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Do you know the origin of the elephant?
This symbol of the party was born in the imagination of
cartoonist Thomas Nast and first appeared in Harper's Weekly on November 7,
1874.
An 1860 issue of Railsplitter and an 1872 cartoon in Harper's Weekly connected
elephants with Republicans, but it was Nast who provided the party with its
symbol.
Oddly, two unconnected events led to the birth of the Republican Elephant. James
Gordon Bennett's New York Herald raised the cry of "Caesarism" in connection
with the possibility of a thirdterm try for President Ulysses S. Grant. The
issue was taken up by the Democratic politicians in 1874, halfway through
Grant's second term and just before the midterm elections, and helped disaffect
Republican voters.
While the illustrated journals were depicting Grant wearing a crown, the Herald
involved itself in another circulation-builder in an entirely different,
nonpolitical area. This was the Central Park Menagerie Scare of 1874, a
delightful hoax perpetrated by the Herald. They ran a story, totally untrue,
that the animals in the zoo had broken loose and were roaming the wilds of New
York's Central Park in search of prey.
Cartoonist Thomas Nast took the two examples of the Herald enterprise and put
them together in a cartoon for Harper's Weekly. He showed an ass (symbolizing
the Herald) wearing a lion's skin (the scary prospect of Caesarism) frightening
away the animals in the forest (Central Park). The caption quoted a familiar
fable: "An ass having put on a lion's skin roamed about in the forest and amused
himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met within his wanderings."
One of the foolish animals in the cartoon was an elephant, representing the
Republican vote - not the party, the Republican vote - which was being
frightened away from its normal ties by the phony scare of Caesarism. In a
subsequent cartoon on November 21, 1874, after the election in which the
Republicans did badly, Nast followed up the idea by showing the elephant in a
trap, illustrating the way the Republican vote had been decoyed from its normal
allegiance. Other cartoonists picked up the symbol, and the elephant soon ceased
to be the vote and became the party itself: the jackass, now referred to as the
donkey, made a natural transition from representing the Herald to representing
the Democratic party that had frightened the elephant.
- Excerpted from William Safire's New Language of Politics, Revised edition,
Collier Books, New York, 1972
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