BackStory; The GOP: A History of the Republican Party

This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. Tens of thousands of Republican party delegates are converging in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. But many high-profile Republicans will be setting this one out, including Trump's former rival, Jeb Bush. He told MSNBC that he can't even bring himself to vote for Trump in November. Donald Trump is barely a Republican. He's certainly not a conservative. Conservatism is temporarily dead. Trump's nomination represents a battle for the heart and soul of the GOP. But then again, so did the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Protesters show up carrying caskets around the Cal Palace in San Francisco that's a RIP GOP. Today on backstory, we'll look at the GOP's origins and evolution from concerns over the spread of slavery in the 1850s to the spread of communism a century later. The history of the Republican Party today on backstory. Major funding for backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial

Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot, and I'm here with Peter Onif. Hey there, Brian. And Ed Ayers is with us. Hey, Brian, Peter. Today's show is about the history of the Republican Party. So we're going to start, well, where it all started with the GOP's birthplace. Hey Ed, I actually know where that is. And I have it from an authoritative source. The Republican National Committee says that the first formal meeting of the new Republican Party was held in Jackson, Michigan on July 6, 1854. Well, there you have it, straight from the elephant's trunk. Actually, Peter, Brian, not everybody accepts the party line. It's true that Jackson claims to be the first formal meeting of the party, but other towns, including Ripon, Wisconsin, and Exeter, New Hampshire, claim to be where the idea

and the name of the Republican Party were born. So we decided to reach out to a couple of folks to help us settle this profound dispute. I'm Barbara Rumconis, and I am the curator at the Exeter Historical Society in Exeter, New Hampshire. My name is Brian Riley. I'm the lead docent at the Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. Well, according to the story, in 1853 on October 12th, Amos Tuck, who was one of our congressmen, founded the Republican Party at a place called the Squam Scott Hotel. It actually was a secret meeting here in Exeter, New Hampshire. He's the one who gave it the name Republican Party. Our meeting was held on March 20th, 1854. We are the earliest public meeting where the name Republican was officially used in the formation of a new party. So here's the problem. You have two towns a thousand miles apart. They each had meetings a few months apart, one secret, one official. And if both stories are true, it's unlikely that either

group knew about the other. Not to mention the other towns in Michigan and Iowa that also claim meetings in 1854. So Ed, what's the answer that we don't know where the party started? Well, Brian, if you ask most Republican presidential candidates over the past 40 years, they might say Exeter. New Hampshire has the first presidential primary and most Republican candidates make a point of stopping an Exeter. But only one historical source says that Exeter's private meeting actually took place in October 1853. So maybe that's why the GOP has remained tactfully silent about Exeter's claim. The Republican National Committee has given Ripon credit for the first spontaneous informal meeting of the party, though. And Jackson still gets credit. How's that for log rolling? It seems very effective here. You know, there's another way of resolving this debate. When you hear Barbara Mkunas and Brian Riley talk about these first party meetings,

they describe very similar experiences. There are groups of disaffected men with different political backgrounds who are bound by a common cause. And Mkunas suggests that maybe that common cause was bigger than any one town. The idea of preventing slavery from spreading was really an idea that was coming of age at that time. And it's not too surprising then that it turns up in various parts of the north and out west. And so maybe it did occur in Exeter, New Hampshire and in Wisconsin and other parts of the United States. But we're all part of that movement. We're all going to have to have a beer together and shake hands and say, well, we all did it together. I think that's the only way to solve the problem. Now, Brian Riley over in Ripon, Wisconsin will raise a glass to that or at least part the way as long as Ripon still gets its due. There always has to be a first meeting somewhere and we just happen to have that distinction. If there weren't other meetings that followed our meeting wouldn't have mattered much, but you still need that starting point as well.

Well, regardless of whether a Republican party was born, this year's full of predictions that 2016 would be the end of the GOP. Because the Republican party is now in crisis. Under a demographic death sentence. The death of the Republican party. Oh, he's in a coffin there. As the Republican National Convention kicks off in Cleveland, many within the party are jockeying for control over what they see as its heart and soul. Is it cutting taxes, small government or social conservatism? Or is it Donald Trump's campaign slogan? Make America great again. But battles over the grand old party's heart and soul and even how to define it are nothing new. Now, let's be clear, ideological twists and turns are not limited to Republicans. But today, we're responding to the GOP's current crossroads by exploring its genesis and transformations since nominating its first presidential candidate 160 years ago. We'll ask what

the label Republican meant to Thomas Jefferson who embraced it decades before the party emerged. We'll hear some catchy GOP campaign songs and we'll find out why baseball, icon Jackie Robinson went from card care and Republican to dissolution independent in the 1960s. But first, I want to return to Barber Room Kunis' idea that the Republican party was born in all these places simultaneously. What's going on in the early 1850s to make that possible? Well, it's because many places are worried about the future of the country and there's lots of things to worry about. You could be worried about immigrants and the Pope who seems to be pushing them around. If you were, you'd be a known nothing. Or you could be worried about alcohol in which you belong to a temperance party. Or you could be a Democrat who's disgusted with the way that the Democrats seem to be selling out to Southern Democrats. Or you could be an abolitionist who thinks that what you really need to do is get rid of slavery. And what you need to do, Peter, is not only to find a way to tie together these places, but to tie together all those themes.

So this is a coalition of parties that becomes a party? Yeah, but it looks unlikely because there's not much that ties all that together. Well, what does tie it all together? There's got to be some central idea. Well, as far apart as New Hampshire and Wisconsin are, they're both in the North. So you got this heterogeneous mass, but they're looking for something to hold the party together. And they look around and they say, what's the most immediate threat? It is the white south and the slavery that it seems intent to expand into the West, ruining the future of the nation. So you're going to have to find a way to stop the spread of slavery. All right, I get the northern thing, but even I know it that most of the people in the North were not abolitionists. Well, about 2% of them, Brian. Exactly right. But northerners are worried about a lot of things that kind of relate to this. What they can do is they can look farther to the West and see, uh-oh, the rest of the country is basically up for grabs now. If we allow the south and its slavery to

expand into these new territories of Kansas and Nebraska and other areas, we don't have a chance because if you show up with the little house on the prairie contingent and you're competing against a guy with 12 enslaved men to help clear the woods or whatever, you're at a severe disadvantage. So what ties northerners together this culture of industry and of every man being his own boss and of agriculture that's flourishing, it's all imperiled if they allow the West to be occupied by the slaveholders. So the future of the country is going to be determined by the future of the West. Exactly. And the future of the country needs to be governed by northern men and northern principles, not the corruption of the south. So that's Brian how you get from people not being abolitionists, but to being fervent northerners who believe that they need to run the country. So is that where Abraham Lincoln becomes the poster child for the Republicans? Yeah, there's two parts of that, Brian. He becomes the poster child partly because he's not an abolitionist. You know, he's not calling for the instant end of slavery. And therefore he's not threatening to

a lot of people. But he's also a railroad lawyer. He's about progress. You know, the great stories of him teaching himself to read by the firelight and his nickname is honest Abe. He's going to be the guy who's going to throw the corrupt white south and their dough faces. They are called northern democratic allies out of the White House. So Abraham Lincoln embodies all the things that this white northern coalition believes in, which is hard work, free soil, free labor, free men as they're saying goes. And they're very fortunate to find this Abraham Lincoln guy who's able to put that in a very palatable package. So Lincoln's president and there's a civil war about to happen. What happens to Lincoln's party? Yeah, so after the election of 1860, which Lincoln just wins by 40% of the vote, the White South does secede in the face of Lincoln's election. There is a war and then in order to win the war, Lincoln finds himself taking one step after another to abolish slavery. But here's the amazing thing. When you get to 1865 and the war is over and amazingly enough,

the Republican Party has steered the United States through that war to victory. They come out of the Civil War in 1865 not only as the destroyers of slavery, but as the saviors of the United States. Nobody would have imagined five years earlier that this brand new party kind of cobbled together from multiple places and multiple sources could have such a unifying identity. That's a pretty powerful result. Of course, we lose Abraham Lincoln shortly after the war. What kept the party together after that? So yeah, now they have to put the pieces back together without the one man who's been the only thing basically holding the Republican Party together. So Republicans have to find a way to hold themselves together enough to force the South to reform itself, to be worthy of rejoining the nation. 13th Amendment abolishes slavery. The 14th Amendment creates universal citizenship. The 15th Amendment creates universal suffrage. When those things are in place, the Republicans say, okay, now we have reconstructed the nation so

that it could come back together. And the white Republicans realize, you know, we don't really need the votes of black southerners to stay in political power because the very original vision of a great northern and now western party has made us so strong that we can basically turn our backs on the people that we have freed. And by 1876, they withdraw from the South. They allow the restoration of white supremacy in the South, the Supreme Court sanctions that in the 1890s. And the result is another 50 years of injustice in the South. So that's the narrative arc as improbable as it seems to go from either New Hampshire or Wisconsin all the way through the war and reconstruction and back out the other side in less than 20 years. And a result of that remarkable story of 20 years, the GOP is able to draw up on that for generations following. You're always able to claim Abraham Lincoln. You're always able to claim the party that ended slavery. You're always able to claim the party that put the United States back together again. It's a remarkable

legacy. What's interesting is how it's changed in all the years since. Hi podcast listeners. If you're in Washington DC area this coming Tuesday, July 19th, we'd love to invite you to come spend an evening with us. That's right. We have a live show at the Jack Morton Auditorium in George Washington University. With both candidates for president having some uneasy relationships with the media of this election year, we'll be exploring the relationship between U.S. presidents and the press through history. We've got so many great things in store, including a live audience, special guests, historian Catherine Brownell, and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Carol Gleonick. Head to our Facebook page for details.

Hope to see you there. One of the major debates within the GOP today is over foreign policy. Blasme, former GOP rival Marco Rubio criticized Trump's plan to limit America's international alliances. My hope is that he can be persuaded away from those sorts of positions. I think it's important on those of us who believe in American global engagement to make a case to the American people while an inward looking foreign policy is counterproductive and quite frankly very negative for our security. In 1952, the GOP was embroiled in a similar dispute, foreign policy dominated the news with the Cold War heating up and the Korean conflict stalemated in its 30-year. Democratic president Harry Truman announced that he wouldn't run for another term after his popularity plummeted. The stage seems set for Dwight D. Eisenhower to waltz in, claim the Republican nomination,

and get the GOP back in the White House for the first time in 20 years. After all, Ike was a popular five-star World War II general and the Supreme Commander of NATO. But in reality, nothing was insured for Eisenhower. He faced a formidable opponent within the GOP, Ohio Senator Robert Taft. Taft was the son of a former president and was famous for leading the charge against Democratic administrations for decades. Historian William Hitchcock says that pushback earned Taft the nickname Mr. Republican. In 1952, Robert Taft was certainly the inside candidate to become the Republican nominee for president, not because he was obviously the strongest national candidate. Most polls had him getting beaten by Harry Truman had Truman run again by a mile. So in a way, he was either Thelma or Louise, I'm not sure, but he was at the wheel of the car of the GOP and everyone was perfectly happy to drive off the cliff with Robert Taft at the wheel

because he'd earned it. Hitchcock says that Eisenhower and Taft were bitterly divided over U.S. foreign policy. While Eisenhower was keen to build and maintain international alliances, Taft was a proponent of isolationism. Robert Taft basically just took the view that the goal, the role of the federal government was to look after the interests of the American citizens. The rest of the world can and should take care of itself and he basically suggested that America now demobilize, that it returned back to its internal needs, that the United States serve as a model to the world for what free markets can actually do. We just don't have to go out and export that model to other places. Taft is still thinking we can actually avoid engaging in a long, costly ideological conflict with the communist world by essentially shoring up the strengths of American security at home. Wailing in the white trunks in 1952 is superstar war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower and he's what some called an internationalist and he

seems really dead set against Taft's position. What was his argument? Well, Eisenhower is such an interesting guy because of course he is in his very personal experience and internationalist. He has a sense for how interconnected the world is and he also knows that the Second World War was one not just by American force of arms but by a great combined alliance of great nations working together. Alliances and international institutions are actually a really cheap way of helping America build friends, create international security, hold back the communists. It's precisely the opposite worldview of Robert Taft. And will whose view fit more squarely with the Republican party's historical position? Well, like most major political parties, there are multiple voices in the Republican party in the 20th century and the Republican party started out in the 20th century

with a number of, you know, rather strong voices of internationalist engaged. Yeah, the sky Teddy Roosevelt, as I recall. Yeah, we could look to McKinley and his successor Teddy Roosevelt who engaged with the wider world believe that America would be more secure and more prosperous if it took a more aggressive role in defending its interests beyond its borders. And you know, it gets discredited for predictable reasons. The United States gets drawn into the First World War by a Democratic president at a time when many Republicans are beginning to say, let's pull back their disillusion by the results of the First World War. They basically are much less interested in engaging with European problems and European affairs. So if we return to Taft in 1952, how did this fight play out on the campaign trail itself? Did Eisenhower and Taft ever debate America's role in the world face to face? No, Alas, because at that time Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. In 1951, he was out of the country. So Taft and Eisenhower did not have

formal debates. However, Taft and Eisenhower did meet together to talk about the future direction of the Republican party. It was an early 1951 before Eisenhower was a formal candidate for president and he had a secret meeting with Robert Taft at the Pentagon. Taft was ushered in to the Pentagon in a side door so that the press wouldn't know he was meeting with Eisenhower. And the two men sat together and Eisenhower said, will you agree to support the policies of supporting the NATO alliance and above all, sending American troops to Europe in 1951, which is what Eisenhower wanted? If you say, I will leave this room and I will make an announcement to the press that I will never run for president of the United States. Amazingly, Robert Taft said, no, I do not believe in those things and I will not support them as a candidate or as president. After the meeting, Taft leaves and

Eisenhower quite famously pulls out a little piece of paper out of his pocket on which he had written his statement declaring he would never be a candidate for president and he tears it up. Wow. Well, do you think that that was a key moment in Eisenhower actually deciding, hey, I am going to run? It was absolutely central. Eisenhower chose to run for president because he was a strong internationalist and that was above all the driving force that propelled him into a campaign that he did not really want. But he felt that either way you would end up with Democratic rule for over 20 years, which meant really the death of the two-party system, or you would have a Taft presidency which would bring about a catastrophic foreign policy. I'm not giving away any state secrets to let our listeners know that Eisenhower won the nomination and went on to win the presidency becoming a two-term president. I'm curious to know whether you

think Eisenhower's victory was a real turning point within the GOP and perhaps the nation as a whole. I think Eisenhower's election in 1952 was absolutely a turning point. Robert Taft said, you cannot be a conservative and be an internationalist because internationalism is expensive and above all, it requires the expansion of the federal government and the executive branch especially. Eisenhower said, no, no, we can have a strong international presence, we can have a strong, reasonably strong presidency and we can also talk like conservatives and in some cases, we can act like conservatives. Eisenhower balanced three budgets out of eight. So he actually managed to figure out how to square the circle between being a conservative on the home front and what amounted to an internationalist on the global front and every president since Eisenhower has been an internationalist. That's not an accident. William Hitchcock is a historian at the

University of Virginia's Miller Center. He's working on a book called The Age of Eisenhower, America in the World in the 1950s. Hey Ed, Peter, so far we've covered two pretty different eras of the Republican Party, but even I know that the word Republican has changed a lot over the course of American history. I'd love to hear from you guys what Republican actually meant at the time that the Republican Party was formed. That's a good question, Brian, and I want to find out the answer to from Peter because I will say this, when they do name the party that in the 1850s when they were created, they don't have very promising materials to work with. The two major tributaries that are flowing into the Republicans are on one hand the Wigs with an H. What's down with that? And the other is the Know-Nothings, which just can't be good marketing material. So Peter,

where does Republican come from? Ed, it was a tried and true name. There were Republicans before that would be the Democratic Republicans of Thomas Jefferson. But as we like to say in the business, there are two kinds of Republican, Big R and Little R, and I think the New Republican Party was exploiting the connection to both. That is, to Jefferson and as Lincoln put it, it was Jefferson who articulated the fundamental values of the New Republic. And it's also that idea of the American experiment in Republican government. That's with a small or- Let me just pause here. What does Republic mean as opposed to Democrat? Well, it's got the nice feel of ye oldie at this time because democracy is somewhat tainted by the Big D democracy, the Jacksonian party and its successors. And to get back to the origins to ye oldie republic, that's the idea that all men are created equal. That citizens are

covering themselves. Those time honored ideas were the touchstone for the New Republican Party as they had been for the nation itself. So what I hear you saying, Peter, is this party sort of barging on to the American political scene says, hey, look at us. We're brand new, but we are new wine and old bottles. We're honoring the tradition out of which we grow. That right? Yeah, that's exactly it had. Well, I think the reason they do that is that they are a very new wine. They are a regional party trying to do something that no party has done before American history, which is to contain the spread of slavery. So I think they need all of the legitimacy that they can get. And then moreover, the Civil War begins and they start doing all of these things that no party had done before. They create three amendments to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, declaring if you're born in America, you're an American citizen, creating universal suffrage. This is a lot for a party to do in its first 15 years, right? It sure is, Ed. The only problem is at the very end you kept referring to they. And isn't it true that those

last accomplishments were really pushed through by a radical fringe called the radical Republicans? Was it really all Republicans that were pushing for this? No, but they persuaded other Republicans to go along with them. And so that's kind of what's amazing is that the Republicans then keep winning for election after election after election after doing the most radical things any political party ever done in American history. Well, that's always easy when you don't let the other party into Congress said. But after the Republicans in essence pull back from Reconstruction, once Reconstruction is over, isn't it true that the Democratic Party gains strength remarkably quickly and we pretty much have parity between the parties? For decade after decade, you have basically each party is somewhere between 49 and 51% of the electorate. But I think Brian until into the 20th century, the Republicans would have been known as relatively the party of big government.

They're the ones that are giving out all this money and pinch into civil war veterans. They're all about using the government to help build railroads. They're all about using government to establish a high tariff. So it's like they start doing one thing. They end up being another. So Ed, you've made a strong case for the GOP being the party of big government for a long time. When does the flip take place and how does it take place? Well, the flip actually begins to take place after World War I. The Republicans come along and they say Wilson has extended us to Europe. He's run up a deficit. We are going to get back to sound the government and that's all embodied in one of the longest serving secretaries of treasury in the history of the country. Now he's no Hamilton. So don't get excited. But his name is Andrew Mellon and he serves from Harding all the way through Hoover and he reduces the highest rate on income taxes from something like the high 70% all the way down to 25% and symbolically this program of balanced budgets and reducing

taxes on the wealthiest became the hallmark of the Republican party. And by the way, although this is the show about the history of the Republican party, we might note that the Democrats change just as much from the party of small government in the 19th century and well into the 20th century to the party of big government under Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. So Peter, do you think that the Republican party of today has in fact accomplished what it tried to with its adoption of the Republican name back in the 1850s? Well, Ed, I think they did. They established their right to be one of the parties and to change their party line. By the election of 1896, their grand old party's decades-long dominance of American politics had waned. A Democrat occupied the White House and Republicans had lost the popular vote in the

previous three elections. The nation was convulsed by labor violence, financial crises, and a third party agrarian revolt. Meanwhile, the GOP continued to hold on to its identity as the party that had won the Civil War so many decades before. It's a party of white, northern Yankee politicians and voters. This is political scientist, Solodyne Ambar. It's a temperance. It's a dry party, right? Actually, ultimately favoring prohibition. It's the Stodgy National Pro Business Graysuit Party. Now, the Democrats past candidates had been just as Stodgy, but in 1896, they nominated a fiery young populist named William Jennings Bryan, passionate and polarizing Bryan appealed to disaffected farmers and workers by railing against banks and big business. At first, it looked like the GOP would rely on its standard playbook. Republicans nominated Ohio Governor William McKinley, a former Union soldier and old-fashioned

statesman, but McKinley had a secret weapon, a wealthy charismatic campaign manager named Mark Hannah. Ambar says Hannah was the Karl Rove of his day, a political operative who raised huge amounts of money and rebranded the GOP. Hannah makes McKinley. I think that's not too strong to say and so doing. I think he makes a new kind of politics in the United States. The new politics included aggressively courting new groups of voters. Ambar says Hannah wanted to retain the GOP base, but also he wants to capitalize on the idea that this is a Republican party that might be a little bit more of a big tent party, not so vocally anti-immigrant, perhaps not so vocally anti-labor. There is the hope at this point. I think there's a reason why Karl Rove is frequently associated. He associated himself with Hannah because he wanted to, both men,

Hannah and Rove wanted to expand the Republican base with Rove. It was with Latinos and with Hannah. It was with new immigrants. Why capitulate to the Democratic bosses who are bringing in so many of these immigrant groups? Let's see how many of them we can get for ourselves. He's also someone who's, because of his resources, is able to bring hundreds of thousands of Americans to McKinley. What do you say bringing voters to McKinley? What are you talking about paying them off, giving them rides? Yes, bringing them on through trains on railroads, paying their way, bringing them to picnics and personal meetings with McKinley. Tons of folks come to McKinley. In part, because McKinley doesn't want to get on the road himself, McKinley wants to be an old-style candidate who doesn't go out and sully himself by appealing directly to the masses for their votes. And so, well, Hannah says, okay, if the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to

the mountain. Where a lot of those people coming to see McKinley businessmen and was part of the brand that the Republican Party was now going to be seen as the party of big business, if you will. The party of big business, but also the party of working people. And I think when we, not to jump ahead, but hear echoes of this in sort of Trump's language today, it's a very peculiar and perhaps limited vision of what we mean by working people, right? So we're talking about a largely Protestant working class, a brand that says, hey, the candidate is successful and associate yourself with a party of success. Dean, the Republican Party has one of the all-time great icons, at least if you're in the North, that's Abraham Lincoln. And for a long time, they're known as the party of Lincoln. How do they pivot towards the industrializing America, increasingly imperial America

without losing the Lincoln thing? Well, it's a great question, Brian. I think, you know, Lincoln is, he's really like the Bible. He's got so much in the way of positive quotations for any political ideology. I said so much. So you can pick out whatever you like for Lincoln and, you know, liberals and conservatives and all others can love him at the same time. So the GOP can still be the party of Lincoln, but the party of economic progress rather than perhaps racial progress. That's right. Lincoln becomes this kind of iconic, happy warrior for industry, for empire, for progress and stability. Sounds like he moves from Abraham Lincoln to a Lincoln continental. Well, those are your words. Yes. So wasn't Hannah's real contribution to campaigns? The money man isn't he the guy who switches from funding campaigns internally by having party workers give

money from their government salaries to going outside of politics for money, frankly, going to big business. Sure. There's no doubt about it. I mean, Hannah is like, I guess, what move on dot org or the Koch brothers rolled up into one, right? He's an individual with this mass amount of wealth, but he's also a man with tremendous networks. He's also linked to the big industrial capitalists of his era. And that likewise helps funnel money and resources to McKinley. So, yes, this is a whole new kind of campaign, a whole new kind of electoral process that Americans are experiencing in 1896. And I think for much of the remaining, our remaining history becomes the way elections are campaigned. Well, spoiler alert McKinley wins the election and in fact he's reelected in 1900 and then assassinated shortly after that, bringing on Teddy Roosevelt. What I want to know is does Hannah's branding and campaign management, does that vision for a lasting Republican

majority outlive McKinley? Perhaps for a brief moment, but not for very long, I think in part because of Roosevelt's vision of what the Republican Party should be, which is a progressive party. And Hannah certainly wanted no part of I think the direct quote was that damned cowboy being one heartbeat away from the presidency. Ultimately, that party becomes more monolithic. It reverts back to just the party of tradition, big business, you know, temperance and all of the rest and good Protestant values. I'm picturing someone in Connecticut in a business suit on a train at that time. I don't know, but it's it's that kind of party with a mild shakeup from a more than a milder and important shakeup. But one, ultimately, I think that doesn't last very long. Dean, the legacy of Mark Hannah, could we have a Carl Rove in the Republican Party without people

like Mark Hannah? Does he really create the template for this? No Carl Rove, no James Carville, no David Axelrod or David Plough? So Democratic, and Michael Deaver, who is more of the image maker for Ronald Reagan, I think all of these modern figures owe a great deal of debt to Mark Hannah. Saladine Ambar is a political scientist at Lehigh University. We're going to step away now from these ideological battles and turn to what should be a more harmonious feature of politics, Republican campaign songs. So this tune is called a Hot Time in the Old Town tonight. It was originally associated with an infamous St. Louis brothel, but oddly enough, it became Teddy Roosevelt's unofficial campaign

song during his presidential run of 1904. Supporters latched on to it because Roosevelt's famous roughwriters supposedly sang it in battle during the Spanish-American War a few years before. Campaign songs were a mainstay of both political parties, especially in the 19th century. They were performed on the campaign trail and in local political clubs and even published in booklets called Songsters. These tunes were written or adapted by supporters and helped spread the party message in the decades before radio and television. We chatted with an expert on this topic and assembled this tribute to GOP campaign songs. My name is Stuart Schimler, I'm the president of American Pioneer Music and I became interested in political campaign songs when I first heard the song Jefferson in Liberty. During the mid 19th century, American political culture was expanding to new groups of people.

You could even find newspapers in the 1850s who would hold contests where voters could submit their favorite songs or songs that they've written. So it was very clear that people were able to express political ideas easily with campaign songs. John C. Freeman was the first Republican nominee for president in 1856. We'll give him Jesse touches on so many hot button political issues of the day, especially the idea of free soil and free men. The chorus refers to Jesse Freeman who is the wife of John C. Freeman as a representation of who he is as a man and who James Buchanan is not. His opponent, of course, is a bachelor. So the song clearly highlights not only John C. Freeman and his beautiful wife, but also the fact that he's

an adventurer and the perfect representation of the new Republican party. Roughly 10 years after the end of the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant was leaving office. He presided over one of the most corrupt presidencies in United States history. With this in mind, the GOP chose Governor of Ohio Rutherford B. Hayes as their nominee, someone who carried very little political baggage. The boys in blue is all about the Civil War and what we call waving the bloody shirt. As you go through the lyrics, it clearly identifies the Democrats as the cause of the Civil War and the Americans shouldn't want them to take control of the White House because of it.

Most of all, we could say that it's actually diverting attention from the real problems of the age, such as political corruption and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. Speaking of diverting attention from real problems, the most popular campaign song in 1884 sort of gets your mind off of anything about politics and into the political sewer of the day. Mama wears my paw as a campaign song in support of candidate James G. Blaine, or maybe more so, it's a song that's designed to deride and embarrass his opponent Grover Cleveland. The song is about Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child crying out to where his father is. Amazingly, this backfired on the Blaine campaign Grover Cleveland admitted to having an illegitimate child and the voters were turned off by dirty politics and he became the first Democrat to serve

in the White House since the Civil War. The campaign song was killed by mass communication. As we moved into the 1920s and people bought record players and they listened to music on the radio, there were different ways for communicating political messages. With that in mind, though, once Madison Avenue became successful, sweet jingles for TV commercials became very valuable. I like Ike was written by the great songwriter Irving Berlin and it's probably the most popular campaign song of the 20th century. You look at the lyrics that clearly highlights Eisenhower as a man who led the troops during World War II. It almost takes you back to all those wig campaign songs of the 1840s and the 1850s.

More recently, Republican presidential candidates have adopted billboard hits like born in the USA for their campaign music. Yet supporters still show their love for the candidates through song. A simple YouTube search turns up grassroots musical tributes for all of the recent Republican and Democratic presidential nominees. These diddies prove that the tradition of voter-written music is alive and well. Those are the USA Freedom Kids from Pensacola, Florida performing at a Donald Trump rally in January 2016. Stuart Schimler helped us tell that story. He's the president of American Pioneer Music.

Thanks to Nate Valentine for his rendition of Mama, where's my paw? To hear more Republican campaign songs, visit our website at backstoryradio.org. Jackie Robinson is one of the most iconic athletes of the 20th century, famed for breaking baseball's color barrier in 1947. But he also has this long career as a civil rights advocate and activist under the banner of the Republican Party for many, many years. This is historian Leah Wright-Rigurr. She says through much of the 20th century, many African Americans, especially those in the segregated Democratic South, remained loyal to the party of Lincoln. But like the Democrats, the GOP had no single position on civil rights. There was a vast ideological diversity that bubbled within the Republican Party. So there was a liberal wing. There was a moderate wing. There was a conservative wing and that these parties

and factions were all fighting one another for control, especially over the matter of civil rights over some 40, 50 years. And Jackie Robinson was loyal to the Republican Party. In the 1960 presidential election, he threw his support behind Vice President Richard Nixon, who was running against Democrat John F. Kennedy. He goes to 100 cities in a span of two months or so, campaigning for Richard Nixon, who has earned somewhat of a reputation for being the civil rights guy in the Eisenhower administration and even before that in the Senate. I want to talk to you for a moment about civil rights. This is Nixon in a 1960 campaign ad. Now the record shows there's been more progress in civil rights in the past eight years than in the preceding eight years because this administration has insisted on making progress. And I want to continue and speed up that progress. I want to help build a better America for all Americans. Nixon lost the election, but he won 32% of the Black vote

close to Eisenhower's total in 1956. Four years later though, Robinson and other Black Republicans weren't so sure they could stay in the GOP. In 1964, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Bipartisan Civil Rights Act into law. Most of the opposition to the bill came from his fellow Democrats. The vast majority of Republican lawmakers supported the legislation. One of the very few Republicans to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act was that year's GOP nominee for president. Barry Goldwater, as a small government libertarian, talks about what he says is a return to true conservatism in embrace of say, for example, states rights over civil rights. Now, if you can imagine, this does not sit well with many African Americans. And that's because states rights was the battle cry for preserving the old Jim Crow segregation system. Is that correct?

Exactly. And it's a real shock to the system. His embrace of states rights allows room for white segregationist for racist for Ku Klux Klan members to join the party. So you have people on the ground, African American voters, including African American voters who voted for Richard Nixon in 1960, saying, this is a person who wants to make sure that, you know, a segregationist can keep his foot on my neck. Where did Jackie Robinson stand on this? Jackie Robinson is very vocal about his dislike of goldwater and what he sees is the danger of goldwaterism. At the 1964 convention, for example, 50,000 protesters show up to protest Barry Goldwater. Jackie Robinson leaves the convention and protests with these people. So we see, for example, protesters carrying caskets around the Cal Palace in San Francisco, that's a RIP GOP. And we have some archival audio of Robinson

at that convention. He was one of many black delegates. Let's hear what he had to say. Oh, I think that the mood of the Negro delegates is such that they could not, would not, will not support the nominee if it's goldwater. Of those that we have discussed now, they tell me there's one who is going along with goldwater. And from what I understand if he does, he's through in his hometown, just like each one of us will be through. If we would support a man with the kind of views that goldwater and his backers support and have. Jackie Robinson is capturing tension between racial loyalties, right? And this idea of civil rights and political loyalties. And so I think it's an important tension because the delegates, almost all of the delegates, really led by Jackie Robinson, say, enough is enough. And we will not cow down to to racist. Leah, tell me what it was like for African Americans inside that convention. So the 1964 convention is a horror show for African

American delegates, alternatives, and just kind of attendees. There are constant fist fights on the floor. Delegates tell these horrific stories of being attacked. And perhaps the most disturbing incident, a black delegate has his suit set on fire. Wow. Well, Leah, you know that after that tumultuous convention, goldwater went on to lose in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson in 64. How did African Americans vote in that election? Only 6% of African Americans vote for goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. That is a shocking number when compared to the 32% that vote for Richard Nixon in 1960. They overwhelmingly, when we think of moments where black people say farewell to the party of Lincoln, 1964 is it. And what about after that, specifically Jackie Robinson? Does he remain Republican even after this? Perhaps the most surprising part of Jackie

Robinson's political story is that he remains a Republican after the goldwater fiasco. And he says that it is much more critical for him to remain within the GOP and to try and change the Republican party from within than to leave and say goodbye to the party. Leah, how important to that idea is a one party system in the South, the Democratic party that advocated segregation? How important was it to Robinson that African Americans use both parties to pursue their agenda so they simply wouldn't be taken for granted within a party? So this argument of two party competition is integral to Jackie Robinson's belief in support of the Republican party. Now what Jackie Robinson increasingly sees as African Americans move further and further and more and more into the Democratic party is his fear that eventually the Democratic party will take African Americans

for granted and the Republican party will just ignore them, seeing them as a lost constituency. All right, let's fast forward to 1968. Jackie Robinson's friend Richard Nixon is running for president again. Where does Robinson stand in 1968? So the man that he had once campaigned for eight years earlier is now he now envisions really as his arch nemesis in many ways. Richard Nixon has now abandoned all of the things that attracted Jackie Robinson to him in the first place. So he has become a proponent of law and order and not law and order in the sense of obey laws or like civil rights legislation, but in terms of for many African Americans law and order translates into suppression of African Americans. So Jackie Robinson finds that Richard Nixon has picked up the mantle of goldwater and in fact a few years earlier he had warned against this right he says

that the foot soldiers of conservatism persist after goldwater. So this is not necessarily about goldwater the figure or Richard Nixon the figure. This is about a shift in ideology and in prerogatives of the Republican party. And so 68 is the year that Jackie Robinson changes his political affiliation from Republican to independent. Leah not long before the period we're talking about there's this huge conflict between isolationists and those who are more internationally oriented. What is the relationship between Jackie Robinson and the Republican party tell us about that party that used to garner the vast majority of African American votes? So Jackie Robinson's role in the Republican party is actually crucial because it illustrates not just that black Republicans you know organized and mobilized in reaction to goldwater but instead the party wrestled over issues of race. And so this is something that really transcends

this ideological spectrum where you have conservatives people self identified conservatives for example saying well actually know we need to incorporate race in positive ways in our party or we're going to be eliminated. This period that we think of is just kind of naturally being the rise of the party's right wing the party's extremist ring was in fact contested. Leah Wright-Rigur teaches public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She's the author of the loneliness of the black Republican pragmatic politics and the pursuit of power. This year's presidential election continues to smash all expectations including assumptions about what has become a vocal minority in the party evangelical voters polls show high support for

candidate who seems to have only a passing familiarity with Christian theology as evidenced by this report from CBS earlier this year. While Trump was in Virginia yesterday courting the evangelical vote at Liberty University he got some laughs when he mistakenly called the Bible book second Corinthians. Two Corinthians right two Corinthians three seventeen that's the whole ballgame. We wanted to learn more about how and when evangelical Christians became a reliable Republican voting block. So we reached out to Robert P. Jones a poster and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. We asked him how he defines an evangelical voter. Someone who identifies as white non-Hispanic Christian Protestant and says that they consider themselves also to be an evangelical or born again Christian so it's a self-identifiable point self-identification measure. Well hold on there I mean the first adjective you used was white. That's right. Well you know from early on I think in political science we realized that the

evangelical world is heavily divided by race and so these groups behave very differently in political space. In fact I used to do kind of an exercise when I was teaching at Missouri State University where I would put these attributes up on the board and two columns one column is white evangelical Protestants one column is African American Protestants even though they look very similar you know whether it's do you believe in a literal view of the Bible do you think there's an actual hell you know you really have trouble telling these two groups apart but then you make the same two columns and put a bunch of political behavior issues and they look wildly divergent. How can they diverge so much simply because of their race? It's a great and fascinating question. What I think is happening is that these theological beliefs are really you might want to say like refracted through the lens of their racial experience and their political proclivity. So I think it's sort of bends it you know and particularly on questions around race questions around economic safety net

those kinds of issues. Again on political behavior it's hard to find two groups that vote in more opposite ways white evangelicals voting about eight and 10 for Republican presidential candidates over the last few election cycles and African American Protestants also voting eight to nine and 10 for Democratic candidates. Got it. Well going back to my days in graduate school I remember learning that the proto evangelicals in the 1920s and the 1930s they kind of withdrew from politics. Is that correct? Yeah the stories usually you know around with the Scopes trial right? Yeah that's a famous trial in 1925 where John Scopes was tried in Tennessee for teaching evolution. That's right imp that there was this this you know time where evangelicals really hit the national radar maybe not in the most flattering way that they were sort of heavily opposed to evolution and were on the losing side of the the famous Scopes trial. And then you do see a kind of quiescence among evangelicals in terms of political activity but you know they were still very active in

kind of state and local politics in the south all the way through but we really don't see them re-entering the national scene until the kind of advent of the Christian right movement in the 1970s and the 1980s. There's kind of a mating dance between white evangelicals and the GOP in the early 1980s who who makes the first moves? Well you know it's interesting I mean you know mating dance is probably not a bad metaphor I mean there was kind of courting on both sides you know Reagan in a sort of piped-in video address to the Southern Baptist Convention said famously you know I know that you as pastors can't endorse me but I endorse you this very you know overt move on his part that definitely sounds like an invitation to dance absolutely I think it it had a great you know great appeal. And besides exchanging flowers with each other what was it that made the GOP in the 1980s so attractive to these white evangelical voters? The conventional wisdom story is that it was Roe v Wade and abortion and prayer and prayer in the

schools. That's right in prayer in prayer in schools there's actually kind of better evidence that it really is this reaction against civil rights and when the democratic party became the party of civil rights and supporting the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and other civil rights following that that became a real point of contention between Southern whites and white evangelicals who had been traditionally Democrats and the party and so you began to see this reaction where gradually white evangelicals in the South are voting for their local politicians who are still Democrats but voting for Republicans at the top of the ticket in presidential election years and then again with Reagan it really is the switch where they voted enough times for president that they realize well you know what I voted for Republican president now three times a row maybe I am a Republican and many but what was it about Reagan's policies or his rhetoric that really appealed to this group? His big message and his this famous ad campaign that he ran was it's morning in America again

and Reagan sort of you know we're going to harken back to you know this time this kind of golden era of America and really for evangelicals who theologically attuned to words like revival and renewal and you know reclaiming America and those kinds of concepts really resonate with evangelicals you know bringing America back to God and those those kinds of references are something that Reagan has done and Trump has more recently done made some of those appeals as well. Well that's the million dollar question I mean how does Donald Trump a guy who's twice divorced casino-owning New Yorker curses during campaign speeches how does a guy like that appeal to a group that is quite literally identified by its religious beliefs? It is a mystery I mean it's one that I you know spent a lot of time scratching my own head about but you know but here's what I think happens that I think that we are in this new era where white evangelical voters have realized I

think that they have lost their hold on the center of the country looking at the composition of their elementary public school right that that used to be 90 percent white 80 percent white and now has a significant number of Latino students and Asian students and things come home in four different languages and then the other thing that I think can't be overstated really is opposition to same-sex marriage so all these kind of symbols I think add up to a real sense of kind of cultural and demographic anxiety that I think sets the stage for someone like Trump to translate or to convert values voters into what I've called nostalgia voters right with his appeal to bring back America to frankly like to put it really succinctly to an America that conservative Christians can say they recognize and feel at home in Robert P. Jones is CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the end of white

Christian America That's going to do it for us today join us online and tell us what you thought of the show be as liberal or as conservative to feed back as you want you'll find us at backstoryredio.org you can send email to backstoryavergenia.edu Ross on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at backstoryavergenia.org Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Backstories produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McLean, Meena Ernest, Kelly Jones, Kimberly Gadig, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor and Melissa Dismondi is our researcher. We had help from Brandon Van Kenowaff. Special thanks this week to the Radio Foundation in New York City. Backstories produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the SheaCon Foundation, the National Endowment for

the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, History made every day. With Nixon in the White House, and I just trusted me, we know that everyone could be secure. Brian Ballot is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onaf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstories was created by Andrew Windon for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstories is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.