Schurz Carpenter

Nast casts Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz as a bumbling cabinet-maker—the pun on "Cabinet" is literal—standing before a visibly crooked, half-collapsed bureau. A sign proclaims "The Indian Bureau Is in Perfect Order Now. It Was Rather Rotten Once," while tools on the wall are labeled "Not Used Against the Indians" and "For Army Critics," skewering Schurz's resistance to transferring Indian affairs to the War Department. A barrel reads "I Always Hit the Nail on the Head." The figure carries no ethnic caricature unusual for Nast's Schurz portraits—the critique is bureaucratic and political: Schurz's celebrated reform agenda, Nast argues, produced shaky results dressed up in self-congratulatory rhetoric.