Smell of Tammany

Nast draws Uncle Sam—long-coated, white-haired, pinching his nose in disgust—holding an enormous egg labeled "Address of the National Democratic Committee to the People of the United States — A. Schell." A placard behind him quotes the New York Tribune: "Tammany is for Greeley: the Reform Tammany in a Reform Canvass." The caption reads THE SAME OLD SMELL. The argument is pointed: Liberal Republican presidential candidate Horace Greeley had positioned himself as a reformer, yet Tammany Hall—the corrupt Democratic machine Nast had spent years exposing—enthusiastically backed him. The egg is a rotten one; the reform rhetoric, Nast insists, stinks of the same machine politics. August Schell, Tammany's treasurer, signing the address seals the irony. The figure of Uncle Sam here is comparatively neutral in caricature, reflecting Nast's focus on institutional rather than ethnic ridicule in this particular plate.