To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

by Heather Cox Richardson
To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party

by Heather Cox Richardson

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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 to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet, despite the egalitarian dream at the heart of its founding, the Republican Party quickly became mired in a fundamental identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or would it be the party of moneyed interests? In the century and a half since, Republicans have vacillated between these two poles, with dire economic, political, and moral repercussions for the entire nation.

In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession, revealing the insidious cycle of boom and bust that has characterized the Party since its inception. While in office, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln's vision of economic freedom and expanded the government, attacking the concentration of wealth and nurturing upward mobility. But they and others like them have been continually thwarted by powerful business interests in the Party. Their opponents appealed to Americans' latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. The results of the Party's wholesale embrace of big business are all too familiar: financial collapses like the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Great Recession in 2008. With each passing decade, with each missed opportunity and political misstep, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles.

Expansive and authoritative, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the Party that was once America's greatest political hope -- and, time and time again, has proved its greatest disappointment.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780465080663
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 09/23/2014
Sold by: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format: eBook
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 99,815
File size: 2 MB

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 AwakeningHow 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

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