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 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.
--From William Safire's New Language of Politics,
Revised edition, Collier Books,
New York, 1972
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