“Ideal Money”

Henry Watterson, the influential Democratic editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, was a longtime personal friend and political target of Nast. They clashed over inflation among many other issues.

In early 1878, Watterson editorialized in his paper that voters could decree that even soft-soap money could be used as currency to “repudiate the whole debt.” Nast responded with the Devil ladling soft-soap money from the U.S. Treasury: “In God We Trust — but the Devil is to Pay.”