It's My Party (4 page)

Third parties do indeed appear. But most remain tiny, like the Libertarian or Green parties. The few that do grow large seldom
last. Whenever a third party begins to attract a sizable following, it also attracts the attention of the two major parties,
who suddenly find themselves scrambling to discern the source of the third party’s appeal. Once they do so, they adjust their
own positions accordingly, putting the third party out of business. Just look at the Reform Party. Ross Perot’s major issue
when he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket in 1992 was the federal deficit. Then the Republican and Democratic parties
picked up the issue, claiming to be as dedicated to reducing the deficit as was the Reform Party itself. When Perot ran for
president on the Reform Party ticket a second time in 1996, his vote fell from the 19 percent that he had garnered four years
earlier to just 6 percent. Now that the federal deficit has been replaced with a federal surplus, the Reform Party must identify
an entirely new issue—at this writing Pat Buchanan, seeking the Reform Party’s nomination, appears to be running on protectionism,
an issue with little national appeal, while Donald Trump, also seeking the Reform Party’s nomination, appears to be offering
the country only his ego—or remain marginal. In the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, “Third parties are like bees:
Once they have stung, they die.”

The second institution that endows the number two with special magic is the presidency. The founders gave us a system of government
in which a single prize, the office of chief executive, dwarfs the rest.

In theory at least, many local two-party systems instead of one national two-party system might have emerged during the early
days of the republic. Virginia might have had two parties, Massachusetts two completely different parties, Rhode Island two
parties of its own, and so on. A few local parties did originally exist. Yet voting patterns converged on the Federalist and
Democratic-Republican parties so quickly that by 1796, when the Federalist John Adams defeated the Democratic-Republican Thomas
Jefferson for president, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans had already become the dominant parties throughout the
country. Why?

Lying outside the national two-party system, local parties faced a choice. Either they signed on with one of the two major
parties and got the chance to participate in presidential politics, which was the big game even then, or they remained independent
and had to observe presidential politics as outsiders. They signed on.

* * *

Fragmented power, plurality elections, and presidential politics. Look in the history books, and those are the explanations
for the two-party system that you’ll find. Yet as I worked in the library, another explanation kept coming to me: human nature
itself. I found my mind occupied by the Blues and the Greens.

The Blues and the Greens were political parties in ancient Constantinople. As far as historians can tell they first took shape
as groups of sports fans—two of the colors under which chariot teams raced at the Hippodrome were blue and green. The Blues
and the Greens each marched through the city, staging demonstrations. They rioted in each other’s neighborhoods. They defended
their own sections of the city walls when Constantinople fell under attack. From time to time one party or the other even
proclaimed an emperor.

What did the two parties stand for? Did the Blues want lower taxes? Did the Greens support more social spending? Did one accuse
the other of being soft on the Turks? Who knows? All we can see as we peer back across the centuries is the two parties themselves.
And the Blues and the Greens represent just one of dozens of instances throughout history in which people have grouped themselves
into two opposing parties. The Blues and the Greens in ancient Constantinople. The Guelphs and the Ghibellines in medieval
Italy. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers in seventeenth-century England. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans in
eighteenth-century America.

Partisanship. The very word suggests shallow-mindedness. Yet partisanship runs deep.

Ignorant as I was, I was prepared to learn a lot when I looked into the GOP’s origins. I was unprepared to learn that there
are two completely different versions of the way the GOP came into existence.

Version One: In 1854 the Republican Party emerged
ex nihilo
, out of nothing, a popular movement of ordinary Americans in the upper Midwest, far from the centers of wealth, power, or
sophistication. The GOP amounted to a spontaneous moral crusade with a single, noble purpose: cleansing the nation of slavery.

Version Two: When it appeared in 1854, the Republican Party drew much of its support from the same regions, economic classes,
and ethnic and religious groupings as had two parties that preceded it, the Federalists and the Whigs. The name of the party
may have been new. The party itself was old.

Strange though it seems both versions are true. Both inform the Republican Party to this day.

Version One took place against a background of seventy years of compromises between the North and the South over slavery.
The first compromise was the Constitution itself, ratified in 1788. To placate the South, the Constitution stipulated that
in determining the population of each state—an important exercise, since it was on the basis of its population that a state
would be allotted members in the House of Representatives—slaves would be counted right along with white people. (Each slave
would count for only three-fifths of a white person. But to the South three-fifths was better than nothing.) To placate the
North, the Constitution stipulated that while the import of slaves would remain legal until the end of 1807, as of that date
Congress would have the right to bring the slave trade from Africa to an end. (Congress did just that as soon as the stated
interval had elapsed.) The next compromise, the Missouri Compromise, took place in 1820. It brought Missouri into the Union
as a slave state. But it also brought in Maine, which until then had been part of Massachusetts, as a state in its own right,
preserving a balance between the North and South at twelve states apiece. Thirty years later came the Compromise of 1850.
It permitted California into the Union as a free state. But it made a number of concessions to the South, including rigorous
provisions for the return of runaway slaves and the settlement of a border dispute between New Mexico, a free state, and Texas,
a slave state, under which Texas received $10 million in compensation from the federal government.

While these compromises were taking place, the North was prospering, its economy expanding, its men of affairs growing rich
on manufacturing, banking, and shipping. About the same as that of the South when the Constitution was ratified, the population
of the North grew so much more quickly that by 1820 it was almost 20 percent larger than that of the South, by 1850 almost
60 percent larger. The very prosperity of the North seemed a condemnation of slavery—look, the North said in effect, at all
that we have achieved without it. Why should we go on making one compromise with the South after another?

The final compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, took place in 1854.

The act arose from the ambitions of Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois, who wanted to be president.
Douglas believed that by opening the territory west of the Missouri to settlement he could ingratiate himself with western
farmers, who would move into the territory, and with moneyed interests in the East, who would build railroads across it. Yet
Douglas faced a dilemma. If he brought Kansas and Nebraska into the union as free states he would infuriate the South. Yet
if he brought them in as slave states he would anger the very farmers and bankers whose support he wanted to win. Douglas’s
solution? To sidestep the issue. The new legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, he proposed, would decide the question of slavery
for themselves. Even before Douglas’s fellow Democrat, President Franklin Pierce, signed the act into law on May 30, 1854,
northerners and southerners, both eager to claim the two new states for their own sides, began pouring into Kansas and Nebraska.
Almost immediately, fighting between the northerners and southerners broke out.

The nation erupted. In the North, the region that concerns us here, patience with the seven decades of compromises over slavery
finally snapped. Preachers denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in every pulpit from Maine to Illinois. Torchlight parades were
held. Newspapers coupled lurid accounts of the fighting in Kansas and Nebraska with diatribes against the South.

In May 1854 a mass outdoors meeting took place in Ripon, Wisconsin, to found a new, anti-slavery party. Two months later,
in July, the new party held a convention in Jackson, Michigan, at which it formally adopted a name, calling itself “Republican.”
The new party grew at an astonishing rate. Within months it had replaced the Whig Party as one of the two major parties in
the country. Within two years it had elected a speaker of the house. Within six years it had placed Abraham Lincoln in the
White House.

There is only one way to make sense of the speed with which the Republican Party rose to power. You have to see the GOP as
a crusade. At the very moment when millions of northerners were suddenly looking for a way to express their outrage, the GOP
represented a vehicle for moral protest. Indeed, until the civil rights protests of more than a century later, the Republican
Party remained the biggest protest movement the United States had ever seen.

Version Two is nearly the opposite of Version One. While Version One stresses the suddenness with which the GOP emerged, Version
Two argues that by the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act the GOP had already been around for decades.

To grasp Version Two, you have to ask yourself just what kinds of people would have joined a moral movement like the movement
in Version One. It certainly wouldn’t have been southerners. They saw the Republican movement as an assault on their very
way of life. But it wouldn’t have been every northerner, either. Laborers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other northern
cities had no desire to free the slaves. The very idea unnerved them. When they pictured freed slaves, they pictured a horde
streaming north to take away their jobs.

When you sit back and consider it, you can see that the people drawn to the GOP would have been northerners of just two kinds.
The first would have been the rich. Bankers and merchants had nothing to fear from freeing the slaves. They knew they would
retain their privileged position in any event. They were at liberty, so to speak, to act upon their indignation. The second
would have been rural folk, the eighty percent or more of the northern population that lived on farms and in small towns.
They were self-sufficient. They had no more fear of freeing the slaves than did the bankers and merchants. And it was just
these two groups, the rich and the rural, that did indeed rally to the Republican Party.

Now, here is the odd part. The same two groups of northerners that provided much of the support for the Republican Party,
the rich and the rural, also provided much of the support for the party that preceded the GOP, the Whig Party, and for the
party that preceded the Whig Party, the Federalist Party. Yet when you compare their stands, you’ll see that the Federalists,
the Whigs, and the Republicans had virtually nothing in common.

The Federalists stood for a strong central government. Their party became defunct after the War of 1812. Then in the early
1830s the Whig Party emerged. Never managing to put together a coherent agenda of their own, the Whigs seldom stood for much
of anything except animosity toward Andrew Jackson and the Democrats. The Whigs remained the second major party, in opposition
to the Democrats (the descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans) for just over two decades. Then with the passage
of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the anti-slavery Whigs of the North, who dominated the party, found it impossible to cooperate
with the pro-slavery Whigs of the South. The Whig Party collapsed. The GOP emerged, standing for abolition.

Three different parties: Federalists, Whigs, Republicans. Three different stands: in favor of a strong central government,
against Andrew Jackson, in favor of abolition. Yet support from the same two groups of northerners sustained all three parties
alike.

Both Versions One and Two inform the GOP to this day, as I’ve said. Version One, the version in which the Republican Party
arose as a spontaneous moral protest, gives Republicans a certain pride. Once you recognize that the GOP was right on slavery,
the greatest issue the nation ever faced, you can almost understand how Republicans manage to hold their heads high, even
during a debacle such as the presidential campaign of Bob Dole.

Version Two establishes the existence of the Republican tribe. Before it was the Republican tribe, of course, it was the Whig
tribe, and before it was the Whig tribe, it was the Federalist tribe. Yet the tribe itself dates from the earliest years of
the republic. Although the tribe has spread out, migrating from its original base in the North to other regions of the country,
it exists to this day. Most Republicans are born into it—indeed, I learned, most Republicans are Republicans
because
they’re born into it. This was not an idea that sat easily with me.