The Elephant, the GOP and Red States and Where Party Symbols Really Came From

Walk into any county Republican office in America and count the elephants. There will be one on the door, one on the coffee mug, one on the lapel pin, and probably a stuffed one on somebody's desk that a volunteer won at a raffle. Ask the person behind the desk where the elephant came from, and you will get a confident answer. It will be short, it will sound right, and there is a fair chance it will be wrong.

Party symbols are like family stories: everybody knows them, nobody checked them. So we are going to do what the cable pundits never do. We take seven of the most common beliefs about our party's emblems and name, put each one on the table, test it against the record, and give a verdict. Some of these will surprise you. A few will make you a better trivia partner. All of them teach something about how political imagery gets made, which is not by committee and almost never on purpose.

Myth 1: "Thomas Nast invented the Republican elephant in 1874"

The claim. The cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the first Republican elephant in 1874, and the party has used it ever since.

The test. Thomas Nast was a German-born illustrator who worked for Harper's Weekly, one of the most widely read magazines of his day. He was famous for hammering the corrupt political machine of William "Boss" Tweed in New York in the early 1870s, and he drew with a fierce skill that made politicians fear him. The elephant cartoon the legend refers to appeared in Harper's Weekly on November 7, 1874, under the title "The Third-Term Panic."

Here is the context. Newspapers had been speculating that President Ulysses Grant might seek a third term, a break from the tradition that stretched back to George Washington. Opponents warned of "Caesarism." Nast's cartoon pictured a jackass dressed in a lion's skin, an old fable, frightening the other animals at a zoo. In the middle of the scene stood a large elephant labeled "The Republican Vote," spooked and stumbling toward trouble. It was not a flattering picture. It showed the Republican voter as a big, powerful, easily panicked creature. And the month it appeared, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War. The third-term question is one we meet again in Why a Republican Congress Wrote the 22nd Amendment After Four Terms of FDR.

So did Nast invent the symbol? Not entirely. Animals had been used in political cartoons before, and Nast had already drawn a donkey in 1870 to stand for newspapers that had opposed the Union cause. But no earlier image of a Republican elephant became famous. Nast's work fixed the symbol in the public mind and kept using it in later cartoons.

The verdict: half true. He did not invent the idea of political animals, but he gets the credit for turning the elephant into the party's emblem.

Myth 2: "The parties chose their own symbols"

The claim. At some point the Republican Party sat down and picked the elephant, the way a company picks a logo.

The test. No. Neither party held a vote on its animal. The symbols came from cartoonists and newspapers and, after a while, party organizations began to embrace what the public already associated with them. The Democratic donkey is the better-documented example. In the presidential campaign of 1828, Andrew Jackson's opponents called him a jackass. By the usual account, Jackson, a man with a sense of humor and a sharper sense of publicity, embraced the donkey and put it on his campaign posters. In other words, the donkey began as an insult and became a badge.

The elephant did not begin as a Republican choice, either. The party eventually used it because the public already saw it that way, and over time it appeared on posters, buttons and, much later, official logos. The Republican National Committee has used elephant imagery in different forms over the decades, and it has redesigned its look more than once, which tells you how little the animal depended on any one decision.

The verdict: false. The symbols were handed to the parties, and the parties wisely accepted them. There is a lesson in that for anyone who wants to shape a political message: you can propose an image, but the public decides whether it sticks.

Myth 3: "GOP always meant Grand Old Party"

The claim. The three letters have always stood for "Grand Old Party."

The test. This one is mostly true, with a caution. The phrase "Grand Old Party" and the abbreviation GOP come to us from the decades after the Civil War, when Republicans had been the dominant party in national politics for a long time. Historians and dictionary editors trace both to the later nineteenth century, though I would be bluffing if I told you who first wrote them down. If you want the primary sources, the Library of Congress's newspaper archives and the Oxford English Dictionary are the places to look, not me and not a bar-stool legend.

Here is the fun irony. The party was founded in 1854, so in the 1870s and 1880s it was only about two decades old. It was "old" only in the sense that it had been in power since Lincoln. Compare the story of how the party was born in The Little Schoolhouse in Ripon and the Oak Grove in Jackson, 1854. A party barely out of its twenties took the word "old" as a badge of seniority, and the nickname stuck.

In later decades, the abbreviation became a handy headline word. It takes three letters and fits any column. That, more than any ceremony, is how it entered the language.

The verdict: mostly true. "Grand Old Party" is the standard meaning. The exact origin of the phrase is a question for the archives.

Myth 4: "Republicans have always been the red party"

The claim. Red states have always meant Republican states, and the party's color has always been red.

The test. Not even close. For most of American history there was no standard color for either party. Newspapers and magazines picked their own. Red, white and blue appeared everywhere, on both sides, because they are the colors of the flag. When television networks began using color-coded electoral maps in the second half of the twentieth century, they chose colors differently from one network to the next and sometimes from one election to the next. Some outlets showed Republicans in blue and Democrats in red. There was no rule.

What changed was the election of 2000. The result was so close that the outcome was uncertain for more than five weeks, until the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore in December. For those five weeks, the same color-coded map sat on the television screen night after night. By the end, viewers had learned it, and the networks had settled on red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. The terms "red state" and "blue state" entered everyday speech in that period and stayed. One of the most-quoted television journalists of that election, Tim Russert, is often credited with popularizing the vocabulary on NBC, though you should treat that as the common account rather than gospel.

So the color scheme is barely a quarter-century old in its present form. It came from a stalemate and a television set, not from the party. The cause of the stalemate is the Electoral College arithmetic we work through in How to Count to 270 an Electoral College Worksheet with the 2016 Map.

The verdict: false. Red became the Republican color around 2000, and the habit was set by television coverage, not by the party.

Myth 5: "Red has always meant the right"

The claim. Red is the natural color of conservatism and blue of the left, everywhere.

The test. Look abroad. In much of the world, red is the color of the left. Socialist, social-democratic and labor parties have flown red banners for more than a century, as the red flag became a symbol of the labor movement in Europe. In Britain, the Labour Party uses red and the Conservative Party uses blue, which is the reverse of the American pairing. A British visitor who sees an American election map may think the coloring is upside down. It is not; it is just American.

That is a good reminder that colors mean what the audience has been taught they mean. Our red-blue convention is a local custom, and an accident of the last two decades at that.

The verdict: false. The American pairing is local and recent, and the international pairing is the opposite.

Myth 6: "The Republican Party is Thomas Jefferson's party"

The claim. The name "Republican" shows that today's Republican Party is the direct descendant of the party of Jefferson.

The test. Jefferson and James Madison led a party in the 1790s that called itself Republican, in opposition to the Federalists of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Historians often call it the Democratic-Republican Party. The name is real. The line of descent is not what the myth supposes.

Here is what happened. Jefferson's party dominated national politics for a generation. In the 1820s it broke apart. One wing, led by Andrew Jackson, became the Democratic Party. Another wing, which supported John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, became the National Republicans and then joined with others to form the Whig Party. The Republican Party of 1854 was a new party, formed out of former Whigs, Free Soilers and antislavery Democrats in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which we cover in How the Kansas-Nebraska Act Killed the Whigs and Gave Birth to a New Party. The founders reached for the Republican name for two reasons: it signaled devotion to self-government by the people and it carried the echo of Jefferson's opposition to aristocracy, here the aristocracy of slaveholders.

So the Democratic Party can claim a more direct line to Jefferson's organization than the Republican Party can, while the Republican Party claims the name and a part of the philosophy. Neither is entirely wrong, and neither is the whole story. Different parties drew from the same idea.

The verdict: misleading. The name echoes Jefferson, but the party of 1854 was new.

Myth 7: "Republican means 'against democracy'"

The claim. The party's name shows that Republicans prefer a "republic" to a "democracy," and that those two ideas are opposites.

The test. This one shows up as a slogan: "We're a republic, not a democracy." The sentiment has a point, and the slogan goes too far. The point is that the United States is a constitutional republic: the people govern through elected representatives, under a written Constitution that limits what majorities can do. That is a real and important structure. Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution says the United States "shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government."

The mistake is to treat republic and democracy as opposites. The Founders did not. Their republic was a government that rested on the consent of the governed, which is a democratic idea. The two ideas overlap, and the difference is mostly in how the majority acts: directly, or through representatives and under law. Nobody who loves the Constitution should be embarrassed by the word "democracy," and nobody who values majority rule should be unhappy with the word "republic." It is also worth noting that the Democratic Party's name does not make it the enemy of the republic, and the Republican Party's name does not make it the enemy of voters.

The verdict: false. The name stands for representative self-government. It is not a rejection of voting.

A bonus: "The map shows a country split in two"

One last belief belongs here, because the color convention gave it life. After 2000, commentators often described the country as sharply divided into red America and blue America. But the maps hide more than they show. A state colored red may have been decided by a few percentage points, and a county map of the same state may show cities in blue amid red countryside. A map of land is not a map of people. The right way to read one is to look at the margins and the population, as we show in How the Republican Electoral Map Moved Across Four Eras from 1896 to 2016. If you ever hear someone say that "America is two countries," ask to see the margins.

How to check a political legend yourself

Here is a short method for the next time someone gives you a confident origin story.

1. Ask for the primary source. Which newspaper, which date, which cartoon? A real story has a citation.
2. Look for the earliest example. If someone claims a person "invented" a symbol, look for earlier uses. They often exist.
3. Check the incentives. Who benefits from the story? A party that wants to be the heir of Jefferson or Lincoln will tell it one way, and its rival another.
4. Use the library. The Library of Congress's digitized newspapers and the Oxford English Dictionary are free to search. The county library probably has a librarian who loves a question like this.
5. Say what you do not know. "Historians trace it to the later nineteenth century" is better than a made-up date.

The bottom line

• The Republican elephant was popularized by Thomas Nast's cartoon of November 7, 1874, which was not flattering. Nast did not invent political animals, and the parties did not pick their own.
• "GOP" means Grand Old Party, but be modest about its first use. The record points to the decades after the Civil War, and the first writer is not firmly known.
• Red for Republicans and blue for Democrats is a creation of the 2000 election coverage. It is not tradition, and in much of the world the colors run the other way.
• The Republican Party of 1854 shares a name with Jefferson's party but is not its direct descendant. Say "echo," not "heir."
• When you hear a confident story about the party's history, ask for the source before you repeat it. Your credibility at the next county meeting depends on it.