To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson (review)

Readers will find little nuance in this book; instead, what they will find is a lucid, tendentious, binary thesis that divides the course of the Republican Party into a struggle between advocates of activist government for the common people and moneyed interests serving Wall Street, big business, and social and racial privilege. Richardson, a historian at Boston College, best known for her earlier books on Wounded Knee and Reconstruction, writes lucidly and with a good deal of drama in her history of the Republican Party. Those who like their history in sharp black and white will find this a compelling book.

Richardson’s heroes are Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom she portrays as understanding the importance of activist government to promote equality, economic opportunity, reduction of income equality, and upward mobility. While her protagonists are portrayed as progressives, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, Warren G. Harding, and every Republican president from Ronald Reagan on are depicted as foes of opportunity for the common man and woman.

Richardson finds the original Republican Party a radical movement that promised not only to end black slavery but also to provide opportunity for the common people through free labor and land. By the end of the Civil War, “the Republicans had fielded an army and navy of more than 2.5 million men; had invented national banking, currency, and taxation; had provided schools and homes for poor Americans; and had freed the country’s four million slaves” (ix). Although periodically revived by such presidents as Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower, the egalitarian promise of the Republican Party was betrayed by its leaders following Lincoln’s presidency. In his efforts to fulfill his party’s promise, “Roosevelt called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns, and impose income and inheritance taxes” (ix). Eisenhower focused his attempts at reviving the party’s founding ideology on its earlier “calls for economic opportunity and applied them on an international scale” (ix). These ideals, however, were consistently subverted by reactionary elements in the party. So, Richardson asks, how did “the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower . . . become the party of today?” (x). To answer this question, she takes the reader on a sweeping march through history, beginning with Abraham Lincoln. Readers of this journal will be most interested in her first four chapters, which focus on the early history of the Republican Party.

Although the Republican Party stood in strong defense of private property, “men like Lincoln adamantly opposed great accumulations of wealth” (18). Furthermore, contrary to antebellum Democrats, Lincoln believed that “the government must respond to popular desire for it to do work that was too big for individuals” (19). Lincoln Republicans endorsed “tariffs to protect every branch of the economy; the distribution of land to promote farming; legislation to protect the equal rights of immigrants; the clearing of rivers and harbors for maritime trade; and the construction of a transcontinental railroad” (23).

During the Civil War, Republicans fulfilled these promises, enacted an income tax, and established a national currency that “rested not on private capital controlled by state banks, but on the stability of the national government, supported by regular Americans” (29). The Department of Agriculture was created. The Morrill Act granted thirty thousand acres of federally owned land for land-grant colleges. In opposition to Wall Street and banking interests, the Treasury Department under Salmon Chase shifted the marketing of bonds away from entrenched financial interests by selling bonds to the public. Richardson maintains that Lincoln Republicans, intent on making government of the people, initially eschewed the spoils system. In short, she holds that Lincoln and like-minded Republicans believed in an activist federal government.

The Lincoln promise of an activist government, she finds, was subverted by the emergence of a large wealthy class, banking interests, and corporations following the war. After fierce party struggle, the...