Word: republican
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...topflight Texas historian thought it would take a lot more than that. Writing in the current Southwest Review, Walter Prescott Webb, longtime professor of history at the University of Texas declared flatly that the great principle of the Republican Party itself was archaic and had been archaic for years...
Golden Era. In an article calculated to raise the hackles on Republican necks, Professor Webb looked beyond the current farm and labor vote, and got the party in his sights down "the long gunbarrel of history." Historically, said Webb, "the debate swings around a principle. The party that originates the principle and establishes it, does so in a national crisis. As long as the principle being acted upon works, it is almost impossible to dislodge the party that discovered...
...Republican Party found such a principle after its triumphant emergence from the Civil War. It embraced "the new and most dynamic force''-business-and the principle that what was good for business was good for the nation...
...each case, Webb argues, the party chose to support the minority against the majority. Then the party ran out of homesteads. After that, says Webb, "the Republican Party had no place at all for the farmer ... It compelled him to buy in a protected market and permitted him to sell in a free market with all the world as his competitor." Observes Webb: "Thus the Republican Party successively turned its back on one great segment of society after another, on the farmer, on small business, on labor. The party quit the people long before the people quit...
There is little the Republican Party can do at present, Webb believes. "The Democrats [have] an initiative based on [this] new principle which for the time being the Republican Party cannot possibly take from it and remain the Republican Party ... It can only complain, criticize, claim it can do the job better and more efficiently. Under present conditions it seems doubtful whether it can find anything to offer that its members would accept or the American voters would take at face value. The Republican Party worked out to the last grain its vein of success and for the present...