Republican Party

Republican Party. The Republican party emerged in the 1850s from a party system torn by political pressures it could not contain. The organizers of the new party brought together formerly hostile groups, including Northern Whigs, antislavery Free Soil Party members, and dissident Democrats—all affected by worsening North‐South tensions unleashed by the struggle for control of the Kansas territory—along with nativist Know‐Nothings reacting against the flood of Irish Catholic immigrants. Republicans portrayed the Democratic party as controlled by an expansionist Southern “slavocracy” abetted in the urban North by immigrant votes, and the new party grew rapidly as sectional conflict intensified in the late 1850s. Its opposition to the expansion of slavery and its backing of free labor and federal support for economic development—a reflection of its Whig ancestry—as well as its nativism all won support in the North.

The election in 1860 of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, and the Civil War that followed solidified Republican dominance. The Lincoln administration, in the name of saving the Union, greatly expanded federal power. At first prepared only to restrict slavery, not to abolish it, Republican leaders gradually accepted emancipation both as a war measure and as an expression of the expanded understanding of liberty forged in the heat of conflict.

From the Gilded Age through the 1930s.

In the postwar years, Republicans won support in the small‐town and rural North by portraying the Democrats as the party of rebellion, a tactic known as “waving the bloody shirt.” The Grand Army of the Republic, an association of Union veterans, mobilized votes as a Republican pressure group. Union veterans headed party tickets for decades, starting with Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. Republican orators also continued to appeal to nativists by picturing the Democrats as the party of immigrants. In this era, too, while retaining their support among northern farmers and shopkeepers, the Republicans championed the era's new industrial conglomerates and financial institutions. The party agenda focused on aiding capitalist development through high tariffs, railroad subsidies, and generous support for the nation's economic infrastructure.

Like all political parties, the Republicans experienced factional tensions rooted in regional differences and policy conflicts. Early in the twentieth century, these tensions produced a wrenching split. Progressive Republicans, led by Robert La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that unbridled industialization was harming farmers and laborers and promoted policies of social amelioration and corporate regulation. The party's corporate wing, predictably, opposed higher taxation, business regulation, and legislation extending workers' rights. The party split allowed the election and reelection of a Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, in 1912 and 1916, respectively.

The most able Republican leader of the 1920s, Herbert Hoover, first as secretary of commerce and then as president, succeeded for a time in reconciling the party's warring wings. Down to 1929, the Republicans, despite their factionalism, remained sufficiently united to dominate national politics. But the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing economic collapse ended the party's electoral dominance and threatened its survival. From 1932 to 1952, the Republicans found themselves for the first time a minority in a sea of Democrats, tainted by their association with the Great Depression, Hoover's failed presidency, and their opposition to the New Deal.

Liberal Republicans in the urban Northeast, ignoring conservative charges of “me tooism,” demanded action. The party would collapse, they warned, unless it accepted parts of the New Deal's regulative and social welfare program. Most congressional Republicans, however, were from small towns and rural areas, and they followed their leader, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, in rejecting the New Deal. The factional battle raged for thirty years. Liberal Republicans, led by Wendell Willkie (1892–1944) and New York governor Thomas Dewey (1902–1971), gained control of the party in the 1940s, at least at the presidential level, but failed to win the White House until the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, the first Republican presidents since Hoover, accepted New Deal programs and insisted that Republicans could be as caring as Democrats in the face of want and despair. In the Nixon years, particularly, support for the welfare state and an active government role in the economy became Republican orthodoxy.

To the party's conservative midwestern wing, all this remained unacceptable despite the anticommunist Cold War pronouncements of Eisenhower and Nixon. To conservatives, the issues were big government, high taxes, and the strangling of free enterprise in governmental red tape. At first, conservatives made little headway against the liberal wing. Their strength was not in the voter‐rich regions of the country. Senator Taft and other conservative Republicans initially welcomed the anticommunist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, but when McCarthy attacked prominent Republicans and even the U.S. Army, many members of his own party joined in a 1954 Senate censure vote. When Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona defeated Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York to win the 1964 Republican nomination, the result was an electoral disaster, the landslide victory of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson.

Amid the urban riots, campus unrest, economic strains, and Vietnam War controversies of the late 1960s, however, Republican conservatism revived. As a Democrat‐supported racial revolution turned from expanding civil rights to promoting programs that seemed to favor ethnic minorities and women at the expense of white males, and as Democratic candidates became more liberal (or radical, in conservatives' eyes), traditional Democratic voters turned to Republican candidates espousing once‐unfashionable conservative positions.

The 1980s and Beyond.

Ronald Reagan, a New Dealer turned conservative Republican, won the presidency in 1980 by excoriating the excesses and failures of the welfare state. Reagan also flexed America's Cold War military muscle, challenging alleged Democratic weaknesses on foreign policy. His success underscored the exhaustion of both Democratic liberalism and me‐too Republicanism. As Republicans made signficant inroads in the white South and in Democratic strongholds of the urban North, the conservative mood within the party hardened. Although conservative Republicans were themselves divided, they clearly controlled the party in the 1980s and 1990s. The emergence of an uncompromising conservatism among highly individualistic entrepreneurs, small shopkeepers, and middle managers typically living and working in the suburbs on the burgeoning Pacific Coast and in the Old South and Southwest (rechristened the Sun Belt) sharpened the party's laissez‐faire, antigovernment outlook. The rise of Republican‐oriented religious, moral‐reform movements such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and the revival of Republican nativism added new issues—tougher immigration controls, school prayer, pornography regulation, opposition to abortion and gay rights, and other matters of personal and group morality—to the Republican agenda.

Conservative Republicans triumphed electorally in the early 1990s, winning in 1994 control of both houses of Congress for the first time in almost fifty years. Espousing themes of individual responsibility and suspicion of government deeply rooted in the party's history, conservative Republicans—with Democratic support—pushed through a sweeping reform of a federal welfare system dating to the New Deal Era. But new economic and social issues sorely tested Republican unity and promoted internecine warfare, contributing to Democratic presidential victories in 1992 and 1996 and further gains in the 1998 midterm elections.

Republican Divisions over Foreign Policy.

Republican divisions were important in the foreign policy arena as well, in long‐term conflicts between internationalists and isolationists. President Theodore Roosevelt favored vigorous U.S. engagement in world affairs, but after World War I, Republican isolationists rejected U.S. membership in the League of Nations and generally withdrew from the international arena. Midwestern Republican senators like Taft, Idaho's William Borah (1865–1940), and Arthur Vandenberg (1884–1951) of Michigan opposed U.S. interventionism in the 1930s and, while supporting World War II, reiterated their isolationism after the war. A turning point came in 1947, however, when Vandenberg supported President Harry S. Truman's call for U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey, and a bipartisan approach to foreign policy generally prevailed during the Cold War. But the intraparty split reemerged the 1990s, as most Republican business leaders supported the global economy and lower trade barriers, while other Republicans, such as the TV commentator and sometime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, espoused protectionism and a more nationalistic economic program.

In the 2000 presidential election, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote, but George W. Bush, bearing a famous Republican name, narrowly won the Electoral College vote after the Supreme Court resolved the bitterly disputed Florida outcome in his favor. Although Bush had campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” he and Vice President Dick Cheney strengthened the party's historic ties to corporate interests, particularly energy companies, while courting the increasingly active religious Right on such hot-button issues as abortion, gay marriage, and Internet pornography. Bush also gave high priority to missile defense, a relic of the Reagan era.

In foreign policy, unlike his internationalist-minded father, Bush embraced the unilateralism of neoconservatives in his administration, pursuing an aggressive U.S. policy abroad—especially in the Iraq War of 2003—while showing little interest in coalition building or multi-national cooperation on such issues as environmental protection.

The Republican Party under George W. Bush appealed to patriots, religious conservatives, corporate leaders, and entrepreneurs, especially in the South and Southwest. Hispanic voters, increasingly important in U.S. politics, were divided, sharing the party's cultural conservatism but not its favoritism to big business and the rich on tax policies and other economic issues. Under Bush the GOP held little appeal for African-American voters and increasingly alienated Republican moderates in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and elsewhere. Indeed, in 2001 Republican senator James Jeffords of Vermont left the party and became an independent. Ironically, many traditional Republicans who were suspicious of big government were dismayed by Bush's tolerance for massive federal deficits and his tolerance of vastly expanded federal power in the War on Terrorism that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

As the nation moved further into the new century, many Americans viewed the Republican party's conservative wing as too extreme, suggesting the imminence of yet another realignment in the party's ever‐shifting balance of power among competing factions.
See also Blaine, James G.; Civil War: Causes; Conservatism; Depressions, Economic; Expansionism; Fifties, The; Gilded Age; Know‐Nothing Party; Nativist Movement; Progressive Era; Political Parties; Progressive Party of 1912–1914; Twenties, The; Whig Party.

Bibliography

Donald B. Johnson , The Republican Party and Wendell Willkie, 1960.
Robert Marcus , Grand Old Party: Political Structure in the Gilded Age, 1880–1896, 1971.
James T. Patterson , Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft, 1972.
Joan Hoff‐Wilson , Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive, 1975.
David Thelen , Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit, 1976.
William Gienapp , The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856, 1987.
Herbert Parmet , Richard Nixon and His America, 1990.
Joel H. Silbey , The American Political Nation, 1838–1893, 1991.
Theodore J. Lowi , The End of the Republican Era, 1995.
Robert Rutland , The Republicans: From Lincoln to Bush, 1996.

Joel H. Silbey

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer