REPUBLICAN PARTY

byname Grand Old Party (GOP) one of the two major political parties of the United States. The Republican Party traditionally stands for limited government and low taxes. The earliest meetings of people who may be identified as Republicans were held in October 1853 in Exeter, N.H., and in May 1854 in Ripon, Wis. The convention that formally launched the party was held in July 1854 at Jackson, Mich., when a group of former Whigs, Democrats, and Free-Soilers adopted the name Republican. The name appealed to those who recalled Jeffersonian republicanism and generally placed the national interest above sectional interest and above states' rights. The party's founders were firmly linked in common opposition to slavery, particularly to the KansasNebraska Act of 1854, which would have extended slavery into those newly created territories. The platform adopted at the party's first national convention in 1856 denied that Congress had the right to recognize slavery in a territory and held that Congress had the right to abolish slavery in the territories and ought to do so. This view was representative of widespread sentiment in the North. During its first four years the party rapidly displaced the Whigs in the North as the main opposition to the Democrats, and in 1856 the party's first candidate, John C. Frmont, carried 11 states in his unsuccessful bid for the presidency. In 1860 the electoral votes of the 18 Northern states gave the presidency to the party's second candidate, Abraham Lincoln. The secession of the Southern states gave the Republicans absolute control of the federal government. The prolonged agony of the Civil War, however, weakened Lincoln's prospects for reelection in 1864, and to broaden his base of support he took as a vice presidential candidate the prowar Democrat Andrew Johnson. After the war's end and the death of Lincoln, Radical Republican (q.v.) members of Congress were able to assert congressional rather than presidential control of Reconstruction in the defeated South after nearly impeaching President Johnson. The end of the Civil War began a long period of Republican domination. The party's close identification with the Union victory in the war secured it the allegiance of most Northern and Midwestern farmers, while its support of protective tariffs and its accommodating attitude toward big business eventually gained it the support of many Northern urban areas and of powerful industrial and financial circles. Of the 18 presidential elections held between 1860 and 1932, 14 were won by Republicans. Within the party itself, however, there were protests against the rigidity of party control and against a small, self-perpetuating, oligarchic leadership. A splinter group named the Liberal Republicans left the party in 1872 in protest against the corrupt Republican administration of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant. After a number of close electoral contests with the Democrats during the 1880s and the early '90s, the Republicans won the presidency and control of both houses of Congress in the 1896 elections. With the Democrats' adoption of economic radicalism under the sway of free-silver and Populist advocates, the Republicans emerged as the nation's majority party and managed to control both houses of Congress until 1910. In 1901 the assassination of the Republican Pres. William McKinley gave the presidency to the vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, who became the leader of the party's progressive wing. Roosevelt launched an attack on monopolistic and exploitative business practices, adopted a more conciliatory attitude toward labour, and urged the conservation of natural resources. But Roosevelt became dissatisfied with the conservative policies of his Republican successor to the presidency, William Howard Taft, and in 1912 he bolted the Republicans and formed the Progressive Party, on whose ticket he ran for the presidency. This divided the Republican vote and gave the presidency and control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. The Republicans regained the presidency in 1920 and rode to victory in the elections of 1924 and 1928 on the wave of economic prosperity of the 1920s. Their policies during this time were notably conservative and pro-business. The Great Depression that began in 1929 had severe consequences for the party, however. The Republicans' unwillingness to combat the effects of the Depression through government action led to Republican incumbent Pres. Herbert Hoover's overwhelming defeat by the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 election. Roosevelt's three reelections, the succession of Harry S. Truman upon Roosevelt's death in 1945, and Truman's election in 1948 kept the Republicans out of power for 20 years. During this time they generally lacked control of either house of Congress and had in effect become the minority party in the nation. For many years most Republicans vehemently opposed Roosevelt's New Deal policies, but by the 1950s the party had largely accepted the federal government's expanded role and regulatory powers. In 1952 the Republican Party returned to power with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president. Eisenhower's candidacy marked the dominance of the party's liberal-moderate wing, as opposed to its conservative wing led by Sen. Robert A. Taft. But the Republican platform remained a conservative one, calling for a strong anti-Communist stance in foreign affairs, a reduction of government regulation of the economy, lower taxes for the rich, and a resistant attitude toward calls for civil-rights legislation. The party retained its longtime support among both big and small business and gained new support from growing numbers of middle-class suburbanites and, perhaps most significantly, among white Southerners who were disturbed by the integrationist stance of the Democrats during the 1960s. Eisenhower was reelected in 1956, but in 1960 the moderate Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, lost narrowly to Democrat John F. Kennedy. Conservative Republicans gained control of the party at the 1964 convention, but their presidential candidate, Barry M. Goldwater, lost that year's election by an overwhelming landslide. By 1968 the party's moderate faction had regained control and again nominated Nixon, who narrowly won the presidency that year. Nixon was reelected by a landslide in 1972, but in congressional, state, and local elections the party made few gains, and it failed to win control of Congress. As a result of the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974 and was succeeded in office by the first appointed vice president, Gerald R. Ford. In 1976 Ford was defeated by a Southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter, but in 1980 Carter was in turn defeated by Ronald W. Reagan, who had assumed the leadership of the conservative wing of the Republican Party after Goldwater's defeat in the 1964 elections. Reagan lowered taxes for the wealthy and launched a massive peacetime buildup of the U.S. military establishment. Reagan's personal popularity secured him stunning victories, even giving Republicans control of the U.S. Senate from 1981 to 1987. Reagan's vice-presidential running mate, George Bush, went on to win the presidency in 1988. Congress continued to be controlled by the Democrats, however, and Bush lost his bid for reelection in 1992 to another moderate Southern Democrat, Bill Clinton. In the 1994 elections Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954. Their program in response to the slow decline of the American standard of living since the 1970s remained a traditional one: lower taxes for business and the wealthy and reductions in government spending, particularly for social services. unofficial English name of the Irish political party Fianna Fil (q.v.). byname Jeffersonian Republicans, first opposition political party in the United States. Its members held power nationally between 1801 and 1825. Organized in the early 1790s, it became the direct antecedent of the present Democratic Party. Many former Anti-Federalists (q.v.), who had resisted adoption of the new federal Constitution (1787), began to unite during the two administrations of Pres. George Washington in opposition to the forceful fiscal program of Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury. When the proponents of a strong central government and loose constitutional interpretation organized as the Federalist Party in 1791, those who favoured states' rights and a strict construction of the Constitution rallied under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson, who had served as Washington's first secretary of state. The term republican was used to underscore the antimonarchical emphasis of the group, which was deeply influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution. The American Republicans feared the aristocratic attitudes of the Federalists (certain that Washington's governmental habits and techniques smacked of royalty), too much centralization at the seat of power, and the fact that Hamilton's fiscal policies tended to benefit the affluent at the expense of the common man. The Republican (Jeffersonian) coalition gained strength in support of the French during the European war that broke out in 1793. Opposition to monarchist Great Britain remained a dynamic unifying issue throughout the 1790s as the party fought the Federalist-sponsored Jay Treaty (1795) and the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798). Ironically, the first three Republican presidents were all wealthy, aristocratic Southern plantersJefferson (served 180109), James Madison (180917), and James Monroe (181725)but all three shared the same liberal political philosophy. Though the vote was close when Jefferson overthrew the Federalists in the election of 1800, the political victory of the loyal opposition party proved that power could be transferred peacefully under the experimental government in the New World and, through an expanded franchise, could be shared with a rural majority of small landholders. Once in office the Republicans attempted to trim Federalist programs but actually overturned few of the criticized institutions (e.g., the national bank was retained until its charter expired in 1811). Nevertheless, Jefferson made a genuine effort to lend an aura of democracy to his administration: he walked to the Capitol for his inauguration rather than ride in a coach-and-six, and he sent his annual message to Congress by messenger, rather than reading it personally. Federal excises were repealed, the national debt was retired, and the size of the armed forces was greatly reduced. The demands of foreign relations (such as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803), however, often forced Jefferson and his successors into a nationalistic stance reminiscent of the Federalists. In the 20 years after 1808 the party existed less as a united political group than as a loose coalition of personal and sectional factions. During the 1820s the Republicans divided into two factions. One took the name National Republicans and was led by such expansionists as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay as well as a number of former Federalists such as Daniel Webster. That faction became the nucleus of the Whig Party (q.v.) in the next decade. The opposition, organized by Martin Van Buren, called itself the Democratic-Republicans and was composed of diverse elements that emphasized local and humanitarian concerns, states' rights, agrarian interests, and democratic procedures. In keeping with the egalitarian spirit of the times, that faction adopted the name Democratic Party in the presidency of Andrew Jackson (182937). French Parti Rpublicain (PR) French political party formed in May 1977 when the former National Foundation of Independent Republicans (Fdration Nationale des Rpublicains Indpendents)founded in 1966 by Valry Giscard d'Estaingwas merged with other small groups. It is conservative in domestic social and economic policies but internationalist in being pro-NATO and pro-European. After Pres. Georges Pompidou's death, Giscard was elected president in May 1974 and tried to govern with a coalition of members of his own party and Gaullists, Radical-Socialists, and other centre-left groups. Eventually, personality and policy conflicts between the Gaullists and Giscardians resulted in the resignation of the Gaullist premier, Jacques Chirac, in 1976 and in an outright battle in the elections of 1978, in which the Republicans and their non-Gaullist allies achieved a modest victory. In a 10-candidate race for the presidency in 1981, however, Giscard lost in a runoff with the Socialist candidate, Franois Mitterrand.