To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

by Heather Cox Richardson

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of Democracy Awakening, “the most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses” (Los Angeles Times)

When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was economic opportunity for all Americans. Yet the party quickly became mired in an identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or the party of moneyed interests?

In To Make Men Free, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Republican Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession. While progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln’s vision and expanded the government, their opponents appealed to Americans’ latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. In the modern era, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles.

Now with a new epilogue that reflects on the Trump era and what is likely to come after it, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the party that was once considered America’s greatest political hope, but now lies in disarray.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541600621
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	11/23/2021
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	96,853
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College. Her daily newsletter, Letters from an American, has over a half million subscribers. The author of Democracy Awakening, How the South Won the Civil War, and Wounded Knee, she splits her time between Boston and Maine.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Founding: The West as a Land of Promise
2. 1854
3. Republicans and the Slave Power
4. A Republican World View
5. Government of the People
6. Government for the People
7. The Party of Loyalty
8. Government by the People
9. Creating a Free Labor Nation
10. Lincoln’s Vision Destroyed
11. Shall Not Perish from the Earth
12. Republicans or Radicals?
13. Corruption and Cowboys: The Republican Party Splits
14. Communism!
15. Republicans and Big Business
16. Equality or Empire?
17. Keeping the Country Republican
18. Making the Depression Work
19. The March of the Flag
20. Republicans Become “Liberals”
21. Roosevelt Stands with Lincoln
22. The Red Scare and Calvin Coolidge
23. The Business of America is Business, 1921-1928
24. The End of an Era
25. Republicans and the New Deal
26. A New Republican Vision
27. The Birth of Movement Conservatism
28. The Second Reconstruction
29. Movement Conservatives Capture the GOP
30. Reagan
31. The Ending: The West as an Idea

Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

08/04/2014
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.)

Publishers Weekly

A readable and provocative account of the many paths that Republicans have taken to their current state of confusion.”―New York Times Book Review

“The book offers a lively survey of Republican politics in all its diversity, from the ‘transformational presidency' of Abraham Lincoln (to borrow a 21st-century term) to the conservative ascendancy of Ronald Reagan.”―Washington Post

“The most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses... an important contribution to understanding where we are today.”―Los Angeles Times

“[Richardson's] theory of the party's historical cycle is intriguing.”―New Republic

“A rich portrait of the thinking and times of Abraham Lincoln and those closest to him in the founding of the Republican Party... perceptive and persuasive.... Readers of Richardson's history of the GOP will come away with a good sense of the complex path that led the party to the abnegation of the Lincoln legacy.”―Washington Spectator

“Sharp and readable.”―Open Letters Monthly

“In To Make Men Free, one of our most admired historians takes on one of the most important topics of our past and present: the 160-year story of the Republican Party. From Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, from Radical Republicans to Movement Conservatives, Heather Cox Richardson recounts the GOP's dramatic history with unimpeachable insights and crisp, vivid writing. How did the anti-slavery party become the party of the Solid South? How did the anti-trust party of Theodore Roosevelt become the party of Wall Street and the Club for Growth? In this brisk account, Richardson make sense of a twisting tale that shapes our lives every day.”―T.J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Heather Cox Richardson has written a much-needed book: a comprehensive and balanced history of the Republican Party. The prose is engaging, the research is deep, the argument is persuasive; To Make Men Free is the work of a major talent at the top of her craft.”―Ari Kelman, Bancroft Prize-winning author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek

“At its Lincolnian best, the G.O.P. has been not just grand but good. In To Make Men Free, the eminent political historian Heather Cox Richardson superbly brings the Republican Party's history to life, while offering sharp and often surprising interpretations of its rises and declines, when it heeded Lincoln's legacy and when it did not.”―Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

“Heather Cox Richardson tells a great story, full of fascinating figures, of how the Republican Party has enjoyed extraordinary political success in a country full of poor people, while doing much to serve the rich. It's a vital chapter in the history of American conservatism.”―Eric Rauchway, Professor of History, University of California, Davis

From the Publisher

2014-07-13
A new history of the Republican Party as a relentless pull by big-business interests has cast it farther and farther from its noble founding principles. How did the party of Abraham Lincoln—dedicated to checking the spread of Southern "Slave Power" in the West and to expanding the vision of freedom and opportunity among the larger pool of poor and newly emancipated—become the party of the rich and entitled? Richardson (History/Boston Coll.; Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre, 2010, etc.) makes a bold, pertinent argument that the Republican Party has always been beset by contradictions within its core as a result of the founding tension between the belief in equality of opportunity and the protection of property. She focuses on three presidents who have been true to the original Republican cause—Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower—and three periods following progressive legislation eras that saw a reactionary swerve back to pro-business policies and a resulting economic crash: 1893, 1929 and 2008. The party emerged in reaction to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, threatening to spread slave power into what Northerners hoped would be a West open to "poor but hardworking, ambitious young men." Harkening back to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, the Republican Party embraced "the first principles of republican government" and broke with "schemes of aristocracy," namely the concentration of wealth among the upper few. Lincoln's assassination, followed by Andrew Johnson's undercutting of Reconstruction, saw the beginning of the reactionary turn back to obstructionism and narrow business interests. Richardson systematically delineates how the "trickle down" economic approach never worked, yet was continually pushed by rogue elements of the party. A hard-hitting study that will surely resonate with ongoing attempts to regenerate the GOP.

Kirkus Reviews