Fun with mashups
I put together this short video because I’ve been thinking about political caricatures, and how important they are to American politics. One of the first was drawn by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 to urge American independence. Here it is:
The first known political cartoon in America
Pretty tame compared with some more recent ones, huh?
I’ve noticed with the current spate of Obama-as-[insert your villain here] cartoons floating around, people are shocked, shocked to see such disrespect to our President. But it’s been going on for a long time.
Here’s a cool one from Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly:
The Tammany Tiger
In 1871 the Republican New York Times ran a scathing
series of exposés of corruption in the Tammany Hall-controlled Democratic administration of New York City, and Harper’s Weekly and Thomas Nast quickly joined the campaign.
A bloodthirsty Tammany mascot has mauled the Republic, symbolized by Columbia, having broken her shield, the ballot, through corruption. The rotund emperor, Tammany Boss William Magear Tweed, enjoys the spectacle, sitting among other well-known Democratic politicians.
The allusion to the historic slaughter of innocent Christians in Roman arenas—Rome now being the center of Catholicism—was particularly powerful, as was the way Nast drew the rampaging tiger looking directly at the reader, clearly its next victim.
My contribution to this fine tradition… hopefully less tedious than the spate of Obama ones: