POSITIVELY LAST AWAKENING OF THE DEMOCRATIC RIP VAN WINKLE.
PUCK, October 27th, 1880.
The picture of the Democratic party as Rip Van Winkle was suggested by the fact that in 1880, when it appeared, (Oct. 27) the party had been for just twenty years wrapt in the sleep of political inactivity. The figure of the old sleeper is the one made familiar by Mr. Jefferson’s wonderful interpretation. He starts up from his twenty years’ slumber to see a spectral host flit by him, as he lies upon the mountain crag—Douglas, Greeley, McClellan, Seymour, Tilden, and Hancock the Superb, leading the doomed line of hapless Presidential candidates. The mean realities of life are represented by the two fiery-eyed owls in the tree at the old man’s back—General B. F. Butler and Mr. John Kelly of Tammany Hall, who never appeared in national politics, except as secret and mischievous birds of prey.
Down in the right-hand lower corner of the picture a pocket-flask labelled “Bourbon” may puzzle the reader who turns this page a generation hence. It is a sly reference to a jest well known and well understood at the time,—it had a much earlier origin. The Democrats were called Bourbons because it was supposed that “they never learned anything and never forgot anything.” As it happened, Bourbon County, Kentucky, had given its name to a brand of whiskey at that time in great favor. As whiskey was America’s democratic drink, in the broader sense of the word, by a natural association of ideas Bourbon whiskey was set down as the drink of the Democratic party. It was generally known as “Bourbon” and pronounced “Burbin.”