The Origin of the Republican Elephant
This symbol of the party was born in the imagination of cartoonist
Thomas Nast and first appeared in Harper's Weekly on Nov. 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 Nov. 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
|
