The illustrations on the side of the float are from one of Comus’s most famous parades, 1873′s Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species, which presented animal-like caricatures of carpetbagging public figures from Reconstruction who had, in effect, inverted the “natural order” by placing a “missing link” — the mixed-race P. B. S. Pinchback in the guise of a banjo-playing gorilla — in a position of power. (Pinchback briefly served as governor of Louisiana.)