Thomas Nast, "Bottom Facts" (1876)

A lone deep-sea diver, helmet sealed and hose trailing upward, picks through the murky ocean floor holding what appears to be a document or ledger. The caption quotes the Evening Post: the House Naval Committee, hunting evidence against Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson, had gone so far as to subpoena his private bank records from the six years before he joined Grant's Cabinet, comparing them to his accounts afterward. Nast's joke is spatial and dry — investigators must dive to the very bottom to find any "facts," and even there the pickings look thin. The cartoon implicitly mocks the Committee's fishing expedition while leaving open whether Robeson's enrichment was real. No ethnic caricature appears; the humor is purely procedural and political, aimed at Washington's culture of performative scandal-hunting during the Gilded Age.