Tracking donkeys, elephants

Political season is upon us. The Democrats are holding their convention in Boston this week. At the end of August the Republicans will hold their convention in New York City.

Or, to put it symbolically, it's the donkeys' meeting in Boston and the elephants' meeting in New York City.

The donkey and the elephant, of course, are the animals that represent America's two dominant political parties. Donkey equals Democrat. Elephant equals Republican. The likenesses of both creatures will be omnipresent at the respective national conventions, adorning key chains, flag-holders, refrigerator magnets, license-plate frames, bobblehead dolls, etc. Normally, a live donkey and elephant also make brief but spirited appearances on the respective convention floors, representing party tradition, energy and unity.

Like me, you may have assumed that each symbol's roots lie in some dignified chapter of respected, revered party history.

But as I discovered by logging onto the official Democratic and Republican Web sites, the truth, like many things political, isn't all that flattering.

Both symbols started out as insults.

The donkey's ties to the Democratic Party date back to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew "Stonewall" Jackson, a man praised by his admirers as resolute.

His political opponents liked a different word: jackass.

As in "belligerent," "stubborn" and "pigheaded."

Jackson did what all politicians do when they're called jackasses: He criticized the opposition for "going negative."

That, however, only lasted until Jackson roundly trounced incumbent president John Quincy Adams by winning 56 percent of the vote in the 1828 election.

After that, President Jackson was proud to adopt the jackass — only by now it had been spun and become a donkey — as his personal logo. He used it in particular to represent his stubbornness in refusing to recharter the national bank.

Thus was the Democrat donkey born. It was used as a party symbol throughout Jackson's eight years in office and then intermittently until the 1870s, when a political cartoonist for Harper's Weekly named Thomas Nast unintentionally gave both the donkey and the elephant their undisputed status as America's political animals.

In his drawings, Nast used the donkey as a symbol of overzealousness by Democrats — not just the party but the liberal press as well — and used the elephant as a symbol of the massive but lumbering "Republican Vote."

The Thomas Nast cartoon that effectively launched the elephant as a political icon appeared in a Harper's Weekly cartoon in November of 1874 that showed the huge animal — labeled "Republican Vote" — about to be scared into a pit by an "ass having put on a lion's skin."