US Election 2024: Tracing The Origins Of The Democrats' Donkey And The Republicans' Elephant

In every US election cycle, illustrations of donkeys and elephants appear in political cartoons, campaign buttons, and Internet memes. The two beasts - the former representing the Democratic Party, and the latter, the Republican Party - have different ideas about how the country should be run. Every president since 1853 has belonged to one of these two political parties.

Yet most people would be surprised to learn that both political symbols were popularised, and given their modern forms, by the same maverick cartoonist.

Who Gave The Democrats' Donkey And The Republicans' Elephant?

His name was Thomas Nast, and throughout his tenure at Harper's Weekly, from 1862 to 1886, he became America's first great political cartoonist - and one of its harshest satirists. In the intricately detailed wood engravings for which he's best remembered, he tackled the Civil War, the follies of Reconstruction, immigration, Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, and - most famously - the Tammany Hall political machine.

Historians have asserted that Nast, who grew up in New York City in the 1840s and '50s, was bullied as a child. Indeed, the two themes that run through his career are his sneering disdain for bullies of all shapes and sizes, and his compassion for their victims. At Harper's, he moved back and forth between these two poles.

Origins Of Donkeys And Elephants As Party Symbols

The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson. During that race, opponents of Jackson called him a jackass, which is a less-flattering term for a donkey. However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 who later served in the US House of Representatives and US Senate, was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters.

Nast later used the cartoon animal to represent the Democrats, and it became a popular symbol for the party by the end of the 19th century.

The Republican Party was created in 1854. During the Civil War, an elephant appeared as a Republican symbol in some political cartoons and newspaper illustrations. At that time, "seeing the elephant" was a phrase soldiers used to mean experiencing combat. However, the elephant didn't become a well-known Republican symbol until Nast used it in an 1874 cartoon for Harper's Weekly.

In the 1874 cartoon, called The Third-Term Panic, Nast, a Republican, mocked the New York Herald by popularising the elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party. In the months leading up to the midterms, the New York Herald, at the time backing several Democratic candidates had spread the rumour that President Ulysses Grant, a Republican, was contemplating running for a third term in 1876 - not illegal in the days before the 22nd Amendment but was frowned upon.

Nast drew the Herald as a donkey wrapped in a lion's skin, frightening the other animals with wild stories of a Grant dictatorship. Among these animals is an enormous, oafish elephant labelled "the Republican Vote," which looks as though it's about to tumble off a cliff.

And while Nast depicted the Democratic Party as a donkey many times (though in Third Term Panic it takes the shape of a fox), the two had been linked since the days of the Jackson administration half a century ago.

The Ending Of Thomas Nast's Career

In the 1880s, Nast was the most feared artist in the country. Then, he lost all his money in a Ponzi scheme. In 1890, he tried to rebuild his fortune by publishing a book of Christmas illustrations.

By that point, however, he seems to have lost some of the creative momentum he had gained at Harper's, and he spent the last decade of his life in poor health, painfully aware that his best work was long behind him.

But the elephant and the donkey live on in political pageantry.

Nowadays, editorial cartoons are deliberately designed in simplistic images - the kind one can process in half a second while reading the news. By contrast, Nast's dense, meticulously labelled cartoons were news: not just images but arguments, meant to be analysed and discussed point-by-point.