The modern Republican Party finds its origins in the
first post-Mexican War election, that of 1848 (1). The victory in the Mexican
War had brought the nation a huge amount of new territory. The question of
"what to do" about the potential expansion of the institution of slavery into
the new states that might be created from the conquest came very much, and very
quickly, to the fore. The South, of course, which had seen limits placed on the
expansion of slavery west (and north west) by the Missouri Compromise of 1820,
wanted unlimited expansion. Opposed were two major forces: those that simply
wanted to prevent the expansion into the territories and those that wanted not
only the former but also wanted the abolition of slavery in the states in which
it already existed.
Starting with the said election of 1848, both major
national parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, were beginning to come apart at
the seams over the above question. For 1848, the Whigs nominated a general,
Zachary Taylor, who was a Southerner and who owned slaves. However, he did not
own much of a public record on the major political question of the time. He
won. Once in office, Taylor surprised just about everyone by taking a free-soil
position for the Territories. However, by the 1854 mid-terms, out of the
by-then accumulated Whig wreckage the Republican Party had been born. The
history is very complex, which much movement backwards and forwards, but the
Republican Party picked up four other pieces of the political pie of the time
that eventually led to its victory in the four-way election of 1860.
One was the Abolitionists who wanted to rid the nation
of slavery in its entirety. Second were the Free-Soilers, who simply wanted to
ban the expansion of slavery into the territories. Third was a wing of the
strongly anti-immigrant "nativist" movement. (While some of these so-called
"Know-Nothings" did join the Republicans, the rest was represented in the 1856
election by the American Party, which had as a principal platform plank
requiring a 21-year wait for naturalization.) Fourth was the growing
anti-alcohol temperance movement, which had achieved (a to-be short-lived)
prohibition of a sort in a number of states in the 1850s. This wing, however,
had a strong anti-immigrant flavor to it, for the Irish (whiskey) and the
Germans (beer).
So what does all of this have to do with the modern
Republican Party, you might ask. Didn't it become the Party of Abolition with
the nomination of Abraham Lincoln in 1860? Well, no. In the campaign of 1860,
and into the start of the Civil War, Lincoln himself had made it clear that
while he personally found slavery reprehensible, he was only determined to keep
out of the Territories, not to abolish it in the South. The Emancipation Proclamation
came later, and was the product of both domestic and foreign politics as much
as anything. Lincoln, of course, just before the end of the War did ram through
Congress the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, to be followed
later by the civil rights 14th and 15th Amednments. But
by the time the disputed election of 1876 came about, the Republican Party had
abandoned any commitment to either civil rights or voting rights, thus making
sure that for all intents and purposes, in the South the ancien regime
would be re-established (2).
So what has the Party really stood for, over the years
and how might this be traced back to its origins? Well, its principal component
was the old Whig Party, which focused very much upon benefitting the up and
coming industrial class by strongly supporting, for example, infra-structure
building (Lincoln authorized the beginning of the construction of the first
trans-continental railroad during the Civil War), a high-tariff wall against
foreign manufactures, and expansion of opportunities for higher education at
public expense, the "Land-Grant" colleges. Thus the Whig Party was the party of
"big business" of its day, and thus by 1876 its successor, the Republican Party
had so become again. As it still is today. The particular policies have changed
--- the present-day GOP is firmly against any major Federal program to
build/re-build infra-structure (holding out, of course, for privatization) ---
but the "big business focus remains.
Nativism? Well, the GOP was pretty quiet during the
period 1880-1910 when the major Italian-Jewish immigration was taking place,
but by 1924 it had put in place very strong anti-immigration legislation. Of
course, its modern anti-immigrant form is its position on Latinos (and by the
way, the last thing the GOP wants to do is "solve" the "undocumented worker"
problem. Doing so would deprive it of a major political issue that its white,
racist base just loves to feed on). The Gingrich/Trump/Palin "American
Exceptionalism" is another modern branch of original Republican nativism. As
for the Temperance Movement, under Republican leadership that led to
"Prohibition" of the 1920s and the "Drug War" of the modern era. As for the
Free-Soilers, while this topic deserves a column of its own (and will get one, somewhere
down the road), growing capitalism could not use slave labor. It needed its
workers to a) have some measure of education (denied to slaves), and b) to
believe the almost never-achieved dream that "they could make it too" and so
put up with low wages and long hours.
So the modern Republican
Party is no aberration. It very much reflects its roots (excluding of the
course the Abolitionists). (Interestingly enough, this party of the modern
Corporate Power has adopted several major themes from what was the Slave Power
party in the 1850s [the Democrats]: "States Rights" [to maintain slavery, of
course], "small government" [to prevent the imposition of national standards on
such matters as civil and voting rights for all persons], and opposition to a
main Whig policy of that era: Federal government support for infra-structure
construction.)
The true aberrations in
GOP history have been: the time of the "Radicals" (e.g., Thaddeus Stevens and
Charles Sumner) of the immediate post-Civil War era who wanted to bring full
justice and citizenship rights to the freed slaves; the (very) short-lived
Progressive Era under Teddy Roosevelt; and the mid-twentieth century time of
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who accepted the New Deal as a done deal, and simply
wanted to make it somewhat more pro-business. (In 1954, Eisenhower, who also
liked infra-structure construction, famously said: "Should
any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance,
and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party
again in our political history." He was, of course, famously wrong, but he did
say it. ) As for the "Tea Party," it
too is hardly an aberration. In terms of policy, they simply say out loud, in
less polite language, what most of the rest of the modern GOP leadership
thinks.
No, with few exceptions, since its founding the GOP
has been the party of right-wing reaction and very much in touch with its
historical origins.
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References:
1. McPherson, J., Battle Cry of Freedom, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
2. Foner, E., Reconstruction: America's Unfinished
Revolution, 1863-1877, New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
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