Why didn’t they dissolve the Republican Party when they had a chance?
From “The Republicans Face a Great Decision”; NY Times 6-20-1937; Delbert Clark.
These are the questions that are now agitating the more thoughtful members of the party, the politicians who, after three disasterous defeats at the polls in the space of five yeras, are now thinking less of the immediate fruits of officeholding and more of the broader aspects of political theory. The party is, in short, in the position of a man with heart disease, whose problem has become not “Shall I play golf?” but rather “Shall I live to play golf again?”
[…] Between 1932 and 1936 the Republican leaders still had hopes and many of them, by November of last year, had by a species of self-hypnosis convinced themselves that the party would squeak through and beat Roosevelt. The overwhelming New Deal victory dispelled all illusions and today the party’s leaders, in and out of Washington, are wondering aand discussing among themselves what the next step shall be. Of one thing most of them are convinced: the party must find iron leadership and a valid set of principles if it is not to vanish as a name and as a political entity.
Yet so uncertain are they concerning particulars, so confused by the variety of immediate issues presented and teh conflicting types of leadershiup all climing to have communed with the burning bush, that none of any responsibility will publicly discuss their thoughts. Vandenberg, Borah, Hamilton, Snell, Ogden, Mills, Wadsworth and such self-constituted leaders will talk volubly in private, but for public consumption will utter nothing but generalities — and very few of those. They are too busy thinking.
From private discussions with some of these real or putative leaders one startling fact emerges. There is a willingness, inconceivable four years ago, to consider the possibility of discarding the party, as Republican party, altogether and of issuing a new manifesto under a new name with the salutary purpose of eliminating fundamental antagonisms and starting afresh on a solid, if small, basis.
A number of factors have incduced this revolutionary thought. It is not merely that the shell of the Republican party is filled with warring elements who agree on nothing but the party name and who cannot be counted upon at the polls. That would perhaps lend plausibility to the theory that the party is dead already and must inevitably disintegrate and disappear in fact as well as name. But the factor that adds hope to teh future is the knowledge that the Democratic party, while in overwhelming majority at the moment, is in almost as serious a state of internal disintegration as the Republican.
With the indutbitable fact in mind, some of the more thoughtful Republicans believe that a new conservative party, sprung from the remnants of the Republican, would rally to its standard innumerable Democrats who would never vote for the Republican label but who are sufficiently disaffected from the New Deal leadership to join a new party that represented their true convictions.
These Republican leaders know that the Democratic party, so far as its national aspects are concerned, has become the Roosevelt party. They know also, from public manifestations and private conversations, that large numbers of conservative Democrats, with sufficiently outstanding leadership, would welcome a way out of the dilemma. They would prefer, for sentimental and traditional reasons, to remain Democrats and get rid of the New Deal, but to many of them that begins to look like the tail’s attempting to wag the dog.
To many political observers in Washington it is apparent that the object of President Roosevelt and his closest advisers, from the very day he formally accepted the nomination in 1932, has been to reconstruct the Democratic party alon gliberal, up-to-date lines. He has appointed well-known Republicans to high office; he has publicly , and courted the support, of politicians who have been high in the Republican councils. He has, it is true, given public aid and comfort to old-line Democratic leaders who violently distrust the New Deal, but he has sought steadily to vitiate their influence by adopting a legislative program generally anathema to them. He has appeared to be seeking to build up anew liberal nucleus within the Democratic party in the hope that eventually it will be strong enough not to need the unfailing support of the Solid South. Eventually the Democratic party would become once more a truly national party, the logical split would occur and the Republicans could have the conservatives. Up to now the old-line conservative Democrats have rallied around at telection time, and have not deserted the party label. They cling, for sweet sentiment’s sake, to that label, but they may not cling for many more years, and it is upon their expected defection that the Republican planners are coutninng to fortify their new party, if and when it is announced.
[…] Some time between then [1938] and 1940, following this line of reasoning, they would work out a mutually satisfactory declaration of principles, laid down under a new party name, and go to the country in that year united and revitalized. They are frank to admit that they might not be able to swing the [1940] election, short of a great popular revulsion against Roosevelt, but they would not be too dissatisfied if they could make as good a showing as the Republican founders did in their first Presidential campaign back in 1856.
If such a new party were to be proclaimed, however, its founders would have no authority to pronounce the last rites over the GOP, and they would find at the very outset determined opposition to such a cavalier jettisoning of the old name and tradition. But the opposition would find itself divided into two bitterly antagonistic groups: […] The very fact of their initial split, of course, would weaken the force of these groups, and it readily to be assumed, in the opinion of some who are thinking of a new party, that one of these dissident groups would presently lose itself in the Constitution Party, the Liberty Party, or whatever it chose to call itself.   But this very question of which way the new party would lean, other than in general opposition to the Roosevelt political dynasty, is one which is agitating its would-be-founders most. Among them are men who are by the standards of the current decade ultra-conservative, and others who would go far down the line with much Roosevelt legislation, but who oppose with all their souls the political tactics of the New Deal and the administrative authoritarianism which they profess to see animating Mr Roosevelt. Some of these men honestly believe that civil liberty in the United States is in grave peril; that we are headed in the direction of an American brand of fascism, and that it is their patriotic duty, regardless of prior party affiliations, to oppose that trend.
[…] There is still another ground however, more fatalistic, more studious of historical precedents, which predicts the early demise of the Republican party without a successor. They reason it this way: [back to James Monroe and a one-party state, more or less, Republican Party anomolie.]
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I probably posted too much from this article. Main focal points are the terms “Liberal” (and its cousin – slash – mask in terms of the current political dichotomy “progressive”), what to make of a “Conservative Project” at its lowest ebb, as well the slow political alignment that held the Solid South until the Republicans now have — not quite a “Solid South” but a dominance nonetheless that holds the South as a political bloc in presidential elections (and Congressional pluralities).
Next up (or probably not “next” but sooner or later), if I can find it, 1938 polling — the conservative – liberal labels (self described) are at parity. Meaning what, precisely –?