Schurz Departing Interior Department

Nast casts outgoing Interior Secretary Carl Schurz as a bumbling carpenter whose workshop is a ruin. The sign above reads "Gen. Carl Schurz, Cabinet Carpenter — Tinkering and Jobbing Done, on the Theoretical Plan." A posted diagram had promised the Indian Bureau — its drawers labeled Lands, Rights, and Citizenship — would be "in perfect order by March 4th, 1881"; instead, broken timber labeled Poncas and Dakota lies in splinters, small human figures crushed beneath. A barrel marked Truth is tipped over. Schurz's own quote adorns the wall: "It is one thing to form ideas, and another to carry them out." Nast turns the reformer's words against him, indicting four years of failed Native-rights policy as good intentions smashed into wreckage, with Native people — rendered as tiny collapsed figures, the era's reductive visual shorthand — paying the price.