“Our differences are policies; our agreements, principles.†-President William McKinley
In a party that seems to endlessly be looking for a new figurehead to able to “lead the party out of the political wildernessâ€Â, GOP members must force themselves to tear away from the idol worship of Ronald Reagan as the seemingly only Republican president to have served and turn the pages and read further into past history at the many figures who made up the party from its conception. Abraham Lincoln who is frequently in the top 5 of the greatest American presidents if not considered by many to be the greatest American president for having the ideological vision of the nation as one and of freeing the slaves, creating the groundwork for an industrial America and being the first major leader of the new Republican Party, is probably a good person to look over in political retrospect. His ability to stand for principles and weave together real world pragmatics and his anti-slavery ideals to bring them about is therefore a natural cornerstone of what the party of today should strive to be like. The emphasis on Lincoln in the first part was necessary to remind those on the far-right who have woefully forgotten or abandoned the original principles of the party and how past Republican history set precedents on how these principles were to be stood for.
It is important to point out that the history of the Republican Party since its conception in Ripon, Wisconsin is full of ups and downs. It has had times of massive victories and defeats, of corruption and of righteousness, the proverbial triumphs and tragedies that are not limited to our party or party members alone. The GOP in the time period right after the civil war pushed hard for and passed the 13th amendment which outlawed slavery and in the case of woman’s suffrage was absolutely instrumental in fighting for the rights of women in society. In 1896, the Republican Party was the first major party to favor women’s suffrage and when the 19th Amendment finally was added to the Constitution, 26 of 36 state legislatures that had voted to ratify it were under Republican control. With the first woman elected to Congress being a Republican from Montana in 1917, it can be said that the party was very much a forward thinking and innovative one standing for the very principles that this nation was founded upon.
The period right after Lincoln’s assassination and into the 20th century was marked by a massive move towards industrialization and urbanization, a time period of prosperity marking the creation of the modern industrial economy along with national transportation and communication networks. Corruption and self-serving special interests is something that becomes evident in both parties over time and is not something that can be pinned down onto one party alone and it took members of both parties to stem the tide of corruption that identified those times. The administration of Grant during Reconstruction, state governments, and the appropriately labeled Gilded Age correctly showed how corruption became evident anywhere regardless of political identification. In those years, government was being horribly mismanaged, and corrupt party machinery like Tammany Hall with Democratic machine Boss Tweed was making infamy. This set the stage for an anti-government mentality to take hold that believed federal or state intervention in the economy inevitably led to the favoritism, bribery, kickbacks, inefficiency, waste, corruption and that it was simply better to keep government out rather than try face and fight these problems. That such a standard in both parties was set would set the stage for the dramatic showdowns and triumphs of Republicans who saw the mismanagement as something to be fought against within their own party as well as to then carry forth their beliefs in the Republican line of thought that government at least has an important role in being part of the solution to the problems facing the nation even if it is not to become the sole answer.
Neither party was free from the wrongdoings of the time as the Whiskey Ring scandal infamously demonstrated for the Republicans while Boss Tweed along with countless others demonstrated for the Democrats. Both parties were very much in the “big business†mentality and corruption was not totally free from either one as political machines and their special interests many times ran the show to a degree that even today’s special interest meddling cannot quite live up to. The conservative libertarian belief system of laissez-faire that was popular in the latter half of the 19th century was, unlike today, to be found in both major political parties as the Gilded Age was in full swing.
Issues such as the spoils systems was tackled by a factionalized Republican Party, one that had split among those who encouraged the cronyism of the system where the cabinet positions in government went to those who helped out the victor the most, against those who believed that job positions must and should have been based on merit. It is true that Republican had been split on this issue but in the end the merit system republicans won out and finally with the strong push by congressional republicans and Republican president Chester A. Arthur, the Pendleton Civil Service reform act was put into writing in a strong effort to rid the nation of the crookedness and fraud within government that made up part of the Gilded Age. Many reform minded republicans also saw how the explosion of industry after the civil war was presenting complex and sometimes troublesome scenarios. The nation’s GDP was growing and the country was coming back from the dark days of the Civil War and the industrial prowess it commanded was well on its way to achieving levels of other industrialized nations. With this new progression in technology and innovation along with societal progress since Lincoln’s tenure came problems that had not been seen before. Some of the most notable problems that this era brought forth included most notably the mass robber-baron attitudes of the wealthy along with their monopolizing corporations.
Reform Republicans and those with similar stands in the Democratic party stood side-by-side and fought the cronyism and corruption that seeped into parties and governments after the Civil War along with Grant’s badly run administration and actually led the way to lay the groundwork for future efforts to curb the corporate and elite excess that were being made at the expense of the hard working American. Many Republicans fighting the corruption within their own party also rejected the obviously failed hard-line laissez-faire conservative ideology within both political parties and whose goals to bring the party back towards centrist policy thinking that would protect the very principles that this party and nation was found on. Principles that called for an active and flexible government with new ideas to protect them from those that do not care about the average American and what the party originally stood for.
These beliefs and the collapse in effective governance of the conservative Democrats would eventually lead to the era of one of the most influential figures of American history. This was a man who would come to realize the changing and growing complexities that society was experiencing and would move to make the government act accordingly to this change. This was a figure whose beliefs that the Republican Party was and should continue to be a force of good common sense centrist governing clashed with others in his party who wished to bring it further to the right and away from the tenets that Republicanism in its creation and its best implementations to that point espoused as a tool for America. Teddy Roosevelt; a president who like Lincoln saw how an active and robust government could be used as a force of good in for society but who also saw how government is incapable of being the end all for any and all problems that come up and that a distinction must be made between the government being a tool to create opportunity and that of a bottomless hole where problems are not fixed but only patched up with taxpayer dollars.