Origins
In 1820 the Missouri Compromise was enacted by the US Congress as an effort to preserve the balance of political power between slaveholder and free states. Missouri was admitted as a slave state; Maine was admitted as a free state. Perhaps more significantly, slavery was also prohibited in the former Louisiana territory north of latitude 36° 30’, which was part of the boundary between Missouri and Arkansas.
The Missouri Compromise was repealed in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska act that implemented the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which provided for the citizens of each territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed. Former members of the Whig party opposed to slavery began meeting in the upper midwestern states in early 1854, and on March 20, 1854 the Republican Party was founded. As the new party gained support in the North, by 1860 a majority of Southern slave states were threatening secession if a Republican was elected president. Six weeks after Lincoln was elected, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and on April 12, 1861 the Civil War began when Confederate forces fired on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter.
As the Civil War progressed, divisions arose within the Republican party between a radical faction that advocated punitive policies toward the South and a moderate faction headed by Lincoln that wanted leniency. In the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson, a Democrat who had run with Lincoln as a “unity” ticket, set in motion the policies of Reconstruction. Disagreement over Johnson’s policies led to gains for the radical Republicans in the election of 1866, and to Johnson’s eventual impeachment in 1868. War hero Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency for the Republicans that year, with the radical party faction in ascension, but the series of scandals in his administration led to the creation of a new political party, the Liberal Republicans. Grant easily defeated their candidate, Horace Greeley, in the election of 1872, but scandals continued to plague his administration. In 1875 the “Whiskey Ring,” in which distillers colluded with federal agents to avoid paying excise taxes, implicated Grant’s personal secretary. Despite the numerous scandals, Grant’s veto of the so-called inflation bill, which would have expanded the money supply, and his signing of the Specie Resumption Act, which tied the dollar to gold exchange, established the Republicans as the party of fiscal restraint and economic conservatism.
In general in the post-Civil War elections Republicans were able to brand Democrats as “Copperheads” -- a derogatory term for Northerners who had opposed the Lincoln administration and were assumed to have been sympathetic to the South. James A. Garfield, a Union general like Grant, was elected president in 1880, but assassinated the following year. His Vice President, Chester A. Arthur, succeeded him. Garfield’s Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, was the Republican presidential nominee in 1884, but a renegade faction of the party, nicknamed the “mugwumps,” threw their support behind the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland, who won the election.
In 1893 financial speculation in South America, South Africa, and Australia failed, leading to a run on gold in the US. A rush to withdraw money from US banks precipitated what has been labeled the “Panic of 1893.” Hundreds of banks failed; businesses couldn’t pay workers or buy materials. Except for a brief uptick in June 1894 the resulting depression lasted until 1897.
In 1896 the Republicans won the presidency (McKinley) and control of both houses of Congress, in part by blaming the deteriorating economic conditions on Democratic support for low interest rates and linking currency to silver (and not just gold). Political scientist V.O. Key includes the election of 1896 among those he terms “critical elections.” The Republican party gained support from all social and economic classes, and from rural as well as urban voters. The Democratic defeat, Key writes, “was so demoralizing and so thorough that the party could make little headway in regrouping its forces until 1916.”
It is perhaps not surprising that Republican political operative Karl Rove would look to this realignment for inspiration. In The Triumph of William McKinley Rove highlights what he sees as the campaign’s focus on clear policies, optimism in the face of economic uncertainty, and broadening the party’s appeal including rejecting anti-Catholic prejudice. McKinley also inverted the traditional practice of barnstorming, opting instead to stay home and have a large number of handpicked supporters brought to him. McKinley’s campaign raised more than ten times what his opponent’s campaign (William Jennings Bryan) did in donations, enabling McKinley to mail some supporters as often as weekly.
In his NY TImes review of Rove’s book Columbia’s Ira Katznelson goes beyond Key’s analysis to suggest that the campaign of 1896 should be viewed in broad historical context, including the US’s transformation from rural to industrial, the settling of the West, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and increasing professionalization of the military.
With McKinley’s assassination, progressive Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency and was re-elected in 1904. In 1908 William Howard Taft, who had served as Roosevelt’s secretary of war, was elected, but his conservative policies divided the Republicans, enabling Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win in 1912. Wilson was re-elected in 1916, but throughout the “Roaring Twenties” Republicans controlled the presidency.
Evangelicalism
As social and geographical mobility increased, traditionally stabilizing institutions such as family and work lost some of their efficacy. In their place, people turned to reform groups such as temperance societies, fraternal associations like the Masons, but perhaps most importantly evangelical churches. Queens College’s Donald Scott refers to evangelicals as “the earliest and most energetic inventors” of what he calls the “new associational order.” Scott compares the functioning of evangelical churches to that of political parties. Like political parties, gaining and retaining members became a central focus of evangelical churches. In the same way that politicians had to craft their messages to attract and excite voters, preachers’ skill in engaging and moving their parishioners became a key measure of their appeal -- and by association, that of their denomination.
In his influential work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter identifies this emphasis on proselytizing and popular appeal as one of the sources of the anti-intellectualist trend in American life. “Simple people were brought back to faith with simple ideas,” Hofstadter writes, “voiced by forceful preachers who were capable of getting away from the complexities and pressing upon them the simplest of alternatives: the choice of heaven or hell.” Hofstadter cites historian of religion Will Herberg in characterizing contemporary American religion as having “a strong belief in religion-in-general coupled with great indifference as to the content of religion.”
In a pattern that prefigures today’s televangelists, prominent 19th-century evangelist Dwight L. Moody combined a professed disdain for education and critical thinking with industrial-age business organization. “I have one rule about books. I do not read any book, unless it will help me to understand the book,” Moody said. “I would rather have zeal without knowledge; and there is a good deal of knowledge without zeal.” Nonetheless Moody applied business skills presumably gained during his first career as a successful wholesale shoe salesman to the business of soul-saving. He sent agents ahead to municipalities on his itinerary to arrange invitations from local congregations. He deployed advertising campaigns including posters, and advertisements in the amusement section of newspapers. Churches generally were too small for his gatherings, so large auditoriums had to be found or built. Sometimes these structures were temporary, sold and scrapped after their use.
Beyond support from local business people, Moody was underwritten by business titans Cyrus McCormick (farm machinery), George Armour (agri-business), Jay Cooke (banker), John Wanamaker (merchant and early proponent of advertising), J.P. Morgan (banker), and Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroad and shipping magnate). While initially opposed to efforts to quantify the effect of his revival meetings, Moody eventually authorized the use of “decision cards” to tabulate data on conversions.
But while Moody is reported to have said “It is a stupid thing to try to be eloquent,” it was the late 19th-century evangelist Billy Sunday whose sermons Hofstadter labeled “the nadir of evangelical rhetoric.”
In contrast to Moody, who remained a layman throughout his career, Sunday sought ordination, and in 1903 faced the Chicago Presbytery Board of Examiners. After Sunday declined to answer a series of questions deemed “too deep,” the board admitted him anyway on the grounds that he had already converted more people than all his examiners.
“With his striped suits, hard collars, diamond pins and studs, shiny patent-leather shoes, and spats, he resembled a hardware drummer out to make time with the girls,” Hofstadter writes.
“What do I care if some puff-eyed little dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain Anglo-Saxon words? I want people to know what I mean and that’s why I try to get down where they live,” Sunday declared. “The church in America would die of dry rot and sink forty-nine fathoms in hell if all members were multimillionaires and college graduates.” For Sunday and his congregants Jesus “was no dough-faced, lick-spittle proposition. Jesus was the greatest scrapper that ever lived.”
In this period of social and economic change, evangelicals’ political alignment largely followed geography. As former G.W. Bush speechwriter and self-described evangelical Michael Gerson notes in a recent Atlantic commentary, Northern evangelicals were advocates of social justice, prison and mental healthcare reform, and worked to end slavery. Gerson highlights the role of his alma mater, Wheaton College, as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
But as the University of Denver’s Nancy Wadsworth writes in a partial critique of Gerson’s piece, “the vast bulk of Southern white evangelicals defended slavery, ... fought Reconstruction, and designed and defended Jim Crow.” Southern Baptists had split with Northern Baptists in 1845 over the issue of slavery. Wadsworth cites an 1860 quote from the Kentucky Baptist Association:
Among the white race in the Southern States there is no difference of opinion upon this subject: all are united in the opinion in reference to the political, intellectual, and social inequality between the colored people and the white races. And the people of our Commonwealth generally feel that the present condition of the colored race in this country accords both with the Word and the providence of God.