What Is the Origin of GOP Elephant?
Political cartoonist Thomas Nast created the image of the elephant for the Republican Party, which is sometimes called the Grand Old Party or GOP. It first appeared in a cartoon he drew for Harper's Weekly on Nov. 7, 1874.
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Predecessors
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An elephant was actually used to symbolize the Republican Party in an 1860 issue of Railsplitter and an 1872 Harper's Weekly. But it was Nast who created a lasting connection between the elephant and the GOP.
Background
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Nast drew on two incidents to create his GOP elephant. In response to a possible third-term run by President Ulysses S Grant, the New York Herald began depicting him wearing a crown. During the same period, the Herald ran a fabricated story about animals escaping from the zoo.
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GOP Elephant
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Nast combined the two Herald stories into one cartoon. The Herald was depicted as a donkey dressed as a lion and frightening all of the "foolish animals" in Central Park, according to the cartoon's caption. One of the "foolish animals" was the Republican vote (not the party itself), which he drew as an elephant.
Popularity
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Soon other cartoonists began using the elephant as a GOP symbol in their own political cartoons.
Democratic Donkey
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The donkey in the original cartoon came to symbolize the Democratic Party instead of the Herald.
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References
- Photo Credit National Archives
