game. When I arrived at the Old Print Shop, I sensed that Robert Newman was worried whether I had the stomach for what I was about to see. As it turned out, I did not. If the Darktown series, depicting Black people drawn mostly by Thomas Worth (1834–1917) for Currier and Ives and issued during the last decades of the nine-teenth century, has a public future it should reside in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery at Ferris University in Michigan, not in these pages, no matter how carefully we express our dismay. There is simply no neutral way to show them. Yes, some of the collectors of these prints have been Black, but as Newman observed of the series: “My father would not have them in the gallery. You had to ask for them.” I went home that evening and looked up early racist prints of Native Americans, Irish, and Chinese and reflected that the dark spirit of Thomas Worth may still haunt the American psyche, even if it no longer appears, as it once did, in prominent publications such as Harper’s.
But my visit to the Old Print Shop was not wasted; it yielded something of great value to me. As Newman paged through a stack of prints one caught my eye: Thomas Nast’s depiction of President Ulysses S. Grant nailing a plank to his party’s 1876 platform. I have been reading Grant’s Memoirs with appreciation for his plain-spoken style, and the kind of sincerity it would be hard to fake. Everyone from Mark Twain, who supervised the publication of the Memoirs, to that reflexive critic of American presidents, Gore Vidal, has found in them a vivid, moving account of his life and times.
By 1876, Grant, damaged by the financial scandals of his second administration (in which he was not implicated except as a woefully credulous administrator), was drawn into the election at a particularly fractious time. Nast’s print depicts a handsome but somewhat anxious Grant nailing down a public-education-for-all-Americans plank. In his Memoirs Grant recalls that his father’s lack of schooling prompted him to arrange things differently for his children. And yet that education had to be cobbled together in a catch-as-catch-can manner, eventually landing Ulysses, an indifferent student who would rather be riding horses, at West Point. There are other planks in the print—freedoms of speech, thought, and the press—but there is also a menacing mob of angry clergy, while a somewhat disdainful woman casts a backward glance at the president as she shepherds children into a public school.
As a record of the tenor of the time, Nast’s print is especially pungent, although the artist was not above some despicable caricatures of his own, especially of the Irish. Ah, the contradictions! But that’s the value of these prints. They deliver as nothing else does the complexities of the American experiment.
Eventually, we moved back in time to 1872, when Grant was running for a second term. Newman showed me a print by John Cameron titled A “Dodge” That Wont Work. In it Horace Greeley is courting the votes of two Black men, who espy Jefferson Davis, with lash and manacles, behind Greeley. They each explain why they will not vote for him, because, as one says, “We vote, as all true hearted colored men will vote, for Mr. Lincoln’s friend General Grant who conquered the rebellion & secured our freedom.” His companion is more outspoken: “No Mr. Greeley we cant vote for you, for behind you we see Jeff Davis and behind him is the old leash and bondage.”
Greeley had been a fervent supporter of emancipation, but by 1872 he thought that mission had been accomplished. I can find no evidence of his backsliding on matters of racial justice, certainly none that would justify linking him to Jeff Davis. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass considered Greeley too changeable on the matter and campaigned nonstop for Grant.’
That’s another virtue of these prints. They send you back to books like Ronald C. White’s American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant to separate facts from sloganeering, while they also provide a keen glimpse of the zeitgeist.
Robert Newman thinks the atmosphere surrounding politics is no worse now than in the past. He should know. He has sniffed the zeitgeist in prints of earlier times and for a long time afterwards, pointing me to an astonishing 1807 engraving, thought to be by Peter Maverick Jr., contrasting an august George Washington flanked by a lion and an eagle alongside a peevish Thomas Jefferson flanked by a crocodile and, worst of all, a snake. Crowned with a smudgy candle, Jefferson is assigned a quote from Hamlet in which the prince describes his repulsive uncle as like a mildewed ear, in contrast to his father who, like Washington, is compared to the Roman gods. The implication is that Jefferson, like Claudius, is a usurper. Strong stuff for the time, especially as Jefferson was president. Not surprisingly, as Newman pointed out, neither the artist nor the engraver put their names on the image.
As I left, I reflected on the privileged status that canvas and sculpture currently occupy in the art world and how that fades away at the Old Print Shop, where paper rules and a treasured public art flourishes.
