Chapter 4: Boss Tweed's Exploitation

While reading Mightier Than the Sword, being a person of impatience, I skipped anxiously to the fourth chapter.  The section, starting off slow, as admittedly I have not found the chance to read most recently, soon picked up speed as the events and their significance sank in. To summarize, in the 1860s and early 1870s, “The Tweed Ring” owned, and therefore essentially managed the city of New York. Lead by William Marcy Tweed, the Ring managed to swindle from the city’s tax payers somewhere around $200 million dollars.

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Streitmatter broke down the events into a very simple, easy-to-follow format; first explaining the issues associated with Tweed and his “band of political henchmen,” and then continuing onto his introduction of Thomas Nast. Derived from Germany, Nast at a young age moved to the United States, and was soon to become one of the most renowned and impressive political cartoonists in American history.

Through his work at Harper’s Weekly, Nast managed to exploit not only Tweed, but certain members of Tammany Hall. Over the years, through his accusations, Nast continued depicting them as covetous criminals, and was able to bring the large amounts of frauds attention to the tax-paying public. Meanwhile, Nast was being offered compensation, even threatened for his silence; however Harper’s continued to expose Tweed and his gang.

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This perseverance and dedication to reporting real news to the public with refusal to be paid-off was quite honorable, as many other publications had vowed to be quiet for they were being paid to do so. Eventually, the New York Times took hold of the concept Nast had been standing by, eventually published a large sum of documents, advertising Tweed’s disloyalty to his state. It was at that point that the news went national, and probably one of the largest defining moments for the Times as far as establishment goes.

At the end of the day, it is Thomas Nast who stood by his beliefs from day one, never backing down, for he knew it was of the nature of the Fourth Estate to stand tall. His cartoons were not only worth a thousand words, they were easily accessible to a much wider range of the public, no matter social standing or lingual background. It is their availability that made the drawings and statements of Nast such a large contribution to the media’s history.

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