letter to the editor
History of donkey vs. elephant, red vs. blue as political symbols
As political issues start heating up during this presidential election year, I doubt that there are many who would give a second thought to how the donkey and elephant became political party symbols. And how did the “blue states” and “red states” become such interesting colors on election night?
It might surprise fellow Tennesseans to know that the donkey had its origin with a famous Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, our fifth president. The presidential nominees in the election of 1828 were Jackson and John Quincy Adams, a race that Jackson won. After the election, Jackson was the first president to identify himself as a Democrat.
So, you could say that the Democratic Party had its beginning in Tennessee — but how about the donkey? During the campaign, Jackson’s opponents began to refer to him as a “jackass.” Although known to be hot tempered, he did not consider being a “jackass” as a bad thing.
Rather, Jackson embraced the concept because he saw the donkey as a hard-working animal that had a stubborn disposition much like himself.
But the growth of the symbol into a national party icon can be attributed to Thomas Nast, a 19th-century political cartoonist who used the animal in his political cartoons of the 1870s. And although it is the official symbol of the Democratic Party, many Democrats still dislike the symbol.
The Republican Party came into existence in 1854, some 26 years after the formation of the Democratic Party, and again Thomas Nast played an important role in creating the Republican icon, the elephant.
Abraham Lincoln was the first president to identify himself as a Republican when he occupied the White House after his 1860 election victory. But even as late as the mid-1870s, Nast was still featuring the elephant in various newspapers, including Harper’s Weekly, one of the most recognized publications of that era.
Although the origin cannot be precisely determined, the most plausible explanation began during the Civil War when soldiers began to describe their first combat experience as “seeing the elephant.” And a popular question among soldiers was: “Have you seen the elephant?” Since Lincoln was the first Republican to occupy the White House during the war years, the elephant became a recognized symbol of the Republican Party.
On election night, most TV channels use blue and red to designate states won by the Democratic Party and Republican Party, respectively. But many states resent being described in a broad way as being either blue or red, so today we have created a new color — purple — which means there is not a general consensus within a state as being either mainly blue or mainly red.
Prior to modern color TV, there was simply black and white with various shades of gray to provide some contrast. But when color blazed across the screen on election night, it was NBC using vivid colors to indicate which party had won or was winning a particular state.
The first color network was NBC, and the NBC political anchor John Chancellor was the first to use the two colors in the 1976 election between the incumbent, Republican Gerald Ford, and the challenger, Democrat Jimmy Carter.
As CBS and ABC came on line with color, they created their own colors. But eventually they adopted the blue and red first used by Chancellor.
So, the use of political party colors began with the advent of color TV, and today the scope of the two colors has been broadened to label politicians, political views and even institutions as having a specific political leaning.
Eventually, blue and red might replace the donkey and elephant.
Malcolm L. Shell,
local historian
Farragut
