To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

Under President Lincoln, Congress passed the first income tax, encouraged immigration, and strengthened the Federal government; Theodore Roosevelt urged business regulation; Eisenhower supported government funding of schools, roads, and hospitals. Sadly, writes Richardson, Boston College professor of history (Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to An American Massacre), in this opinionated history, upon these figures’ exit from the scene, their party reversed course to take up its role as the protector of the rich. Lincoln and his Republican contemporaries believed government should promote individual economic advancement, but their successors (well before the Russian revolution) denounced such thinking as “socialism” and “communism.” In the first decade of the 20th century, a new generation of Republican progressives supported TR’s reforms, but by the 1920s their influence was minuscule. Eisenhower’s popularity gave middle-of-the-road modern Republicanism a short-lived cachet, but, Richardson argues, the subsequent half century has seen the party harden into a defender of jingoism, privilege, and property under the banner of Movement Conservatism. The election of Barack Obama, a Democrat, signaled a “return to the vision of Republicans Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower,” just as it “revealed the hollow core of the twenty-first-century Republican Party.” Richardson aptly ends by wondering if the modern Republican Party “will find a way to stay committed to the ideals of its founders.” (Oct.)