How did the animal icons of the Republicans and Democrats originate?
We’ve always thought it a little strange that our nation’s most prominent political parties are represented by two less-than-majestic animals. There must be a good reason why the Republicans use a pachyderm and the Democrats use an ass so we set out to find it. We started our search by typing “republican elephant” into the search field. Although we didn’t receive any Yahoo! category matches, we did receive 4,710 relevant web pages. The first search result took us to “Origin Of The Republican Elephant,” a web page on the Republican National Committee web site. According to the site, the symbol of the party was born in the imagination of cartoonist Thomas Nast and first appeared in Harper’s Weekly on November 7, 1874. The entire explanation is rather convoluted, but the whole story is outlined in the article. Interestingly, Nast is also the person credited with g
