REPUBLICAN PARTY
The Republican party has been a major political force in the United States since it first appeared on the presidential ballot in 1856. Following the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Whig party disintegrated, and mass meetings in the upper midwestern states led to the formation of a new party opposed to the spread of slavery into the western territories. One such meeting, at Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20, 1854, is usually credited as marking the birth of the Republican party.
The Republicans rapidly became established as the dominant political force in the North. In 1856 their presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, carried eleven of the sixteen northern states. By 1860 the Republicans had also absorbed the support of the nativist Know-Nothing party, and their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president, an outcome that precipitated the outbreak of the Civil War. The war firmly identified the Republican party as the party of the victorious North. As such, the Republicans became anathema to the white South for almost a century, with the exception of several antislavery redoubts in the mountain areas. That loss was more than counterbalanced in other parts of the country, however, by the Republicans' reputation as the party that had freed the slaves and saved the Union.
After the war, the Republicans continued the Whig tradition of promoting industrial development through high tariffs, while their popular base lay among the freedmen and the white, Protestant population of the northern states (the party began to be referred to as the "Grand Old Party," or gop, during this period). Western farmers had supported the Republicans in resisting the spread of slave agriculture, but in the 1865-1900 period the laissez-faire ideology of the eastern, corporate wing of the party predominated. The tension between the Republicans' "Wall Street" and "Main Street" wings would become an abiding feature of Republican party politics.
Immediately after the Civil War, Republicans in Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and promoted a Radical Reconstruction policy regarding the southern states. But in order to secure the disputed electoral votes of four southern states in the 1876 presidential election, the Republicans abandoned Radical Reconstruction and the cause of black civil rights. By doing so they virtually surrendered the South to the Democrats.
The scandals of President Ulysses S. Grant's administration (1869-1877) provoked a revolt in the 1872 election by Republican civil service reformers known as the Liberal Republicans. This issue was kept alive by a group of patrician Republicans in New York—the so-called mugwumps—who agitated against the widespread corruption of the time.
After the critical election of 1896 the nature of the party conflict changed. The close competition between the parties in the post-Civil War period was replaced by Republican dominance, as the Democrats became associated with agrarian radicalism. The Republican grip was reinforced by the return of prosperity under William McKinley and by the Spanish-American War. McKinley's defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and 1900 was followed by Republican victories in every presidential election until 1932, except for Democrat Woodrow Wilson's victories in 1912 (when the Republicans were split) and 1916. They also controlled Congress from 1896 to 1930, save for the 1910-1918 period. In every region of the country outside the solidly Democratic South, the Republicans were dominant.
The party's western agrarian radicals and eastern upper-middle-class reformers became more prominent after 1896. The latter tendency was most clearly exemplified by President Theodore Roosevelt who identified the Republicans with the cause of progressivism—in particular the idea of a vigorous executive regulating the economy and society in the public interest. The 1912 election (when Roosevelt emerged from retirement to challenge his successor, William Howard Taft) demonstrated the factional divisions within the Republican party. Western agrarian progressivism was represented by the candidacy of the radical senator from Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette, the more urbane progressivism of the East by Roosevelt, and the party's conservative business mainstream by President Taft. In disgust at Taft's renomination, Roosevelt bolted from the Republicans and launched his own Bull Moose candidacy, thereby guaranteeing defeat for the gop.
Widespread disillusionment with Woodrow Wilson and with progressivism in general after World War I allowed the Republicans to reassert their electoral dominance during the 1920s. Three Republican presidents—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover—were elected with comfortable margins, and the gop retained a firm grip on Congress. After Roosevelt's death in 1919, eastern urban progressivism lay dormant temporarily, and the party's corporate establishment, epitomized by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, was in control. The western tradition of radical Republicanism was sustained by continuing economic hardship in the agricultural states, but its spokesmen in the Senate—La Follette of Wisconsin, William Borah of Idaho, George Norris of Nebraska, and Hiram Johnson of California—were regarded derisively as the "Sons of the Wild Jackass" by the party elite.
The Republicans returned to the laissez-faire probusiness policies of the late nineteenth century in the domestic sphere. In foreign affairs, the Senate Republicans were instrumental in defeating Wilson's League of Nations in 1919-1920, and the party ostensibly became committed to a policy of isolationism. This was particularly true of the western radicals in the Senate, but the dominant Wall Street Republicans were less strident and did not pursue an isolationist economic policy vis-à-vis Europe. Republican foreign policy from the time of Theodore Roosevelt has emphasized robust defense of American interests within an international balance of power rather than "making the world safe for democracy." It was thus not so much isolationist as unilateralist, in contrast to the Democrats' Wilsonian universalism.
The Great Depression brought an end to the era of Republican dominance, as Herbert Hoover was overwhelmed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. After supporting the Roosevelt administration's initial emergency measures, the Republicans became unremittingly hostile toward the New Deal. As a result the Republican presidential candidate in 1936, Alfred M. Landon, carried only Maine and Vermont, and the gop was reduced to a paltry seventeen senators and eighty-nine representatives in Congress.
From the nadir of 1936, however, the Republicans recovered as the tone of their opposition became less strident. In Congress, they formed alliances with conservative southern Democrats against fdr's more radical proposals (particularly his 1937 Court-packing bill). This so-called conservative coalition generally controlled both houses of Congress until the early 1970s.
While the western radical Republicans either merged with the New Deal Democrats or turned conservative, progressive Republicanism revived in the metropolitan Northeast. Led initially by corporate lawyer Wendell Willkie and later by New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, the new Republican progressivism accepted the need for some government intervention in economic and social policy. Progressive Republicans also emphasized a commitment to civil rights and advocated a more Atlanticist foreign policy.
After Willkie's defeat by fdr in 1940, the leadership of the party fell upon Dewey, who was nominated in 1944 and 1948. During this period the progressive wing (also referred to as the moderate or even liberal wing of the party) was able to control the party's national convention because of its strength in the large delegations of the northeastern states and support from the progressive states of the Pacific Coast. The financial power of Wall Street over Republican elites in the western and midwestern states and over the shadow Republican organizations of the South was also decisive.
The party's isolationist, midwestern, Main Street tradition did not disappear, however. Inspired by the candidacy of Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, members of this wing bitterly contested the party's presidential nomination at every convention during the 1940-1952 period. On each occasion, Taft was thwarted by the eastern Republican establishment, primarily because of his lack of enthusiasm for America's post-World War II global commitments.
Although the progressives consistently won the presidential nomination, they equally consistently failed to win the White House. The Republicans managed to regain control of Congress in 1946, but two years later Dewey unexpectedly lost the presidential election to Harry S. Truman. In desperation after 1948, the Republicans at last discovered several issues they could use effectively against Truman's administration. They attributed the "fall of China" and the outbreak of the Korean War to the Truman-Dean Acheson foreign policy and to domestic communist "subversion." The Republican congressional leadership encouraged Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy to attack the Democrats on the latter issue, and anticommunism also became a means by which previously isolationist Republicans could justify international commitments by the United States. This "new nationalism" was particularly evident in the approach of the junior California senator, Richard M. Nixon.
In 1952 with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower at the head of their ticket (and Nixon as the vice-presidential nominee), the Republicans at last regained the White House. They also won control of Congress, and Eisenhower was able to make inroads in the Democratic South. Yet though Eisenhower was overwhelmingly reelected in 1956, his administration did not strengthen the Republicans' electoral position significantly. No major changes were made in domestic or foreign policy, and after the anticommunist issue had exhausted its electoral potential, the Republicans lost control of Congress in 1954. Nixon also lost the 1960 presidential election narrowly to Democrat John F. Kennedy.
During the Eisenhower years a new species of conservatism began to emerge within the party. This new Republican Right was composed of stalwart conservatives alienated by Eisenhower's failure to defeat communism and reverse the New Deal, the emerging Republican party in the South, and Catholics in the North who identified with McCarthy's anticommunist crusade. Organized into a network of intellectuals, interest groups, and journals, the conservatives defeated the moderate eastern establishment in 1964 and secured the party's presidential nomination for Arizona senator Barry M. Goldwater, who confirmed the moderates' worst fears by losing in a landslide to Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson.
The New Right had become so powerful within the Republican presidential party, however, that former vice president Nixon had to accommodate them to win the party's nomination in 1968. The movement toward the right within the gop reflected a broader shift of economic power and population away from the party's old northeastern base and toward the South and West, as well as the Republican mobilization of conservative white southerners in the wake of the civil rights revolution. With that movement the balance of power shifted from the moderate eastern establishment to southern and western conservatives.
Nixon's administration repeated the moderation of Eisenhower both at home and abroad; only rhetorically did it reflect Nixon's alliance with the New Right. The Watergate scandal during his presidency reflected badly on all elements of the party and retarded the progress the Republicans had hoped to make in the 1970s with the Democrats torn apart by Vietnam, race, and various social issues. In 1976, President Gerald Ford only narrowly defeated former California governor Ronald Reagan (who had succeeded Goldwater as the hero of the Republican Right) for the presidential nomination.
The years in opposition during Jimmy Carter's presidency reinforced the New Right's hold on the Republican party. This was largely due to the continuing Republican mobilization of formerly Democratic white southerners and northern, white, middle-class, Catholic, ethnic voters concerned about crime, inflation, and American "weakness" abroad. A further addition to the Republican ranks at this time were many formerly apolitical evangelical and fundamentalist Christians antagonized by Supreme Court decisions proscribing prayer in public schools and the national Democrats' association with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Reagan easily won the party's nomination in 1980 and triumphed over President Carter in November, perhaps helped to some extent by an independent candidacy by liberal Republican congressman John B. Anderson. The Republicans also took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1954.
Reagan's administration pursued the New Right agenda more zealously than had those of Nixon and Ford. The impact was greatest in the economic sphere as Reagan's 1981 tax and spending cuts reversed the direction of policy since the New Deal. In addition, the administration achieved a massive increase in defense spending and adopted a much more aggressive American posture vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and communist insurgencies in the third world. Finally, the Reagan administration was also committed to a social agenda of opposition to recent Supreme Court rulings on abortion, school prayer, and civil rights. The most significant legacy of the Reagan presidency, however, was the unprecedented federal budget deficit engendered by the combination of sweeping tax cuts and large increases in defense spending. The deficit precluded any short-term expansion of federal government programs and changed the whole context of political debate.
Although the Republicans won their third consecutive presidential election victory in 1988 under Reagan's vice president, George Bush, they had lost the Senate in the 1986 elections and had little prospect of taking control of the House. In elections for statewide offices and in state legislatures also, the Democrats retained a clear advantage.
The Republicans hoped they could realign the party system in their favor during the 1990s, because of the continuing shift of population to the South and West where they had recently been dominant in presidential elections and also because of indications that younger voters favored them over the Democrats. But any decline in the economic prosperity of the Reagan years could severely retard their progress, and the ending of the protracted American-Soviet conflict threatened to deprive the gop of the defense issue, which had been so electorally advantageous for them. Moreover, Court decisions in favor of the New Right social agenda could alienate upper-middle-class business Republicans and the younger voters whom the party had been assiduously wooing in recent years.
Regardless of the electoral balance between the parties in the 1990s, the powerful constraints that exist to maintain the two-party system in the United States, such as ballot access and the plurality voting system, would likely ensure that the Republican party, formed in the heat of the slavery crisis of the 1850s, would remain a major political force into the twenty-first century.
George H. Mayer, The Republican Party, 1854-1964 (1964); Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans: From 1952 to the Present (1989).
Nicol C. Rae
See also Anticommunism; Civil War; Conservatism; Isolationism; Liberalism; Mugwumps; Progressive Parties: 1912, 1924, 1948 Progressivism; Reconstruction; Whig Party; and entries for individual party figures.
