Tilden's "Wolf at the Door, Gaunt and Hungry" — Don't Let Him In

Two stacked panels from Harper's Weekly frame the 1876 presidential race as a battle over public schools. The upper panel shows children—white and Black, together—being pushed toward a schoolhouse door bearing a Republican declaration that public funds must never flow to sectarian purposes; a wall sign reads "Free to All / Down with Sectarianism." The lower panel inverts the scene: the same children are crushed against the door from outside while a wolf's head, tagged "Democrat," forces its way in from the right. The caption names Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden as the wolf. Nast renders the Black child in the exaggerated caricature conventional to the era's illustrated press—a reminder that "inclusion" in Reconstruction-era imagery carried its own degradations even when arguing for integrated schooling. The cartoon targets both Tammany-aligned Democrats and Catholic pressure to redirect public school funds to parochial institutions, two threats Nast considered inseparable.