"The Brains" — Thomas Nast, 1871

A rotund figure in a businessman's suit stands with fists on hips, but where a face should be sits a bulging money bag stamped with a dollar sign — Boss William Marcy Tweed, head of Manhattan's Tammany Hall machine, rendered as pure corrupt wealth. The caption reads: The "Brains" that achieved the Tammany Victory at the Rochester Democratic Convention. A $15,500 diamond stickpin — one of Tweed's real accessories, widely reported in the press — glints at his lapel, anchoring caricature to documented fact. Nast's argument is brutal in its simplicity: Tammany's political intelligence was not wit or principle but money, and the man wielding it had no human identity apart from his graft. The cartoon appeared during the weeks Nast's exposés were helping force Tweed's arrest; Tweed allegedly offered Nast $500,000 to stop drawing him.