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Fables and Myths |
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“The Babes of the Wood: Lost On the Way To The White House” |
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Cartoonist: Thomas Nast |
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Source: Harper's Weekly |
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Date:
August 10, 1872, p. 632
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Click to return to previous version of this
cartoon |
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Complete HarpWeek Explanation:
With this cartoon, Nast appears for the first
time to concede that the end for Greeley and his seldom pictured
vice-presidential designate B. Gratz Brown was within view. This pictorial
adaptation of an English children's story concerns two babes who had been left
to die in a forest so that a wicked uncle might secure their inheritances. In
the original, they are covered with leaves by "friendly Robin
Redbreasts" in a vain attempt to keep them warm.
Here the "blanket" is formed of voting-ballots for Grant and his
running mate, Henry Wilson. Greeley sleeps the sleep of the innocent, while
Brown, who was allegedly intoxicated at a Yale commencement dinner in early
July, sprawls stiff as a board across the editor's lap. At the dinner, Brown,
who apparently had a longstanding drinking problem, was reported to have been
seen buttering his watermelon. The candidate's alcoholism provoked the Nation to
call for him to withdraw from the ticket. Nast would later portray Brown as
Bacchus the God of Wine in "Apollo Amusing The Gods." The
accompanying text for the latter cartoon describes Governor Brown as
"generally represented with a wreath of soft-shell crabs about his brow and
riding on a buttered water-melon." |
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