Families allowed hug on the US-Mexico border. Historians have asserted that Nast, who grew up in New York City in the s 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. This political cartoon by Thomas Nast, taken from a edition of Harper's Weekly, was an early use of the elephant and the donkey to sybolize the Republican and Democratic parties.
At Harper's, he moved back and forth between these two poles. In one famous cartoon, "Worse Than Slavery" , 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.
Take "Third Term Panic," the 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 -- not illegal in the days before the 22nd Amendment but definitely frowned upon. In this politcal cartoon by Thomas Nast, titled "Fine-Ass Committee," a donkey stands in for a Democratic congressmen blowing financial bubbles.
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.
However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of who later served in the U. House of Representatives and U. Senate , was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters. In the s, influential political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped popularize the donkey as a symbol for the entire Democratic Party. The Republican Party was formed in and six years later Abraham Lincoln became its first member elected to the White House.
Nast employed the elephant to represent Republicans in additional cartoons during the s, and by other cartoonists were using the creature to symbolize the party. Happy th birthday to the Democratic donkey! Originally intended to be insulting, we embraced the comparison with such a tough, hardworking creature.
From protecting union rights to fighting for affordable healthcare, I'm proud to stand with working-class Coloradans. COPolitics pic. FathersDay BlueWave pic.
The animals began in political cartoons and still appear in many of them today. CNN featured both animals in animated political cartoon ads that depicted them as friends:. The Republican elephant and Democratic donkey are longtime friends in CNN's artful new election coverage ads. In recent years, some members of the Libertarian Party have unofficially embraced the porcupine as the unofficial animal mascot of the party.
Will these mascots eventually catch on like the donkey and the elephant? The stories of the donkey and the elephant certainly have their own surprising twists and turns, and would have been hard to predict. Did you know the United States is a democratic republic?
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