Republican Evolution, From Lincoln to Reagan
nytimes.com
November 12, 2003
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'GRAND OLD PARTY'
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
GRAND OLD PARTY
A History of the Republicans
By Lewis L. Gould
Illustrated. 597 pages. Random House. $35.
As a schoolchild in Ohio during the 1970's I was taught that "Republican" was synonymous with Abraham Lincoln. As the story went, Lincoln, imbued with backwoods charm, debated the ornery Stephen Douglas throughout Illinois in 1858 and in the process became a national political star. To Lincoln slavery was a moral issue, unsolvable by legislative compromises.
When he ran for president in 1860 as a Republican, he was essentially viewed as a third-party candidate. Lincoln, who won less than 40 percent of the popular vote, did not have a mandate. Never before (or after) in American history had the election of a president caused such an inflammatory ruckus. The South quickly broke away from the Union. The Civil War then ripped America apart.
Throughout the grim upheaval Lincoln, the super-Unionist, held firm, guiding his war-ravaged country through bloody battles while leading his party to victory over George B. McClellan in 1864. By winning the war and re-election, Lincoln succeeded in transforming the Republican Party from an anti-slavery soapbox into the dominant political organization in America.
The historian Lewis L. Gould explains all of this, and much more, in "Grand Old Party," a smart, sprawling, highly readable survey of the Republican Party from its origins in 1854 to George W. Bush. In workmanlike fashion Mr. Gould makes clear that the early Republican motto was "economic prosperity," even during the Civil War, and it lasted all the way to Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. The Grand Old Party, he says, was as much the party of unfettered growth as it was of Lincolnian anti-slavery.
"A party that began as an attack on the existing political order," he writes, "became an organization that believed in an identity of the interests of capitalists, workers and farmers."
Mr. Gould, a professor emeritus in American history at the University of Texas, has long been celebrated as a reliable authority on American politics. Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, credits Mr. Gould with inspiring him to study American history, and Vice President Dick Cheney has lauded his work. But these conservative accolades are deceptive. In the preface to "Grand Old Party" Mr. Gould reassures the reader that he is "not a Republican" in his "personal political views." He wants to be perceived as a party chronicler, not advocate.
Mr. Gould jumps quickly out of the gate. He breezes through the 1854 creation of the Republican Party in a few pages, offering the reader a choice between sites where it was officially founded: in Ripon, Wis., on Feb. 28, or Jackson, Mich., on March 20. Take your pick. The founders were a disgruntled mix of Whigs, Democrats and Free-Soilers.
Why the party was created, however, is not disputed: to stop the expansion of slavery. When that high-profile explorer John C. Frémont received the Republican nomination in 1856, to the consternation of the South, his slogan was: "Free Speech, Free Press, Free Men, Free Labor, Free Territory and Frémont." While Frémont garnered only 33 percent of the vote and lost the election to James Buchanan, a Democrat, the new "Freedom Party" was established for real.
Then came the Lincoln revolution. Despite the lingering antagonism of the Deep South after the Civil War, the G.O.P. controlled the White House for all but 16 years between 1860 and 1932.
The novelist Thomas Wolfe, in his book-length essay "From Death to Mourning," written during the early years of the Depression, wrote poignantly about how forgettable 19th-century Republican presidents — with the exception of Lincoln — were. "For who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had seen him in the streets of life?" Wolfe asked. "Who could believe his footfalls ever sounded on a lonely pavement? Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? And where was Harrison? Where was Hayes? Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides; which was which?" No matter who became president, they were all in the shadow of Lincoln.
While Wolfe was of course correct that 19th-century Republicans are somewhat forgettable, "Grand Old Party" is surprisingly chock full of factoids on their lives that will delight readers who embrace political history as a trivia sport. During the Civil War, for example, Republicans enacted an income tax, believing that "the rich should be taxed more than the poor." The most notorious atheist in United States history, Robert G. Ingersoll, was a Republican who orated at G.O.P. conventions. The Republican Party actually embraced the Equal Rights Amendment from 1940 to 1960.
Mr. Gould even informs us that Charles Evans Hughes was the last presidential nominee to grow a beard, and that Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to seriously be considered a presidential contender. As for George W. Bush, he was the third Republican candidate in American history to win the White House while losing the popular vote. Whether Mr. Gould is writing about why the cartoonist Thomas Nast chose the elephant as the party mascot in Harper's Weekly or how "McCarthyism" crept into our national parlance, he is never boring.
In "Grand Old Party" he condenses 150 years of history into approximately 600 pages. He balances his character sketches between hard-core conservatives like Robert Taft and moderates like Thomas Dewey. But he plays down the enduring importance of Theodore Roosevelt in G.O.P. history. Roosevelt is portrayed as a wily reformer, more Democrat than Republican, a genuine aberration.
"His regulatory policies, his advocacy of resource conservation in the West, and his endorsement of an inheritance tax," Mr. Gould writes, "drove conservatives to paroxysms of rage." Yet he never explains why America's two most recent conservative presidents — Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — have embraced Roosevelt as their all-seasons role model.
Mr. Gould hits his high-water mark in a paean to Mr. Reagan, a revolutionary maverick who, for better or worse, turned Lincoln's Republican Party upside down in 1980. "It was as if the Republican Party had sprung from the forehead of Ronald Reagan without a past to burden its affairs," he writes.
But one inherent characteristic of the party still holds true from Lincoln to Bush II: Republicans have never liked Democrats. And that is a trend that will undoubtedly continue. Meanwhile it's safe to say that the freedom party of Lincoln has become the conservative party of Reagan, at least for the time being.
Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies and professor of history at the University of New Orleans. |
