Our two major parties.
The Democrats. The Republicans.
And our mascots. The Donkey. The Elephant.
I got to wondering how these came about.
The long and short of it is this.
The Republican Party was formed in 1854. Ta-da.
Their first president was a good one. Yes, six years after the party was formed, Abraham Lincoln became its first member elected to the White House.
So. The elephant came along during the Civil War. An image of an elephant was featured as a Republican symbol in at least one political cartoon and a newspaper illustration during that time.
Back then, the term “seeing the elephant” was an expression used by soldiers to mean experiencing combat. But the big grey elephant didn’t start to take hold as a GOP symbol until 1874. That is when Thomas Nast, who’s considered the father of the modern political cartoon, used it in a Harper’s Weekly cartoon.
The cartoon was titled “The Third-Term Panic.” In this drawing, Thomas Nast’s drawing mocked a rival newspaper (The New York Herald). I guess the Herald had been critical of President Ulysses Grant’s rumored bid for a third term. They portrayed various interest groups as animals. And this included a huge elephant labeled “the Republican vote,” which was shown standing at the edge of a pit.
So, from then forward, Nast (and then others) employed the elephant to represent Republicans in many more cartoons during the 1870s. And the image stuck as the mascot. Sadly.
Now on to the Dems. The Democratic Party was founded in 1828. You see, Martin Van Buren played the central role in building the new party as a vehicle to elect Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Youch.
Anyway. Nast was responsible for the Democratic Donkey, too.
It came about on January 15, 1870. That is when the first recorded use of a donkey to represent the Democratic Party appeared in Harper’s Weekly. Again.
The cartoon was entitled “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion.”
The cartoon is described here by the History Channel:
“The jackass (donkey) is tagged “Copperhead Papers,” referring to the Democrat-dominated newspapers of the South, and the dead lion represents the late Edwin McMasters Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war during the final three years of the Civil War. In the background is an eagle perched on a rock, representing the postwar federal domination in the South, and in the far background is the U.S. Capitol.”
Go figure.
So there you have it. One man with an ink pen. And he gave those parties mascots. And now we are stuck with them. Do other parties have mascots. Like the Independents? Or the Libertarians?
If I form a party, I think I’ll pick the squirrel. Or maybe a crow. Or how about the octopus?
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“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
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“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.”
– Oscar Ameringer
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“Politics have no relation to morals.”
– Niccolo Machiavelli
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Party over here. Party over there.
