Schurz Played Out

Nast draws Missouri Senator Carl Schurz—German-born Liberal Republican and Grant critic—slumped at a grand piano, fingers barely touching the keys, the picture of exhaustion. The sheet music propped before him reads Grant Is Not Honest / Amnesty and Civil Service Reform / Composition Carl Schurz; pages littering the floor carry titles such as Down with Grant, Military Ring, Liberal Reform, and The Germans Will Vote for Grant, cataloguing Schurz's political crusades and contradictions. The caption, Played Out!, is Nast's verdict: that Schurz's anti-Grant campaign for the 1872 Liberal Republican nomination had spent itself without result. No ethnic caricature appears here; Nast targets Schurz's politics, not his German origin—unusual restraint for an era when immigrant politicians were routinely lampooned in dialect and grotesque physiognomy.