page_769 < previous page page_769 next page > Page 769 rate rollbacks and then used national radio talk shows to hold off a congressional pay hike. Maintaining the same modest bachelor quarters throughout (his parsimony is legendary), Nader has thus far outlasted six presidencies and a dozen Congresses. "You've got to keep the pressure on, even if you lose," he said. "The essence of the citizens' movement is persistence." As the 1990s began, Nader added to his agenda making his Connecticut hometown a model democracy. "The most important office in America for anyone to achieve," he said, "is fulltime citizen." In a quarter-century of activism, he seemed to have virtually defined that exalted office for America's largest generation. David Bollier, Citizen Action and Other Big Ideas: A History of Ralph Nader and the Modern Consumer Movement (1989). HARVEY WASSERMAN See also Liberalism. Narcotics See Drugs. Nast, Thomas (18401902), political cartoonist. Nast may reasonably be judged the most powerful and influential political cartoonist that America has ever known. To a unique degree he both shaped and illuminated the political consciousness of his time. Nast's career was closely linked to the rise of illustrated magazines in the mid-nineteenth century. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, America's first successful pictorial magazine, appeared in 1855, and the teenaged Nast was one of its artists. Harper's Weekly, the vehicle for Nast's greatest work, followed in 1857. His medium was the woodblock engraving. His first important drawings, dealing with the course and character of the Civil War, relied appropriately enough on somber, fluid tones of gray and black. After the war he turned to vigorous political commentary, with drawings notable for their clarity of line. Part of the impact of his works derived from their size: his Harper's cover drawings were nine by ten inches, his inside double-spread cartoons more than thirteen by twenty. But his real significance lay in what he had to say. As Daumier drew strength from his adversarial relationship to the France of the July Monarchy, so Nast gave pictorial form to the intense passions of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He was the great pictorialist (as Lincoln was the great wordsmith) of the crisis of nineteenth-century American nationalism. Nast was born in Germany and brought to America in 1846. He came of age in antebellum New York City, part of a middlebrow literary-artistic community whose leitmotifs were romantic nationalism, classic liberalism, and anti-slavery. This was the worldview that gave form to Nast's brilliant comments on the great political drama of his time. During his peak productive years in the 1860s and 1870s, he created or popularized some of the most influential symbols of nineteenth-century American political life: the Tammany tiger, the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, the workingman with his cap and dinner pail, the Rag Baby of currency inflation. He also popularized the figure of Santa Claus as a round, cheery dispenser of gifts, exuding a gemÃźtlichkeit that Nast drew from the folklore of his native land. Nast's greatest work dealt with the politics and public policies of the postCivil War decade. There is a notable correlation between the quality of his art and the force of personal conviction that lay behind it. When he commented on issues that stirred his liberal conscience  the struggle for the Union and against slavery, the plight of the freedmen during Reconstruction, the threat that Andrew Johnson and the Democrats posed to the war's results, the menace of the Tweed Ring, the danger (as he saw it) of Roman Catholicism to American mores and institutions  he did so with what has been called the "stark, focused style" of his artistic peak. But his political commitments became muddied from the mid-1870s on, when postwar Radical Republicanism gave way to the scandals of the Grant administration, rising economic and social tensions, and a resurgent negrophobia. In pace with his growing disillusion, his art declined. He ended a pensioner of sorts, as the American consul in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he died of yellow fever.  < previous page page_769 next page >