his cartoon, the first major epitaph on the
Greeley candidacy, was in the hands of readers eight days after Republican
victories in the pivotal state and Congressional elections in Pennsylvania,
Ohio, and Indiana on October 8. It depicts a portent of impending popular will
as a raw force of nature that dooms the campaign flotilla of Horace Greeley and
company. On October 9 the New York Times, a strong backer of Grant, declared
that the 1872 presidential race was over, using an exuberant election analysis
introduced by a towering stack of 17 headlines beginning with "EXIT
GREELEY." Much of the mainstream press agreed with this verdict.
Naturally Greeley's New York Tribune emphatically disagreed (October 9). In an
astounding triumph of high hope over cold reality, acting editor Whitelaw Reid
presented a state by state assessment that awarded 173 electoral votes to
Greeley, 120 to Grant, with the remaining 63 "seriously contested." He
concluded: "Friends! In spite of fraud, we are on the home stretch, with
every prospect of success." Thomas Nast had all the ammunition for which he
could have possibly prayed. He preserved a clipping from the October 10 Times
that expressed the hope: "As for that 'homestretch,' we wish Mr. Nast would
draw a picture of it." It appears likely that the imagery of the
"Tidal Wave" was well under way before the twin titles came into view
upon reading Reid's editorial on the morning of October 9. By that moment the
finished drawing could even have been in the hands of the engravers.
The pictorial inspiration for Nast's "Tidal Wave" probably had a couple
of sources. For months Nast had been fighting a pictorial dual with cartoonist
Matt Morgan of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, so he was a careful
reviewer of his rival's newspaper and work. He would have noticed a Morgan
biblical extravaganza (August 24) in which Senator Charles Sumner is
cast as Moses, commanding the parted Red Sea to close over "Pharaoh"
Grant and his pursuing legions. Prominent among the latter, Morgan seems to
include a tiny figure of Nast about to be swamped. An editorial in the September
7 issue of Leslie's characterizes Grant as a drowning man grasping for straws,
while an image used by Morgan in an October 19 cartoon of Grant facing
inundation by a huge wave. (As stated above, the final drawing of Nast's
"Tidal Wave" was probably completed by October 9.)
The principal inspiration, though, for the catastrophic mishap of "Tidal
Wave" was the collision of the steamer Metis and the schooner Nettie
Cushing in turbulent seas off Rhode Island around 4 a.m. on August 30. The Metis
sank almost immediately, with heavy loss of life, and the incident grabbed
headlines across the country. Here, the ill-fated ships become the Liberal and
the Democrat. Although the skyline of Washington D.C. appears in the background
of "Tidal Wave," the rocky coastline approximates that of Watch Hill,
Rhode Island, where bodies from the Metis collision washed ashore. Also in the
picture's background, the victorious clipper U.S. Grant is passing the stump of
the unfinished Washington Monument and proceeding in calm waters towards the
Capitol, silhouetted against the sunrise.