Lewis Gould's Grand Old Party (2003) chronicles the history of the Republicans. (The companion volume on the history of the Democrats, Jules Witcover's Party of the People (2003), will be the subject of a future diary.) What I particularly liked about this book was that it stuck to a single theme, namely how the two parties, in the course of a century, apparently swapped places ideologically. The Republicans of the nineteenth century sounded in many respects like the Democrats of today, and vice versa. Specifics after the jump.
The most important issue confronting the nation at the time of the GOP's birth was slavery. The GOP opposed it (or at least opposed its expansion, initially) and the Democrats came to be its champions. After the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, the Democratic Party continued to stand against the interests of African Americans, especially in its support for Jim Crow segregation.
Republican propagandists today like to highlight this fact without acknowledging the dramatic realignment that occurred between the 1930s and 1960s. It was the Democrats, starting with Truman and culminating with LBJ, who first embraced the cause of civil rights. The racist Democrats became increasingly alienated and eventually fled to the Republican Party, which eagerly embraced them in what came to be known as the Southern Strategy. That is how the GOP ended up as the home for all those former Dixiecrats who once openly supported segregation like Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, and Jesse Helms.
That a white supremacist party evolved into a civil rights party (and ultimately gave us our first black president) is one of the more bizarre facts of American political history, as is the fact that the "Party of Lincoln" now houses most of the apologists for the Old Confederacy. How this shift occurred is one of the matters that Gould's book focuses on.
But racial emancipation wasn't the only area in which the two parties changed. Take protectionism. Did you know that the tariff was once called "the sacred temple of the Republican Party"? Don't let Rush Limbaugh hear this, but the GOP of the 19th century was openly and proudly a tax-and-spend party that sought a host of federal government programs paid for out of the pockets of ordinary citizens. In Gould's words, "They established a national banking system, imposed an income tax, created a system for dispersing public land in the West, and started a transcontinental railroad" (p. 29). If modern-day Democrats are to be tarred with the sins of their predecessors, shouldn't the same be true of Republicans? But you rarely hear GOP spokesmen today mention 19th-century Republicans except sentimentally, as in Mike Huckabee's curious line at the 2008 Republican Convention: "Abraham Lincoln reminded us that a government that can do everything for us can also take everything from us." Was he mythologizing Lincoln as a small-government conservative or criticizing the massive government expansion that Lincoln in fact engendered? Probably a little of both. When your party includes both Lincoln admirers and neo-Confederates, bait-and-switch is called for on occasion.
The early GOP wasn't entirely a different creature than it is today. It was increasingly identified with business interests. Indeed, stimulating business was much the purpose of these early reforms. Gould locates the GOP's shift away from its pro-tax position roughly with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified shortly before Woodrow Wilson took office:
When the Democrats enacted an income tax in 1913, they permanently changed how government revenues were collected. Customs duties became less important, a diminishing percentage of the funds for government operation. Republican attitudes toward taxation, spending, and trade policy would commence a long and slow evolution away from the tariff and toward the commitment to free trade that would characterize the party by the end of the twentieth century. Such a prospect would have seemed rank political heresy to Nelson Aldrich and the defenders of protectionism in 1909. (p. 176)
Gould sees other elements of the modern-day GOP in incipient stages in the 19th century. For one thing (and this seems a bit of a stretch to me), he suggests that the GOP's tendency to view itself as the patriotic party and the Democrats as treasonous is some kind of residual throwback to its early identification of Democrats with the defeated Confederacy. For another, he points to the late-19th-century Democratic Party's appeal to Catholic immigrants, alienated by the Protestant moralism of Republicans who advocated temperance, English-only in schools, and strict Sabbath observance, as a formative reason why the Democrats developed as a party of ethnic minorities.
The first president to be identified with the Progressive Movement, the forerunner of modern liberalism, was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt. According to Gould, "Roosevelt advocated policies that very much looked forward to the modern welfare state. He endorsed such progressive reforms as limits on corporate power in politics, greater regulation of big business through government agencies, and laws to curb child labor, provide minimum wages, and workers' unemployment compensation" (p. 179). Gould believes that Roosevelt's departure from the party in 1912 (strictly speaking he never left, he simply ran on a third-party ticket after the Republicans refused to nominate him) contributed strongly to the development of the GOP as an economically conservative party; the other President Roosevelt would later cement the Democratic Party's identification with welfare liberalism.
There is much more in the book, including the impact of the Cold War and the rise of Goldwater conservatism, but for now I will simply leave you with Gould's own summation at the end:
One hundred years earlier, the Democrats had been the party of states' rights, limited government, free trade, anti-imperialism, and white supremacy in the South. A leavening of anticorporate sentiment also animated the Democrats. The Republicans had been the party of business within the context of tariff protection, economic nationalism, overseas expansion, and an activist federal government. By 2000 the GOP was still pro-business, but otherwise it had taken over key aspects of the Democratic creed of the Bryan era: states' rights, small government, free trade, and limits to overseas involvement. On race, the Republicans had not adopted the creed of white supremacy, but they did represent the view that too much had been done for African Americans and other minorities during Democratic administrations. In the South, however, many leading Republicans saw the party as a means of maintaining the ascendancy of whites in the region.
The Republican endorsement of states' rights and restricted federal government arose from the GOP dislike of government regulation of business, a foundation of the party's ideology after 1912. Opposition to the income tax began in 1913 and intensified as the levy became part of funding the New Deal and the Great Society. The social welfare programs of the New Deal, most notably Social Security, also seemed to Republicans ill-conceived in theory and destructive of individual initiative in practice. The Republican shift on race stemmed from the defection of black voters to the Democrats after 1932 and then the allure of southern white ballots in the 1960s and beyond. As free trade replaced the protectionist international economy of the nineteenth century, the GOP moved toward a view of world commerce that maximized the market and afforded a smaller role to the government. (p. 481)