Was Thomas Nast really a Bigot?

 

It takes one to know one, I guess. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, a man who Don Quixote-like defends the Catholic Church against charges of bigotry against homosexuals, has decided to take on 19th century cartoonist Thomas Nast because of cartoons that Donohue considers bigoted against Catholics. Donohue is incensed that The New Jersey Hall of Fame plans to add Nast to its list of luminaries that includes Albert Einstein and Shaq. As Donohue puts it in his trademarked blowhard style:

Catholics will be outraged to learn that of the 50 nominees for the class of 2012, Thomas Nast made the cut. Nast is not only the most bigoted cartoonist in American history, the 19th-century artist consistently inflamed hatred against the Irish and Catholics alike.

Was Nast anti-Catholic? Yes. From Wikipedia:

Nast, a German Protestant, considered the Roman Catholic Church a threat to American values, and often portrayed the Irish Catholics and Catholic Church leaders in hostile terms. In 1871, one of his works, titled "The American River Ganges," [seen at the heading of this post] portrayed Catholic bishops as crocodiles waiting to attack American school children; they wanted to have Catholic schools for Catholic children. Nast expressed his feelings about ethnic Irish in his depictions of the Irish as violent drunks.

But was nast a bigot? Compare the Wikipedia article continues:

In general, his political cartoons supported American Indians and Chinese Americans. He advocated abolition of slavery, opposed segregation, and deplored the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. One of his more famous cartoons, entitled "Worse than Slavery", showed a despondent black family holding their dead child as a schoolhouse is destroyed by arson, as two members of the Ku Klux Klan and White League, paramilitary insurgent groups in the Reconstruction-era South, shake hands in their mutually destructive work against black Americans.

Worse than Slavery

Is this the work of "the most bigoted cartoonist in American history" or simply the work of a person who distrusted the theocratic leanings of the Catholic Church?

Morton Keller writes, in The World of Thomas Nast:

It may be asked why Nast’s sympathy for blacks, Indians, and Chinese did not extend to the Irish and Catholicism. Mid-nineteenth century liberals—and Nast certainly was one of them—regarded the Catholic church as the fount of anti-modernism and fanaticism. (See fig. 16.) This attitude was reinforced by the commitment of many Irish-Americans to the Democratic party, hostility to abolition, and Negrophobia. The intertwining of his hostility to the Church, the Irish, and the Tweed Ring suggest that for him this was another chapter in the ongoing struggle to preserve the American Union, and Lincoln’s new birth of freedom, from its enemies. In this sense the Confederates, the anti-Reconstruction, pro-Johnson Democrats, and the Tweed Ring and the Catholic church were parts of a collective whole. It stirred in Nast the peak of his distinctive mix of artistic inventiveness and political passion.

It has been wisely said that only a fool would tolerate intolerance. Nast recognized in the Catholic Church a dangerous conservatism and theocratic bent that might undermine American values, values so recently threatened by the American Civil War.

Here in Rhode Island, the most Catholic state in America, we can see this allegiance to unAmerican values, as the Providence Diocese, under Bishop Tobin maintains a lobbyist at the State House to argue for Catholic concerns, such as limits on procreative rights and a ban on GBLT equality. In Pawtucket, private Catholic schools were, until recently, given first dibs on publicly maintained recreational fields. Public schools were forced to make due with inferior fields or even do without. (A verdict on that case is still pending in Federal Court.) A Catholic Priest, Father Roman R. Manchester, has provided the blessings at Tea Party events at the state capitol, before breaking into a stirring speech about how there is no such thing as separation of church and state, and how the First Amendment was invented to protect the church from the state, not the other way around.

On a national level Rick Santorum, a very right wing Catholic, has become a darling of Evangelicals because of his anti-homosexual and anti-procreative rights stance. He goes so far as to want states to be able to outlaw birth control. The Catholic Church's rightward swing has only intensified since Vatican II, and the easy alliance they've made in America with Evangelicals is frightening to those of us concerned about Enlightenment values.

What's most disturbing about Nast's image of crocodile-like bishops emerging from the water to devour children is how strangely prescient it is of the recently revealed pedophilia scandal that is plaguing the Catholic Church worldwide. It would not take much to reinterpret that cartoon in light of the events of the last decade. The Catholic Church has, routinely and with great deliberation set out to conceal the ongoing rape and torture of children.

It is not bigotry to point this out. It would be the height of moral turpitude not to.