The Republican elephant made its lumbering debut in an unflattering cartoon on November 7th 1874, in “The Third-Term Panic”. In it, a donkey (“N.Y. Herald”, a democratic newspaper ...

But it was Nast’s revival of the Democratic donkey in his Jan. 18, 1870 cartoon, shown above — “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” — that popularized the symbol. The cartoon depicts ...