GRAND OLD PARTY: A History of the Republicans

GRAND OLD PARTY: A History of the Republicans. By Lewis L. Gould. Random House. 602 pp. $35

This much-needed history of the Republican Party takes as its theme America’s partisan fluctuations during the past century and a half. Lewis L. Gould, a professor emeritus of histo-ry at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that the positions of the two major American parties have been almost interchangeable on a wide variety of issues, especially those relating to foreign policy and the division of labor between federal and state government.

What, he asks, does the Grand Old Party actually stand for? The Whigs, Know-Nothings, and others who formed the Republican Party in 1854 seized the initiative to become, in effect, America’s party, the party of Union and patriotism. The Republican Party presided over the Civil War and Reconstruction, during which it intimidated opponents by waving the bloody shirt and taking the "patriotic" offensive. For all the cultural and political twists and turns in the years since, for all the contradictions brought about by shifting centers of power and interest, the Republicans have retained this position in the mainstream of national identity. Witness the Democrats’ ongoing difficulty contending with, in Gould’s words, the "sense of innate social harmony as the central fact of American political and economic life [that] remains a key element in Republican thought."

The Republicans’ seminal contributions to modern American democracy, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, did much to define a system of values for multiracial coexistence, but the price was high: Radical Reconstruction effectively scuttled Republican control of the South. A century later, it was the Democrats who set out to fulfill the promise of civil rights. The GOP opposed these New Frontier and Great Society reforms, and thereby won back the loyalties of Southerners.

Since splitting with Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moosers in 1912, Gould notes, Republicans have generally opposed labor unions, welfare programs, and regulation of business. He also pays some extended recognition to such Republican presidents as William McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower, whose accomplishments were scanted during more liberal periods. With Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy, Republicanism "shrunk and shifted rightward at the same time." By the 1980s, the GOP "had detached itself" from most of its own history. Current leaders, Gould suggests, have become so arrogant as to raise doubts about whether they "really believe in the two-party system as a core principle of politics."

Unfortunately, Gould mostly sidesteps the fundraising dilemma of American politics. He discusses the post-Watergate regulations only briefly, by noting that "soft money" helped the Republicans because of their "greater access to corporate resources." The true magnitude of the problem, for the political system as well as for the GOP, and its defiance of workable solutions go largely unmentioned.

Still, Gould is especially effective in charting the shifts in the defining political issues of the past 150 years. And he reminds us that the Republican positions on these issues haven’t always been predictable: The party has repeatedly "moved in directions that would have seemed improbable to its members only decades earlier."

—Herbert S. Parmet