What is the significance of the elephant and donkey

Eventually, the elephant picked up as a symbol and other cartoonists were using it in their work when speaking about Republicans. Instead of being insulted, Jackson took the opportunity to use it on his campaign posters against John Quincy Adams.

He defeated Adams and Nast also popularized the donkey in his political cartoons about the election. Jump directly to the content. The Republican Party, however, has never had a live elephant at one of its conventions. But a donkey being at the DNC raises a question. Where did these two symbols come from? Why do the Democrats choose to affiliate themselves with an oft-ridiculed member of the horse family?

And how did the Republicans come to be represented by an ivory-tusked pachyderm? The origins of these two iconic political symbols were created by noted German-born political cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose drawings also helped create modern images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus.

Nast moved to New York City when he was 6 years old and displayed artistic ability at an early age. Nast joined the staff of Harper's Weekly in 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.

He wasn't even the first artist to compare Republicans to pachyderms: At least a decade earlier, advertisements had promoted the GOP with the slogan "see the elephant," an obscure bit of Civil War slang that roughly translates to "fight bravely.

And while Nast depicted the Democratic Party as a donkey many times though in "Third Term Panic" it actually takes the shape of a fox , the two had been linked since the days of the Jackson administration half a century ago. The Republican elephant made its first appearance in this cartoon by Thomas Nast. A fox in the bottom right corner represents the Democratic party.

Like the best satirists, he ridiculed his own side almost as gleefully as he did his opponents' -- and so, he reimagined the GOP as a weak, panicky creature that was constantly lumbering off in the wrong direction, its size more of a liability than an asset. Artists mark Trump's inauguration anniversary with day of protest art.