Reply #10: The Answer... [View All]

How did Republicans pick the elephant, and Democrats the donkey, to represent their parties? Long Island, New York - 9/5/00

They didn't pick these labels – they got stuck with them! Their origin as symbols for the parties is attributed to a political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, who used the donkey
and the elephant in cartoons drawn for Harper's Weekly in the 1870's. Why Nast chose the donkey and the elephant is a pretty complicated story.

One version traces it to the "Central Park Menagerie Scare of 1874," a hoax foisted on its readers by the New York Herald newspaper. The Herald ran a deliberately false story about animals breaking out of the zoo and foraging for food throughout Central Park. Around the same time, the Herald was running a series of editorials against a 3rd term for President Ulysses S. Grant, calling the possibility "Caesarism."

Nast combined these two elements together for the first time in an 1874 cartoon for Harper's Weekly. He had a donkey disguised as a lion trying to scare away the animals in a forest. The donkey was a symbol for the New York Herald; the lion-skin costume was a symbol for a scare tactic , and the animals in the forest were the symbol for the newspaper's hoax about zoo animals in Central Park.

More, and photo at... http://www.c-span.org/questions/week174.htm