The Third-Term Panic

Nast's elephant makes its debut here as "The Republican Vote," a massive beast rearing back in alarm near a pit labeled Southern Claims / Chaos / Rum and broken planks reading Inflation, Repudiation, and Re-construction. The panic is manufactured: a braying ass draped in a lion's skin and collared "N.Y. Herald" charges through the forest, scattering credulous animals — a giraffe ("N.Y. Tribune"), a unicorn ("N.Y. Times"), an owl ("N.Y. World") — with the false scare that Ulysses Grant means to seize a third term as Caesar. A fox labeled Democratic Party slips away with the "Reform (Tammany. K.K.)" plank. The caption quotes Shakespeare or Bacon on the ass in lion's skin. Nast's target is Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., whose opportunistic alarm-raising, Nast argues, only hands chaos to Democrats whose own reform credentials hide Tammany corruption and Klan sympathy.