"Back to Basics for the Republican Party" is an insightful history of the Grand Old Party which recounts how the party of the Emancipation Proclamation and "forty acres and a mule" developed, step by step, into today’s Republican Party, all the way through the Clinton impeachment. By explaining the party’s true heritage, "Back to Basics for the Republican Party" lays the foundation for advances in the future.
Republicans get themselves outmaneuvered by Democrats endlessly because they rely for knowledge of their own party on all those distorted histories written by hordes of lefty professors. The purpose of the book is to enable Republicans to retake the policy initiative by embracing their own heritage. The Republican elephant symbol, incidentally, predates the Thomas Nast cartoon by 14 years, having first appeared during Lincoln’s 1860 campaign, to show our party’s strength; and the Democrat donkey began as a caricature of Democrat President Andrew Jackon, as a jackass.
How many Americans know why the Republican Party began or what its original purpose was? Not many! How many Americans know, for example, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were reforms that the Republican Party struggled for in vain during the Reconstruction era a hundred years earlier? Fewer still. The 13th amendment banning slavery, the 14th amendment extending the Bill of Rights to the states, and the 15th amendment according voting rights to blacks - all three were enacted by the much-maligned Radical Republicans in the face of fierce Democrat opposition. How many Americans know that? Again, very few.
Now whose fault is it that so much past glory of the Republican Party goes unnoticed today? Who should we blame? Ourselves, of course. How can we hope to convince voters to place their confidence in us when we lack confidence in our own heritage? And how can we Republicans battle Democrats effectively on economic, foreign policy, and other fronts when we act as if the world began the day we were born?
Throughout "Back to Basics for the Republican Party," we will run through our fingers the links in the chain of events between then and now. Placing events in context means reaching back to the drafting of the Constitution to describe the point of view of patriots in the 1850s who were alarmed that the slave system was extending itself northward, threatening the free market system we still cherish today. To understand this original vision of our Republican Party we look to the site of the 2000 Republican National Convention. Philadelphia is not only where the Constitution was written but where in 1856 the first Republican National Convention met in order to save it, for their generation unto ours.
One U.S. Senator called "Back to Basics for the Republican Party" "one of the best books [he] ever read," and another U.S. Senator said it is "exactly what the Republican Party needs right now." And it is! A Republican state chairman said "Back to Basics for the Republican Party" was "outstanding," and Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in a recent opinion (Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Election Committee) cited the book.
As George Orwell observed, whoever controls the past controls the future. For example, few people know that during the Reconstruction era the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party, or that Republicans backed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act much more than did the Democrats. How many people know that after being arrested for casting a ballot in the 1872 election, Susan B. Anthony boasted to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she had voted for the straight Republican ticket?
"Our Party is an athlete who has lost his balance – we are in good shape, with plenty of drive, but until we regain our balance we are going nowhere." -- page eighteen
Though "Back to Basics for the Republican Party" is a history book, it is not about the past. It is about right now. To quote from page six: "’As knowledge is power, we must understand how trends from the past entrap us today, for ‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.’"
According to their Judicial Act of 1789, which established the federal court system, the Supreme Court would have the last word on any conflicts between laws. Article VI having established that the Constitution is "the supreme Law of the Land," judicial review was Federalist policy from the start, and as Hamilton clearly anticipated, the Supreme Court would be the arbiter of constitutionality. Jeffersonians, however, would have none of it, so concerned were they that state governments be able to judge for themselves whether a federal law was constitutional.
Several sites share the credit as the birthplace of our Party. At one town meeting in a Ripon, Wisconsin schoolhouse on February 28, 1854, the leader, Alvan Bovay, called for another meeting the following month to organize a new political party, to be called the "Republican Party." Though only fifty-three people were present at that second small town meeting on March 20, 1854, this was the first time the name "Republican" was used for the new political party. The first state Republican Party convention, attended by 10,000 people, took place in Jackson, Michigan on July 6, 1854. Dozens of members of Congress pledged themselves to our new Party. The Republican Association, forerunner of the Republican National Committee, met for the first time in June 1855. The first national organization meeting of newly-minted Republicans was in Pittsburgh in February 1856, followed four months later by the first Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Just as many northerners sympathized with the rebels, the onset of the Civil War found many southern patriots trapped between enemy lines. Unionist sentiment was particularly strong among the mountain folk of Appalachia, a region never integrated into the slave system. During this war fought between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, these Appalachian Yankees, or "Hill Billies," sided with the Union. When Union troops marched into eastern Tennessee, for example, residents greeted them with American flags they had hidden from the Confederates. Southwest Texas, northwest Arkansas, Jones County in southern Mississippi, Winston County in northwest Arkansas, and parts of Louisiana were other Unionist strongholds. For decades after the Civil War, these areas of the South would remain Republican islands in a Democrat sea.
To keep blacks down, discharged rebel troops started to form armed bands such as the Knights of the White Camellia, the Knights of the Rising Sun, the Regulators, the Pale Faces, and the Constitutional Guards. The most successful of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan, named for "kuklos," the Greek word for "circle," plus the alliterative "Klan." Goofy title for high-ranking Klan commanders, such as Wizard, Dragon, and Cyclops, were intended to conceal the fact that the KKK was a paramilitary terrorist organization.
The Republican Governor of Indiana, Oliver Morton, blocked a Democrat ploy to withdraw the state militia from the Union army by having the Republican minority in the legislature walk out, preventing a quorum. For the next two years he funded the state government with contributions from Republican counties and the War Department. Governor Morton described the Democratic Party as "a common sewer and loathsome receptacle into which empties every element of treason, North and South." Of course, notwithstanding the Clinton administration's sale of nuclear weapons secrets to Communist China, many Americans today would disagree with that assessment.
There exists a photograph of a six-year old Theodore Roosevelt and his brother watching President Lincoln's funeral procession pass below their window in New York City, and an eight-year old Woodrow Wilson caught a glimpse of Jefferson Davis under arrest after the fall of Richmond.
President Nixon did try to obstruct the criminal and congressional investigations, very serious offenses, but he was not involved in the Watergate break-in itself. Some other crimes Nixon did not commit include selling military secrets to Communist China, bombing foreign countries to distract attention from his legal troubles, and covering up the theft of thousands of top secret files by his CIA Director. To put Nixon's character in perspective, if Mephistopheles (the devil in Faust) had appeared to him and offered to make his political troubles go away if only he would sell military secrets to the Communist Chinese, can anyone doubt that he would have been appalled at the suggestion he betray his country to save himself?
In December 1998, the House of Representatives impeached President Clinton, nearly every Republican voting yes and nearly every Democrat voting no. During his Senate trial, the Democrats closed ranks around their leader and voted to keep him in office. Even so, our Party could take pride in its courage because, as every Republican should know by now, doing the right thing is always the right thing to do.
