THE REPUBLICANS—THE SUPPLY-SIDE PARTY

By Edwin Cooney

He knew it was unwise and he really and truly didn’t want to do it, but he did. Franklin Pierce, our fourteenth President, a New Hampshire Democrat (often called “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills”), surrendered to pressure from his Secretary of War and from one of the Senate’s most powerful senators that Sunday, January 22nd, 1854.

The issue at hand was whether the Missouri Compromise of 1820 should be violated in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska act which would allow the voters of those territories to decide whether or not to adopt slavery.

Two of the visitors to President Pierce that Sunday were his Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and Illinois Senator Steven A. Douglas. Senator Douglas had made a deal with southern senators to allow for the possibility of slavery in both territories (“popular sovereignty” it was called) in exchange for southern support for construction of a transcontinental railroad from Chicago through one of these two territories to Sacramento, California.

Frank Pierce didn’t like to work on Sundays. He and his wife Jane were filled with remorse after the death of their child, eleven year-old Benny, who died in a train accident shortly before Pierce’s inauguration. They had already lost two other children earlier in their marriage. Jane Appleton Pierce was convinced that God had taken their last son so that Frank wouldn’t be distracted during his presidency. Hence, Sunday was a day for prayerful meditation. Secretary Davis and Senator Douglas believed that pressuring the president on a Sunday would allow them to sway him: accept this bill or lose the support of the South, Pierce was told that Sunday.

So, he surrendered -- but instead of losing the South he lost the North by indirectly creating a new political Party. Within months, angry northern Democrats, members of the dying Whig Party, and those who had joined the Free Soil party, the first anti-slavery expansionist party, began to merge into an even more potentially powerful entity: the Republican Party.

The first Republican nominating convention opened in Philadelphia’s Music Fund Hall on Tuesday, June 17th, 1856. Its first presidential nominee was John Charles Fremont, the illegitimate son of a French immigrant who had fled from the French Revolution. Fremont made his name as a surveyor and explorer of the American West in the 1830’s and 1840’s. In 1850, he was one of the first two men sent to the U.S. Senate to represent California.

In 1856, the Republican Platform:
called for an end to the advancement of slavery into free territories;
held the Pierce Administration responsible for “bleeding Kansas”, a metaphor for the bloodshed which was the result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act;
criticized the Pierce administration for plotting to forcibly take Cuba from Spain; and
pledged to construct a transcontinental railroad.

Fremont and his running mate William L. Dayton of New Jersey carried just eleven of the thirty states in 1856.

History has recorded and re-recorded the combination of conscience and practicality of the Republican Party’s first great leader Abraham Lincoln. Most of us were raised to believe that “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.” While it is true that he hated slavery, Lincoln, rather than abolishing it as feared by the South, ultimately used that “peculiar institution” to entice Southern states back into the Union. The tool he used was the Emancipation Proclamation. Issued in September 1862, it gave Southern states the ability to both keep their slaves and re-enter the Union if they did so by January 1st, 1863. Only when the war continued did President Lincoln and his fellow Republicans in Congress advance the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution to outlaw slavery. Hence, it can never be said that either the Civil War or freeing the slaves was any part of a Republican Party social agenda.

The Republican Party’s roots can be traced back to the Federalists who didn’t call themselves a party because their leader, George Washington, loathed the idea of political parties. However, many of his federalist contemporaries such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and John Jay were more realistic.

The next generation of “Federalists” was made up of men such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and young Abraham Lincoln. They all served as members of the Whig party between 1834 and 1854. Whigs, like their Federalist forebears, believed that the government had an obligation to promote American commerce through the construction of canals, harbors, turnpikes, financial institutions, and a high protective tariff. They called it “The American System”.

It was this view of the role of government that was passed on to the Republican Party. During the first major phase of Republican Party rule, between 1860 and 1912, banking and business were the major supporters and beneficiaries of the GOP or “Grand Old Party” (a phrase first used to describe the party during the 1876 campaign). Originally, the phrase referred to the “Gallant Old Party”.

Ironically, it was a Republican president’s view of the role of the party that would expose the party’s ultimate weakness. Like his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt was pro-business. However, he also saw business growing steadily out of control. Believing that responsibly regulated business would be most beneficial to the country, Roosevelt:
• launched a suit against the Morgan-Harriman Northern Securities Railroad Trust in 1902;
• involved himself in the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 urging recognition of the union;
• signed the Food and Drug Act of 1906 along with the Hepburn Act which strengthened the usefulness of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

In short, due to Teddy Roosevelt’s desire to create a strong presidency, the Republican Party (which had been financed and elected for the most part to sustain business and commerce) was force-fed a social conscience. It was this social conscience that would split the GOP in 1912 and begin the schism that would create the modern Republican Party.

Angered when his handpicked heir William Howard Taft (President from 1909 until 1913) seemed to be caving in to the demands of the Republican Party’s Old Guard, TR split away from the GOP in 1912 and formed the Progressive or “Bull Moose Party.” In so doing, TR spoke of a doctrine he called “the New Nationalism”. In short, a benign central government would control big business. TR was audacious enough to assert that human rights were even more precious than property rights. These social sentiments were beyond the pale for traditional Republicans, but reasonable to over four million voters that fall. Many of these “radical” ideas returned to the Republican Party along with TR in 1916 and then lingered within the liberal element of the party for decades after.

Throughout the 1920’s, the Conservative wing of the party largely prevailed under men such as Calvin Coolidge and his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. Even under Herbert Hoover, whom many of the Old Guard considered to be a “Progressive,” the idea that “the business of America was business” predominated.

Then came FDR’s New Deal along with Harry Truman’s Fair Deal and an absence of Republican leadership during the years from 1933 until 1953. Even with the return to power of the GOP under Dwight D. Eisenhower (who served from 1953 until 1961), many Republicans believed that the essence of the party, limited government, was being checked by an all-pervasive liberalism.

Along came the unsettling 1960’s which seemed to bring about more government, more regulation of business, more government-enforced conformity and, worst of all, higher taxes. “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” came the cry from men such as Barry Goldwater and, ultimately, Ronald Reagan.

By 1980, the string had run out on nearly fifty years of what was called “twentieth century enlightened liberalism.” It was time for “supply-side economics” and a new brand of “compassionate Conservatism” to guide the national ship of state. Was this something new or was it merely Calvin Coolidge made more suave and eloquent in the optimistic personage of Ronald Wilson Reagan? Would it be strong enough to permanently strengthen the military, economic, and moral fiber of America? Or, would it, like its liberal opposite, need to be re-tooled from time to time? Only time would tell.

The question now is: has the promise of 1980 run its course or will it be renewed by the American voter this fall?

Whatever the answer to that question, the soul of Republicanism is somewhere in these words spoken by President Reagan in his 1985 State of the Union Address:

“Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God’s children. Look to where peace and prosperity flourish today. It is in homes that freedom built. Victories against poverty are greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech, and freedom to worship, vote, and create wealth.”

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY