They were, without question, the busiest people on earth. When they were not fighting Indians, Mexicans, or each other, they were hacking a nation of cities, farms, and factories out of the continental wilderness. In spare moments they built graceful steamboats, high-stepping railroad engines, and tall sailing ships to seek the world’s commerce. Rough, practical, hard-handed, these Nineteenth-Century Americans were, yet sentimental to the core. They hung mottoes seriously. They approached romance primly and gingerly, like an unexploded bomb. They read sermons for pleasure and wept easily. Funerals, deathbeds (especially of young females wasting away with consumption), floods, explosions, mournful poetry, tales of unrequited love, these moved them excruciatingly. The Age of Go-Ahead was strangely intertwined with an Age of Gloom; the Voice from the Tomb was heard with delicious sorrow between blasts of the steam whistle. But of course they laughed too, genteelly or uproariously. It is all there, the achievements and the sorrows, the tears and the laughter, in Currier & Ives.

Seldom has the hour met the man with more felicity than when the mid-Nineteenth Century found Nathaniel Currier, its greatest, most successful lithographer who, with the partner he took on exactly 100 years ago, James Merritt Ives, left behind an unsurpassed record of the age. If these “Printmakers to the American People” could have chosen a third partner from the next generation, they would doubtless have picked the late Harry T. Peters, greatest of all Currier & Ives collectors, once described as “the best publicity man the firm ever had.” His vast collection, from which this selection comes, will be on exhibit all this summer at the Museum of the City of New York, to which a large part of the total has recently been donated.

— Oliver Jensen

A World Centered on Children

Children, sometimes so neat, polite, and circumspect as to challenge belief, heavily populate the world of Currier & Ives. If there is war, they wear paper helmets and chase Mother with wooden swords. They mimic their elders with keen observation, ranging from pathos (above) to low comedy (left). America, as travelers from abroad have noted for over a century, is and always has been a child-oriented country. “The youth of America is their oldest tradition,” Oscar Wilde once observed. “It has been going on now for three hundred years.”

The Height of Low Comedy

No very large gulf separates the humor of Currier & Ives from that of our time. Mark Twain’s comment that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow” seems to have lost no validity. Modern cartoonists still parade mother-in-law and use animals and children to lampoon the times. The old campaigner at left, with the bear replaced by apes, pythons, visitors from outer space, etc., still goes to the wars for modern