The Republican Party is the most successful third-party movement in the United States history.
-Lilly Goren
There’s been an especially popular place for people to snap photos this week at the RNC. It’s a small, white building that looks like an old-fashioned schoolhouse. It’s set up on the convention grounds, near booths selling fried cheese curds and frozen custard. The building is a one-third scale replica of the so-called “Little White Schoolhouse” in Ripon, Wisconsin. That’s the city in Wisconsin known as the birthplace of the Republican Party.
Meetings held in the Little White Schoolhouse in 1854 led to the party’s creation. Lilly Goren is a professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha. She shares how — and why — the Republican Party came to be formed in Ripon.
"[The Republican Party] was really founded upon the remnants of what would have been known at the time as the Whig Party, and also integrated some folks who were known as Free Soilers. And so, the Whigs could not quite sort out what they wanted to do with regard to the issue of slavery," explains Goren. "And the Republican Party, while not necessarily moving directly into an abolitionist mode was opposed to some of the decisions that had made in the Kansas, Nebraska Compromise, and also the Dred Scott decision with regard to extending slavery further West. So the early days of the Republican Party was really about sort of containing the extent of slavery and keeping it also out of essentially the northern states, and thus the Republican Party, was dominated by people from the northern states or their northwestern state."
The party grew quickly, having been formed in 1854 before having its first president, Abraham Lincoln, elected six years later in 1860. Following the Civil War, the Republican Party began to evolve through different variations. Goren cites the New Deal Coalition as a significant factor in the party's development because it notably narrowed it. Eventually, in the 1980s, the cross-ideology between parties gradually stopped, resulting in the current American political makeup that is seen today.
Goren notes the party is different today from when it was first founded. "The Republican Party and the Republican Party platform looks like a much more constrained approach to market economics and it's not necessarily as clear that the party itself is committed to. You know sort of freedom of labor to move around in the United States and for all individuals to be treated equally, which was, at least as the Republican Party evolved, something that it was also committed to," Goren explains.
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