Here is an election season look at John Calvin Batchelor’s 1996 book, 
“AIN’T YOU GLAD YOU JOINED THE REPUBLICANS?": A SHORT HISTORY OF THE GOP (New York. Henry Holt. 399 pp., $25).

The title is from an 1856 Republican party song .The first Republicans were Americans enraged by Stephen Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed extension of slavery into the Federal Territories. On June 16, 1856  Horace Greeley gave the new anti-slavery party the name, “Republicans.” He declared as its  goal: “to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of liberty” (p.12).

New York novelist John Batchelor’s “AIN’T YOU GLAD YOU JOINED THE REPUBLICANS” is not about policy. It is a well written, copiously illustrated pageant of the major personalities of all American political parties from 1854 through the Republican sweep of 1994. It is also dotted with quiz show style” trivia.” For instance:

--Of the 17 Republican Presidents [by 1996], five had previously been generals: Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower.

--Three Republican Vice Presidents succeeded Republican Presidents who died in office: Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. (Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was not a Republican.) One, Gerald Ford, succeeded Richard Nixon who had resigned. George Bush was elected after the man whose Vice President he had twice been--Ronald Reagan.

--The famous Republican elephant was created during the 1874 campaign in  two cartoons by HARPER’S WEEKLY cartoonist, Thomas Nast. (p.74)

--The term “grand old party” (short form “G.O.P.”) was first used in 1878 by a Georgia politician to refer to the pre-Civil War Democratic Party. Campaigning  in 1894, Republican  William McKinley of Ohio, however,  spoke often  of “this Grand Old Party we love” and “Our Grand Old Party.” The name remains safely Republican. (p.108)

--The first woman to run for the White House, attorney Belva Lockwood, did so in 1884. Leading the National Equal Rights party, Ms. Lockwood won 4,149 votes (p. 354).

--In 1988 when George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, “it was the seventh time since FDR that a conservative Republican had defeated a liberal Democrat.” (p. 363)

Republicans have pursued large goals. From 1861-1865 they preserved the Union. They freed over four million slaves. The Republican Congress passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Acts and the Morrill Act, which created land grant colleges. After Reconstruction, Republicans created a new theme: Once we saved the Union. From now on we save the economy.

Theodore Roosevelt roared away his opposition by sheer force of personality, built the navy, faced down big business and did not choose to run in 1908.  He told the White House staff not to weep for him. “I have had a perfectly corking time.” (p. 153) When he ran again in 1912  Roosevelt took an assassin’s bullet in his chest and then immediately gave an 85-minute public oration.  (p. 166)

Too often Republicans reacted and simply counter punched their faster-footed Democratic opponents. Batchelor’s book presents Republicans  as defeating Wilson on the League of Nations. But they could not stop Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  After World War Two, Republicans found a new winning issue: the Communist menace at home and abroad. Ronald Reagan and George Bush finally broke the USSR and its “evil empire” into pieces. 

Franklin Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address in 1933, made a stinging charge: “They [the Republicans] have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.” (p. 228) The Republicans got credit for the economic boom of the 1920s and equally for the economic collapse of the Great Depression. 

Author John Batchelor is fascinated by Republican Richard M. Nixon.   “Richard Nixon was just tougher than everyone else in American politics.” (260) Nixon “dominated fifty years of American politics.” (p.262)

Republicans in and out of office have produced stunning insights and sayings. Here are some.

--In his debate with Stephen Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln defended the Negro’s entitlement “to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. ...In the right to eat bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is ... the equal of every living man.” (p. 32)

--In 1952 at the Republican Convention which nominated Eisenhower and Nixon, the 78-year old Herbert Hoover said, “this party was born to make all men free.” (p. 275)

--During the 1988 Vice Presidential Debate Senator Daniel Quayle argued that he had as much public service  as had John Kennedy when he ran for the White House. Democratic Senator Lloyd Bensen’s replied: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” (362)  Ronald Reagan returned the favor at the 1992 Republican National  Convention when Democrat William Jefferson Clinton was about to oppose George Bush. Joked Reagan: I knew Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was a friend of mine and governor,  you’re no Thomas Jefferson.” (p. 367)

Patrick Buchanan enlivened the 1992 Republican Convention. Of the competing Democratic Convention he said” “twenty thousand radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.” (p. 368)

Current star of the GOP is U.S. Representative Newt Gingrich, whose troops recaptured the House of Representatives in 1994 and then elected him Speaker. Gingrich said, “There are profound things that went wrong with the Great Society and the counterculture.” “Until the mid 1960s there was an explicit long-term commitment to creating character. It was the work ethic. It was honesty, right and wrong. ” “I think the Republican Party has an obligation to be positive, but I think it is an obligation to be positive on behalf of the values of the American people.”(p. 379)

John Calvin Batchelor asserts that history is on Gingrich’s side. For political power always flows to those who are seen to be “positive on behalf of the values of the American people.”

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for Asheville TRIBUNE