Every election cycle, illustrations of donkeys and elephants show up in political cartoons in the United States, campaign buttons, Internet memes, and some truly alarming fashion choices. How could it be otherwise? The two beasts — the Donkey representing the Democratic Party; the Elephant, the Republican Party — are mainstays of America’s visual culture, as recognizable as Santa Claus or Uncle Sam.
Yet most Americans would be surprised to learn that both political symbols (as well as Santa Claus and Uncle Sam) were popularized, and given their modern forms, by the same maverick cartoonist.
His name was Thomas Nast, and over the course of 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, and — most famously — the Tammany Hall political machine. Some have suggested that the word “nasty” derives from the artist’s surname, and while this is almost certainly not true, one glance at his cartoons might convince you that it is.

Historians have asserted that Nast, who grew up in New York City in the 1840s and ’50s, was ferociously 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. In one famous cartoon, “Worse Than Slavery” (1874), a defenseless black family cowers before a grinning Klansman; in another — a blistering parody of the KKK’s alliance with New York’s political machine, captioned “They Are Swallowing Each Other” — there are no victims, only two bloated, bug-eyed men depicted as ouroboroi. Nowadays, “editorial cartoons” might bring to mind spare, deliberately simplistic images — the kind you can process in half a second while reading the news. By contrast, Nast’s dense, meticulously labeled cartoons were news: not just images but arguments, meant to be analyzed and discussed point-by-point.
In the post-truth era, photographers use lies to spread facts
Take “Third Term Panic,” the 1874 cartoon often credited with popularizing 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 rumor 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 definitely frowned upon.

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Nast, a proud supporter of the Party of Lincoln, 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 are an enormous, oafish elephant labeled “the Republican Vote,” which looks as though it’s about to tumble off a cliff.
Nast was hardly the first humorist to compare humans to animals — the story of the donkey in the lion’s skin goes back all the way to Aesop. He wasn’t even the first artist to compare Republicans to pachyderms: At least a decade earlier, advertisements had promoted the GOP with the slogan “see the elephant,” an obscure bit of Civil War slang that roughly translates to “fight bravely.”
And while Nast depicted the Democratic Party as a donkey many times (though in “Third Term Panic” it actually takes the shape of a fox), the two had been linked since the days of the Jackson administration half a century ago.

Source: cnn.com