Republican Party And Its Dominance example essay topic

Introduction The Republican Party was founded by a coalition in 1854 and was comprised of former members of the Whig, Free-Soil, and Know-Nothing parties. The slavery issue shattered America's established political landscape and catapulted the Republicans from what seemed like nowhere straight into the White House in 1860. After Fremont's attempt at winning the presidency in 1856, Lincoln won the election four years later, cementing the Republican Party's desire for executive power. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States found itself politically gridlocked.

Neither the newly formed Republicans nor the Democrats were able to gain much traction. The decades after the Civil War saw some of the closest and most controversial races in American history. The Rutherford B. Hayes commissioned election victory is a great example as he had fewer popular votes than Sam Tilden, but won the election under the guise of the Electoral College. The 1888 election was also very close, as less than 100,000 votes separated the leading candidates; Benjamin Harrison again won by the rules of the electoral process but lost the popular vote.

During the Gilded Age of American history, the mainstream political scene was superficial and intensely partisan, but the regular Joe loved it. "Despite the lack of issues", writes Morton Keller, "balloting - and straight ticket voting - in the 1870's and 1880's was at or near the highest level in American history". He also contends that policy had become subordinate to "the sumptuous display" of parades, bonfires, and pep rallies. Accompanying this era of political advertisement and propaganda, the political system itself depended upon a spoils and patronage allowance, which gave rise to political corruption. Political cartoons and mass media grew up with the end of the Civil War as well. As Harper's weekly, Judge, Puck, and the New York World all competed for popular acceptance, they helped reform the political corruption of the time.

After the critical election of 1896, the nature of party conflict changed. The close competition between the parties in the post Civil War period was replaced by Republican dominance. Mckinley's defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and 1900 was followed by Republican victories in every presidential election until 1932, except for Woodrow Wilson's victories in 1912 and 1916. This will be explored later. As the Republicans also controlled Congress from 1896 to 1930, except for during Wilson's tenure, they were dominant everywhere but the South. The purpose of this paper is to resolve the reasons for Republican dominance during this period.

As mass media grew with the urbanization of a growing industrialized America, the Republican party maintained its dominance by using this media to push a message different from its post Civil War "hero" complex to one of prosperity guided by a pro-business platform. Political cartooning was instrumental in winning over America for the Republicans as corruption based reform cartoons were replaced by a dominant thread of defending the establishment. The Republican Party achieved its dominance through media, money, and message. Media As the Second Industrial Revolution gave rise to the growing populations in urban areas, the commercial landscape of America had changed since the Civil War. National newspapers grew in circulation, as well as magazines. As the Reconstruction era was plagued by political machines and their corruption, political critique was a common form of literature in these early forms of mass media.

According to Fischer, "political cartoon art in a democratic society has been on of the purest artifacts of popular culture, seeking to influence public opinion through its use of widely and instantly understood symbols, slogans, referents, and allusions". (Fischer, 122) As they embody the humor of the general public, they do "influence public opinion" and their effect at a time when media was defined by the written word and illustrated by the political cartoon is analogous to the way in which television and its advertisements push citizens toward their commercial inclinations. The effect of cartoons after the Civil War can be found in an anecdote whose components have elevated it to the stature of myth. Much of the legend surrounding Thomas Nast's 1871 Harper's Weekly cartoons on the corrupt "Boss" Tweed shows the importance and large impact of cartooning. Fischer writes, "The Story of William "Marcy" Tweed and his bete noir Tom Nast is known to most students of American history, and familiar to every aficionado of the history of American political cartooning... This confrontation is credited by consensus with establishing once and forever a fledgling craft... as an enduring presence in American political culture.

In its telling is exemplified those salient themes dear to the collective scholarship of the medium, such as it is - the power of the giants of the genre to fuse creative caricature, clever situational transpositions, and honest indignation to arouse the populace and alter for the better the course of human events". As Lewis L. Gould notes, Lincoln is frequently quoted as saying Nast was his best "recruiting" sergeant. (Gould, 30) By the end of the Gilded Age, political cartooning was an efficacious tool of advertising to the general public and swaying their opinion. Magazines like Puck and Judge, the two fastest growing political cartoon publications after 1892, depended on all strata of the population, in that the political inspiration came from the intellectual aristocrats while the general public put ten cents down each week to keep them in print.

Price is important to who reached which demographic. As Harper's sold for thirty-five cents, ten cents bought a copy of Judge or Puck, which contained color pictures (Harper's did not). With a price below Harper's Weekly, Judge and Puck were able to reach the large middle and working classes of urban America. The attention of a large and loyal group of buyers ensured these magazine's dominance in political satire through the end of the century. As Puck was founded by Keppler, a German immigrant who blasted Republican ideology, Judge took a different approach around the turn of the century.

Judge magazine was founded in 1881 as James Wales had a quarrel with Puck magazine's editor Joseph Keppler and left. As Puck magazine was the dominant source for political caricaturing in the urban northeast, Judge found it hard to compete early on. The reason for this is that Judge seemed to copy the format of Puck and was too much like its established rival to form its own branded audience. As James Wales had difficulty making the magazine a financial success, he sold it in 1885 to William J. Arkell. Arkell used his considerable wealth to persuade other artists to leave Puck magazine. As a supporter of the Republican Party, Arkell had his cartoonists attack the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland.

By the early 1890's, the circulation of the magazine reached 50,000. This is a considerable amount of people reading political cartoons. And by as early as 1900, Judge had passed the circulation of its rival, Puck magazine. (Press, 188) During the Mckinley-Bryan elections of 1896 and 1900, Judge magazine drew its support for Mckinley. The cartoon shown in the works cited asserts Mckinley as a beacon of success to middle income America with the depiction of Mckinley as the windmill dragon and Bryan as a loony Don Quixote. (Young, illustration) This is exemplary of the kind of the success the GOP had in the support of its political journals and cartoons like those in Judge.

The cartoon itself says a lot of things about Mckinley's campaign and the circumstance of the politics at the time. The drawing calls on "four years more". This points out the defeat Bryan had already been victim to in 1896. Without denigrating Bryan's successes, this is important as it classifies Bryan's progressive platform as a social movement rather than political policy or practice.

The Mckinley era, like much of the Republican administrations post Civil War, drew support from industrial offices and urban areas. The cartooning of the era particularly reached these audiences, which in turn won elections because of their population demographics. Mckinley won votes in only 1/7 of the land area of the United States, but he won the popular vote by well over a million votes in 1900. So as political cartooning had changed under the new prosperous image of the Republican Party, the reform minded corruption based cartoonists attacked the big government policies of Roosevelt.

These "attackers of the establishment" that worked for Puck and other smaller publications went out of business before their rival, Judge. (Press, 112) Judge, backed by William Randolph Hearst after Wilson's election, maintained the Arkell Republican stance of the magazine and helped influence public opinion in such a direction for years to come. As political cartooning got its birth as a watchdog of political machines, its position changed with the growth of the pro-business and prosperity platform of the Republican Party after 1892. The message evident in the cartoon used as an example was not devised by the cartoonist, but rather, the Grand Old Party. Their dominance after 1892 was aided by the growing popularity of Judge magazine and Republican cartoonists, but their pro-business platform and message of prosperity gave them the edge in an America growing in the middle class with industrialization (this is not to belittle the struggles of the common man shown by Smith), and it only helped that Judge reached this class with its discounted price. The Grand Old Party The Republican Party and its platform was influenced largely by the Industrial Revolution.

From its beginnings, the party represented a certain kind of America: nationalistic, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, and committed to a strong federal government. They came to represent many of the new industrial forces in society. Their actions in office during the Gilded Age emphasized a promotion of industrial values in a highly centralized economy. As the Gilded Age was competitive politically, it was not until the historic election of 1896 that Republicans were able to break the pattern and gain enduring control of the national government. James Sundquist describes how electoral conflict came to a head at the turn of the nineteenth century and produced GOP dominance. In his book, The Dynamics of the Party System, there were two parts to the transformation, "message and money".

(Sundquist, 29) As he discusses message, Sundquist outlines how elections over the preceding generation was concerned mainly with issues of "the past". (Sundquist, 87) In essence, the elections following 1865 were fought over the legacy of slavery and the Civil War. The 1896 campaign differed greatly. Industrialization and the 1893 economic panic produced an election that had urban working class citizens fighting the interests of big business. Real political cleavages existed in social and political debate for the first time in years. Labor picketing was repressed by business leaders, and under the terms of the "Cross of Gold" speech by Bryan, the Democrats wished to move away from the business minded approach of Republicans.

Bryan's forceful message sympathetic to labor and populist in orientation was revolutionary in the sense that just as much as it defined the Democrats apart from the Republicans, it solidified the message of the Republican Party. As Bryan lost by just over 600,000 votes, it represented a narrow but definite repudiation of his message. Mckinley and his successors pursued their pro-business agenda and dominated the political landscape for years. The 1896 election, as well as the 1900 defeat of Bryan, though, was not just about message on the Republican side. It was also about money. They won these elections because of Mark Hanna.

The GOP was able to raise an extraordinary amount of money. Fundraising and organization helped in the decisive victories. Hanna enacted a one-quarter of one percent political tax on corporate capital for the GOP. This was unprecedented. (Mayer, 252) Sundquist describes Hanna's fundraising machine as "the most thorough and methodical political organization the country had yet seen". (Sundquist, 156) This combination of message and money helped the Republicans open their era of domination politically.

Composed mainly of western agrarian radicals and northern upper middle class reformers after 1896, the GOP became associated with Theodore Roosevelt and his interest in progressivism - especially the idea that the executive should help regulate the economy and society in public interest. The 1912 election showed the factionalism that was apart of the GOP at this time. With Taft running as the incumbent and Roosevelt coming out of retirement running under the Bull Moose Party, the Republican vote was split and the presidency went to the Democrats and Woodrow Wilson. Even though the election was between three candidates, the press decided that the campaign was really between Roosevelt and Wilson. (Burdette, 75) This showed that the message was important, but so was the media.

They framed the election and helped split the Republican Party. As progressivism lost its taste with the public for many reasons, including the Red Scare of 1917, Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats allowed the Republicans to reassert their electoral dominance during the 1920's. (Allen, 38) Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover were elected with comfortable margins and the GOP retained a firm grip on Congress. After Roosevelt's death in 1919, eastern urban progressivism was second to the corporate establishment epitomized by Andrew Mellon. They returned to the laissez-faire pro-business policies of the late nineteenth century in the domestic sphere.

The party had become committed to isolationism after Wilson's gasp with the League of Nations and World War I. Even those that did not promote such isolationism did promote something different from the Democrats. Instead of emphasizing a Wilsonian universalism when it came to foreign policy, they were very much unilateralist in approach. Again, the message of the Republicans differed from the Democrats and it also was effective because of the Red Scare of the early 1920's. Frederick Lewis Allen wrote of the general population, "They were less concerned with making the world safe for democracy than with making America safe for themselves". (Allen, 38) The Republican Party remained dominant throughout the 1920's. Even with another progressive defection in 1924, they held onto their power.

Despite opposition from agricultural and progressive Republicans, the party continued to foster industrial economic values in a time of extraordinary prosperity. To quote our professor, "The United States has always tried to solve its problems through economic growth". Herbert Hoover finished the era of Republican dominance as he symbolized the GOP commitment to unbounded national prosperity rooted in massive industrial expansion. Conclusion While this era of Republican dominance was aided by media and put into policy through victory because of message and money, it has recently been tied by many journalists, almost congruently, to the state of political affairs that makes up America today. This is what sparked my interest in the idea of Republican dominance.

As I had already completed my primary source paper earlier this semester on Republican political cartoons during the 1896 and 1900 elections, it was important to break down the role of cartooning and media in the era of dominance from 1896 to 1932. By showing the history of political cartoons tied to the rise of urban populations and industrial growth in the United States, it is evident that the GOP profited from such social dynamics. The United States political scene after the Civil War was one of competitive show. The Bryan-Mckinley election changed the course of American politics.

Media, money, and message was the new formula for success. The Republican Party understood this and proved its efficacy until 1912. One could say that Roosevelt's pride got the best of the GOP and killed their success rate as Wilson ran away with the ticket as the Republicans split in half. After two terms of progressivism under Wilson, not to mention a foreign policy not supported by most of the United States population, the Republicans regained their control of the Houses and the White one.

It was not until the Great Depression when the pro-business policy of the GOP caused discontent with massive amounts of people that they lost their stronghold on the presidency to a New Deal government. The Republican Party and its dominance during this era is attributed to media, a platform for industrial expansion, and organizational skills never linked to political campaigning before..