Posted by
flagwaver on Thursday, February 04, 2010 8:14:15 AM
First, for those that took my little quiz and answered I thank you. I thought it would be fun to do something a little different, and in keeping with my future career teaching history. You were some of my first guinea pigs, and thanks for playing along. Now for the answers you have all been dying for: #1 Sen. Fessenden, #2 Sen. Sumner. And the occassion, which no one guessed, was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson for his refusal to enforce Congressional Reconstruction, and his attempts to undermine the authority of the Congress.
My point in that little quiz was to give you quotations that you may not have heard and see if they sounded familiar...and they did, didn't they? The first quotation sounded just like something that McCain or Snowe would have said, and the second sounded like something one would expect from the Gipper or James Madison. Yet both quotations came from different factions of the GOP in the late 1860s, after the Civil War and as the country was being pieced back together from the rubble of war.
Even then the GOP had fissures that had the Democrats of the day, and the "conservatives" of the Party (more like our modern moderates), proclaiming that to follow a certain course was to doom the GOP to total irrelevance. Back then, the "conservatives" led by people like Fessenden (who, as Philo pointed out was from Maine...must be something in the water there) were more than willing to allow Johnson to ignore their laws, many of which were passed over the President's veto, for the sake of not alienating the public and not being seen as undiplomatic. For that group, being right and doing right were less important than following established protocols.
For the "radicals" who held that all men, even former slaves, were created equal and were deserving of the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution, established protocols meant nothing. They could see that their political opponents, even within the Party, were men who lacked conviction and were willing to compromise their very principles for political gain. They, as do we, rejected that notion out of hand and fought tooth, nail, and claw to bring the President to heel and do what their convictions compelled them to do...without worrying about political repercussions.
Which brings us to the present, where we are constantly being told that we must "go along to get along" or all will be lost. We have to become the pale reflection of our adversaries in policy, deportment, and ideology lest we become an afterthought in American politics, say the learned pundits both left and right. We must abandon our principles and compromise our values in an attempt to gain political respect from the "moderates" in the country, even if that means that means we become indistinguishable from the left. That is our only chance of survival, they say....and this split is also described as "unprecendented" in the annals of the GOP.
Yet from the very beginnings of the Party, there have been deep divisions between the "moderates" and the conservatives. It was seen in the split over the way the nation was to be reconstructed; it was in evidence in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson; it was there in the days of Goldwater and Reagan, and it remains with us today. For well over a century, the Grand Old Party has fought these battles, sometimes fiercely, but has usually managed to stay tethered to its basic underpinnings; limited government, fiscal responsibility, prosperity, equality, and security. Today we are still fighting for control of the ship, but even in our most heated moments we understand that the people we are fighting against, for the most part, want to get where we want to go...they just want to follow a different path.
So when the pundit class comes out and tells you how the GOP must drift left or essentially die as a political force, I urge you to do what President Obama always tells us he has to do: Reject that false choice between becoming them or ceasing to be. The GOP has survived these battles before, it will survive this one, and it will survive the next. And God willing, when history reports on these days we will stand on the same side as heroes such as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and Ronald Reagan and not with the Fessendens of the world who would sell their very souls for a scrap of political acceptance.