The Third Term Panic

Thomas Nast's political cartoon introduces the elephant as symbol of the Republican Party, a visual shorthand that would endure for generations. The frightened elephant, labeled "The Republican Vote," stumbles through a forest scattered with planks marked "Inflation" and "Corruption"—references to Grant administration scandals. Smaller animals (a donkey, goat, and others) represent Democratic opposition and other political threats. Nast's savage animals became standard vocabulary in 19th-century political cartooning, where crude caricatures and bestial imagery conveyed partisan outrage. This engraving exemplifies how newspaper cartoonists developed the visual grammar of comics: emblematic characters, labeled concepts, sequential action, and exaggerated form to compress complex politics into instant understanding. Nast's recurring symbols shaped how Americans read political news for decades.