A Tammany Hall Tiger: Thomas Nast and Temperance
A fragment from a 19th-century American periodical shows the many ways to fall down in life and succumb to its many vices
When I first saw this striking cartoon image of a tiger, I immediately thought of “Boss Tweed” and New York City’s infamous Tammany Hall political machine.
The prowling tiger’s menacing and toothy gaze and its threatening attitude is a direct rip-off of Thomas Nast’s 1871 caricature of Tammany Hall as a tiger killing democracy in the coliseum of New York politics.
The wood engraving of the Tammany tiger shown above was used to illustrate a letterhead or, more likely, a prospectus for the New Jersey Temperance Gazette, published in Camden from 1881 to 1896. Though our example is fragmentary (seen below in its entirety), this ephemeral printing evokes its era.
The newspaper editor’s not-so-subtle linking of intemperance with political corruption is a clear battle line. The tiger as a symbol of corruption was easily recognized and grasped and was a clever re-purposing of popular visual vocabulary to advance the temperance cause.
The cartoon has survived here as an ephemeral fragment. It’s conceivable the item served as a prospectus and the bottom two thirds of the sheet is where the names of potential subscribers would be engrossed.
The tiger’s spiked collar fittingly bears the legend “Liquor Ring” and the tiger’s body depicts “Eight Steps Down the Broad Way [a reference to New York City?] of Ruin.” These latter scenes show the vices that result from drinking: billiards, horseracing (and presumably gambling), dancing, fighting, police intervention, jail, and, finally, suicide.
The wood engraving bears the legend “Copyright Secured” and is signed within the block “Sweet & Howland, Cleve[land]. O[hio].” As published, Thomas Nast’s original 1871 tiger faces to the right.
Copying their version of Nast’s drawing of the tiger onto the wood block and adding their temperance imagery, Sweet & Howland’s tiger, as here printed, now faces to the left. While certainly distinct, their depiction of the tiger owes much to Nast’s original conception.