During its century and a half as a major political organization, the Republican Party has undergone significant shifts in its ruling ideology and electoral base. Created in 1854 in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a way of opposing the expansion of slavery into the territories, the Republican Party, for the first 50 years of its existence, favored the broad use of national power to promote economic growth. During the early twentieth century, as the issue of government regulation emerged in the national debate, Republicans became identified with opposition to such supervision of the economy. That stance defined the party’s position on economic questions for the next six decades.
By the 1960s, the Republicans slipped away from their traditional posture in favor of the rights of African Americans and sought new support from alienated white voters in the previously Democratic South. The party grew more conservative, opposing abortion rights and other manifestations of cultural liberalism. In foreign policy, Republicans have been, by turns, expansionists from 1890 to 1916, isolationists in the 1930s and 1940s, and militant anti-Communists during the cold war. A firm belief that they were the natural ruling party and that the Democrats carried the taint of treason and illegitimacy have been hallmarks of Republican thinking throughout the party’s history.
The first phase of Republican history extended from the party’s founding through the presidential election of 1896. In 1854 antislavery Northerners, former Whigs, and some dissenting Democrats came together to create a new party that took the name “Republican” from the Jeffersonian tradition. After the Republican presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, lost in 1856, the Republican Party won the White House in 1860 behind Abraham Lincoln, who led the nation through the Civil War. Republican strength was sectional, with its base in the Northeast and the upper Middle West. The Middle Atlantic states were a contested battleground with the Democrats.
To wage that conflict, the Republicans in power enacted sweeping legislation to impose income taxes, distribute public lands, and create a national banking system. Party leaders also pushed for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, and the more intense or “radical” Republicans called for political rights for the freedmen whom the war had liberated from bondage.
Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 brought to power his vice president, Andrew Johnson, a former Democrat with little sympathy for Republican ideology or the plight of former slaves in the South. The result was a contest between the mainstream of the party for some degree of political rights for African American men and a president who opposed such innovations. Throughout Reconstruction and beyond, the Republicans sought to build an electoral base in the South of black and white voters sympathetic to government support for economic growth. The effort was protracted and sincere; the results were disappointing. By the mid-1870s, the South had become solidly Democratic, with the Republicans a minority party in most of the states below the Mason-Dixon Line.
During Reconstruction, the Republicans did achieve the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution to provide citizenship and voting rights to former slaves. These significant contributions attested to the party’s sincerity on the issue, but the will to extend equality further in the 1880s and 1890s proved lacking. Republicans slowly relinquished their interest in black rights and turned to questions of industrialization and economic expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.
The protective tariff became the hallmark of Republican ideology during this period. Using the taxing power of the government to provide an advantage to domestic products appealed to the entrepreneurial base of the Republicans as well as to labor. The tariff offered a vision of benefits diffused throughout society in a harmonious manner. In the hands of such leaders as James G. Blaine and William McKinley, the doctrine of protection also took on a nationalistic character as a way of achieving self-sufficiency in a competitive world. Charges soon arose that the tariff was nothing more than a rationale for economic selfishness. As businesses grew larger and industrialism took hold in the United States, Republicans were seen as the party of producers and identified with capitalist aspirations. Measures such as the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897 raised tariff rates. Republicans argued that protection brought prosperity and that Democratic free-trade policies imperiled the nation’s economic health.
Throughout the late nineteenth century, Republicans and Democrats battled on even electoral terms. Then, in the 1890s, the Grand Old Party (as it had become known) emerged as the nation’s dominant political organization. With the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, the Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency. Their activist program in the 51st Congress (1889–90) brought a voter backlash that led to a Democratic victory in the 1892 presidential contest. The onset of the economic downturn in 1893 discredited the Democrats under President Grover Cleveland and gave the Republicans their opportunity. The congressional elections of 1894 produced a Republican sweep in the House of Representatives and opened an era of dominance for the party.
The presidential election of 1896, which brought William McKinley to the White House, confirmed the emergence of a national Republican majority. For most of the next four decades, the party held an electoral advantage. Under McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft, the Republicans acquired an overseas empire, broadened government power over the economy, and took a few steps toward limiting the power of corporations. By 1912, however, as Roosevelt and Taft split the party, the Republicans moved rightward and generally opposed the expansion of government regulatory authority.
During the eight years that Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats were in power, from 1913 to 1921, the emphasis on Republican conservatism intensified. The 1916 presidential campaign between Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes anticipated the ideological divisions of the later New Deal on domestic questions. In that contest, the Republican candidate opposed organized labor, federal regulation of child labor, and farm credit legislation. Wilson won reelection largely on the issue of American neutrality in World War I. As the country swung to the right during the war and the Democratic electoral coalition broke up, Republicans made big gains in the 1918 congressional elections. The landslide victory of Warren G. Harding two years later confirmed that Republican dominance of national politics had returned after an eight-year interruption.
The presidencies of Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, from 1921 to 1933, represented a high point of Republican rule. Under Harding and Coolidge, income tax cuts stimulated the economy and helped fuel the expansion of that decade. Government regulation receded, labor unions were weakened, and social justice laws died in Congress. As long as prosperity continued, the Democrats seemed an impotent minority. The Republicans still had no base in the South, despite efforts of the presidents to break that monopoly. Outside of Dixie, Republicans dominated the political scene. In 1928 Hoover won a decisive triumph over Democrat Al Smith, as if to confirm the Republican mastery of national politics.
The onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s undermined the Republican position just as the depression of the 1890s had the Democrats. President Hoover’s failure to provide real relief for the unemployed during the hard times of 1931–33 doomed his reelection chances. The Democrats selected Franklin D. Roosevelt as their presidential candidate in 1932, and his promise of a New Deal produced a landslide victory for his party. The Republicans were then to experience 20 years without presidential power.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the Grand Old Party struggled to find an answer to Roosevelt and the Democrats. In the three elections in which they faced the incumbent president (1936, 1940, and 1944), the Republicans sought to moderate their conservatism and appeal to the broad middle of national politics. They continued this strategy in 1948 when Thomas E. Dewey ran against Harry S. Truman. Each time they lost.
In Congress and in the nation at large, the Republicans were more explicit about their conservatism. They opposed the social programs and deficit spending of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. On issues of foreign policy, the party was isolationist during the 1930s and anti-Communist in the 1940s and 1950s. Believing that the Democrats had a predisposition to help the nation’s enemies, the Republicans readily assumed that Roosevelt and Truman were soft on the Communist “menace.” The leading symbol of this point of view became Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose crusades against Communists in government delighted many Republicans between 1950 and 1954. Republicans of this stripe hoped that Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio (known as “Mr. Republican”) would be the Republican nominee in 1952 and oust the Democrats after what McCarthy called “20 years of treason.”
In 1952 the Republicans, after a bitter convention, nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower, a military hero whose election was more certain than Taft’s would have been. Finally regaining power after 20 years, the Republicans found their 8 years in power with Eisenhower rewarding at first but frustrating in the long run. The president governed to the right of center but did not embark on crusades to roll back the programs of the New Deal. He called his point of view “modern Republicanism.” Eisenhower’s popularity brought his reelection in 1956, but, by then, Republicans were a minority in Congress again. As the 1960 election approached, Vice President Richard M. Nixon sought to extend the Eisenhower legacy while party conservatives went along grudgingly.
After Nixon’s narrow defeat by John F. Kennedy, conservative Republicans sought to recapture control of the party through the presidential candidacy of Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. In 1964, Goldwater defeated the moderate alternative, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, and his forces controlled the national convention in San Francisco. Goldwater’s candidacy was an electoral disaster. He carried only his home state and five states in the South, as Lyndon B. Johnson secured a landslide victory.
In terms of Republican history, however, Gold-water’s candidacy proved a sign of things to come. Although a majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate helped to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the party appealed to white Southerners as an alternative to the more liberal and racially integrated national Democrats. The movement of southern Democrats into Republican ranks accelerated in the three decades after 1964. In another electoral portent, an actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan gave a very successful fund-raising speech at the end of the Goldwater campaign. Soon Reagan would enter national politics himself.
After the disaster of 1964, the Republicans regrouped. Soon the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson became bogged down in an unpopular war in Vietnam. Racial tensions mounted within the United States, and a reaction against the party in power ensued. Republicans made gains in Congress during the 1968 elections, and Nixon again emerged as the leading Republican candidate for the White House. He united the party behind his candidacy and gained the nomination despite a last-minute challenge from Ronald Reagan. Nixon went on to win the presidency in a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey and independent Alabama governor George Wallace.
Nixon’s presidency proved a troubled episode for the Grand Old Party. At first, he seemed to have found the way to marginalize the Democrats. The strategy of winding down the war in Vietnam proved popular, and Republicans capitalized on divisions in the opposition party to achieve a landslide triumph of their own in the 1972 presidential election. Nixon crushed the Democratic candidate, George McGovern.
The triumph was not to last. The Watergate scandal, covered up during the election, burst into full view in 1973 and led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 in advance of impeachment and removal. Nixon’s legacy to the party was mixed. He had strengthened its southern base, but his moderate social policies and foreign policy opening to China put off many conservatives. That wing of the party looked to Reagan as its champion. Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, won the presidential nomination in 1976 over Reagan, but then lost the election to Democrat Jimmy Carter in the fall. Reagan was the party’s nominee in 1980.
Reagan beat the weakened Carter in that election, and the Republicans also regained control of the Senate. During the eight years that followed, Reagan became a Republican icon for his policies of lowering taxes, advocating an antimissile defense system, and bringing down the Soviet Union. The reality was more complex, since Reagan also raised taxes, the missile system did not work, and the fall of the Soviet Union that came after he left office was not his achievement alone. Yet, because of his landslide reelection victory in 1984, Reagan remained the electoral standard by which future Republicans were measured.
Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, had a rocky single term. Having pledged during the 1988 campaign not to raise taxes, Bush never recovered when he reached a budget deal in 1990 that imposed new taxes. He lost to Democrat Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential contest. Clinton’s first two years were difficult, and the Republicans made big gains in the 1994 elections. They took back the Senate, and under the leadership of Newton “Newt” Gingrich, they recaptured the House for the first time in 40 years, with a “Contract for America” as their program. Gingrich proved to be better at campaigning than governing; yet the Republicans, now dominant in the South, retained their congressional majority for 12 years. In 1998 the majority party in Congress impeached President Clinton for lying under oath and other alleged crimes, but the Senate acquitted him.
The 2000 election brought Governor George W. Bush of Texas, son of George H. W. Bush, to the White House. Although he lost the popular vote, Bush won a disputed election in the Electoral College. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Bush’s initial response to them lifted the new president to high poll ratings. Republicans gained in the 2002 elections and, for the next four years, controlled all branches of the federal government. Bush won reelection in 2004, defeating Democrat John Kerry.
Yet in that period, the Grand Old Party experienced striking changes. The party of small government expanded the size of the federal establishment to unprecedented levels. The champions of lower spending brought government expenditures to record heights. Proud of their record as administrators, the Republicans under Bush mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, permeated the federal government with partisan cronies, and produced record budget deficits. Bush’s poll rating sank, and his unpopularity spilled over to other members of his party.
Social conservatives wanted a government that regulated private behavior; pro-business conservatives hoped for a government that would keep taxes low and diminish regulations. Disputes over immigration and control of the borders further divided the GOP. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was unclear what constituted the ideology of the Republican Party. After a century and a half in American politics, the Republicans faced a crisis over their identity that would shape how they performed during the century to come.
FURTHER READING. Mary Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP, 1995; Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the South, 1869–1900, 2006; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856, 1987; Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans, 2003; Sheldon Pollack, Refinancing America: The Republican Antitax Agenda, 2003; Matthew Rees, From the Deck to the Sea: Blacks and the Republican Party, 1991; David W. Reinhard, The Republican Right since 1945, 1983; Clyde Weed, The Republican Party during the New Deal, 1994; Michael Zak, Back to Basics for the Republican Party, 2001.
LEWIS L. GOULD
The Republican Party emerged in the 1850s and soon became one of the nation’s two major parties. It began as a coalition of elements set loose by the collapse of America’s Second Party System. In the previous two decades, the Whigs and the Democrats had divided principally over such economic issues as the tariff, the Bank of the United States, and internal improvements. But as the question of territorial expansion grew more salient, the vexatious issue of slavery, especially the extension of the institution westward, made it difficult for leaders of both those parties to keep their organizations united across sectional lines. The Whigs’ staggering loss in the 1852 election dealt a devastating blow to that party, whose constituent elements—anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant nativists, temperance advocates, and antislavery Northerners—concluded that the party had become an ineffectual vehicle to achieve their ends.
The climactic crisis for the Second Party System came with the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in most of the Louisiana Purchase territory. Conflict between northern and southern Whigs over this law completed the destruction of their party as a significant national entity, although a remnant limped along for the next few years. Though sponsored by Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas and endorsed by the Democratic administration of Franklin Pierce, the Kansas-Nebraska Act tore a gash through the Democratic Party, whose unity its northern and southern leaders had maintained for many years only with great difficulty. The Nebraska issue dominated the congressional elections of 1854. In states across the North, the Democrats confronted an array of variously configured coalitions that included old Free Soilers, anti-Nebraska Democrats, antislavery Whigs, temperance supporters, and nativists. These anti-Democratic “parties” fought under various names: Anti-Nebraska, Fusion, Opposition, and People’s Party. In only two states, Michigan and Wisconsin, did they take the name Republican. Whatever the label, the new coalitions achieved phenomenal success, winning a plurality of seats in the new House of Representatives.
As time passed, more of these northern state coalitions adopted Republican as a fitting name to cast the party as a relentless opponent of corruption and tyranny and a defender of liberty and civic virtue. In 1854, however, the Republican Party did not emerge either full blown or as the sole alternative to the Democrats. Some Whigs still harbored hope for a reversal of their party’s ill fortunes, but more problematic for the new Republican strategists was the anti-Catholic and nativist Know-Nothing movement, which claimed to have elected 20 percent of new House members from districts scattered throughout the country, especially in New England. Know-Nothingism proved attractive not only to Americans who resented the presence of immigrants and “papists” and their supposed subservience to the Democratic Party but also to those who saw nativist issues as a way to deflect attention from the potentially Union-rending slavery question. The task of those who strove to make the Republicans the principal anti-Democratic party was to fashion an approach to public questions that would co-opt the Know-Nothings while preserving the allegiance of the various northern antislavery elements that had made up the fusion movement of 1854.
In 1856 the nativists fielded a presidential candidate, former president Millard Fillmore, under the American Party banner and garnered 22 percent of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes from Maryland. The Republicans, now campaigning generally under that name, nominated John C. Frémont and put forth a combative platform focused on opposition to slavery expansion, and particularly condemning the outrages committed by proslavery forces in the battle for control of Kansas Territory. Frémont posted a remarkable showing for the party’s first run for the White House. Running only in the North, he won 33 percent of the national popular vote and 114 electoral votes to Democrat James Buchanan’s 45 percent of the popular vote and 174 electoral votes. In the free states, significantly, Frémont outpolled Fillmore by more than three to one. Had Frémont won Pennsylvania plus either Indiana or Illinois, he would have been the first Republican president. Republican leaders recognized that future success depended on converting or reassuring enough nativists and conservatives on the slavery question to win these key northern states.
Events in 1856 and the ensuing years moved the slavery question to center stage in the struggle against the Democrats. These included not only the Kansas turmoil but also the vicious caning of Massachusetts Republican senator Charles Sumner by a South Carolina congressman, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in a territory, and calls by southern leaders for a reopening of the African slave trade and for a federal code sustaining slavery in the territories. Although these developments served to underscore Republicans’ warnings of the threats posed by an aggressive “slave power,” the new party designed its campaign strategy in 1860 not only to retain the support of men who gave priority to that issue but also to attract as broad an array of voters in the North as possible.
The party’s platform in 1860 took a balanced approach on slavery, denouncing the Dred Scott decision and denying the power of Congress or a legislature to legalize slavery in any territory, but also upholding the individual states’ right to decide the slavery question for themselves, and condemning John Brown’s attempt to spark a slave revolt at Harpers Ferry. Aiming to appeal to men on the make, the party endorsed an economic package that included a protective tariff, internal improvements, and a homestead law. In an effort to woo German Americans, who formed a critical bloc in key states, the Republicans eschewed nativism and called for the protection of the rights of immigrants and naturalized citizens. Most important, in choosing their presidential nominee, they turned aside candidates such as William Seward and Salmon Chase, deemed too radical on slavery, and selected the newcomer Abraham Lincoln, whose record on the issue appeared more conservative. Hopelessly riven, the northern and southern Democrats chose separate nominees, Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, while a nativist remnant and other conservatives offered a fourth ticket headed by John Bell. In the popular vote, Lincoln led with only 39.6 percent of the vote. In the Electoral College he swept the entire free-state section except for New Jersey, which he split with Douglas, who came in last behind Breckinridge and Bell.
Despite Lincoln’s victory, his party still stood on shaky ground. It failed to win a majority in either house of Congress, and only the departure of Southerners after their states had seceded enabled Republicans to assume control. They proceeded to pass most of their legislative agenda, but in the face of prolonged bad news from the military front during the Civil War, the Democrats remained alive and well and actually gained House seats in the 1862 midterm elections. Lincoln also confronted severe critics in his own party, and, in the summer of 1864, he doubted he could win reelection. At their convention, the Republicans even changed their name to the National Union Party to attract pro-war Democrats. At last, Union battlefield successes muffled the carping, and Lincoln defeated Democrat George McClellan.
That the Republicans’ first president was a man of Lincoln’s greatness, who guided the nation safely through its darkest hour, contributed mightily to establishing the party as a permanent fixture on the American political landscape. Ever after, Republicans could rightly claim the mantle of saviors of the Union and liberators of the slaves. In the wake of Lincoln’s death, however, reconstructing the Union proved enormously difficult. In 1864 the party had put a Tennessee War Democrat, Andrew Johnson, on the ticket, and, when he succeeded to the presidency, he broke with Congress and the Republicans and did all in his power to block their efforts to remodel the South. After a titanic struggle, Republicans added the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution to uphold blacks’ civil rights and the right of black men to vote. To reorder the southern political landscape, Republicans encouraged the creation of a new wing of the party in the South comprising blacks, southern white Unionists, and Northerners who had moved south. Against this tenuous coalition, conservative white Democrats posed a fierce, sometimes violent, opposition. Although congressional Republicans passed enforcement legislation and Johnson’s Republican successor, Ulysses S. Grant, occasionally intervened militarily, state after state in the South fell under Democratic control.
In the North, moreover, the Republicans suffered divisions, especially spurred by so-called Liberal Republicans who opposed Grant’s southern policy, his acceptance of probusiness policies such as the protective tariff, and his handling of the touchy subject of federal appointments. In 1872 Grant easily defeated liberal Republican (and Democratic) nominee Horace Greeley, but, during his second term, a series of scandals tainted his administration and hurt his party. Economic collapse after the panic of 1873 compounded the Republicans’ woes. In 1874, the Democrats took the House of Representatives for the first time since before the war. Only after a prolonged and bitter controversy following the indeterminate outcome of the 1876 election was Republican Rutherford B. Hayes able to win the presidency.
During Hayes’s term, the Democrats secured control of the last southern states formerly held by Republicans, and the nation entered a prolonged period of equilibrium between the two major parties. From the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s, the Republicans and Democrats were nearly equal in strength nationwide. The Democrats had a firm grip on the Solid South, while Republicans enjoyed support nearly as solid in New England and the upper Midwest. But neither of these blocs held enough electoral votes to win the presidency, and each election in this period turned on the outcome in a few key swing states, most notably New York and Indiana. Moreover, the national government was nearly always divided in this era. The Democrats usually controlled the House, and the Republicans usually controlled the Senate. Rarely did one party hold both houses and the presidency. These circumstances obviously made governing difficult.
Although close elections underscored the need for party unity, Republicans nonetheless continued to suffer divisions. Most Liberal Republicans returned to the party fold, but as independents, later dubbed “mugwumps” (after an Indian word for leader), they continued to push for civil service reform and chastised party leaders whose probity they suspected. In several states the party was rent by factions, often based on loyalty to particular party leaders. This factionalism reached a head in the convention of 1880, where “stalwarts” hoping to restore Grant to the presidency battled against the adherents of former House speaker James G. Blaine, labeled “half-breeds” by their enemies for their alleged lukewarm commitment to the party’s older ideals. The delegates eventually turned to a dark horse, James A. Garfield, a half-breed, and nominated for vice president a stalwart, Chester A. Arthur, who succeeded to the White House after Garfield’s assassination.
In presidential election campaigns during this period, Republicans faced a strategic dilemma. Some insisted they should work to mobilize a united North, including the swing states, by emphasizing the righteousness of the party’s position on black rights and by denouncing political oppression in the South—a tactic their opponents and many later historians disparaged as “waving the bloody shirt.” Other party leaders argued that the party should strive to break its dependence on winning New York and other doubtful northern states by trying to detach states from the Democratic Solid South, primarily through economic appeals and the promise of prosperity for a new South.
In 1884 presidential nominee James G. Blaine took the latter course, pursuing a conciliatory campaign toward the South and emphasizing the benefits of Republican economic policies, especially the protective tariff, to the southern states and the nation at large. This strategy dovetailed with the party’s increasing solicitude for the nation’s industries and for workers threatened by foreign competition. Blaine lost every former slave state, and with his narrow defeat in New York, he lost the presidency to Democrat Grover Cleveland. But Blaine received 49 percent of the vote in Virginia and 48 percent in Tennessee. Had he carried those two states, he would have secured a victory without any of the northern doubtful states, including New York.
Republicans had won every presidential election from 1860 to 1884, and in 1888 they faced the unaccustomed prospect of campaigning against a sitting president. GOP leaders could not, as in the past, turn to federal employees as a ready contingent of campaign workers and contributors, but they could tap a large corps of party cadres eager to regain what they had lost. In addition to the regular party organization of national, state, and local committees, they created a structure of thousands of Republican clubs around the country ready to do battle.
In 1888 Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison, like Blaine, emphasized the tariff issue, though not entirely omitting civil rights questions. He defeated Cleveland. Like Blaine, Harrison carried none of the former slave states but ran well in the upper South. In the congressional elections the Republicans won enough House seats from the upper South to take control of the new Congress. Thus, for the first time since the Grant years, the GOP held both the presidency and the two houses. In one of the most activist Congresses of the nineteenth century, the party passed a host of new laws, including the McKinley Tariff, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the Meat Inspection Act, and the Forest Reserve Act, and it came close to enacting strict new protections for black voting in the South. In addition, legislatures in key Republican states passed “cultural” regulations such as temperance laws and restrictions on the use of foreign languages in private schools. Despite these accomplishments, all the activism alarmed an essentially conservative electorate still enamored of Jeffersonian ideals of limited government. Voters turned against the Republicans overwhelmingly in the 1890 midterm congressional elections and in 1892 put Cleveland back in the White House joined by a Democratic Congress.
Soon after Cleveland took office, the panic of 1893 struck, and the economy spiraled downward into the deepest depression of the century. The GOP blamed the Democrats, and Cleveland’s bungling of tariff and currency legislation underscored the Republicans’ charge that the Democrats’ negative approach to governing failed to meet the needs of a modernizing economy. In the 1894 congressional elections, Republicans crushed their opponents in the largest shift in congressional strength in history. Two years later Republican presidential nominee William McKinley campaigned as the “advance agent of prosperity,” emphasizing the tariff issue and condemning Democrat William Jennings Bryan as a dangerous radical whose support for the free coinage of silver threatened to destroy the economy. McKinley won in a landslide, and, with a Republican Congress, he proceeded to enact a new protective tariff and other probusiness measures. McKinley was a popular chief executive. During his term, the economy rebounded, largely for reasons unrelated to government policy. But the Republicans took credit for prosperity and positioned themselves as the nation’s majority party for more than three decades.
McKinley was the last Civil War veteran to serve in the White House. His victory in 1896 marked the culmination of the party’s drift away from sectional issues as the key to building a constituency. After the Democrats secured their grip on the South in the late 1870s, some Republicans touted issues such as nativism and temperance to build a following in the North on the basis of cultural values. But Blaine, Harrison, and McKinley recognized the futility of this sort of exclusionary politics. Instead they emphasized economic matters such as tariff protectionism tempered by trade reciprocity, plus a stable currency, to fashion a broad-based coalition of manufacturers, laborers, farmers, and others who put economic well-being at the center of their political concerns. As a result, the Republicans held the upper hand in American politics until the Great Depression demonstrated the inadequacy of their economic formula.
See also Democratic Party; nativism; slavery; Whig Party.
FURTHER READING. Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900, 2006; Idem, Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Campaign of 1888, 2008; Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation, 2002; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 1970; Idem, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, 1988; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856, 1987; Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans, 2003; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s, 1978; H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896, 1969; Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War, 1997; R. Hal Williams, Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s, 1993.
CHARLES W. CALHOUN
In the history of the Republican Party, the years between the election of William McKinley in 1896 and the defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932 stand as a period of electoral dominance. To be sure, Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats interrupted this period with eight years of power from 1913 to 1921. That shift occurred in large measure because the Republicans themselves split, first between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in 1912 and then, to a lesser extent, over World War I in 1916. For all these 36 years, however, the electoral alignment that had been established during the mid-1890s endured. The Republican majority that emerged during the second term of President Grover Cleveland and the Panic of 1893 lasted until another economic depression turned Hoover and the Republicans out of office.
The coalition that supported the Republicans during this period rested on capitalists, predominantly in the Northeast and Midwest; Union veterans; skilled workers; and prosperous, specialized farmers who identified with the tariff policies of the party. German Americans also comprised a key ethnic voting bloc for the Republicans. African American voters in the North, although still a small contingent, regularly endorsed Republican candidates. In those states that were more industrialized, the Republicans tended to be stronger and their majorities more enduring. Outside of the Democratic South, Republicans enjoyed wide backing from all segments of society.
The Republican triumph during the 1890s rested first on voter alienation from the Democrats. Cleveland and his party had not been able to bring relief and recovery from the economic downturn that began during the spring of 1893. The resulting social unrest that flared in 1894 contributed to the perception that the Democrats lacked the capacity to govern. These causes helped the Republicans sweep to victory in the congressional elections of 1894, when the largest transfer of seats from one party to another in U.S. history took place. The Republicans gained 113 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Democrats suffered serious losses in the Northeast and Midwest, a growing bastion of Republican strength. The third party, the Populists, failed to make much headway with their appeal to farmers in the South and West.
The Republican appeal rested on more than just criticism of the Democrats. The main ideological position of the party was support for the protective tariff. Republicans believed that raising duties on foreign imports encouraged the growth of native industries, provided a high wage level for American workers, and spread economic benefits throughout society. The Grand Old Party also associated prosperity with the benefits of protection. According to Republicans, the Democratic Party, with its free-trade policies, was a menace to the economic health of the country. By 1896 William McKinley of Ohio was the politician most identified with protection as a Republican watchword.
As the 1896 election approached, McKinley emerged as the front-runner for the nomination. With his record in the House of Representatives and his two terms as governor of Ohio, McKinley was the most popular Republican of the time. His campaign manager, Marcus A. Hanna, an Ohio steel magnate, rounded up delegates for his candidate and easily fought off challenges from other aspirants. McKinley was nominated on the first ballot at the national convention. He then defeated the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, in the most decisive presidential election victory in a quarter of a century.
Republican fortunes improved during the McKinley administration. The Dingley Tariff Law (1897) raised customs duties and became associated with the prosperity that returned at the end of the 1890s. The success in the war with Spain in 1898 brought the United States an overseas empire. These accomplishments identified the Republicans with national power and world influence. In the 1898 elections, the Grand Old Party limited Democratic gains. McKinley then defeated Bryan in a 1900 rematch with a larger total in the electoral vote and in the popular count. By the start of the twentieth century, the electoral dominance of the Republicans seemed assured. As his second term began, McKinley pursued a strategy of gradual tariff reduction through a series of reciprocity treaties with several of the nation’s trading partners. In that way, the president hoped to defuse emerging protests about high customs duties.
The assassination of McKinley in September 1901 brought Theodore Roosevelt to the White House. In his first term, Roosevelt put aside McKinley’s tariff reciprocity initiative in the face of Republican opposition. Instead, he assailed large corporations (known as “trusts”), settled labor disputes, and promised the voters a “square deal” as president. In 1904 the Democrats ran a more conservative candidate, Alton B. Parker, as a contrast to Roosevelt’s flamboyance. The strategy failed, and Roosevelt won by a large electoral and popular vote landslide. Elected in his own right, the young president wanted to address issues of government regulation that an industrial society now faced. While his party enjoyed big majorities in both houses of Congress, these Republican members were less enthusiastic about government activism and regulation than Theodore Roosevelt.
During his second term, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to adopt the Hepburn Act to regulate the railroads, the Pure Food and Drug Act to safeguard the public, and inspection legislation to address the problem of diseased and tainted meat. He pursued conservation of natural resources and legislation to protect workers and their families from the hazards of an industrial society. These measures bothered Republicans who were now doubtful that government should be overseeing the business community as Roosevelt desired. When the issue of regulation arose, conservative Republicans believed that the government’s role should be minimal. By the time Roosevelt left office in March 1909, serious divisions existed within his party over the issue of government power.
To succeed him, Roosevelt selected his secretary of war, William Howard Taft, as the strongest Republican in the 1908 election. Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan in a race where ticket-splitting helped Democrats put in office a number of state governors. The Republicans still enjoyed substantial majorities in Congress, but there was restiveness among the voters over the party’s congressional leaders, Speaker Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois and Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. At the same time, the transition from Roosevelt to Taft was unpleasant. Surface harmony hid tensions between the two men over Taft’s cabinet choices and the future direction of the party.
In their 1908 platform, the Republicans had pledged to revise the tariff. Taft sought to fulfill that promise during the spring of 1909. Long-simmering disagreements over the tariff broke into public view when the Payne Bill, named after the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Sereno E. Payne, reached the Senate. The House had made reductions in duties. Senator Aldrich, who lacked a secure majority, made concessions to other senators that drove rates up again. Midwestern senators, known as insurgents, rebelled and fought the changes. In the ensuing conference committee, Taft secured some reductions in the rates of what became known as the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Law. Hard feelings lingered within the party about the result.
During Taft’s first year in office, while Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Africa, controversy erupted between his friend Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot and Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger over conservation policy. The ouster of Pinchot accelerated Roosevelt’s feeling that he had made a mistake in selecting Taft. When he returned from his journey, Roosevelt plunged into Republican politics with a philosophy of “new nationalism,” which called for more presidential power and government regulation of the economy. Roosevelt’s tactics contributed to the Republican disunity that marked 1910. The Democrats regained control of the House in that fall’s elections and the GOP lost ground as well in the Senate. Taft’s prospects for 1912 seemed bleak.
By the eve of 1912, relations between Taft and Roosevelt had deteriorated to the point where the former president was on the verge of challenging the incumbent. Brushing aside the candidacy of Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, Roosevelt entered the race in February 1912. A bitter battle for delegates ensued during the spring, which led to a series of primary elections, most of which Roosevelt won. Taft controlled the party machinery and came to the national convention with a narrow but sufficient lead in delegates. After Taft men used their power to renominate the president, Roosevelt decided to form his own party. The Republican division had now become open warfare.
Roosevelt bested Taft in the fall election with his new Progressive Party. However, the Democrats, behind the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson, won the White House as well as majorities in both houses of Congress. The success of Wilson in enacting the New Freedom Program of lower tariffs, banking reform, and antitrust legislation showed that the Democrats could govern. Still, the Republicans looked to the 1914 elections as a test of whether the country was returning to its usual political allegiances. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 changed the political landscape. The Democrats urged voters to rally behind Wilson. Nonetheless, Republicans regained seats in the House while Democrats added seats in the Senate. Prospects for Wilson’s reelection in 1916 seemed doubtful, but the Republicans had to find a winning presidential candidate.
The impact of World War I clouded Republican chances as the 1916 election approached. Some eastern party members wanted a more assertive policy against Germany’s submarine warfare toward neutral nations. If that meant war, they supported it as a way of helping Great Britain and France. In the Midwest, where German Americans formed a large voting bloc among Republicans, sentiment for war lessened. The party had to find a way to oppose Wilson’s neutrality strategy without alienating voters who wanted to stay out of war. Theodore Roosevelt, now edging back toward the GOP, was the leading exponent of pro-war views. Nominating him seemed unwise to party elders.
Their alternative was Charles Evans Hughes, a former governor of New York who was chief justice on the Supreme Court. Hughes had not been involved in the elections of 1912 and was seen as a fresh face who could win. The Republicans nominated him, only to learn that the jurist lacked charisma and campaign skills. Hughes never found a winning appeal against Wilson and the Democrats, who proclaimed that the president “kept us out of war.” The election was close, but after days of counting the returns, Wilson eked out a narrow victory.
When Wilson later took the United States into World War I, the coalition that brought him victory in 1916 broke up. The Republicans capitalized on popular discontent with higher taxes, a growing government bureaucracy, and inefficiency in the war effort. Wilson’s call for the election of a Democratic Congress to sustain him in October 1918 outraged the GOP. Even with victory in sight in Europe, voters ended Democratic control of both houses of Congress. Republican electoral supremacy, outside of the South, had reasserted itself.
Republicans, under the direction of Senate leader Henry Cabot Lodge, then blocked Wilson’s campaign to approve the Treaty of Versailles, which would have taken the United States into the League of Nations. By early 1920, it was evident that the Republicans were likely to win the presidency, and a crowded field of candidates emerged to compete for the prize. Few took seriously the chances of Warren G. Harding, a one-term Republican senator from Ohio. After three intellectually formidable candidates in Roosevelt, Taft, and Hughes, the party was ready for a less threatening nominee. The affable Harding was the second choice of many delegates at the national convention. Despite the legend that he was designated in a “smoke-filled” room by Senate leaders, Harding won the nomination because of his good looks, availability, and adherence to party orthodoxy; the delegates chose Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts as his running mate. The election of 1920 was no contest. Harding swamped the Democratic nominee, James Cox, also of Ohio, with nearly 61 percent of the vote. Only the South stayed in the Democratic column.
Harding’s brief presidency was undistinguished, though not as bad as historical legend has it. Two high points were the adoption of a federal budget for the first time and the Washington Naval Conference of 1922 to reduce armaments. By 1923, however, the administration faced a looming scandal over money exchanged for leases to oil lands in California and Wyoming that became known as Teapot Dome. Worn out by the exertions of his office and suffering from a serious heart condition, Harding died while on a tour of the country in August 1923.
Calvin Coolidge pursued pro-business policies with a greater fervor than Harding. The new president gained from the disarray of the Democrats, who were split on cultural issues such as Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan. Coolidge easily won nomination in his own right. In the 1924 election, he routed the Democrats and brushed aside the third-party candidacy of Robert M. La Follette. The Republicans seemed to have regained the position of electoral dominance they had enjoyed at the turn of the century. With the economic boom of the 1920s roaring along, their ascendancy seemed permanent.
After Coolidge chose not to run for another term, the Republicans turned to his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, in 1928. In a campaign based on the cultural and religious divide within the country, Hoover bested the Democratic Party nominee, Alfred E. Smith of New York. Smith’s Catholicism helped Hoover carry several states in the South. Prosperity was also an essential ingredient in Hoover’s triumph.
Within a year of his election, the economic environment soured. The stock market crash of 1929 and the depression that ensued over the next three years tested the resilience of the Republican coalition. When Hoover proved incapable of providing relief for the unemployed, his assurances of an imminent return of prosperity seemed hollow. The Republicans lost seats in the congressional elections of 1930. Soon it was evident that the nation had lost faith in Hoover, too. The defeat he suffered at the hands of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 was an electoral landslide. Democrats now dominated both houses of Congress as well.
Beneath the wreckage, Republicans retained the allegiance of some 40 percent of the voters. However, they had failed to address the economic inequities of the nation during the 1920s or to propose effective solutions to the plight of farmers, industrial workers, and the disadvantaged. They had the power to do so but chose instead not to offend the business interests at the heart of their party. For these lapses, they would spend two decades out of the White House and a decade and a half out of control of Congress.
Until the 1930s, the Republicans held the allegiance of African American voters, both North and South. The Grand Old Party continued its rhetorical devotion to black rights against the racist policies of the Democrats, but it did little to advance the interests of African Americans. Under Taft, Harding, and Hoover, some Republicans proposed abandoning blacks and appealing to white southern Democrats. By 1932 sufficient disillusion existed among African Americans about Republicans that an opening for the Democrats existed if that party changed its segregationist stance.
From the heady days of the late 1890s, when Republicanism seemed the wave of the nation’s political future, through the challenges of the Roosevelt-Taft years, the Republican Party had at least engaged some of the major issues and concerns of the time. After eight years of Wilson, however, the conservatism of the GOP lost its creative edge and became a defense of the status quo. As a result, the party encountered a well-deserved rebuke during the depths of the Great Depression in 1932.
See also Democratic Party, 1896–1932; Gilded Age, 1870s–90s; progressivism and the Progressive Era, 1890s–1920.
FURTHER READING. John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, 1954; Robert H. Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge, 1998; Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The Election of 1912 and the Birth of Modern American Politics, 2008; Idem, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans, 2003; Idem, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 1991; John Earl Haynes, ed., Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era, 1998; Joan Hoff-Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive, 1975; Herbert F. Margulies, Reconciliation and Revival: James R. Mann and the House Republicans in the Wilson Era, 1996.
LEWIS L. GOULD
The GOP began the 1930s as the nation’s majority party. Winner of eight of the ten presidential elections dating back to 1896, it held a coalition comprising eastern pro-business conservatives, who controlled the party purse strings, and reform-minded midwestern and western progressives, who identified more with middle-class Americans. But during the Great Depression, the mainstays of Republican dominance—a surging economy and stock market—lay prostrate. Another usual source of GOP political strength, the protectionism embodied in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, only worsened the economic quagmire. By decade’s end, amid economic despondency, Franklin D. Roosevelt had welded together a new Democratic coalition that crushed the Republican supremacy.
The contrast between the 1928 and 1932 presidential elections demonstrated the GOP’s devastation. In 1928 Herbert Hoover won 41 states; four years later, he claimed just 6, all in the Republican Northeast and New England. While the party in power usually loses ground in midterm elections, the Democrats increased their congressional majority in 1934. Worse for Republicans, their small minority splintered between pro–New Deal progressives and conservatives who opposed FDR, although feebly. The 1936 election brought Republicans more despair. Not only did Roosevelt pummel its nominee, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, who won just Maine and Vermont, but his victory transcended geographical lines. He claimed the traditionally Republican regions of the Northeast and Midwest, as the GOP hemorrhaged members; liberals, African Americans, urbanites, and farmers abandoned it to join the New Deal coalition.
But Roosevelt’s hubris following his 1936 triumph enabled Republicans to regain some footing. When the president clumsily proposed “packing” the Supreme Court with up to six more justices to ensure against having his programs ruled unconstitutional, the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress defied him. Roosevelt’s blunder and an economic downturn in 1937, which critics dubbed the “Roosevelt recession,” allowed Republicans to band together with conservative southern Democrats, forming a coalition on Capitol Hill to oppose Roosevelt and later Harry Truman.
Southern members of Congress fought Roosevelt partly because his programs expanding the federal government’s powers and spending reawakened their traditional sympathy for states’ rights. The New Deal also provoked a fundamental shift in the Republican Party’s philosophy. Heir to the Hamiltonian tradition supporting a strong central government, Republicans began to espouse limited federal powers and states’ rights, positions they advocated more emphatically in the coming decades. Despite cooperating with Republicans, southern Democrats declined to switch parties, for that would have cost them seniority and committee chairmanships. They stayed put, and although the GOP gained seats in the 1938 midterms, it remained in the congressional minority.
Republicans also squabbled, revealing deep party fissures. By 1940 they were divided between internationalists and isolationists. With war consuming Europe and Asia, isolationists wanted to steer clear of the conflict, while internationalists favored aid to allies. An even deeper breach was between Northeast and Middle Atlantic Republicans, who tightly controlled the party, and western progressives, who resented the eastern establishment’s power. These splits helped Wendell Willkie, an Indiana native and former president of an electric utility, to win the 1940 GOP nomination, beating out rivals like establishment favorite Thomas Dewey of New York. Willkie was an unusual candidate, and his elevation showed the dearth of Republican leaders. A political novice, he had been a Democrat until 1938. To balance Willkie’s internationalism, Republicans picked as his running mate isolationist Senator Charles McNary of Oregon. Although Willkie received more votes than Hoover or Landon did against FDR, the president won an unprecedented third term. In the 1944 election, Roosevelt’s margin of victory over GOP nominee Dewey was slimmer still, but wartime bipartisanship reduced Republican chances of making inroads against the Democrats.
When Roosevelt died in 1945, Republican fortunes appeared to change. Truman had far fewer political gifts than FDR, and in the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans scored their greatest gains of the twentieth century, picking up a total of 67 seats in Congress—55 in the House and 12 in the Senate—to win control of both houses of Congress. Jubilant Republicans brandished brooms to symbolize their sweeping victories, and Newsweek declared, “An Era Begins,” anticipating a long Republican reign on Capitol Hill. The 80th Congress stamped a permanent conservative imprint, passing the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act and the Twenty-Second Amendment, which limited the president to two terms. But the new Congress proved unable to roll back New Deal programs, and GOP dominance proved short-lived.
In the election of 1948, the strong Democratic coalition helped Truman pull off an upset of Thomas Dewey, and Democrats retook control of Congress. But the president soon suffered setbacks. In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb; Communists won control of China, prompting charges that Truman “lost” the world’s largest nation to a growing Red tide. The Korean War, which began in 1950, exacerbated fears of worldwide Communist gains. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin capitalized on the Red Scare by charging that a large conspiracy of Communist spies had infiltrated America’s government. Cold war anxieties and the issue of anticommunism provided a winning theme for Republicans and united the party’s moderates, libertarians, and social and moral conservatives.
The new unity boded well for the 1952 election, but the run-up to the contest again revealed party friction. Conservatives wielded considerable strength, yet in both 1944 and 1948, Dewey, an eastern moderate, won the nomination. In 1952 the leading conservative contender was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, President William Howard Taft’s son. But Taft suffered a severe charisma deficit and generated no widespread appeal. Moreover, he had an isolationist bent, favoring a decreased U.S. commitment to NATO and opposing the Marshall Plan, America’s successful economic aid program for Western Europe. These views alarmed Taft’s potential rival for the GOP nod, General Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II hero and NATO commander.
A late 1950 meeting with Taft proved critical in propelling Eisenhower into politics. Before conferring with the senator, he had drafted a letter declaring himself out of the 1952 race, intending to make it public if he found Taft’s diplomatic views palatable. But Taft refused to commit to NATO and internationalism. After the meeting, Eisenhower destroyed the letter.
The importance of American internationalism was just one factor inducing Eisenhower to run. Growing federal budget deficits jarred his sense of fiscal integrity. The string of five consecutive Democratic presidential victories made him fear the two-party system’s collapse if the Republicans lost again. Supporters entered him in the GOP primaries, and he won the nomination. But Taft controlled party machinery, and the Republican platform reflected conservative views more than Eisenhower’s moderation, denouncing Truman’s foreign policy of containment and the 1945 Yalta agreements for immuring Eastern Europe behind the iron curtain. Conservatives advocated a more aggressive stance, “rollback,” which meant forcing Communists to yield ground and free captive peoples.
The 1952 elections allowed Republicans to taste success for the first time in more than 20 years. Eisenhower soundly defeated the Democratic nominee, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Significantly, he made inroads into the Solid South, winning four states there and establishing a beachhead in a region that proved fertile ground for Republicans. His coattails also extended to Congress. The GOP gained control of the House and had equal strength with Senate Democrats, where Vice President Richard Nixon’s vote could break a tie.
In 1956 Eisenhower read A Republican Looks at His Party, a book written by his undersecretary of labor, Arthur Larson. A centrist, Larson considered New Deal activism excessive but believed modern times demanded a greater government role in areas like labor and social insurance. The president praised the book for encapsulating his own political philosophy. What Eisenhower called “modern Republicanism” embraced internationalism and fiscal conservatism yet accepted a more active government role in social services than conservatives could stomach. Disdaining conservatives out to shrink or even end Social Security, he wrote, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
Eisenhower proved a popular president. His approval ratings averaged 66 percent during his eight-year tenure, and the prosperity of the 1950s allowed Republicans to shuck their image as the party of the Great Depression. In 1956 Eisenhower beat Stevenson more handily than four years earlier. He exulted, “I think that Modern Republicanism has now proved itself, and America has approved of Modern Republicanism.”
But Eisenhower’s popularity was personal and never translated to a broader party appeal. During the 1954 midterms, Democrats regained control of Congress and in 1956, picked up one more seat in each house. In the 1958 midterms, Democrats rode a wave of worries over a recession, national security, and lack of progress in areas like space exploration, concerns made palpable in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. They pasted the GOP, gaining 48 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate. Many Republican elected during these years—especially in the House, which remained Democratic until 1995—spent their entire Capitol Hill careers in the minority.
Republican conservatives were restive. The party’s failure to make gains against Democrats was frustrating, and they howled in protest at Eisenhower’s budgets, which grew despite his attempts to restrain spending. Blaming modern Republicanism for the increases, they derided it as a political philosophy that advanced government programs on only a smaller scale than what Democrats liked—a “dime store New Deal,” as Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona called one GOP program. They resented Taft’s being passed over as a presidential nominee, and his death in 1953 left them bereft of a leader. They failed to limit the president’s foreign policy powers when the Bricker amendment, which would have constrained them, was defeated. An image of extremism sullied fringe conservatives, such as members of the John Birch Society, the extremist anti-Communist group founded in 1958, whose leader even charged that Eisenhower was a Communist agent. Indeed, the battles over many of Eisenhower’s domestic and international views within the party explain why, despite a successful two-term presidency, he never won the reverence within the GOP that Ronald Reagan later did.
Moderates got another crack at the Democrats when the GOP nominated Nixon in 1960. Although the Californian had built a reputation as a harshly anti-Communist conservative in Congress, as vice president he identified himself with Eisenhower’s moderation. His razor-thin loss to Senator John Kennedy in the presidential election gave conservatives more heft to advance one of their own.
They gained strength, especially in the South and West, regions ripe for right-wing thought. In the West, the spirit of individualism and freedom from personal restraints meshed with the ideal of limited government. Westerners distrusted the federal government, and its vast western land ownership irritated residents. In the South, Democratic support for the civil rights movement drove white conservatives out of the Democratic Party and into a new home, the GOP. These Sunbelt regions also enjoyed an economic boom, and their financial contributions—including from Texas oilmen—registered a growing impact in the party. The GOP, once too weak even to field congressional candidates in the South, began to bring in big names and even cause conversions. In 1961 Texas Republican John Tower won Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat; in 1964 Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched to the Republicans, and Governor John Connally of Texas later followed suit.
Conservatives determined to get their chance in 1964, nominating Barry Goldwater to run against President Johnson. To many moderates, Goldwater’s views were extreme. He urged a tough stand against the USSR, favored voluntary Social Security, and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because he feared it would lead to hiring quotas. Moderates fought him. Liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ran against Goldwater in the 1964 primaries, and after Rockefeller withdrew, Pennsylvania governor William Scranton jumped in. In defeat, Scranton sent Goldwater a harsh letter denouncing “Goldwaterism” for “reckless” foreign policy positions and civil rights views that would foment disorder. The letter killed any possibility of a unifying Goldwater-Scranton ticket, and the bitter clash between moderates and conservatives persisted to the national convention, where conservatives booed Rockefeller. The intraparty fight left the nominee wounded; Goldwater recalled, “Rockefeller and Scranton cut me up so bad there was no way on God’s green earth that we could have won.” Other moderates rebelled. Rockefeller and Governor George Romney of Michigan declined to campaign for Goldwater, and Arthur Larson even endorsed LBJ.
Badly trailing Johnson in polls, Goldwater hoped to garner at least 45 percent of the popular vote. Instead, he received just 38.5 percent. Democrats gained 2 Senate seats and 37 House members, making Congress even more Democratic. So thorough was the Republican Party’s repudiation that pundits expressed doubts about its viability.
Goldwater later reflected, “We were a bunch of Westerners, outsiders, with the guts to challenge not only the entire Eastern establishment—Republican and Democratic alike—but the vast federal apparatus, the great majority of the country’s academics, big business and big unions. . . .” Therein lay an important facet of Goldwater’s effort. He laid the groundwork for a future conservative upsurge by energizing the party’s southern and western forces, which began to wrest control of the party from the eastern establishment. His ideological brand of conservatism provided rallying cries for Republicans: lower taxes, small government, states’ rights, anticommunism, and an emphasis on law and order. His crusade also enlisted the participation of fresh faces in politics, including actor Ronald Reagan, who filmed an eloquent television spot endorsing Goldwater. The humiliation of 1964 also prodded Republicans to find better leadership. In 1965 House Republicans elected Michigan congressman Gerald Ford minority leader, providing more effective resistance to Johnson policies, while new Republican National Committee chairman Ray Bliss also helped rebuild the party.
Significantly, Goldwater won ten southern states in 1964. He emphasized campaigning “where the ducks are,” so he hunted for votes in the South. There, white conservatives, traditionally states’ rights supporters, viewed federal support for civil rights as big government intrusion. Desiring more local control over issues involving integration, taxes, and church, they began drifting from the Democrats and moored themselves to the GOP.
Republicans rebounded in the 1966 midterms to win 50 congressional seats, 47 in the House and 3 in the Senate. Richard Nixon rode the wave of renewed GOP energy, capturing the 1968 nomination and fashioning an electoral strategy that used two overarching issues, the Vietnam War (he called for “an honorable settlement”) and “law and order.”
The war had generated protests nationwide, and riots in cities plus student uprisings shattered the country’s sense of stability. The unrest disturbed middle-class Americans, and polls showed that a majority of respondents felt that LBJ had moved too quickly on civil rights. An independent candidate, Alabama governor George Wallace, played on such sentiments by charging that communism lay behind the civil rights movement.
Nixon’s appeal was more subtle. Promising law and order, he addressed patriotic “forgotten Americans” who quietly went to work and spurned the demonstrations that rocked the nation. His vice presidential pick reinforced his message: as Maryland governor, Spiro Agnew had taken a strong stand against urban rioters. Agnew’s presence on the ticket plus Nixon’s strong stand on crime and opposition to forced busing for integrating schools all capitalized on race as a political issue. Burgeoning suburbs, home to millions of middle-class Americans, welcomed Nixon’s message, and the suburbs drew strength away from old Democratic political machines in cities. Meanwhile, in the South a momentous reversal occurred. White conservatives there switched to the GOP, while African Americans nationwide deserted the party of Abraham Lincoln. In 1960, Nixon won 30 percent of the African-American vote; eight years later, he received little more than 10 percent.
Nixon’s “southern strategy” helped him win the election, beating Vice President Hubert Humphrey by a slim popular margin. Had third-party candidate Wallace not won five southern states, Nixon would have gained them. His appeal to issues involving race, crime, and war cracked the core of the New Deal coalition, attracting traditional Democratic voters such as blue-collar workers. He also pulled the South more firmly into the Republican fold. After a century as solidly Democratic, the region became reliably Republican. Although Nixon failed to carry either house of Congress, his party had made much headway since the 1930s. Struggling for decades, it gained enough strength by 1968 to win the White House while making new regional inroads. For Republicans, the doleful days of the Great Depression seemed a part of the past. After a third of a century as the minority party and a disastrous defeat in 1964, Republicans had built the foundation for a promising future.
See also era of consensus, 1952–64; New Deal Era, 1932–52.
FURTHER READING. Mary Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP, 1995; Gary Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey, 1999; Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution, 1995; Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960; Lewis Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans, 2003; Idem, 1968: The Election That Changed America, 1993; Dewey Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History, 1988; Arthur Larson, A Republican Looks at His Party, 1956; Donald Ritchie, Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932, 2007; Robert A. Rutland, The Republicans: From Lincoln to Bush, 1996; David Stebenne, Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years, 2006.
YANEK MIECZKOWSKI
When former vice president Richard M. Nixon became the Republican Party nominee for president in 1968, the GOP was deeply divided between its moderate and conservative wings. Moderates such as New York governor Nelson Rockefeller had supported racial equality and federal spending on education, health care, and welfare. Conservatives like Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona opposed what they called “big government” and “tax-and-spend” policies, and they championed limited government, individualism, and self-reliance.
Goldwater’s 1964 presidential nomination seemed to have shifted the momentum to the conservative wing until his landslide defeat by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the general election. But the conservative wing eventually rebounded with renewed strength in the 1980s under the leadership of Ronald Reagan. The revived conservative movement that turned into a juggernaut in the 1980s was a result of a variety of factors, including a reaction against the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the gradual political realignment of the South.
Many Southerners had become dissatisfied with high taxes, government regulations, federal civil rights legislation, and what they saw as the dismantling of traditional institutions, such as church and family. Goldwater appealed to these Southerners and other Americans upset with the direction of U.S. politics. Despite his loss, the 1964 election marked the first time since Reconstruction that most Southerners had voted Republican. This achievement set the stage for what became known as Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” for regaining the White House in 1968.
The 1968 presidential race touched on many sensitive issues. Public concerns ignited over the conflict in Southeast Asia, the civil rights movement, inner-city riots, and the violent antiwar protests on college campuses throughout the nation. Nixon faced off against Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey and third-party candidate George Wallace.
Nixon won 301 electoral votes and 43.4 percent of the popular vote. Humphrey received 191 electors and 42.7 percent. Nixon won the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes. It was a narrow victory, with a margin that was almost as small as John F. Kennedy’s against Nixon in 1960. Wallace garnered 13.5 percent of the vote and 46 electors.
For Republicans, Nixon’s victory meant the beginning of the demise of the New Deal liberal coalition and the emergence of a political realignment. In The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips argued that “a liberal Democratic era ha[d] ended and that a new era of consolidationist Republicanism ha[d] begun.” Yet the evidence for realignment was not so clear.
Indeed, from 1968 until the 1990s, Republicans dominated presidential elections, while Democrats maintained strong majorities in the House of Representatives. It was the beginning of an era of divided government, which emerged from the increase of registered independents, the weakening of political parties, and the rise of split-ticket voters. Since 1968, Republicans have won seven out of eleven presidential elections, losing only four times to Democrats—to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and Barack Obama in 2008. In Congress, from 1968 until 1994, Republicans gained a majority in the Senate only once and for only six years, from 1981 until 1987. Republicans served as the minority party in the House for 40 straight years, from 1954 until 1994.
To be sure, Republicans learned well their role as a minority party, at least until they captured both houses of Congress in 1994, the year of the so-called Republican revolution. Nevertheless, Republican presidents, beginning with Nixon, faced Democratic-controlled Congresses and had to come to terms with the concept of “separated institutions sharing powers.” As a result, some GOP presidents moved their policies to the center of the political spectrum.
In the 1970 midterm elections, Republicans won two seats in the Senate but lost nine seats to the Democrats in the House. Nixon characterized the outcome as a victory for Republicans because usually the president’s party loses many more congressional seats in midterm elections. However, the true test of the party’s strength, and its ability to build a coalition big enough to win another presidential election, would occur two years later.
Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign relied on personal loyalists instead of party leaders at the national, state, and local levels. Former senator Bob Dole of Kansas, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, stated, “The Republican Party was not only not involved in Watergate, but it wasn’t involved in the nomination, the convention, the campaign, the election or the inauguration.” Isolated from his party, but possessing a favorable foreign policy record, Nixon campaigned tirelessly.
Leading up to the 1972 election, conservatives had mixed feelings about Nixon’s social, economic, and foreign policy record. Nixon’s policies in health care, affirmative action, and the environment estranged him from conservatives. He proposed a national health insurance program, approved affirmative action programs for federal workers, and signed into law legislation establishing the Environmental Protection Agency.
Yet Nixon made some policy decisions that pleased conservatives. For example, he rejected congressional attempts to reduce defense spending. He removed many antipoverty programs passed under Johnson’s Great Society, including Model Cities, Community Action Activities, and aid to depressed areas. Nixon pushed for tough crime laws. He also ordered officials at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to not cut off funding to school districts that failed to comply with the Supreme Court’s desegregation order.
In an effort to court the vote of disaffected white Southerners, Nixon spoke out against court-ordered busing and lamented the moral decline in America. He denounced the Supreme Court’s decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which upheld busing laws and allowed federal courts to oversee the integration process. The issue of busing caused many working-class Americans to join Nixon and the GOP. To gain the Catholic vote and the support of religious conservatives, Nixon bemoaned the loss of traditional moral values and condemned abortion and the removal of prayer in public schools.
Nixon’s foreign policy accomplishments enhanced his stature. A longtime staunch anti-Communist, Nixon surprised his critics when he reached out to China and when he sought détente with the former Soviet Union. His trip to China in 1972 was a success. Intending to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union, Nixon successfully negotiated a trade agreement and thereby opened China to Western markets. Achieving relations with China empowered Nixon during his trip to Moscow that same year. Nixon and the Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev met and formulated a Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT I), which imposed limits on both countries’ nuclear weapons. Though the treaty did not do much in the area of arms reduction, the meeting itself was enough to temporarily ease U.S.-Soviet tensions. Nixon’s opening to China and his trip to Moscow enhanced his credibility among American voters.
Nixon’s 1972 opponent was Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. As a liberal Democrat, one of McGovern’s biggest problems was that most voters in America still remembered the urban riots and violent protests on college campuses that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Nixon won by the largest margin in history—60.7 percent of the popular vote to McGovern’s 37.5 percent. The electoral margin between the two was 520 to 17. In the congressional elections, Republicans lost 1 seat in the Senate and gained 12 in the House. However, the momentum for Republicans would soon change after the 1972 election because of scandals in the White House.
Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after revelations of his involvement in bribes and tax evasion while governor of Maryland. Then the Watergate scandal began to consume the Nixon presidency. On June 17, 1972, five men had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, located in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Although Nixon dismissed the break-in by people associated with his reelection campaign as a “third rate burglary,” the president’s role in the cover-up led to his resignation on August 8, 1974. Nixon’s vice president, Gerald R. Ford, appointed previously to replace Agnew, succeeded to the presidency.
Ford was an unlikely person to rise to the presidency, as he had never aspired to an office higher than the House of Representatives and was contemplating retiring from public life when Nixon chose him to replace Agnew. As president, Ford moved quickly to win public trust—an essential goal given public cynicism toward government and political leaders in the wake of Watergate. Although Ford initially succeeded in that task, he lost enormous support from the public when he issued a controversial pardon for Nixon a mere month after taking office. The combined effects of Watergate and the Nixon pardon on public perceptions were disastrous for the GOP. The party lost 49 seats in the House of Representatives and 3 seats in the Senate in the 1974 midterm elections. The president himself never recovered politically from the pardon and lost his bid for election to the presidency in 1976.
Ford’s brief tenure highlighted the ideological rift in the GOP. He appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, an action that infuriated conservatives who had long battled the politically moderate New Yorker for control of the GOP. Ford further alienated the Right with his support for détente with the former Soviet Union. Former California governor Ronald Reagan challenged Ford’s quest for the 1976 GOP nomination, and the two ran a close race right up to the party’s convention. Ford prevailed, but not before he had suffered much political damage. In the general election, Ford lost to Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, a former one-term governor of Georgia whose improbable campaign for the presidency stunned political observers.
By the time Carter assumed the presidency in 1977, the Republicans were hugely outnumbered by the Democrats in Congress. The GOP held a mere 143 seats in the House (versus 292 for the Democrats) and 38 in the Senate (against 61 Democrats and 1 independent). The GOP did gain 15 House seats in the 1978 midterm elections, as well as 3 seats in the Senate. Public disaffection with Carter created an opportunity for the GOP to stage a political comeback.
The conservative wing of the Republican Party gained strength during Carter’s term. Conservatives reached out to working- and middle-class voters with appeals for lower taxes, deregulation, and reduced social spending, and they courted religious voters by criticizing liberal abortion laws and the elimination of school prayer. Many conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants set aside their theological differences and joined the ranks of the Republican Party. A movement known as the New Right brought together a new coalition of voters for the GOP. The New Right stood for traditional institutions (family and church), traditional moral values (antigay, antiabortion, and progun), and states rights (limited government).
Some conservative Democrats joined the GOP. Many became known as “neoconservatives,” and they were distinctive in their emphasis on strong defense and U.S. intervention abroad along with their preference for progressive domestic policies. Together, the New Right and neoconservatives set in motion a conservative juggernaut, which became palpable in the 1980 election of Reagan. The conservatism of Reagan revolutionized the Republican Party. What Reagan had done to the party was to revitalize the type of conservatism that Barry Goldwater advocated in the 1960s.
Reagan’s 1980 campaign held Carter and Democrats responsible for high inflation, high interest rates, and for the long hostage crisis in Iran. Reagan believed that the federal government had become too large and powerful, that it had assumed too much social and economic responsibility. In his first inaugural address, Reagan told Americans, “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”
Reagan won 51 percent of the popular vote, carried 44 states and 489 electoral votes compared to Carter’s 49. In addition to winning the White House, Republicans picked up 32 seats in the House, which was short of a majority, but which marked the largest gain of seats in the House during a presidential election since 1920. Of greater importance was the Republican victory in the Senate. Republicans won 12 seats and took control of the Senate. Republicans had not been the majority party in the upper house since 1955. Overall, the outcome of the 1980 election demonstrated a significant shift in the political landscape.
After taking office in 1981, Reagan pushed his conservative agenda. Cutting domestic programs, deregulating the economy, reducing taxes, and building up the military were some of his key initiatives. Reagan proposed cutting the Food Stamp and School Lunch programs. He proposed loosening many environmental regulations. Reagan perpetuated Carter’s deregulation of the airline industry, and he objected to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulating the cable television networks industry. In foreign affairs, Reagan sought to put an end to the spread of communism. In doing so, he rejected the policies of containment and détente. He accepted the use of military intervention in and economic aid to non-Communist countries, a policy known as the “Reagan Doctrine.” To improve national security—and perhaps to bankrupt the Soviet Union—Reagan oversaw the largest military buildup during peacetime in American history.
By the 1984 presidential election, Reagan had increased his popularity among the American electorate. One reason was that the economy had rebounded during his first term. He had achieved major tax cuts and convinced the Federal Reserve to loosen its grip on the money supply. Another reason for Reagan’s popularity had to do with his decisions in foreign policy. He labeled the former Soviet Union the “evil empire” and launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as “Star Wars.” He aided anti-Communist groups in their fight against oppressive regimes. Reagan’s speeches also imbued Americans with optimism about their future.
The 1984 GOP platform was a document of conservative principles. It contained promises to pass an antiabortion amendment, a balanced budget amendment, and a law that would reform the federal tax code. In the general election, Reagan defeated former vice president Walter Mondale. Reagan won 59 percent of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes. In Congress, the GOP lost only 2 seats in the Senate and gained a small number in the House.
In his second term, Reagan had his share of difficulties. Republicans lost six seats in the Senate in the 1986 midterm election and, consequently, their majority status. Reagan could not, as he had promised, balance the budget. The federal deficit surged well over 
200 billion in 1986 and dropped down thereafter to 150 billion, a result attributed to both economic growth and tax reform. A big victory for Reagan occurred in 1986, when he signed a tax reform bill into law. The new law simplified the tax code by setting uniform rates for people with similar incomes, and it eliminated many tax deductions. However, in the same year, the Iran-Contra scandal broke.
Top White House officials, including Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Admiral John Poindexter, had illegally sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages. The proceeds of the arms deal were sent surreptitiously to a rebel group, called the Contras, who were trying to overthrow the Communist regime in Nicaragua. Leading up to the 1988 elections, the scandal did not hurt the Republican Party as much as Democrats would have liked. In the final two years of Reagan’s presidency, other events overshadowed Iran-Contra.
In 1987 Reagan’s conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork failed to win confirmation. In December 1987, Reagan and the Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Unlike SALT I, which limited the number of nuclear weapons, the INF treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. Most Americans lauded Reagan’s foreign policy decisions. They believed his agreement with Gorbachev and his May 1988 trip to Moscow signaled the beginning of the end of the cold war. Despite record federal budget deficits, Reagan left the presidency—and his party—in relatively good shape for the 1988 election.
In 1988 the GOP nominated Vice President George H. W. Bush for the presidency, and he campaigned on the promise to continue Reagan’s policies. He also pledged not to support new taxes. Bush beat Democratic nominee governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, winning 40 states and 54 percent of the popular vote. However, while Republicans held on to the presidency, the Democrats kept their majorities in Congress.
Bush’s middle-of-the-road views widened the gap between moderates and conservatives. For example, in 1990 he signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act and an extension of the Clean Air Act. The savings-and-loan bailout, spending on the Gulf War, as well as welfare and Medicare payments increased the strain on the federal budget. As a result, the deficit rose, and Bush was compelled to break his pledge not to raise taxes.
In response, Pat Buchanan, a conservative columnist, challenged Bush for the GOP nomination in 1992. Buchanan forcefully spoke out against abortion, gay rights, and sexual tolerance, and he advocated the restoration of prayer in public schools. Although Buchanan’s challenge failed, he had weakened Bush politically and embarrassed the party with an overheated prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention.
The Democrats nominated Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. The general election also included a billionaire third-party candidate, Ross Perot, who garnered 19 percent of the vote. Clinton won with merely 43.3 percent of the popular vote. Within two years, however, voters started to view Clinton negatively because of his proposed tax increases and proposed universal health care program.
In the 1994 midterm election, sensing an electorate disgruntled over low wages and the loss of traditional moral values, conservative Republicans, led by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, devised a series of campaign promises. Under the rubric of the Contract with America, the promises included tax cuts, welfare reform, tougher crime laws, congressional term limits, an amendment to balance the budget, and a return of power and responsibility to the states. Some 300 Republican candidates signed the contract in a public ceremony on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Republicans won control of both houses of Congress. They had not enjoyed a majority in the House in 40 years.
Yet, after failed attempts to enact the Contract with America, the public soon became disgruntled with the GOP in Congress, so much so that the 1996 presidential nominee Bob Dole distanced himself from Gingrich and others associated with the Republican revolution. Clinton ably defined the GOP “revolutionaries” as political extremists and easily won reelection, although he failed to win a majority of the vote with Perot again on the ballot.
In the 2000 campaign, Texas governor George W. Bush faced off against Vice President Al Gore. Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative,” which was a campaign stratagem designed to attract independents and moderates without sacrificing conservative support. Bush promised to restore dignity to the White House, a reference to President Clinton’s personal scandals and impeachment. After the polls closed on November 7, it was clear that Gore had won the popular vote by a narrow margin, a little over 500,000 votes. Not so clear was the winner of the Electoral College. The election came down to Florida. The winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes would become president-elect. For over a month, Florida remained undecided because of poorly designed ballots in Palm Beach County. As recounts by hand were taking place, Gore’s legal team convinced the Florida Supreme Court to rule that the results of a hand count would determine the winner. On December 12, Bush’s legal team appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5 to 4 decision, the Supreme Court stopped recounts on the premise that they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Bush thus won Florida and with it the presidency.
In his first year in office, Bush signed into law a bill that lowered tax brackets and cut taxes by 1.35 trillion over a ten-year period. In education, his No Child Left Behind Act required standardized national tests for grades three through eight. He proposed a school voucher program that would allow children to leave failing schools and attend schools of their choice—including private, parochial schools—at the expense of taxpayers. He also banned federal funding for research on stem cell lines collected in the future.
Bush’s leadership would be put to the test on September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He reminded Americans of their resiliency and assured them the United States would seek and punish the terrorist group responsible for the attacks. His approval ratings soared, and the GOP gained seats in Congress in the midterm elections in 2002.
Bush won the 2004 election against Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts with 51 percent of the popular vote and 286 votes in the Electoral College. In Congress, Republicans increased their majorities, winning four more seats in the Senate and five more in the House. The success of the Republican Party was, in part, a result of a strategy to focus on the registration of conservative voters, especially in key battleground states, such as Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. To mobilize conservatives in those states, Republicans emphasized social issues, such as abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage.
However, by the 2006 midterm elections, Bush’s popularity had fallen significantly due to the bungled U.S. military intervention in Iraq and the government’s slow response to hurricane Katrina in the Gulf States. Bush’s mismanagement of Katrina lowered public confidence in the national government. Moreover, in the month preceding the election, a number of scandals within the GOP had become public. House Majority Leader Tom Delay of Texas violated the campaign finance laws of Texas. He later resigned his seat in the House. Representative Mark Foley of Florida resigned due to sexual misconduct.
Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress. They interpreted their victory as a mandate to end the war in Iraq. Bush continued to prosecute the war, and shortly after the elections he requested more money from Congress to fund the troops. The unpopular war and Bush’s low approval ratings increased Democrats’ prospects of taking back the White House in 2008.
The 2008 GOP nomination contest failed to attract much enthusiasm from conservatives. The leading candidates—former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and Senator John McCain of Arizona—were all seen by conservative activists as too politically moderate. McCain eventually won the nomination, and to shore up conservative support, he chose as his vice presidential running mate the staunchly conservative governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.
Amid the collapse of the U.S. financial sector under a Republican administration and a national surge in support for the Democratic Party, McCain lost the election to first-term senator Barack Obama of Illinois. In Congress, the Democrats picked up 21 seats in the House of Representatives and at least 8 seats (one race was undecided at the time of this writing) in the U.S. Senate. For the first time since 1993, Republicans were clearly the minority party.
See also conservative ascendancy, 1980–2008; era of confrontation and decline, 1964–80.
FURTHER READING. James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch, The Perfect Tie: The True Story of the 2000 Presidential Election, 2001; Richard F. Fenno, Learning to Govern: An Institutional View of the 104th Congress, 1997; Gary L. Gregg and Mark J. Rozell, eds., Considering the Bush Presidency, 2004; Harry P. Jeffrey and Thomas Maxwell-Long, eds., Watergate and the Resignation of Richard Nixon, 2004; Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 1969; Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, 1999.
MARK ROZELL AND KYLE BARBIERI
Republicanism is a political philosophy that exerted a profound cultural influence on the life and thought of Americans living in the Revolutionary and antebellum eras (1760–1848). This unique view of government and society originated during the crisis in Anglo-American relations that resulted in the independence of the 13 colonies and the creation of a new nation.
Responding to actions of the British government during the 1760s and 1770s, colonial American spokesmen drew extensively on the libertarian thought of English commonwealthmen. Epitomized by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters and James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions, the publications of these dissenting radicals railed against the urgent danger posed by the systematic corruption they attributed to Robert Walpole’s ministry (1721–42). The parliamentary government emerging under Walpole appeared to them to maintain the facade of constitutional procedures while actually monopolizing the whole of governmental powers within his cabinet. In their minds, Walpole’s machinations were destroying the balance among king, lords, and commons that constituted the very strength of the British constitution. Believing in a separation of powers among the three constituent elements of the government, commonwealthmen urged parliamentary reforms such as rotation in office, the redistribution of seats, and annual meetings to restore the proper constitutional balance. Beyond that, their concern for freedom of thought and the sovereignty of the people led them to speak out passionately against the increasing corruption and tyranny they believed to be infecting English society and government. Pairing liberty with equality, Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters and Burgh’s Disquisitions proclaimed the preservation and extension of liberty to be all important. Since the greatest danger to the liberty and the equality of the people came from their leaders, all citizens must maintain a constant vigilance to prevent governmental officials from being corrupted by power and stealthily usurping liberty away from the people. In their minds all men were naturally good; citizens became restless only when oppressed. Every man should, therefore, act according to his own conscience, judge when a magistrate had done ill, and, above all, possess the right of resistance. Without such a right, citizens could not defend their liberty.
While revolutionary leaders in America made extensive use of such conceptions, the ideas of these commonwealthmen did not cross the Atlantic intact. Americans adapted beliefs regarding consent, liberty, equality, civic morality, and constitutions to their specific and concrete needs, so that even when the same words were used and the same formal principles adhered to, novel circumstances transformed their meanings. Consequently, revolutionary leaders, believing that history revealed a continual struggle between the spheres of liberty and power, embraced a distinctive set of political and social attitudes that gradually permeated their society. A consensus formed in which the concept of republicanism epitomized the new world they believed they were creating. This republicanism called for a constant effort on the part of all American citizens to protect the realm of liberty (America) from the ceaseless aggression of the realm of power (Great Britain) under the guidance of gentlemen of natural merit and ability.
Above all, republicanism rested on a self-reliant, independent citizenry. The sturdy yeoman—the equal of any man and dependent upon none for his livelihood—became the iconic representation of American republicanism. Americans believed that what made republics great or what ultimately destroyed them was not the force of arms but the character and spirit of the people. Public virtue, the essential prerequisite for good government, became all important. A people practicing frugality, industry, temperance, and simplicity were sound republican stock; those who wallowed in luxury were corrupt and would corrupt others. Since furthering the public good—the exclusive purpose of republican government—required a constant sacrifice of individual interests to the greater needs of the whole, the people, conceived of as a homogeneous body (especially when set against their rulers), became the great determinant of whether a republic lived or died. Thus republicanism meant maintaining public and private virtue, social solidarity, and vigilance against the corruptions of power. United in this frame of mind, Americans set out to gain their independence and to establish a new republican world.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the American commitment to republicanism had grown even stronger than it had been in 1776. Its principal tenets—a balance between the separate branches of government and a vigilance against governmental power—had been inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. America had indeed become republican, but hardly in the manner intended by its early leaders. Economic and demographic changes taking place at an unparalleled rate had begun to work fundamental transformations within the new nation. Geographic expansion spawned incredible mobility, and great numbers of Americans, becoming increasingly involved in the market economy, strived to gain all the advantages they could from their newly acquired social and economic autonomy.
Revolutionary republicanism, rather than constraining these activities, seemed rather to encourage them and to afford them legitimacy. The emphasis placed on equality in revolutionary rhetoric stimulated great numbers of previously deferential men to question all forms of authority and to challenge distinctions of every sort. Rather than generating an increased commitment to order, harmony, and virtue, republicanism appeared to be fostering an acquisitive individualism heedless of the common good and skeptical about the benevolent leadership of a natural elite. Postrevolutionary America, instead of becoming the New World embodiment of transcendent classical values, appeared increasingly materialistic, utilitarian, and licentious: austerity gave way to prosperity; virtue appeared more and more to connote the individual pursuit of wealth through hard work rather than an unselfish devotion to the collective good. No longer a simple, ordered community under the benign leadership of a natural elite, America seemed instead to be moving toward being a materialistic and utilitarian nation increasingly responsive to both the demands of the market and the desires of ordinary, obscure individuals.
The rapid democratization and vulgarization that took place in American society during the last decades of the eighteenth century helped create a far more open and fluid society than had been anticipated by most revolutionary leaders. Indeed, the transformations taking place in American society through these years were so complex and indeliberate, so much a mixture of day-to-day responses to a rapidly changing socioeconomic environment, that most Americans were unaware of the direction that such changes were taking them and their society. Their commitment to republicanism, however, allowed them to continue to imagine themselves as members of a virtuous, harmonious, organic society long after the social foundations of such a society had eroded. The fact that republican language became increasingly disembodied from the changing cultural context made self-awareness that much more difficult. Such language allowed—even impelled—citizens to view themselves as committed to the harmony, order, and communal well-being of a republican society while actively creating an aggressive, individualistic, and materialistic one.
Most Americans clung to a harmonious, corporate view of their society and their own place in it, even while behaving in a materialistic, utilitarian manner in their daily lives. Thus, while rapidly transforming their society in an open, competitive, modern direction, Americans idealized communal harmony and a virtuous social order. Republicanism condemned the values of a burgeoning capitalistic economy and placed a premium on an ordered, disciplined personal liberty restricted by the civic obligations dictated by public virtue. In this sense, republicanism formalized or ritualized a mode of thought that ran counter to the flow of history; it idealized the traditional values of a world rapidly fading rather than the market conditions and liberal capitalistic mentality swiftly emerging in the late eighteenth century. As a result, Americans could—and did—believe simultaneously in corporate needs and individual rights. They never, however, had a sense of having to choose between two starkly contrasting traditions—republicanism and liberalism. Instead, they domesticated classical republicanism to fit contemporary needs while amalgamating inherited assumptions with their liberal actions.
The kind of society that would emerge from the increasingly egalitarian and individualistic roots being formed in the late eighteenth century was unclear when Thomas Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801. Even by that time, the perception of personal autonomy and individual self-interest had become so inextricably intertwined that few of Jefferson’s supporters had any clear comprehension of the extent to which entrepreneurial and capitalistic social forces were shaping American life. Under the pressure of such rapidly changing conditions, the autonomous republican producer—the yeoman integrally related to the welfare of the larger community—gradually underwent a subtle transmutation into the ambitious self-made man set against his neighbors and his community alike. Consequently, by incorporating as its own the dynamic spirit of a market society and translating it into a political agenda, the party of Jefferson had unself-consciously developed a temper and a momentum that would carry it beyond its original goals. Indeed, even by 1800, personal independence no longer constituted a means by which to ensure virtue; it had itself become the epitome of virtue. The process by which this took place was complicated, often confused, and frequently gave rise to unintended consequences. It ultimately resulted, nonetheless, in profound changes in American culture in the nineteenth century.
Republicanism in the hands of the Jeffersonians—the foremost advocates of the persuasion—spawned a social, political, and cultural movement that quite unintentionally created the framework within which liberal commitments to interest-group politics, materialistic and utilitarian strivings, and unrestrained individualism emerged. Simultaneously, however, republicanism also fostered a rhetoric of unselfish virtue—of honest independence devoted to the communal welfare—that obscured the direction in which American society was moving. By promoting the desire for unrestrained enterprise indirectly through an appeal to popular virtue, the Jeffersonians helped produce a nation of capitalists blind to the spirit of their enterprise. Consequently, their movement enabled Americans to continue to define their purpose as the pursuit of traditional virtue while actually devoting themselves to the selfish pursuit of material wealth. Irresponsible individualism and erosive factionalism replaced the independent producer’s commitment to the common good. Still, free enterprisers, who by the 1850s would include publicly chartered business corporations, fell heir to the republican belief that an independent means of production sufficiently attached a citizen’s interests to the good of the commonwealth. Entrepreneurial fortunes became investments in the general welfare. The entrepreneur himself, freed by the American belief in virtuous independence, could proceed unencumbered by self-doubts in his attempt to gain dominion over a society of like-minded individuals who could only applaud his success as their own.
The triumph of Thomas Jefferson initiated a brief period—a “Jeffersonian moment”—when the virtues of both republicanism and eighteenth-century liberalism merged into a cohesive political philosophy offering the bright promise of equal social and economic advancement for all individuals in a land of abundance. That the moment was brief stands less as a critique of the individuals who combined to bring Jefferson to the presidency than it is a comment on the forces that impelled them, forces over which they had little control and, perhaps, even less understanding. Just at the time when an ideology translated the realities of the American environment into a coherent social philosophy, those very realities carried American society far beyond the original goals of the Jeffersonian movement as they transmuted eighteenth-century American republicanism into nineteenth-century American democracy.
If the protean nature of republicanism obscured such transformations by providing a sense of harmony and comfort to great numbers of late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Americans, no such cordiality and consensus characterizes scholarly attempts to come to grips with republicanism as a historical concept. Indeed, since first receiving formal analytic and conceptual identity in the early 1970s, republicanism has been at the epicenter of strife and contention among historians of the early national period. Even though the concept had become omnipresent in scholarly literature by the mid-1980s (in the terms republican motherhood, artisan republicanism, free labor republicanism, pastoral republicanism, evangelical republicanism, and others), a good many scholars, particularly social historians, remained convinced that the emphasis on republicanism obscured far more than it clarified about early American society. For them the scholarly concentration on republicanism occluded vast domains of culture—religion, law, political economy, and ideas related to patriarchy, family, gender, race, slavery, class, and nationalism—that most scholars knew were deeply entangled in the revolutionary impulse.
The greatest challenge to republicanism, however, came not from social historians but from scholars wedded to the concept of liberalism. For these individuals, Americans of the Revolutionary era manifested aggressive individualism, optimistic materialism, and pragmatic interest-group politics. In their minds, John Locke’s liberal concept of possessive individualism, rather than Niccolò Machiavelli’s republican advocacy of civic humanism, best explained American thought and behavior during the years after 1760.
The intellectual conflict that emerged between advocates of republicanism and those of liberalism ushered in years of sterile debate. An entirely unproductive “either/or” situation resulted: either scholars supported republicanism or they espoused liberalism. Fortunately, in realizing that partisans of both republican and liberal interpretations had identified strands of American political culture that simply could not be denied, a great many historians transcended this tiresome dialogue. Replacing it with a “both/and” mode of analysis, these scholars have revealed the manner in which republicanism, liberalism, and other traditions of social and political thought interpenetrated one another to create a distinctive and creative intellectual milieu. Over time a “paradigmatic pluralism” emerged: scholars employing a “multiple traditions” approach emphasized concepts drawn from natural rights, British constitutionalism, English opposition writers, contract theory, Protestant Christian morality, Lockean liberalism, and republicanism. Such work has resulted in a far more sophisticated understanding of early American culture.
The multiple traditions approach to early American history provides scholars with significant insights of inestimable value in their efforts to analyze this vital era. The first and perhaps most important of these is that no single concept—whether republicanism, liberalism, or Protestant Christianity—provides a master analytical framework for understanding revolutionary America. Each of these concepts comprised a multitude of arguments developed in different contexts to solve different problems and to articulate different ideals. Whatever conflicts or contradictions might seem apparent among them could always be held in suspension by the interpenetration of ideas and mutual reinforcement. While republicanism can clearly no longer be considered the key to understanding early American history, it certainly remains a vital constituent element in the political culture of revolutionary America. If no longer a conception of transcendent meaning, republicanism remains a discourse deeply embedded in the central issues facing Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a time in which a distinctive pattern of social and political thought incorporating republican, liberal, and religious ideas emerged in response to these issues. Each of these clusters of ideas comprised a vital part of the larger meaning Americans brought to particular disputes in the years of the early republic. To abstract one set of ideas—whether republican, liberal, or religious—from this intellectual fabric not only impairs an understanding of this distinctive pattern of thought, but obscures the special character—the very uniqueness—of the early republic.
See also democracy; era of a new republic, 1789–1827; liberalism; war for independence.
FURTHER READING. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, 1984; Barnard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 1967; Alan Gibson, “Ancients, Moderns and Americans: The Republicanism-Liberalism Debate Revisited,” History of Political Thought 21 (2000), 261–307; James Kloppenberg, “Premature Requiem: Republicanism in American History,” in The Virtues of Liberalism, 59–70, 1998; Idem, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 (1987), 9–33; Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America, 1990; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 1975; Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, 1992; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstances of Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies, 1959; Daniel T. Rogers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History, 79 (1992), 11–38; Robert E. Shalhope, The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1760–1800, 1990; Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87 (1993), 549–66; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 1969.
ROBERT E. SHALHOPE
See war for independence.
While the political history of the Rocky Mountain region—Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico—does not lack stories of partisan division and struggle, a greater share of that history challenges the assumptions and conventions of party loyalty and identification. Over a century and a half, the desires for economic development and federal money have acted as incentives to pay little attention to the usual boundaries of party. A proliferation of factions and interest groups has often muddled efforts to define and patrol the usual lines of partisanship. Reinforced by an enthusiasm for individualism and independence, electoral success has frequently coincided with eccentric personality and temperament in the candidate. In the Rockies, traditional party activists have often found themselves a demoralized people, bucking a trend toward the hybrid and the maverick.
For all the electoral success awarded to eccentrics who set their own courses, the political history of the region in the last century tracks the usual arrangement of eras and phases in American political history. And yet the region’s citizens gave those familiar eras a distinctive or even unique inflection. Moreover, the U.S. Constitution enhanced the national impact of the Rockies, since states with comparatively sparse populations were awarded the same number of senators as eastern states with dense populations. Thus, a number of senators from the Rocky Mountain states have exercised consequential power in national and international decisions.
In the invasion, conquest, mastery, and development of the interior West, an initially weak federal government acquired greater authority, force, and legitimacy. The history of the Rockies is rich in case studies of agencies and institutions of the federal government exercising a remarkable force in the political life (not to mention the social, cultural, economic, and emotional life) of the region. Under the Department of State until 1873 and then under the Department of the Interior, the territorial system oversaw the progression (sometimes quite prolonged and halting) to statehood. Even after statehood, the residents of the Rockies found themselves subject to the rules, regulations, and sometimes arbitrary authority of agencies in the executive branch, many of them clustered in the Department of the Interior: the Office (later Bureau) of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Army (both the combat forces and the Army Corps of Engineers), the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management (a hybrid itself of the venerable General Land Office and the more junior Grazing Service), the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Many of the activities of federal agencies in the Rockies focus on the management, use, preservation, and regulation of the region’s mountains, canyons, and deserts. In national politics, the issues that have come to occupy the category of “the environment” have fluctuated in the attention paid to them, sometimes dipping below visibility. In the Rockies, policies governing water, land, and wildlife have long held a place at the center of political life; the region has thus functioned as a political seismograph, recording dramatic shifts in attitudes toward nature. This is a region in which indigenous peoples retain important roles in local, state, and national politics, as do the “other” conquered people—the descendants of Mexicans who lived in the territory acquired by the United States in the Mexican-American War. In this case and in the case of Asian immigrants, western race relations are often intertwined with international relations, with the terms of treaties and the actions of consuls stirred into the struggles of civil rights. The great diversity of the population meant that the civil rights era had many dimensions, as Indians, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans pursued similar, though sometimes conflicting, agendas of self-assertion.
Diversity, variation, and complex negotiations between and among peoples set the terms for Rocky Mountain politics long before the arrival of Europeans. Decentralized governance characterized the nomadic groups of the northern Rockies as well as the Southwest, with the band far more established as the unit of loyalty than any broader tribal identity. Kinship set the terms of cohesion and obligation, and leaders rose to authority by repeated demonstrations of their courage and wisdom.
The arrival of Spanish explorers, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries near the end of the sixteenth century initiated a long-running struggle for imperial dominance. As the more rigid and hierarchical systems of Europeans encountered the widely varying structures of leadership among native peoples, the comparatively simple dreams of empire produced far more tangled realities. One particularly ironic and awkward outcome was the rise of a vigorous slave trade in the Southwest, as Utes, Navajos, and Apaches traded captives from other tribes to Spanish settlers; centuries later, under U.S. governance, the campaign for the abolition of the interior West’s version of slavery extended well beyond the abolition of the much better known practices of the American South.
The Spanish introduction of horses into North America unleashed a cascade of unintended and unforeseen rearrangements in the balance of power. With the horse, Indian people took possession of a new mobility for trading, raiding, hunting, and warfare. The spread of the horse unsettled the balance of power between the newly mounted native people and their would-be European conquerors. When the Navajos and Apaches, as well as the Utes and Comanches (nomadic people to the north of the New Mexican settlements) took up the horse, both Pueblo Indians and Spanish settlers found themselves living in communities where the possibilty of a raid was a constant source of risk and vulnerability.
The opportunities for bison hunting and migration offered by the horse brought new peoples into the region, and thereby accelerated the contests for turf and power. By the time of European contact, these groups would become known as the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, Crow, Blackfeet, Shoshone, Gros Ventre, and Nez Perce. In the northern and central Rockies, while people with a shared language, similar religious beliefs, and a sense of common origin gathered together annually for ceremonies, they spent most of the year divided into bands who dispersed for hunting and gathering through much of the year. Tribes varied widely in the formality and informality of their designation of leaders. In many groups, men rose to leadership through constant and repeated demonstration of generosity and courage. For most tribes, decisions rested on consensus emerging from long discussion. Over the next centuries, the political diversity and complexity of the native groups, as well as their democratic forms of decision making, would perplex European and American newcomers to the Rocky Mountains. Non-Indian explorers, emissaries, or military leaders, who arrived expecting to meet a group and identify a man or men who carried the authority to make lasting decisions for all, had come to the wrong place.
Centralized, imperial authority held sway only intermittently in locations remote from capitals and home offices. Disunity and opposing factions within the colonial society could set the empire’s plans to wobbling as effectively as resistance from the indigenous communities.
Mexican independence in 1821 introduced even greater complexity to an already complicated and precarious political landscape. One of the most consequential actions of the new nation was the opening of the northern borderlands to trade with Americans, a change in policy of great political consequence. As merchants began traveling back and forth between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and St. Louis, Missouri, the United States acquired the chance to have a commercial presence, initially tolerated and welcomed, in Mexican terrain. But the Santa Fe trade presented the possibility of a conquest by merchants, and Mexican authorities struggled to limit the intrusions of the legal and illegal aliens of their day.
Thus, by the 1820s, the future of sovereignty in the Rocky Mountains was an unsettled domain. It was one thing to sit in distant offices and trace lines of sovereignty on a map, and quite another to give substance and meaning to those lines. No other section of the United States experienced so many changes in national boundaries and came under so many governmental jurisdictions. In the first half of the nineteenth century, maps of the Rockies recorded claims by six nations: Spain, France, Mexico, Britain, the United States, and the independent republic of Texas. The former Spanish territories—from the southwest corner of Wyoming through the western half of Colorado, and the bulk of what would become Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico—remained under Mexican control after independence. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French placed the central and northern Rockies under the sovereignty of the United States. Between 1836 and 1850, Texas claimed portions of New Mexico, Colorado, and even a sliver of Wyoming. Meanwhile, the area now called Idaho fell under the joint occupation of Great Britain and the United States until awarded to the United States by treaty in 1846. These “official” Euro-American boundaries, moreover, existed in not particularly splendid isolation from the most important dimension of power on the ground: the authority of the Indian tribes.
The aridity, elevation, and difficult terrain of much of the Rockies further challenged the aspirations of empire. The area seemed, as early explorers bluntly noted, ill-suited to conventional American agricultural settlement. Given the aridity in the interior West, it seemed possible that Americans would find that they had no need or desire to assert power over areas like the Great Salt Lake Basin, since there seemed to be no imaginable economic use to which to put them. And yet Americans still hoped that explorers would uncover other resources that would inspire settlers and lead to the political incorporation of this territory into the nation. Still, the pursuit of beaver pelts, the key resource of the 1820s and 1830s, did not offer much of a foundation for a new political order. As it did elsewhere on the continent, the fur trade brought Euro-Americans and Indian people into a “middle ground” of shifting power, with no obvious answer to the question of who was in charge.
In 1846, the joint occupancy of the Northwest came to an end, assigning the Oregon territory to the United States. The Mexican-American War dramatically rearranged the lines of sovereignty to the advantage of the United States. In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred more than one-third of Mexico’s land to the Americans. Hundreds of one-time Mexican citizens found themselves reconstituted as residents of the United States. In a promise that, in the judgment of some latter-day activists, still awaits full delivery, Article IX of the treaty declared that the Mexicans in the acquired territories “. . . who shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic . . . shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States, and be admitted at the proper time (to be judged of by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States.”
With the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the United States achieved its lasting borders. The value of the territory of the Rocky Mountains was undemonstrated and unrecognized; it had simply been necessary to acquire this land in order to span the continent from sea to sea. In the 1840s, the movements of Americans—overland travelers on their way to California and Oregon, and then, in the late 1850s, gold seekers drawn to discoveries in Colorado and Nevada—began to give on-the-ground meaning to U.S. territorial claims. And yet the undiminished powers of Indian tribes still rendered the U.S claims both hollow and precarious.
The discovery of gold and silver put to rest any lingering doubt that the territory of the Rockies might not be worth the trouble of political incorporation. In many sites in the mountains, collections of individualistic strangers improvised methods of governance that would, at the least, formalize mining claims and property rights. The political unit of the mining district tied small camps together and established procedures for platting out the district’s boundaries, defining claims, setting up law-enforcement and court systems, and establishing water rights, most often through the system known as prior appropriation, or “first in time, first in right.” Settlers also sought recognition, organization, and aid from the federal government.
For white Americans newly arrived in Colorado, the onset of the Civil War brought a heightened sense of vulnerability to Indian attack, since the new settlements depended on an overstretched and ill-defended supply line to the Midwest, and the resources and attention of the Union Army were directed to the war in the East. The primary feature of the Civil War era in the Rocky Mountain region was thus an escalation of Indian-white violence, as militia and volunteer forces reacted forcefully to threats and suspicions. With the shift of federal attention away from the West, at the Bear River Massacre in Utah, at the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, and in the campaign against the Navajo, the conduct of white soldiers and volunteers was often extreme and unregulated.
The Confederate Territory of Arizona (the southern half of the New Mexico Territory) represented the one foothold of the rebellion in the West. Operating out of Texas, Confederate troops entered New Mexico, took Santa Fe, and headed north to take the Colorado gold mines, but then met defeat from a Colorado militia at Glorieta Pass. With this battle, the question of the loyalty of the Rocky Mountain states was put to rest.
The post–Civil War era in the Rockies gained its shape and structure from three major projects: creating territories and then determining when they had reached the condition that justified the awarding of statehood; designing and installing systems for allocating property in minerals, land, water, and transportation routes; and conquering (sometimes through direct military engagements and sometimes through more subtle processes of negotiation and escalating economic dependence) the Indian people of the region and confining them to reservations under treaties that, even if negotiated under terms of surrender and defeat, nonetheless turned out to provide a basis for a reassertion of Indian self-governance a century later.
In the post–Civil War era, the political circumstances of the West both resembled and differed from the political circumstances of the South. In the Reconstruction enterprise of providing the vote to African American men, the West led the South. African Americans in Colorado tied the cause of black suffrage to the cause of statehood, and enlisted influential senators to their cause. The Territorial Suffrage Act of 1867 granted the vote to African American men in the territories, two months before the first Reconstruction Act gave freedmen the vote in the former Confederacy.
In their greatest era of common experience, the South and the West were the targets and subjects of the attentions, plans, and reforms of ambitious northern Republicans. If the word Reconstruction sums up this experience for the South, historian David Emmons has argued, the similar process for the West might more accurately be called Construction. In the South, Republicans undertook to reconstruct a comparatively well-defined social and political order, while in the West, without a comparable, well-established elite like the southern planters, the Republicans had the opportunity to construct a new political and economic order from the foundation. Under the terms of territorial government, American citizens found their assumed rights of self-government temporarily (for New Mexico and Arizona, this “temporary” status endured for over 60 years) diminished and restricted. They could elect their territorial legislators, and they could send a nonvoting delegate to Congress, but the federal government appointed the governor and (perhaps even more important) the judges. Those who chafed under this regime and longed for statehood often found that their cause had become thoroughly entangled in national tussles over slavery, race, and partisan dominance in Congress.
Through most of the territorial period, Republicans held the presidency, and Democrat Grover Cleveland did not make a consistent practice of using his patronage power to replace Republicans with Democrats in territorial positions. At first glance, this situation may have seemed to give an advantage to Republicans in shaping the partisan leanings of the territories under their governance. But territorial government was so unpopular, and the governors so often resented and disliked, that the Republican advantage in appointments over the territorial period may actually have worked in favor of the Democrats, or at least did them little injury. Historian Earl Pomeroy has reported that Democrats in Montana in 1877 privately acknowledged that they were happy to have a Republican governor, noting that “it will keep the [Republican] party divided and we will stand a much better show to defeat them in the elections.” Even though denunciation of appointed officers as outsiders was a standard refrain, appointing a local man to office did not necessarily increase the supply of goodwill. The legacy of territorial status lingered in the minds, hearts, and certainly the rhetorical reserves of Westerners, enhancing resentment of the federal government and reinforcing a sense of power-lessness and victimization. As Pomeroy has observed, the “political complexions” of the Rocky Mountain states came out of the territorial period stamped as “unpredictable, insurgent.”
Tension over the control exercised by Congress and presidential appointees was most sustained in Utah, as northern Republicans undertook to eliminate Mormon polygamy, which they had initially paired with slavery as one of the “twin relics of barbarism.” Before the creation of the Utah Territory, and in the years in which Mormon Church leader Brigham Young held the office of governor, the Mormon homeland of Deseret was a theocracy, a state of affairs that troubled the souls of northern Republicans even as they themselves were guided in many of their own political undertakings by Protestant Christianity. With a sequence of increasingly forceful antipolygamy laws, the federal government undertook a purposeful campaign to end Mormon political and cultural distinctiveness, including congressionally mandated disenfranchisement of Utah territory women in 1887. The Woodruff Manifesto in 1890, renouncing polygamy, was a key step in Utah’s progression toward legitimacy and statehood. How to shift the distinct politics of Utah to the partisan rivalries of the nation as a whole was far more complicated and orchestrated with considerably less explicit exercise of church authority. Given the long campaign of persecution of the church by the Republican Party during the territorial period, the Mormons’ eventual shift to a strong Republican affiliation offered its own telling demonstration that political categories have shown, in this region, a remarkable capacity for reconfiguration and realignment.
Along with territorial government, a second major arena for the process of “constructing” the West involved the federal government’s allocation of property rights in transportation routes, land, minerals, and water. The remoteness and isolation of the region made the building of railroads a major concern of settlers; by ending the struggle over whether the route of the transcontinental railroad would serve the interests of the North or the South, the secession of the Confederacy opened the way for the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, providing crucial government aid. In a similar way, secession cleared the way for the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, followed by a complicated stream of legislation trying to adapt the homestead principle to the difficult terrain of the Rockies. The 1872 Mining Law took the local improvisations of the mining West and built them into federal legislation, guaranteeing free access of prospectors and miners to the public domain and omitting a royalty that would have directed a portion of the revenue from mining to the public treasury. The allocation of water presented the greatest challenge to federal hopes of bringing order to the West; under the doctrine of prior appropriation, a tangle of water rights already held status in the region well before Congress or the executive branch could try to establish a national policy.
In the last half of the nineteenth century, the most unambiguous display of federal power occurred in the final campaigns of conquest against Indian people. After the Civil War, the West became the main arena for the military campaigns of the U.S. Army. Military forts and posts, already significant, gained in importance as economic drivers for the region. In 1849, jurisdiction over the Office of Indian Affairs transferred from the Department of War to the newly established the Department of Interior. This shift of agencies gave institutional form to the contest between civilians and the military in setting the direction of Indian relations.
In the region of the Rockies, Indian peoples tried every imaginable strategy to respond to the imposition of American power. Even as the Sioux and Cheyenne fought against George Armstrong Custer in the battle at Little Big Horn, Crow Indians allied themselves with Custer as scouts and auxiliaries. In the Southwest, the Army used Apache scouts to find and pursue other Apaches who had refused to surrender. In their dealings with the Americans, native peoples chose various combinations of alliance and resistance, and those choices meant stress and strain for Indian communities. All these strategies led to the negotiation (and sometimes imposition) of treaties shrinking the tribes’ land holdings, designating reservations for their confinement, ending their mobility, prohibiting their religious practices, and subordinating tribal leadership to the arbitrary powers of appointed agents of the Office of Indian Affairs. And yet the treaties also recorded a formal recognition of the tribes and their rights, providing the foundation for the U.S. Supreme Court’s recognition of tribal sovereignty a century later.
In this era of constructing the region, voters responded with enthusiasm to the idea of governmental support for economic development, and with that priority front and center, the warmth of support could shift easily and rapidly from Republican to Democratic and back again. The category of “booster of the economy” trumped party affiliation. In states like Nevada, Colorado, or Montana, with the mining industry at the center of the economy, the state legislatures had a way of selecting (sometimes with an incentive, encouragement, or bribe provided by the aspiring officeholder) the heads of mining companies to serve in the Senate. In any individual state or territory, citizens sparred and struggled over the material benefits and advantages delivered by political success, but these contests were rarely guided by political principle. A term coined by historian Kenneth Owens, chaotic factionalism, goes a long way toward capturing the reality of political conduct in the Rockies in the last half of the nineteenth century. The term works equally well when applied to Indian tribes, making difficult choices between resistance and accommodation; to the agencies and officials of the federal government; and to the region’s Euro-American settlers, almost infinitely divided by nationality, class, and competing occupations and professions.
In the 1890s, populism diminished the “chaotic” part of “factionalism” for at least a few years. Responding to the serious economic troubles of that decade, the People’s Party posed a genuine challenge to northeastern political and economic dominance, as a sectional party with a complicated mix of southern and western dimensions. Fusion politics—loose, temporary alliances across party lines—spurred campaigns that emphasized issues and candidates over party loyalty. The 1896 campaign of Democrat William Jennings Bryan marked the high point of fusion politics in the interior West. Bryan’s pro-labor and pro-silver Populist Party/Democratic Party coalition earned the popular and electoral votes of every western state except California and Oregon. The election also highlighted the limits of Rocky Mountain electoral power, since states with such sparse populations yielded just a fraction of the electoral votes Bryan would have needed to win the presidency. Carrying the Rockies still meant losing nationwide.
Demanding federal intervention and protections against burdensome railroad shipping rates and arbitrary charges for the storage and marketing of grain, farm families were the backbone of Midwestern and southern populism. In the Rockies, the activism of miners and their unions gave rise to a more inclusive and class-conscious form of populism. Rocky Mountain populism brought together a coalition of farmers, workers, and small businesspeople. This large voting bloc helped elect more Peoples’ Party candidates in the mountain states than in any other region. Populist goals moved well beyond economic protections for farmers to include passage of the nation’s first eight-hour day laws and protections for union organizing. Populist support for women’s suffrage spurred the enactment of that radical measure, and thus gave additional clout to the voting power of the People’s Party in Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. The Populist enthusiasm for “direct democracy” also fired up voter interest in election campaigns in the Rockies. Electoral reforms like the voter initiative and referendum, and the direct election of senators, were not unique to the Mountain West, and yet, embraced by voters, they quickly became the hallmark of elections and lawmaking in the region during and after the 1890s.
Four of the Rocky Mountain states—Wyoming (1869 territory, 1890 state), Colorado (1893 state), Utah (1870 territory, until congressional disenfranchisement in 1887; 1896 state), and Idaho (1896 state)—led in the cause of women’s voting rights in the United States. Arizona women voted by 1912, joined by women in Nevada and Montana in 1914, all well in advance of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Voting rights in all of the interior mountain states were achieved through popular referenda, demonstrating a remarkable willingness to experiment on the part of male voters. Strong and active mining unions, as well as the influential Populist Party, proved receptive to efforts of persuasion and recruitment by activist women. Women’s unmistakable importance in the household economies of farming and ranching carried a symbolic power that, in itself, made a case for suffrage.
The Mountain West also led the nation in women’s party and electoral activism. From 1896 to 1910, when no additional states granted suffrage, an era that eastern suffragists and historians have dubbed “the doldrums,” women in the first four Rocky Mountain suffrage states seized their new powers. Spurred on by the belief that western politics offered a greater openness to experimentation, suffrage leaders in the Rocky Mountain states often reached across dividing lines of place, race, ethnicity, creed, and economic circumstance to win both men and women to their cause. In many states of the region, early women activists and voters embraced “nonpartisanship,” furthered third-party movements and independent candidates, promoted public referenda to circumvent entrenched and lethargic state legislators, and won early electoral reforms like primary election laws opening up the nomination process to wider constituencies. Partisan women in the interior West also worked to open up the party machinery to broader participation, with Mountain West women emerging as the nation’s first female elected officials, well into the Progressive and New Deal Eras.
Even though the Populist Party had faded in membership and influence by 1900, many of the innovations it had placed on the political agenda came to fruition during the Progressive Era. The legacy of western populism, ongoing labor activism, women’s independent voting patterns, and the sweeping national reform movement known as progressivism combined to produce a whirlwind of political reforms in the Rockies. Since participants in this movement were sometimes Republicans, sometimes Democrats, and sometimes members of the Progressive Party, this era made its own contribution to the muddling of partisan identity in the region.
The fact that the Progressive Era coincided with the era of labor wars in the Rockies made a reckoning with the tensions of industrial labor relations unavoidable. Under the militant leadership of the Western Federation of Miners, unions spread in the precious-metal mining districts, especially in Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Montana. At the same time, organizers for the United Mine Workers went into action in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico to establish union locals in coal mining communities. Strikes often edged into violence, as miners clashed not only with company guards but also with state troops. The repetitious pattern of state intervention of the military on behalf of mining companies produced political repercussions regionally and nationally. Created by Congress in 1912, the Commission on Industrial Relations led by Frank Walsh held highly visible hearings on Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre. In 1914 a strike against the Colorado Oil and Fuel Company, owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. exploded in a long run of violence involving strikers, their families, mine guards, and the Colorado National Guard. When Rockefeller and labor activist Mother Jones both testified at the Walsh Commission hearings, the intensity of labor struggles in the Rockies preoccupied the nation.
Beyond strikes, the members of mining and other labor unions in the mountain states joined the political fray in state legislatures, electoral campaigns, and voter initiatives. The eight-hour workday, workers’ compensation acts, unemployment relief, and laws protecting union organizing came relatively early in the Rocky Mountain states. The nation’s first eight-hour day law for miners in the nation was passed (and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court) in the Utah legislature in 1899. The peaceful, effective, and legal political activity of unionists in the Rocky Mountain region contrasted dramatically with the “pure and simple” unionism of the eastern leadership of the American Federation of Labor. The pursuit of progressive unionism also portrayed union members as good citizens and voters, quite different from the violent terrorists that newspapers of the time often made them out to be based on the actions of a few hard-boiled radical union leaders.
Urban progressivism gained a foothold in Denver, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah; Boise, Idaho; and Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Middle-class women reformers played a direct and visible role as enfranchised citizens in western urban reform movements, which by and large matched the national pattern of concerns for public education, civil service laws, juvenile courts, child labor laws, public transportation franchises, public health, and sanitation. Water supply added a regional variation to the Progressive agenda, as urbanites responded to the challenges of aridity. In Denver, women’s groups joined forces with men’s civic associations and union leaders to demand public control of the city water system, resulting in the creation of the Denver Water Department, a quasi-public agency with an enormous impact on the allocation and distribution of water in the Rockies. Over the next century, Denver Water would be a central case study in the mounting friction between urban and rural interests, as conflicting visions of the region’s political and economic future came to focus on the supply of water.
In Progressive minds, the storage and diversion of water in dams and canals fell under the category of conservation, since water left in streams and rivers seemed wasted and thus in need of “conserving” for productive use. Nevada Democratic U. S. senator Francis Newlands led the campaign for the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902, setting up the framework for the Reclamation Service (later, the Bureau of Reclamation) to build dams and reservoirs to supply water to farms and ranches. The passage of the Reclamation Act has posed a puzzle for historians: Why did senators and congressmen, representing eastern and Midwestern regions with agricultural sectors, vote in favor of a federal program to aid their competitors in the arid West? Historian Don Pisani has solved this riddle with a finding of relevance to the big picture of the region’s political history: the passage of the Reclamation Act offers prime evidence of “the West’s increasing power in Congress,” produced by the admission, in the 1890s, of North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, with those seven additional states having two senators each. The West now “had the power to block important legislation in the Senate,” and recognition of that power “explains the passage of the Reclamation Act.”
In both the Progressive and New Deal Eras, enthusiasm for dam building was widespread, in a dramatic contrast to lamentations in the mid- and late twentieth century over the disturbance of free-flowing rivers. Considerably more controversial was the revolution in federal management of the public domain, as policy shifted from disposal (the transfer to private ownership) to the permanent reservation of lands under federal control. With much of his hearty public image derived from his hunting expeditions in the Rockies, President Theodore Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot were the iconic proponents of this enormous change. Progressive conservation launched a process that remapped the Rockies, with half or more of land recategorized as public, not private, property.
To many Westerners, ranging from the heads of large mining and timber corporations to small-scale ranchers, the creation of the Forest Service and the National Park Service seemed not an exciting and enterprising invention of a new form of land management, but a resurgence of the familiar colonialism of the territorial period. The struggle, both rhetorical and material, between the authority of the states and the authority of the federal government would remain central to regional political life, even as economic change revealed that landscapes reserved from extractive activity could provide equally valuable economic opportunities in recreation and tourism.
During World War I and into the 1920s, the efforts at political cooperation between the middle class and workers took a downturn, as anti-immigrant and antilabor political movements gained force. A mob in Bisbee, Arizona, forcefully deported over a thousand striking miners to a remote desert town in New Mexico in 1917; in Montana, alarm over the speeches and actions of the Industrial Workers of the World came to reshape the basic terms of national civil liberties. During the war, the Sedition Act of 1798 had come back into play as prosecutors around the country used it to bring charges against people who criticized the war or the government. Wanting more power to police than the 1798 law provided, Democratic senator Henry Myers of Montana proposed a bill in Congress in August 1917 that gave the terms of sedition a very broad definition, including criticism of the government during wartime; when it failed to pass at the national level, the Montana legislature “recycled” it, passing it in 1918. With the national mood toward dissent souring, Senator Myers then returned to Washington, D.C., and proposed the bill again. This time, it passed with only minor changes.
Already of inestimable importance in the Rockies, the role of the federal government expanded in the Depression, as federal funding provided the investments once derived from private capital. The operations of the New Deal proved compatible with the enthusiasm of western political leaders for economic development. The landslide victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt throughout the West in 1932 and in subsequent elections, moreover, reconfirmed the power of personality in the region’s political culture. Warm feelings toward Roosevelt were validated and reconfirmed as the Rocky Mountain states received a disproportionately large flow of federal dollars per capita. The interior mountain states’ regional average was between one-third and one-half more than the next highest region, the Pacific states, and double that received by the states in the Great Plains. One form of federal funding had a lasting impact on the region’s landscape, providing an important foundation for the growing tourism economy. Teams of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) cleared hundreds of mountain trails, built roads and bridges, and even carved a spectacular public amphitheater, near Denver, out of solid red rock.
Representatives from the Rocky Mountain states had an important impact in the area of federal agricultural policy and aid programs. Most notably, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, sponsored by Colorado’s Democratic congressman, Edward P. Taylor, rescued the region’s cattle industry from extinction during the drought-ridden 1930s by regulating grazing on federal land. In the next quarter century, the Grazing Service would be merged with the General Land Office to become the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency with the ironic combination of the largest territory with the lowest profile and funding.
At the other end of the spectrum of visibility and fame, Hoover Dam remains the most telling monument to the centrality of Depression-era federal funding in the Rocky Mountain West. As much as the dam has come to stand for New Deal achievements, its very existence was made possible by its pre–New Deal namesake, Herbert Hoover, and his work as secretary of commerce in negotiating the Colorado River Compact of 1922. The compact, as an interstate agreement signed by all the western states through which the river flowed, was itself a political innovation. By the early 1920s, uncertainty over the provisions for allocating the waters of the Colorado River put the economic well-being of all the neighboring states at risk. Called together by Secretary of Commerce Hoover, representatives from Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming all signed on to a plan to divide the flow of the river between the Colorado River’s upper and lower basins. Even though the agreement assumed a much greater and steadier flow of water than the river actually delivered, the compact provided the legal foundation for construction of Hoover Dam and the massive system of dams and reservoirs along the Colorado.
In the 1940s, the Mountain West had both an extraordinary range of federally controlled open spaces in remote locations and an extraordinary enthusiasm on the part of local communities for jobs arising from federal projects. The match between these qualifications and the needs of the American military was an obvious one. The technology involved may have been innovative and novel, but these military installations in the West echoed and even revived the pattern of the nineteenth century, when Army forts had played an important role in providing markets for farmers, ranchers, and merchants. World War II and the cold war led to a resurgence in the importance of the military in the region, with new military posts and bases, as well as contractor-operated defense plants. The majority of the strategically remote Japanese American internment camps dotted the interior West. The Manhattan Project made Los Alamos, New Mexico, into the vital center of the new nuclear age. As the cold war arms race gathered momentum, the interior West won the competition for many of the key facilities in nuclear weapons production: the Nevada Nuclear Test Site north of Las Vegas, the Idaho National Engineering Labs near Twin Falls, the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, and the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver. All of these research and production facilities generated contaminated material and waste requiring permanent storage, and after considerable controversy, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project near Carlsbad, New Mexico, came into operation in 1999. The passage of time would make the legacy of these enterprises into yet another source of tense relations between Westerners and the federal government, as communities worried about the dangers of radioactivity in the soil, water, and air, and workers from the plants asked for a reckoning with the health impacts of their jobs.
Defense projects brought millions of dollars and hundreds of new residents into the region during and after World War II. In ways both directly and indirectly related to those projects, the cold war reconfigured both the western infrastructure and political landscape. Justified by the needs of national security, the Highway Act of 1956 transformed transportation through the region. In the mid-twentieth century, the Bureau of Reclamation went into overdrive, designing, funding, and operating a new network of dams and diversions. Here, too, cold war justifications played their part; the interior West’s greatest champion of water projects, Democratic congressman Wayne Aspinall from western Colorado, was also an outspoken cold warrior, drawing anti-Communist rhetoric into the arguments he made for more dams. The massive Central Arizona and Central Utah Projects represented both the enthusiasm of the interior West’s residents for federally subsidized economic development and the ambitions of the Bureau of Reclamation at their peak.
Central to the political changes of World War II and the cold war was the push for greater power and representation on the part of Indians, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The civil rights movements of the Rockies were thus multiple and varied, ranging from the reclaiming of treaty rights by Indian tribes to the protesting of segregation, on the part of both Mexican Americans and African Americans, in the Denver school system, with Asian Americans contesting both discrimination and relegation to the status of “model minority.” All these campaigns for rights took place in the context of a region shaped by waves of migration and immigration, leaving the legitimacy of any group or individual always open to dispute, as were the roles of insider and outsider. Tensions over population growth thus sometimes pitted groups of white Americans against other white Americans, as “old-timers” and “newcomers” squared off in an ongoing dispute of who was a deserving resident of the Rockies and who was an unwelcome intruder. In that context, with citizens already squabbling intensely among each other, the issue of immigration policy—and especially the status of Mexican immigrants—could be the subject of heated debate while also registering as just another one of many disputes over who deserved the status of rightful Rockies resident.
While the region held no particular advantage over any part of the nation in its progression toward racial inclusiveness and equity in the political process, the history of Denver’s election of mayors is nonetheless striking, with the Latino Federico Peña serving from 1983 to 1991, followed by the African American Wellington Webb. In the same spirit, when the state of Idaho became the home of pernicious white supremacy groups, citizens of the state rallied with a number of organizations, monuments, and governmental resolutions, denouncing racism and defending human rights. Idaho’s Malicious Harassment Act of 1983, adding force to the prosecution of “crimes based on religious and racial hatred,” was, as Stephen Shaw has described it, “the product of bipartisan effort in the Idaho legislature and especially between a Democratic governor and a Republican attorney general.”
In the second half of the twentieth century, an extraordinary reorientation of public opinion and legislation brought on a political earthquake that has not stopped shaking voters and elected officials in the interior West. For more than a century, the discovery and development of natural resources, and the use of land and water to support expanding human settlement, had the enthusiastic support of most Westerners. As the national movement known as environmentalism played out, with particular impact in the interior West, it dramatically shifted the very direction of progress and improvement. In the minds—and votes—of many, the direction ascribed to progress reversed, as population growth and economic development were recast, not as the hope of the region but as its bane and burden. As articulate, powerful, and well-funded organizations, exemplified by the successful voter initiative rejecting Colorado’s bid for the 1976 Winter Olympics, campaigned for the preservation of natural ecosystems, a new political alignment came into being.
The most consequential element of this change was the passage of an extraordinary package of environmental laws in the 1960s and 1970s, ranging from the Wilderness Act of 1964 to the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Without the active and committed support of both Republican and Democratic members of Congress (and the signature of Republican president Richard Nixon), most of these laws would have remained pipe dreams. But as they went into effect, the memory of their bipartisan origins faded from public awareness. Astute Republican office seekers in the Rockies seized the opportunity presented by the friction and frustration arising from the implementation of environmental laws. With an agile dismissal of recent history, they built an image of the Republican Party as the standard-bearer for the right of local Westerners to use natural resources, free of burdensome regulations and restraints imposed by the imperial East. In the Rockies, as elsewhere in the nation, Democrats became more and more identified as the party allied with federal oversight and environmental causes, and Republicans became more and more identified as the party supporting the traditional forces for development, extraction, and growth, a configuration without particularly deep roots in time.
Of the many environmental laws passed in the 1970s, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976—the organic act that belatedly established the specific powers and mission of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) 30 years after its birth—had the greatest effect in stirring up local resistance. The FLPMA gave the BLM (cynically nicknamed the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining”) a much broader, “multiuse” mandate, with recreational and ecological values now included in the BLM’s mandate, along with extractive uses. In areas where locals had come to take for granted their right to graze livestock, make mining claims, and build roads on public lands, the FLPMA evoked strong resentment. In the late 1970s, the Sagebrush Rebellion, calling for the transfer of federal lands to state ownership, as well as relief from federal grazing, mineral, water, and environmental regulations, became a force in several legislatures in the region. Nevada set the precedent with a resolution in 1979 with Assembly Bill 413 mandating the transfer of BLM lands to the state, and Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming passed similar laws. In the manner of such campaigns, Sagebrush Rebels championed the cause of small-scale ranchers, loggers, or miners. While many of their troubles stemmed from changes in the national and even international economy rather than from federal intrusion, many of the reforms they sought also suited the purposes of extractive corporations operating on a vastly larger scale. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah introduced the Western Lands Distribution and Regional Equalization Act—a Sagebrush Rebellion bill—in Congress in the fall of 1979, but the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 took the wind out of the sails of the Sagebrush Rebellion, with the installation of a presidential administration that declared official sympathy and support for the rebels.
Since the 1970s, the majority of the region’s electoral votes have gone to Republican presidential candidates, tempting pundits to declare that the region had become solidly and definitively conservative. And yet the region’s voters often chose Democrats as governors, senators, and congresspeople. The case study of Idaho makes this point dramatically: widely characterized as extremely conservative, the voters of Idaho four times elected Democrat Cecil Andrus as governor. Utah’s history makes the same point: between 1965 and 1985, Democrats (Calvin Rampton, followed by Scott Matheson) held the post of governor. Gubernatorial elections have never ceased to follow a pattern of committed variability: in 2000, all eight of the Rocky Mountain states had Republican governors, but by 2006 five had chosen Democrats as governors. The region’s defiance of clear and steady political categorization, and the reluctance of many voters to see themselves as consistent party loyalists, continued into the twenty-first century.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, faced a number of tough challenges in self-definition. To some degree, this involved the national split between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. But the energy boom of the 1990s and the early twentieth-first century opened new rifts in the center of the party. Beginning in the 1990s, a big boom in natural gas production in the Rockies strained Republican unity, as oil and gas developers struggled with opposition from ranchers and sportsmen. A shared identification of all these people as “conservatives” did nothing to reduce this conflict.
While some Rocky Mountain residents gave unswerving support to the cause of environmental preservation and some gave equally single-minded support to the extraction of natural resources, a much larger percentage of the region’s residents occupied a category one could call “the muddled majority,” with attitudes that were far more characterized by hybridity than by purity. This majority tried to accommodate its desire for the resources produced by extraction to the changing economic valuation of nature, as recreation, tourism, second homes, and the attraction of intact landscapes to employers and employees became increasingly powerful forces in local and state economies.
As a practice called cooperative conservation emerged in response to this complicated set of issues, the political world of the Rockies presented an instructive and telling laboratory for experiments in the evolving meaning of federalism. In many arenas, the relationship between federal authority and local governments came up for renegotiation and redefinition. Over a century and a half, the region had emerged with a proliferation of jurisdictional lines laying out the turf of numerous federal agencies, state agencies, municipalities, counties, tribes, and special districts with jurisdiction over matters like electricity and water supply. Nearly every law, regulation, or policy required some degree of coordination between these various jurisdictions, demanding considerable political inventiveness in finding methods of negotiation and collaboration across these lines, and in allocating authority and responsibility among various levels of governance. In many western communities, a new tradition of “stakeholder” coalitions or “watershed” associations came into play as representatives of agencies and various interest groups met to work out agreements for the management of local natural resources. From the Malpai Borderlands Group in southern New Mexico and Arizona north to the Clark Fork Basin Committee in Montana, the Rockies saw a proliferation of groups attempting to avoid the usual channels of contention and litigation, and, in the words of Matt McKinney and William Harmon, “to integrate the interests of affected parties” through “collaboration and consensus building.” Without any particular awareness of the connection between them, the descendants of white settlers had happened onto a process of decision making that bore a similarity, coincidental but still striking, to the consensus-based practices of the Native American tribes who originally lived in the region.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century in the state of Colorado, one-third of registered voters chose “unaffiliated” over identification with either major party. In all the states of the Rockies, even many voters who went ahead and registered as Democrats or Republicans showed, in their voting, the region’s trademark flexibility and inconsistency. How can the persistent pattern of weak party identification and independent voting be explained?
First, economic development, often with federal support, has been the key concern of the region’s citizens, and Democrats and Republicans have both pursued this goal. In the early twenty-first century, environmental preservation may be primarily identified with Democrats, but Democrats from the region have a strong record in supporting projects in economic development, whatever their effect in environmental disruption. Democratic congressman and senator Carl Hayden was the leading force behind the giant Central Arizona Project, bringing water to the state’s cities, a project loyally supported by the noted conservationist, Democratic congressman Morris Udall.
Second, for many of the most pressing and immediate western issues, the positions of the major parties had little bearing or relevance. In matters ranging from the allocation of water for urban or agricultural use to land-use planning in growth-burdened counties, from the challenges of fighting wildlands fire to the mediation of conflicts between the recreational economy and the extractive economy, the political platforms of both parties bore a striking resemblance to Mother Hubbard’s very bare cupboard.
Third, in many parts of the Rocky Mountain West, high rates of mobility have both introduced and minimized the possibility of big changes in political behavior. In the late twentieth century, the Rockies had the highest population growth rates in the country. Yet, even if many of those newcomers arrived with far more settled party loyalties than those held by longer-term residents, the newcomers did not come in organized phalanxes, equipped to swing into action and to substitute their ways for local tradition. Moreover, in recent decades, for many of the new residents, the charm of natural landscapes has been a major factor in the decision to relocate, leaving them solid reasons to join the “muddled majority,” with loyalties split between continued economic growth and the preservation of natural amenities.
And, fourth, the persistent and omnipresent western myth, of a region populated by hardy folk characterized by an unbreakable spirit of independence and self-determination, has exercised an unmistakable power over voters—with consequential results. The myth’s inability to achieve a high score in historical accuracy has not in any way reduced the certainty that it inspires in its believers, nor its political power. With surprisingly undiminished power, this myth can be counted on to validate and celebrate the region’s party-defying mavericks. Resting on the inseparability of myth from reality, the political history of the Rocky Mountain states offers constant reminders of the extraordinary subjectivity that guides human self-perception and self-appraisal in the terrain of politics.
See also Great Plains; territorial government.
FURTHER READING. John Porter Bloom, The American Territorial System, 1973; Thomas C. Donnelly, Rocky Mountain Politics, 1940; David M. Emmons, “Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West,” Western Historical Quarterly (Winter, 1994); John P. Enyeart, “By Laws of Their Own Making”: Political Culture and the Everyday Politics of the Mountain West Working Class, 1870–1917, dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2002; Marcia Tremmel Goldstein, “Meet Me at the Ballot Box”: Women’s Innovations in Party and Electoral Politics in Post-Suffrage Colorado, 1893–1898, dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2007; Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America, 1976; John Kantner, Ancient Puebloan Southwest, 2004; Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, revised ed., 1998; Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History, 1966; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, 1987; Richard Lowitt, ed., Politics in the Postwar American West, 1995; Matt McKinney and William Harmon, Western Confluence: A Guide to Governing Natural Resources, 2004; Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914, 2004; Kenneth Owens, “Patterns and Structure in Western Territorial Politics,” Western Historical Quarterly (October, 1970); Donald Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935, 2002; Earl Pomeroy, The Territories and the United States, 1881–1890: Studies in Colonial Administration, 1969; Francisco A. Rosales, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement, 1997; Stephen Shaw, “Harassment, Hate, and Human Rights in Idaho,” in Politics in the Postwar American West, edited by Richard Lowitt, 94–105, 1995; Daniel A. Smith, Tax Crusaders and the Politics of Direct Democracy, 1998; Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African-Americans in the American West, 1598–1990, 1998; Clive S. Thomas, ed., Politics and Public Policy in the Contemporary American West, 1991; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West, 1991; Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, 2005.
PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK AND
MARCIA TREMMEL GOLDSTEIN