History of the GOP

The Republican Party was conceived in the early 1850s by anti-slavery activists and individuals who believed that government should grant western lands to settlers free of charge. The first informal meeting of the party took place in Ripon, Wisconsin, a small town northwest of Milwaukee. The first official Republican meeting took place on July 6, 1854 in Jackson, Michigan. The name "Republican" was chosen because it alluded to equality and reminded individuals of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. At the Jackson convention, the new party adopted a platform and nominated candidates for office in Michigan.

In 1856, the Republicans became a national party when John C. Fremont was nominated for President under the slogan: "Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men, Fremont." Even though they were considered a third party because the Democrats and Whigs represented the two-party system at the time, Fremont received 33% of the vote. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House.

The Civil War erupted in 1861 and lasted four grueling years. During the war, against the advice of his cabinet, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves. Republicans of the time worked to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery; the Fourteenth, which guaranteed equal protection under the laws; and the Fifteenth, which helped secure voting rights for African-Americans.

The Republican Party also played a leading role in securing women the right to vote. In 1896, Republicans were the first major party to favor women's suffrage. When the Nineteenth Amendment finally was added to the Constitution, 26 of 36 state legislatures that had voted to ratify it were under Republican control. The first woman elected to Congress was a Republican, Jeanette Rankin from Montana in 1917.

Presidents during most of the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were Republicans. While the Democrats and Franklin Roosevelt tended to dominate American politics in the 1930's and 40's, for 28 of the forty years from 1952 through 1992, the White House was in Republican hands - under Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. Under the last two, Reagan and Bush, the United States became the world's only superpower, winning the Cold War from the old Soviet Union and releasing millions from Communist oppression.

Behind the elected officials and the candidates of any political party are thousands of hard-working staff and volunteers who raise money, lick the envelopes, and make the phone calls that every winning campaign must have. The national structure of our party starts with the Republican National Committee. Each state has its own Republican State Committee with a Chairman and staff. The Republican structure goes all the way down to neighborhoods, where a Republican precinct captain organizes Republican volunteers to participate in the nation’s political process.

Republicans have a long and rich history grounded in basic principles: Individuals, not government, can make the best decisions; all people are entitled to equal rights; and decisions are best made close to home. The symbol of the Republican Party is the elephant. During the midterm elections in 1874, Democrats tried to scare voters into thinking President Grant would seek to run for an unprecedented third term. Thomas Nast, a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly, depicted a Democratic jackass trying to scare a Republican elephant - and both symbols stuck. For a long time Republicans have been known as the "G.O.P." And party faithful thought it meant the "Grand Old Party." But apparently the original meaning (in 1875) was "gallant old party." And when automobiles were invented it also came to mean, "get out and push." That's still a pretty good slogan for Republicans who, every campaign, depend on the hard work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get the party’s message out and encourage Americans to support the causes and candidates of the Republican Party.

Origin of "GOP"

A favorite of headline writers, GOP dates back to the 1870s and 1880s. The abbreviation was cited in a New York Herald story on October 15, 1884; "' The GOP Doomed,' shouted the Boston Post.... The Grand Old Party is in condition to inquire...."

But what GOP stands for has changed with the times. In 1875 there was a citation in the Congressional Record referring to, "this gallant old party," and, according to Harper's Weekly, in The Cincinnati Commercial in 1876 to, "Grand Old Party."

Perhaps the use of "the G.O.M." for Britain's Prime Minister William E. Gladstone in 1882 as, " the Grand Old Man" stimulated the use of GOP in the United States soon after.

In early motorcar days, the GOP came to be associated with the phrase, "get out and push." During the 1964 presidential campaign, "Go-Party" was used briefly, and during the Nixon Administration, frequent references to the, "generation of peace" had happy overtones. In line with moves in the 1970s to modernize the party, Republican leaders took to referring to the, "Grand Old Party," harkening back to a 1971 speech by President Nixon at the dedication of the Eisenhower Republican Center in Washington, D.C.

Indeed, "Grand Old Party" is an ironic term, since the Democrat Party was organized some 22 years earlier in 1832.

Origin of the Elephant

This symbol of the party was born in the imagination of cartoonist Thomas Nast and first appeared in Harper's Weekly on November 7, 1874.

An 1860 issue of Railsplitter and an 1872 cartoon in Harper's Weekly connected elephants with Republicans, but it was Nast who provided the party with its symbol.

Oddly, two unconnected events led to the birth of the Republican Elephant. James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald raised the cry of "Caesarism" in connection with the possibility of a third term try for President Ulysses S. Grant. The issue was taken up by the Democratic politicians in 1874, halfway through Grant's second term and just before the midterm elections, and helped disaffect Republican voters.

While the illustrated journals were depicting Grant wearing a crown, the Herald involved itself in another circulation-builder in an entirely different, nonpolitical area. This was the Central Park Menagerie Scare of 1874, a delightful hoax perpetrated by the Herald. They ran a story, totally untrue, that the animals in the zoo had broken loose and were roaming the wilds of New York's Central Park in search of prey.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast took the two examples of the Herald enterprise and put them together in a cartoon for Harper's Weekly. He showed an ass (symbolizing the Herald) wearing a lion's skin (the scary prospect of Caesarism) frightening away the animals in the forest (Central Park). The caption quoted a familiar fable: "An ass having put on a lion's skin roamed about in the forest and amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met within his wanderings."

One of the foolish animals in the cartoon was an elephant, representing the Republican vote - not the party, the Republican vote - which was being frightened away from its normal ties by the phony scare of Caesarism. In a subsequent cartoon on November 21, 1874, after the election in which the Republicans did badly, Nast followed up the idea by showing the elephant in a trap, illustrating the way the Republican vote had been decoyed from its normal allegiance. Other cartoonists picked up the symbol, and the elephant soon ceased to be the vote and became the party itself: the jackass, now referred to as the donkey, made a natural transition from representing the Herald to representing the Democratic party that had frightened the elephant.

Source: William Safire's New Language of Politics, Revised edition, Collier Books, New York, 1972.