With less than a month to go before the American Presidential election, I thought it might be a good time to think about the Democratic Party’s symbol – the donkey – and look at its origins.
The story goes that during the 1828 presidential election race, the democratic* candidate Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) was referred to as a jackass by one of his political opponents. The intention was to label Jackson as stubborn and foolish – two negative attributes conferred on the donkey. Jackson however, embraced the stolid beast, preferring to laud the donkey’s steadfast, hardworking and determined attributes as qualities to be admired. He apparently even used the donkey on his campaign posters, so in some ways you could say that his opponents were right, and he was stubborn.
Jackson, who was the seventh president of the United States of America, certainly seemed to embrace the contrarian qualities of the donkey. He has been depicted as a divisive leader whom scholars have lauded for his anti-corrupt stance as well as criticised for his role in the removal of native Americans from their traditional homelands. He even survived an assassination attempt!
Jackson’s biographer, James Parton, summed up the paradox that was Andrew Jackson, writing:
Andrew Jackson, I am given to understand, was a patriot and a traitor. He was one of the greatest generals, and wholly ignorant of the art of war. A brilliant writer, elegant, eloquent, without being able to compose a correct sentence or spell words of four syllables. The first of statesmen, he never devised, he never framed, a measure. He was the most candid of men and was capable of the most profound dissimulation. A most law-defying law-obeying citizen. A stickler for discipline, he never hesitated to disobey his superior. A democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.
Even donkeys couldn’t be more contrary than that – but there’s a little-mentioned addition to Jackson’s donkey association.
Although not a reference to the democratic donkey, one of Jackson’s opponents associated him with another donkey attribute. This rarely noted slight was also levelled at Jackson during the 1828 presidential campaign, when someone claimed that Jackson’s father was a ‘mulatto man’. Mulatto is defined as someone of mixed race. It is thought to derive from the word ‘mule’ which was the hybrid equid resulting from the cross breeding of a horse and donkey. This remark was obviously meant to be an insult and infer some deficient character trait – a clear case of ad hominen or playing the man rather than the argument: still a common modus operandi of some of today’s politicians.
Political Cartoons and the Democratic Donkey.
The year that Jackson left office America experienced the Panic of 1837 – a financial crisis that led to a major economic depression. Although the crisis had domestic and foreign origins, Jackson bore the brunt of the blame. That year Henry R. Robinson published a political cartoon depicting the outgoing president as a modern-day Balaam – unable to see the way ahead and take heed of the warnings. The original Balaam of the Old Testament (Numbers 22: 22-35) was a willfully blind prophet who disobeyed God’s command whose donkey, prevented him from continuing his rebellious mission. This was the first time that the donkey appeared in a cartoon to represent the Democratic Party.
Yet despite the donkey being associated with Jackson and even appearing in the 1837 cartoon, its affiliation as the sign of the Democratic party was not fully cemented until the 1870s. Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist used the donkey as a symbol of the democratic party in this 1870 cartoon.
Here, the donkey represents the Copperhead press – a group of Northern Democrats opposed to the Civil War; it is seen kicking a dead lion, symbolizing E.M. Stanton – President Lincoln’s recently deceased press secretary. Nast’s message is a clear disparagement of the democratic party for dishonouring the legacy of Lincoln’s administration. Throughout the 1870s, Nast continued to use the donkey as a symbol for the Democratic party and the rest is history as they say.
* I use the term democrat loosely as the party was known as the Democratic-Republican Party, as it was known in the 1820s, and did not separate into the individual Democrat and Republican parties until later in the nineteenth century.
Sources, Images, and Further Reading
Mulatto reference: Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 134.
OED – mulatto: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/123402?redirectedFrom=mulatto#eid
The Library of Congress, Presidential Campaign Posters: 200 Years of Election Art (Quirk Books, 2012)
Biographer: James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol 1 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860).
The Modern Balaam and His Ass: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_modern_balaam_and_his_ass.jpg
Andrew Jackson Portrait by Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Andrew_jackson_head.jpg