Against the Tendencies of the Times: The Republican Party and the Roots of Modern Conservatism, 1900-1930
- ISBN-10
- 1369202903
- ISBN-13
- 9781369202908
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016
- Author
- James Casey Sullivan
Description
The dissertation makes an argument about the roots of important strains of modern American conservatism. While most of the relevant historiography argues that their origins lay in a reaction - especially among Republicans - to the New Deal and the further growth of government power in the wake of World War II, this study counters that we can trace the roots of modern American conservatism to developments in the Republican Party in the two decades before the New Deal. This is a story of how the turn-of-the-century Republican Party - one that emphasized government activism and cultural pluralism - became the Republican Party of the late 1910s and 1920s, one increasingly hostile to government activism in economic matters and receptive to nativist critiques of American society. Put perhaps most simply, it is the story of how the Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt became the party of Calvin Coolidge. This study will examine the party platforms, Republican campaign textbooks, campaign speeches, correspondence of influential political figures, and contemporary political reporting, among other sources, that helped inform changes in the party's electoral rhetoric and policy preferences at the state and national levels. It will look chiefly at how state and national issues in the first three decades of the twentieth century played out in four states - New York, Ohio, California, and Tennessee - of particular interest to the party, one from each of the four major regions of the United States. As state and national parties began to develop a new electoral rhetoric, they transformed how the Republicans appealed to voters and what those voters came to expect from the party. This new Republican electoral rhetoric appealed to a different mix voters. While turn-of-the-century Republican emphasis on the virtues of government activism and cultural pluralism attracted many new ethnic voters to the Republican Party, the development of economic anti-statism and nativism in the party's appeals in the 1910 and 1920s alienated many of these same voters. The party's appeals to southern whites in the 1920s also began to alienate black voters just as many of them were moving North and voting in numbers. In this period, then, the Republican Party's coalition grew more dependent on a coalition of business interests and native born white Protestants that was narrower yet deeper than the broader turn-of-the-century coalition of William McKinley. To digest that the origins of modern conservatism trace to the Republican Party in the decades before the advent of the New Deal will enhance our understanding of twentieth-century political history. It may also afford us a deeper appreciation about the nature of political opposition to both the growth of federal power - especially in its regulatory and welfare functions - and to a more ethnically and culturally pluralistic Unites States. Early modern conservatives in the Republican Party had identified these trends in the 1910s and stirred to resist them. In their resistance - in the rhetoric and policies informing it - we see the roots of modern America conservatism.
