Stuff You Should Know - What made the donkey and the elephant political?

Episode Date: December 1, 2011

Sure we take it for granted the elephant represents the Republican party and the donkey Democrats, but have you ever wondered why? Josh and Chuck explore the foundation of these bizarre political symbols in this old-timey episode of Stuff You Should Know. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know, the continued political edition, because we did presidential pardons. So we're all political now. Well, this is the time of the year, you know? Yeah. It's beginning to look a lot like

a political season. I'm going today to cast my ballot for Georgia to start letting everybody buy booze on Sundays. I am too. I appreciate you doing that. No, I'm voting against it. A lot of people on the AJC, they had, you know, the opinion like, what do you think? And the people that were against it were all just like, well, you got six days a week. Like, why change it? Why bother? You know, it's just the one day. Is it really that big of a pain? And it's like, what is lost on these people is that this is the United States of America. It's about freedom. It's not about buying booze on Sunday. It's about somebody else telling you not to when this is 2011. Nice, Chuck. Yeah. Well, let's stop talking politics. And instead, let's talk animals. Let's

talk biology. You know much about donkeys? No. Okay, not really. Well, donkeys are a member of the horse family, but they're different species from horse. Now, donkeys and mules are not the same, correct? Are we getting there? Because they're different species, it makes it really weird that they can not only mate, but procreate, but donkeys and horses do get it on. Okay. And what they produce are mules. So a mule is actually the offspring of a male donkey, a jack, and a female horse, a mare. I don't know that in 40 years. A hyenae is the offspring of a female donkey, a Jenny, and a male horse, a stallion. So a mule or a hyenae can be boy or girl. It depends on what their parents were. So this is actually the second podcast where we've started with equestrian

definitions. Yes, interesting. And I also want to give a little shout out to the donkey. Apparently, a donkey, they're very well known for stubbornness, of course. But apparently, it is a misinterpretation, as I understand it, of their incredibly well-defined sense of self-preservation. They are not very easily frightened or forced into doing something they think is not in their own best interest, which comes off to us as stubborn jackass donkey mule who won't go down the trail to get to the gold. No, no. I could fall off that trail. Exactly. Interesting. Yeah. So I think humans should start listening to their donkeys. And to make sure that people don't accuse us of donkey bias. Yes. I want to talk also about elephants, too. Because if you talk donkeys,

you have to talk elephants and eventually electric eels, which we'll get to later. Is that the tea party? No. No. I thought they might have had their own. I don't think so. I don't think it's electric eels. That'd be pretty awesome. They do have that carved up snake. Oh, really? Yeah, the don't tread on me snake that was carved up into the 13 colonies. But that's definitely not an electric eel. Elephants are a horse of a completely different color. A few couple facts of them. Their societies are structured by female. If you see a group of elephants walking around, they're all female. They live in the same family their whole lives. That's nice. The elephant pack is led by a female. It's matriarchal. And males spend their whole

lives just basically doing their own thing, hanging out, and then coming around to mate every once in a while. And these lives can live, can go for up to 82 years. And elephants are pretty amazing animals. They are very well known to mourn, scientifically proven to mourn their dead. The first study that established that was in 2005 that found that elephants will return to where their loved ones have fallen and visit their bones and skulls and tusks and stroke them and just kind of meditate over them for a while. That's very sad. Right. So you have donkeys, you have elephants, you have American politics. That I think is as interesting as the story of how they became symbols of politics. I would say it's more interesting.

All right. It depends on your your leanings. This one was written by Sam Abranson. You remember him? Oh, yeah. Sam Abranson. He's a good guy. I wonder where he is. I have no idea. I doubt a few listens. I do too. So Thomas asked if you're going to start the the discussion on how the donkey and the elephant became symbols of our two political parties. There's only one place to start and end. And that is a German oddly enough, a German born political satirist and illustrator cartoonist. That's the way to put it. Woodblock cutter. Yeah, really? Name Thomas Nast, who was born in Germany, came over to the New York City when he was six and was a natural. He was a shoe in right off the bat with his artwork stuff. Right. Yeah, he was pretty good. You can tell and

you've if you haven't heard of him, you've still seen his stuff somewhere out there. You've seen a Thomas Nast illustration. Anytime you think of 19th century political cartoons, what you're envisioning is a Thomas Nast illustration or Uncle Sam. It depends. What I always think of is flag. Thomas flag. I can't remember his name. Anyway, he's the one who painted that. I want you. Oh, really? Uncle Sam. Yeah. But Nast is the one who popularized the first images of Uncle Sam. Is that right? Well, Uncle Sam was around. He was he was the one who first put him in like a star spangled suit and made him tall and gaunt model after Abraham Lincoln. Gotcha. But Uncle Sam was, if I may, please, he was possibly named after a guy named Samuel Wilson, not Abramson. No,

who was a meat packer from Troy, New York in the early 19th century and who was who got a great reputation as being very honest. And so we got a government contract to send meat provisions to the troops during the War of 1812. And these crates would come arrived stamped U.S. And the troops came to mention that this was Uncle Sam or Uncle Sam Wilson who came to be a symbol for the United States as a whole. And they were providing Uncle Sam was providing food for the soldiers in their minds. Yes. That's nice. Nothing but horse meat. And Santa Claus, the modern Santa Claus as we know him was sort of captured by a nest as well. Is that right? Yeah, you got a story there? I do. Okay, let's hear it. So people say that Thomas Nast invented Santa Claus and that

is true. It's pretty close. There was St. Nick. It was Sincher Claus. There was all these these conceptions of Santa Claus based around St. Nick. Thomas Nast was the one who associated St. Nick who still today in Germany, he's honored. He has a day on December 6 where people give one another gifts, but it's not Christmas. Right. Thomas Nast took the gift giving idea associated with St. Nick, put it to Christmas for Harpers and then added the elves as well. So the whole idea of Santa Claus coming and bringing gifts was Thomas Nast. Wow. Yeah, like 1862, I believe, for the cover of Harper's Weekly. Thank you, Thomas Nast. And then by 1881, he was fat and jolly thanks to Thomas Nast as well. Well, how was Santa going to be? Lean and mean? Yeah, he was a

little skinny. It's off-putting to see a skinny Santa Claus. What, the earlier ones? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, you spilled the beans on that spoiler. Harper's Weekly was where Nast worked for 24 years from 1862 to 1886. And that is where he made his name like big time. He was influential. He was country-wide famous. I don't know about world famous. I don't know if a whole lot of people were world famous at the time. Yeah, he was definitely like a household name, I think. Yeah, he was a rock star. This is when a political cartoon really meant something and actually held sway in elections. Yeah, not so today. Yeah, because, you know, so many people were illiterate, which is kind of unfortunate because Thomas Nast drew in a time

where you could draw a bunch of stuff and be like, oh, this doesn't make any sense and just put labels on him apparently. You can label absolutely everything. It's like, oh, okay. This tree is sometimes you would come to your house and explain it to you as well if you still didn't get it. Well, I mentioned Woodcut. He did not draw these in pen and ink until later, which would end up being his undoing. We'll get to that. But he actually carved these things. That's how they printed these. These are carvings. It's amazing, especially when you look at the detail. It's striking, Josh. I agree. I didn't realize there were wood carvings until about 30 minutes ago. Oh, really? Yeah. So you're still reeling. Yeah, I'm a little, I'm still queasy. I still have the

taste of vomit in my mouth. All right. So politically speaking, Nast was a Republican, but Republicans at the time aren't exactly what we might think of today. It was a shift over the years. Yeah, that's how many people know this. It's a big eye opening thing. It's like learning in eighth grade that the United States pretty much brought genocide down on Indians in America. Wait, what are you talking about? Yeah, there are cowboys and stuff, but what do you mean? Same thing with this, that Republican and Democrat is fluid term. Really, it's like conservative and liberal are the two opposing forces at all times. Yeah, that's a good way to put it, actually. And at the time, I guess Republicans were very much socially liberal.

Yeah. And he was on board with that and ended up having problems with his own party because of that, which influences cartoons. Yes. We call them cartoons? I think, yeah, political cartoons. It's an acceptable term. So donkey, should we start there? Yeah. The donkey first came about in 1870 was the first time the donkey made its appearance. And that was in, and I have these printed out too. That was this one right here. The Copperhead Northern Democrats were called Copperhead Democrats. Yeah. They opposed the Civil War and he thought they were racist. Well, that's what Sam calls them. Well, that's what Nass thought of them though, right? Right. But I think that that's an overbroad description. I think that the Copperhead Democrats were made

up of like, they were the crux of the peace movement. Right. They also basically, they were made up of people who said it's unconstitutional to force a country together if one part of it wants to secede. Right. There were a lot of different voices. But yes, they were very powerful and Nass definitely opposed them for sure. And a Copperhead is a snake in case you didn't know that. So it's definitely a derogatory term. It's a deadly snake. It is a deadly snake that we have right here in Georgia. So in 1870, he showed the donkey kicking a dead lion. The donkey, and like you said, he would just literally label them. He would write words on the body of the animal saying, this is what this is. No subtext. The donkey was the Copperhead press, which was,

he was taking a jab at the press and not necessarily the party. And then the lion was Edwin and Stanton Lincoln, secretary of war. It was dead. Yeah. And dead in the photo. And it looks like there's a little eagle looking on even. Yeah, he's like, what are you doing? But the eagle's not labeled. And I think that's the capital in the background. Yeah, I think so. So yeah, he would just write on it like on the side of the donkey. It says Copperhead press. And it looks like, have you heard of, I think his name is Vim Vanderwall or something like that. He came up with the cloaca machine. He's an artist from the Netherlands. He has like this whole exhibit where he like tattoos pigs. Really? Yeah. And like elaborate tattoos. And it looks a lot like this. Oh,

really? Like the woodcut? Yeah. Or just that style? That like the donkey having writing on the side of it. Okay, I got you. It's been graffitode. So that is, that was the first appearance of the donkey. The next one was in 1874, when Republican Ulysses Grant, Ulysses, was vying for a potential third term, which freaked a lot of people out. Right. Well, he freaked people out twice. How do you try to do that twice? Well, they tried to get them to run for a third consecutive term in 1876, but he pooped it. But then he went and traveled abroad and came back and said, I'm a better man. I think I could be president for a third time, third non consecutive term. Right. In 1880. Right. Yeah. Which is why that, that this third term panic, the 1874 cartoon,

was when people were like, well, he can't, you can't have a three term president, even though you could constitutionally. That's right. So if you look at this one, this one is like, this is crazy. This looks like a Grateful Dead album cover or something. It's got a donkey in sheep's clothing labeled Caesarism, obviously referencing Julius Caesar as some mad power hungry tyrant. Yeah. And then there's all sorts of other stuff going on and, and we'll get to that because the elephant plays a part in this one as well. I like the giraffe a lot in that one. It's kind of upward. It looks like he's wearing a vest. Yeah. He's wearing some sort of a suit. Yeah. Giraffe in a suit. And that was called third term panic. Yeah. But again,

even though he was symbolizing the democratic press mainly with the donkey, it sort of stuck is the democratic party, even though that wasn't his original intent. Is that right? I don't know. I don't know if like he, I don't think he originally intended it, but I think over time he just came to see it as, I think it, yeah, popularly was picked up and kind of forced him to use it later on. Right. You know, even though the Democrats still haven't, that's not their, their symbol officially. No, they've never adopted the brain jackass as their official party symbol. I wonder why. Although the Republicans have, they've adopted their symbol. That's true. But there's some stuff in that third term panic thing that kind of pops up that was clearly

important to nest like inflation. There's like a plank he wrote inflation on. Yes. So apparently at the time there was a big struggle going on about abandoning the gold standard or printing as much silver as you wanted or issuing paper. Right. So you could basically cause inflation so people could pay off their debt so they could buy stuff more cheaply, that kind of thing. And apparently NASA posed that the inflation because that's like a plank that's broken over this pit that the elephant, the Republican vote, I think is what it is. The pit is chaos, right? Right. There's chaos because farmers can pay their bills kind of thing. So he was like, he was definitely a social liberal, but I get from this that he was also not a populist. Yeah. Like I think he'd

liked people in theory, but not in practice. Right. And then, you know, this is important because he was a guy who only drew what he believed in. Yeah. Which would also further prove to be his undoing later on. Yeah. But you got to take your hand off to somebody like that, you know? Well, he'd made his name. I guess he was like, do you know who I am? I'm the nasty man. I'm not going to draw anything. I don't believe it. Nice. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And

they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Step out of piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with

decisions, turning points, deals and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the senior executive editor for Bloomberg opinion. And I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart radio. Every week on Crash Course, I'll bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur. And I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts and big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political and social disruptions and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart radio. Listen to Crash Course every

Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So where are we here? There was another example, a presidential candidate grabbing a donkey labeled Democratic Party by the tail. Yeah. So that was Thomas F. Bayard. Yeah. And he was grabbing it by the tail. He was actually one of those guys who fought to repeal the issuance of paper money, legal tender that doesn't really mean anything, rather than use gold. And so I guess Nast approved of him, even though he's a Democrat. And that's this one right here, right? Yeah. And that's, he's trying to keep the donkey from falling into a pit, another pit labeled financial chaos. It's a very popular motif at the time, I guess. Yeah. And then in the background of this one, you do see the dead

Republican Party elephant with, is that Lincoln hovering above him? Probably. I think Nast kind of had a thing for, for Lincoln. Had a thing for him? Yeah. It's strictly in an idle way with an O. So that is the donkey that fairly summarized how it got started. Yeah. Like you said, I mean, he started just kind of using it and associating it with the Copperhead Democrats, Democratic press. And then ultimately, people just said, well, I can't read, but I see that you're making fun of the Democrats and that's a donkey. So Democrats are donkeys. Right. And that said, okay, we'll go with that. Oh, and also, by the way, the Wizard of Oz apparently is a popular allegory for politics at the time, including

that whole gold standard abandonment. Was it meant to be? Yeah. Or was it? It was? Yeah. Frank Baum, who, who wrote it, was a political writer for many, many years before he wrote it. And the gold, the Yellowbrook Road is the gold standard. And then Dorothy's shoes originally were silver, not ruby. And so silver and gold was a call out to this free silver idea of printing 16 silver coins that every gold coin printed to make money cheaper and abundant. Right. Interesting. Yeah. A lot of subtle stuff going on in the late 19th century, you know? Well, they're way more obvious now, I guess, because they can be. Yeah. At least we don't label our political cartoons as much. It's still a tradition that's upheld. It is. You just don't

see words all over the place. I don't read a lot of political cartoons anymore, do you? I just don't run into them very often, but I almost always enjoy them when I do, especially that Mike Luckovich guy. He is good. He's a local boy, too. Yeah, Luckovich is good. You know, I'm a big family circus fan. It's rarely political. You know, when Jeffy like tracks mud through the house. Yeah. It's like, oh, Jeffy. Have you seen the altered version of those? There's altered versions of everything. These are pretty funny. They're really, really dirty, but they're funny. Dirty is not the right word. They're just, like, filthy. Yeah, they're filthy. All right. So moving on to the elephant. This was Nast's party, the Republicans at the time.

So obviously his cartoons about the elephant are going to be more positive, I guess. Or sad. Yeah, true. Like the dying elephant. Yeah. I think he probably intuitively knew that elephants mourn their dead, which makes you sad when you think about elephants, which is why he chose the elephant. I wonder if he knew that. I don't think he did. That's appropriate, though. Before he actually ever, it keeps saying pinned in here, but carved his first elephant, it was used twice before, once in 1864, in a Lincoln campaign literature piece, and then in 1872 by Harper's, but it wasn't until 1874 that he used it. So I can imagine the Lincoln use of it was very intended to be derogatory. Yeah, probably so. But you're all jackasses. Right.

So that's a third term panic, the one we already talked about was the first Republican elephant that he had carved. Right. Okay. But the first appearance of the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey together as those two as the representative of the whole party was the stranger things have happened cartoon where he's got the donkey by the tail. Okay. As far as I know, it's the first one. That's what that one was called. Yeah. Stranger things have happened. In 1876, there was one called the political situation pretty straight up. Uncle Sam is confused. He is labeled the vote of the people and there's a two-headed elephant choosing to decide which road, Democratic road, or the Republican road to go down.

That one's fairly self-explanatory, I think. It is, but it's also kind of confusing because Uncle Sam's confused. Yeah. So what's he saying? The Republicans can go one of two ways at the time. Well, no, because they're it's two-headed. So I would imagine it was it's more representative of the two-party system. I think NASA was pretty drunk that day. What else do we have here? There was the, oh, my favorite. I haven't seen it yet. Did you print it out the one with the tombstone? No, I couldn't find that one. I thought this was very sweet. But NASA apparently, when Rutherford B. Hayes ran for president, he won the 1876 election that Grant didn't go for the third term for. And Hayes apparently said that he would only

run once. And I guess he wasn't a very well-liked guy because he was one of those presidents who won through the electoral vote but lost the popular vote and apparently lost the popular vote pretty bad. And so his whole presidency was in no way shape or form of mandate. It was very representative of the fact that this country or country was still very much torn apart from the Civil War. And so NASA created this cartoon where this elephant that Sam describes as bruised and battered is crouching down at a tombstone of the Democratic Party, which I thought was pretty cool because he had the sense that there was still, no matter how acrimonious things got, these two parties were still American parties. There's still a whole wild world out there for

us to hate. Why do we hate each other? That's sort of a nice sentiment. But I don't want to characterize NASA as an isolationist or even a nativist. One of his Uncle Sam paintings, I'm sorry, carvings was Uncle Sam in Columbia, right, Liberty, hosting a Thanksgiving dinner with all the peoples of the world, which included some Chinese people, some black people, some Native American Indians, and a host of others. But not the Irish. I don't think the Irish were present. But it was like a world or suffrage for all, you know, equality for everyone in the world. Come on, Kamal, you're all invited. Right. It was pretty cool. He was definitely not a bigot as far as I could tell in any way. It doesn't seem like it. The war on drugs impacts everyone,

whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call

civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with decisions, turning points, deals and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the senior executive editor for Bloomberg Opinion, and I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Every week on Crash Course, I'll bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur. And I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts in big

names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political and social disruptions, and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So, you know, what Sam points out is, and it's true, it's kind of striking that 150 years after this or so that these are still the symbols. I mean, the Republicans officially adopted the elephant, but he points out that a lot of that was due to just how influential and popular Nast was at the time. It just became part of the national fabric because of him.

There's some good quotes about him after, well, while he's working even, apparently Abraham Lincoln called Nast his quote, best recruiting sergeant during the 1864 re-election. And this is while he was traveling around the country heckling. What's his name? Oh, Stephen. It's not Stephen Decatur. What was that guy's name? I don't know. We'll go with Ambrose Bierce, even though it's not right. I can't believe we don't remember that guy's name. I know. My head is just bulging. Mark Twain said that Nast won a prodigious victory for grant. I mean for civilization and progress. That's Mark Twain for you. What a guy. He can turn a phrase. So he, you said that he kind of gave up his career in a lot of ways by being

stubborn as a donkey. Yeah. Especially he was apparently in very good with Fletcher Harper, who founded Harper's Weekly. Do you read Harper's? No, it's monthly. No. It's, Lewis Lapham just left and I got into it right before he left and I got sucked into Harper's and then he left and now I'm like, it's not as good. It's just not as good. Why? Why did this happen to me? Why does everything bad happen to me? But it's still, it's very good. And it's been around since the mid 19th century, which is pretty impressive for a magazine. Oh yeah. It endured. Endors. But junior came aboard and didn't really side with Thomas Nast. Yeah. I mean, Nast had a lot of freedom under Fletcher Harper, but Joe Jr. kind of tightened down the ranks and was like, hey man, don't be so square.

People want to be entertained. So there was a bit of a shift in the way American public wanted to, you know, what they wanted to read in magazines. Yeah. And then people wanted to not be bothered anymore. Yeah. They were sick of it. So the other death knell though was, was they went to photo chemical reproduction and they didn't do the woodblock cuttings anymore. And apparently woodblock, even though, I mean, it looks to me like incredibly detailed. It gives you a lot of leeway to make mistakes that you don't get with pen and ink and paper. Right. So his shortcomings all of a sudden stood out. They're like, this guy kind of sucks. This is just not true. Santa Claus. Right. Yeah. So he ended up like penniless as you, as you love the term. I do. Yeah. Don't you love the term

penniless? I was listening to an old podcast and you're like, I hate that term. It's so no one doesn't have a penny. Oh yeah. Yeah. He was the Niagara Falls one. Geez. I need to lighten up back then. But anyway, he was very much broke. And he tried to, he tried to open his own paper, Nast Weekly, which lasted six months. And luckily he had a friend in Teddy Roosevelt, right? Yeah. And he, he appointed him to council general to Ecuador. And Nast, I guess, was like, alright, and I guess I'll go to Ecuador. That's like, is there money there? Because I'm penniless. That's better than doing nothing. And it actually was not better than doing nothing because he got yellow fever there and died six months later. Yeah. So that's a pretty weird end to that guy,

if you ask me. But I didn't expect yellow fever. He was 62. And at the turn of the last, last century, the last, last turn of the century, he 62 is not bad. It's a pretty good run for back then, especially being a household name. Once your celebrity's over, you might as well. I mean, I mean, you're dead anyway. It just hasn't, you haven't actually died yet, but you might as well be, you know, so there you go. The donkey and the, the elephant. If we, if you feel like we've explained this, if you now understand it and gotten to the bottom of it, you were not paying attention because it's still as convoluted as ever. No, it's not. So that's all from Nast. Well, don't you wish though that there was like some sort of like, Oh, here's the reason why he chose

the donkey. Oh, of course he would choose an elephant. It's totally intuitive. No, it's the ramblings of a madman who used to carve stuff into wood blocks and Fletcher Harper published it for the consumption of everybody else. But now you know knowing is half the battle. So if you want to learn more about Thomas Nast, if you want to read one of the extraordinarily rare Samuel Abramson articles on the site, you can type in the words why are a donkey and an elephant the symbols of the democratic and republican parties? Question mark. You can probably also just type in donkey and elephant and it will bring it up. Sure. So I think I said that you should type it into the search bar. If I didn't, you should type it into the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

Since I said that it's time now for listener mail. Josh Bison feedback from Canada, Burlington, Ontario specifically. Guys, your recent bison podcast put me in mind one of the coolest experiences of my life. When I lived out in Alberta, I'd often go hiking in Elk Island National Park. I was halfway around one of the parks longer trails one day when I looked down, saw a fresh buffalo chip. That is scat. As I pondered what this meant, I heard a snort and about 10 to 15 meters in front of me, which is a length that I don't understand. It's 30 to 45 feet approximately. Okay. There was a 10 to 15 yards. Okay. I get yards. 10 to 15 meters in front of me was a bison. I froze. I was alone, hadn't seen another soul on

the trail. I knew roughly eight kilometers, whatever that is. I have no idea. From the road, I'm sorry, from the trailhead in either direction. And I knew this animal decided to charge. I was as good as dead. We stared each other down for a few minutes. I don't know what was going through its mind, but I was weighing my options. If I turned around and it decided to charge, I might not hear it coming and wouldn't be able to take evasive action. If I went forward, I might provoke it and be in deep trouble. I knew I couldn't stay there all day. So I decided to take a single step towards it to gauge its response. Good move, Enig. I moved towards it. It gave a snort and turned its head away from me and ran into the woods to my right. Very cool, I thought. No sooner

had I thought that than from my left came a thundering herd of bison stampeding across the trail. There must have been 20 to 30 of them running in front of me. Awesome. Following their lookout, that was a scout, I guess. A scout scout. Into the forest. I stood there utterly all struck for several minutes before I decided to move forward to where they had just been. For the next 15 minutes or so. Bumpalow tips everywhere. I bet. For the next 15 minutes or so, I kept looking over my shoulder just in case they were hiding behind a tree, ready to pounce on me, like a giant cartoon kangaroo. Interesting imagination. So they didn't pounce. He made it back safe and he just says, if anyone finds himself in this situation, probably won't happen.

Don't do what I did. I got lucky. These are wild animals, not petting zoo bison. I could have easily been trampled and left to die. So that is Gordon C. from Burlington, Ontario, Canada, Earth. Weird ending there. He doesn't give any suggestions of what to do. No, but he did say that it was the most amazing experience of his life, seeing the thundering herd of bison right in front of him. I will bet. That was pretty cool. Yeah. I want to add something from the bison podcast. We got a tweet from some guy recently saying, hey, I was really disappointed. You guys used the word Indian instead of Native American. And I was like, oh yeah, Mr. Smart Guy. Well, how about I provide you with a link to an article that has a poll that shows

that in clear 49% of all Indian Native American Indians prefer the term Indian over Native American. It's a 51%. No, no. 37% prefer Native American. And then like 16% or whatever the rest is, prefer something else. Don't call me. I'll call you. All right. So the, not a majority, but very close to it, prefer Indian over Native American. So chew on that, pal. We were doing something right for once. And he goes, no, I'm talking about people from India are offended by that. Like me. And I was like, oh, your Twitter handle is Sanjay something. And I haven't responded yet, but I hadn't considered that yet. I knew we were doing right by Indians of North America, but I hadn't considered how Indians of India, also known as Asian Indians felt about it.

And I'm curious to know. So I would like to hear from everybody. Yeah. If from Asian Indians and North American Indians, and I'm sure I'm just like, offending everybody in any way, shape, or form right now, but let's figure out how to establish this. I want to know. I never consider that either. So and even if you're not Asian Indian or American Indian, yes, we want to hear from you if you have a good suggestion too about how to end this conundrum. You can tweet to us, like Sanjay did at syskpodcast. You can go to Facebook, also known as the 50,000 at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us a plain old fashioned email at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.

Join How Stuff Works staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola que tal mi gente. It's Chiquis from Chiquis and Chill Podcast. Welcome to the show. I talk

about anything and everything. I did have a miscarriage when I was 19 years old. And that's why I'm a firm believer and an advocate of therapy and counseling. The person that you saw on stage, the person that you saw in interviews, that was my mother offstage. Every Monday on my podcast, Chiquis and Chill available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.