Republican Party

V

The New Deal Era

The Great Depression, which began during Hoover’s administration, destroyed America’s belief in that dream of unlimited prosperity and its faith in the Republican Party. The disastrous economic collapse and extraordinarily high unemployment that followed made a mockery of Republican claims. The slow and limited response of the Hoover administration was ineffective and seemed to indicate too much indifference to the people’s suffering. The Democrats made full use of the depression as an issue, capturing the presidency by a large margin in 1932 and winning the election of 1936 by one of the greatest landslides in history. The New Deal coalition, headed first by Franklin D. Roosevelt and later by Harry S. Truman, remained in power for a generation, the Republicans losing five presidential elections in a row. So great was the reaction to the depression that the Republican Party controlled Congress for only 4 of the 48 years between 1932 and 1980. The Republicans did win the presidency four times during that period—in 1952, 1956, 1968, and 1972—when the Democratic Party split or when some unusual combination of circumstances occurred. From the 1930s through the 1970s, however, the Democratic Party was the dominant party in the United States.

The response of the Republicans to this new situation was confusion, anger, and much infighting as they sought a way to rebuild their national following. They vigorously condemned the New Deal policy of deficit spending and argued against government intervention on behalf of poorer elements in the society. In foreign affairs the party as a whole did not usually differ markedly from the Democrats, although Republicans generally tended more toward isolationism before World War II (1939-1945) and were apt, at least in their rhetoric, to take a stricter anti-Communist line during the Cold War period. From the late 1930s on, Republican factionalism exploded again between liberals or moderates—mainly in the East—who were willing to accept many of the New Deal reforms, and conservatives, who saw nothing good about them.

VI

The Post-World War II Period

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the moderates dominated the party on the national level. Republican moderate Wendell Willkie was defeated in 1940, as was Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 and 1948, but Dwight D. Eisenhower, also a moderate candidate, won the presidency in 1952 and again in 1956.

Seeking a way to break the power of economic issues with their disastrous effect on party fortunes, Republicans returned to the social issues of an earlier day, although with modern overtones. Party leaders again argued that they represented a particular kind of American society: traditional, small town, and family oriented. This ideal played a part in the popularity of Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s crusade against Communist subversion in the early 1950s and in conservative Republican attacks on Eastern establishment (meaning cosmopolitan and urban) values in the same decade. In the 1960s this approach became dominant: More and more the party represented itself as the movement of a better America—more homogeneous, simpler, happier, and unspoiled by the ruinous policies of the New Deal Democrats.

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VII

The Triumph of Conservatism

The nomination of Senator Barry M. Goldwater in 1964 brought conservative Republicanism to a dominant place in party councils for the first time since the 1930s. The conservatives thereafter controlled the party machinery and increasingly impressed their stamp on the party’s principles and actions. They worked hard to win recruits in places where they had long been without influence, especially in the South and among urban, ethnic working-class groups. Although Goldwater’s landslide defeat temporarily put to rest the belief that a conservative, anti-New Deal Republican majority existed in the country, waiting to be activated, conservative efforts began to have more of an effect later in the decade. The backlash against the movement for racial equality and the New Left agitation of the 1960s and 1970s drew some groups toward the party; by 1972 Republicans were successfully accusing Senator George S. McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee, of a permissive attitude toward drug use, indifference to patriotic needs, and a willingness to use the power of government on behalf of controversial social policies.

As these themes developed, moderate Republicans were increasingly isolated within the party. Some prominent moderates abandoned Republicanism, leaving behind only the conservative core to influence the party’s stance and outlook. Although an occasional moderate nominee still appeared, moderates seemed to make up less and less of the party. The administration of Richard M. Nixon from 1969 to 1974 started out as a strong reaction against the radicalism that swept U.S. college campuses in the late 1960s. After 1972, however, the administration became identified with the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation under threat of impeachment. The administration of Gerald R. Ford was unable to restore the nation’s confidence. A Democratic resurgence followed with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, but the conservative tide returned when the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan won an overwhelming victory over Carter in 1980.

VIII

The Reagan Era

As president, Reagan, backed by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, embarked on a program to increase military strength and curtail many of the social welfare programs of previous Democratic administrations. Reagan won a landslide reelection victory in 1984. In the midterm elections of 1986, however, which turned mostly on local and regional issues, the Democrats took control of Congress for the first time since Reagan took office, with a net gain of eight seats in the Senate (55-45) and five seats in the House (258-177). The Republicans gained 8 governorships—24 to the Democrats’ 26. In 1988 the strength of the Republican Party helped presidential nominee George Bush overcome the effects of the scandal known as the Iran-Contra affair, as well as the traditional handicaps faced by an incumbent vice president running for higher office. Republican losses in other races from 1988 through 1990, however, left the Democrats with increased majorities in the Senate, the House, and state governorships.

IX

Contract with America

In August 1992 the Republican National Convention illustrated the dominance of the conservative wing of the party by focusing on topics such as traditional family values; the convention alienated many moderate supporters. The loss of the White House in 1992 to Democrat Bill Clinton marked the end of the Reagan-Bush era. However, in the midterm elections of 1994 the Republicans gained a majority in Congress for the first time in more than 40 years. The Republican candidates for the House of Representatives campaigned on a platform called the “Contract with America,” which consisted of a ten-point agenda that included a pledge to pass a balanced-budget amendment, to reform welfare, and to impose term limits. The contract was drafted by Representative Newt Gingrich, who became the Speaker of the House after the 1994 elections.

Republicans in both the House and the Senate encountered problems passing parts of their agenda. President Bill Clinton vetoed two welfare reform bills before finally signing a third one in August 1996. He also opposed proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and educational and environmental programs. Even within the Republican Party, the members of the House and the Senate could not always agree. The House passed the balanced-budget amendment, but the Senate defeated it. However, there were some parts of the Republican contract that were successfully passed, such as an antiterrorism bill.

As the 1996 presidential election campaign began, Robert Dole, the Senate majority leader, emerged as the likely Republican nomination. Dole resigned his Senate seat in June 1996 in order to devote his full attentions to the campaign. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi took over as Senate majority leader.

During the campaign, Dole focused on a 15-percent tax cut, his service to the country through his war record, and long service in government. However, Clinton defeated Dole in November 1996. Clinton received 49.2 percent of the popular vote compared with Dole’s 40.8 percent. The Republican Party, however, was able to maintain its majority in both houses of Congress.

In the spring of 1997 Congress and Clinton reached an agreement to balance the federal budget in five years by cutting projected spending by $263 billion, with many of the cuts to come from Medicare and Medicaid. The government actually eliminated the deficit in one year, and in 1998 the budget showed a surplus for the first time since 1969. The Republicans and Democrats then began to debate what to do with the projected surpluses. The Republicans insisted upon major tax cuts, while Clinton and the Democrats wanted to use the money to shore up Social Security and to increase spending on education.

During the 1998 general election, the Republican Party seemed likely to increase its majorities in Congress because of scandals in the Clinton White House—particularly the president’s affair with a White House intern and his efforts to conceal it. Republicans made the scandal and the president’s imminent impeachment a central issue in the congressional campaigns. But party leaders miscalculated the voters’ fatigue with the scandal and their opposition to impeaching and removing a president who most people thought was doing a good job.

In the election, the Democrats gained five seats in the House, the first time since 1934 that a president’s party picked up seats in an off-year election. The election left the Republicans with only a 223-211 lead over the Democrats in the House. While the party kept its 55-45 majority in the Senate, senators who had been major critics of Clinton in the investigations were defeated. Gingrich, the Speaker of the House, and his chosen successor, Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana, resigned their seats in the aftermath of the election, leaving the party’s leadership severely weakened.

After the election, Republicans in the House of Representatives pressed ahead with the impeachment process. In December the House voted along party lines to impeach the president for perjury and obstruction of justice. In February 1999 the Senate voted to acquit Clinton of the charges, although most Republicans voted to convict and remove the president from office. The Republican Party emerged from the ordeal badly damaged rather than strengthened, and it began to search for ways to repair its standing with voters.

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