The
Democratic Donkey
When Andrew Jackson ran for
President in 1828, his opponents tried to label him a
“Jackass” for his populist views and his slogan, “Let the
people rule”. Jackson, however, picked up on their name
calling and turned it to his own advantage by using the
donkey on his campaign posters. During his presidency, the
donkey was used to represent Jackson’s stubbornness when he
vetoed re-chartering the National Bank.
 The
first time the donkey was used in a political cartoon to
represent the Democratic Party was, again, in conjunction
with Jackson. Although in 1837 Jackson was retired, he still
thought of himself as the Party’s leader and was shown
trying to get the donkey to go where he wanted it to go. The
cartoon was titled “A Modern Baalim and his Ass”.
Interestingly enough, the
person credited with getting the donkey widely accepted as
the Democratic Party’s symbol probably had no knowledge of
the prior associations.
Thomas
Nast, a famous political cartoonist, came to the United
States with his parents in 1840 when he was six. He first
used the donkey in the 1870 Harper’s Weekly cartoon to
represent the “Copperhead Press” kicking a dead lion,
symbolizing Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who
had recently died. Nast intended the donkey to represent an
anti-war faction with whom he disagreed, but the symbol
caught the public’s fancy and the cartoonist continued using
it to indicate some Democratic editors and newspapers.
Later, Nast used the donkey
to portray what he called “Caesarism” showing the alleged
Democratic uneasiness over a possible third term for Ulysses
S. Grant. In conjunction with this issue, Nast helped
associate the elephant with the Republican Party.
 Although
the elephant had been connected with the Republican Party in
cartoons that appeared in 1872, it was Nast’s Cartoon in
1874 published by Harper’s Weekly that made the pachyderm
stick as the Republican’s symbol.
By 1880 the donkey was
well-established as a mascot for the Democratic Party. A
Cartoon about the Garfield-Hancock campaign in the New York
Daily Graphic showed the Democratic candidate mounted on a
donkey, leading a procession of crusaders.
 Over
the years, the donkey and elephant have become the
acceptedsymbols of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Although the Democrats have never officially adopted the
donkey as a party symbol, we have used various donkey
designs on publications over the years. The republicans have
actually adopted the elephant as their official symbol and
use the design widely.
Adlai Stevenson provided
one of the most clever descriptions of the Republican’s
symbol when he said, “The elephant has a thick skin, a head
full of ivory, and as everyone who has seen a circus parade
knows, proceeds best by grasping the tail of its
predecessor”.
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