On this day in 1870, Harper’s Weekly ran Thomas Nast’s drawing “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion.” The depiction by Nast a leading political cartoonist, solidified the donkey as the symbol of the Democrats. It has served as the party’s unofficial mascot ever since.
Nast labeled the jackass “Copperhead papers.” It was a reference to newspapers and magazines that had opposed the Civil War and were uniformly pro-Democratic after it ended. The dead lion represented the recently deceased Edwin Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war during the final three years of the struggle. In the background, Nast drew an eagle perched on a rock to depict the radical Republicans, who exercised federal control over the vanquished South under Reconstruction.
In the cartoon, Nast (1840-1902) was voicing his view that the Copperhead press had dishonored the legacy of Lincoln’s administration.
Historians note that Andrew Jackson, the founder of the modern Democratic Party, had been labeled a jackass by his National Republican opponents during the 1828 presidential race. (Jackson won the race, which featured vicious mudslinging.) A political cartoon of Jackson riding a donkey appeared in 1837. His political opponents called Jackson a "jackass" for espousing populist views. Jackson apparently didn’t mind the intended insult; he used the image of the strong-willed donkey on his campaign posters.
In 1874, Nash, in a Harper’s Weekly cartoon titled “The Third-Term Panic,” originated the use of an elephant to symbolize the Republican Party. His cartoon referred to the negative reaction of the New York Herald to the possibility that President Ulysses Grant might seek a third term in 1876.
The Herald is depicted as a donkey wearing a lion’s skin labeled “Caesarism” — a form of government in which the ruler is absolute dictator. The bogus lion frightens timid animals tagged with the names of various opposition newspapers, while an elephant, labeled “Republican vote,” totters above a chasm labeled “Chaos.” The caption reads: “An ass, having put on the lion’s skin, roamed about the forest and amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met with in his wanderings.”
Cartoons had power, observed Jimmy Stamp, writing in the October 2012 issue of Smithsonian magazine. As he put it: “It was a time when political cartoons weren’t just relegated to a sidebar in the editorial page, but really had the power to change minds and sway undecided voters by distilling complex ideas into more compressible representations.”
Stamp concludes: “Like Andrew Jackson, the Republican Party would eventually embrace the caricature, adopting the elephant as their official symbol. The Democrats, however, never officially adopted the donkey as a symbol. Nonetheless, come election season, both animals lose any zoological significance in favor of political shorthand.”
SOURCE: “THE HISTORIC ELEPHANT AND DONKEY: IT WAS THOMAS NAST, ‘FATHER OF THE AMERICAN CARTOON,’ WHO BROUGHT THEM INTO POLITICS,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, AUG. 2, 1908