A General Blow Up – Dead Asses Kicking a Live Lion

It took political courage to veto the Inflation Bill, so Nast’s depiction of President Ulysses Grant as a lion was apt. The Fine-Ass Committee of Grant’s mid-Western Republican opponents — Congressmen Ben Butler (MA) and William (“Pig Iron”) Kelley (PA), and Senators Simon Cameron (PA), Matt Carpenter (WI), and John Logan (IL) were all sprawled on the ground in unceremonious positions. The cartoonist gleefully reversed Aesop’s Fable to depict them as Dead Asses Kicking a Live Lion.