US: Who turned the (originally) “anti-slavery” GOP into the “pro-business” party?

Question

It is my understanding that the Republican Party (of the US) arose from the anti-slavery movement, and, more specifically, as a reaction against the 1854 repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

And yet, pretty early on (at least as early as the Reconstruction, if not earlier), the Republican Party became, roughly speaking, "the party of big business".

I imagine that the evolution of the GOP from the "anti-slavery" party into the "pro-business" one was motivated largely by the relative alignments of political interests at the time, but I would like to know, more specifically

the names of those most clearly responsible for bringing about this "re-positioning" of the GOP.

(Please provide sources.)

Answer 1

I would date the "turning" of the Republican party into a pro business party to William McKinley 1897-1901.

The Republicans dominated the Presidency for 72 years between 1861-1933. But this can be subdivided into two 36 year sub periods 1861-1896, and 1897-1932.

It's true, as one of the other respondendents pointed out, that the Republicans absorbed the remnants of the pro-business Whig party. Fundamentally, however, the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln was a LEFT party (up to 1896). Freeing the slaves and giving African Americans even a few civil rights was a radical "leftist" idea in its time. It was then opposed mainly by "Democrats." Postwar Republican Presidents such as Johnson, Grant, and Hayes were preoccupied by Reconstruction. Then Chester Arthur and Benjamin Harrison (Garfield served only one month.) focused on "Progressive" issues such as civil service reform and trust-busting (the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act). Democrat Grover Cleveland was more pro business than the Republican Presidents (ditto for Samuel J. Tilden, who lost to Hayes by one electoral vote).

The shift toward business began with William McKinley, who was associated with pro business tariffs. His successor, Teddy Roosevelt (TR),was an (antitrust) "Progressive." William Howard Taft was a cipher, sometimes appearing to be Progressive, at other times being associated with pro business interets, like his fellow Ohioan Senator Joseph Fouthaker. (This confusion caused the split off of the "Bull Moose" Republicans under TR.) Certainly by the time of Calivn Coolidge, Republicans were associated with the quote "The business of America is business." (Harding was a nonentity.)

One may wonder how the originally "left" Republican party eventually became pro business. My guess is that it remained in power so long that it eventually became the "Establishment" party.

Answer 2

The Republican Party was always, since its founding, a "pro-business" party.

The party was formed from the remnants of the previous pro-business party, the Whig Party, when that party split over the expansion of slavery into the territories in the early 1850's.

The two platforms are not as disjoint as they may at first appear. Northern business interests did not like the labor market distortions caused by the existence of large amounts of unpaid slave labor. The party's first platform in 1856 was in large part an economic one: (wikipedia)

The new party went well beyond the issue of slavery in the territories. It envisioned modernizing the United States — emphasizing giving free western land to farmers ("free soil") as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best lands, expanded banking, more railroads, and factories. They vigorously argued that free-market labor was superior to slavery and the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism - this is the "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" ideology

Of course once slavery had been ended, and the Republican Party disclaimed any further concerns for civil rights (after the end of Reconstruction in the wake of the election of 1876), that only left the "pro-business" platform of the party standing.

Here, according to wikipedia, is what that looked like in the late 19th Century:

The GOP supported business generally, hard money (i.e., the gold standard), high tariffs to promote economic growth, high wages and high profits, generous pensions for Union veterans, and (after 1893) the annexation of Hawaii. The Republicans supported the pietistic Protestants who demanded Prohibition. As the northern post-bellum economy boomed with heavy and light industry, railroads, mines, fast-growing cities and prosperous agriculture, the Republicans took credit and promoted policies to sustain the fast growth

Answer 3

I'm not sure that anyone is responsible for this shift; I rather suspect that politics is stochastic more often than planned. I'm not sure that it is possible to give an answer that a panel of objective observers would agree with. With those caveats in mind, I'd offer the following description of events.

I think the dominant player is FDR. FDR built a political machine that dominated US politics.

African Americans moved into the Democratic Party during Roosevelt's time. After Roosevelt took office in 1933, New Deal legislation sailed through Congress at lightning speed. In the 1934 midterm elections, 10 Republican senators went down to defeat, leaving them with only 25 against 71 Democrats. The House of Representatives was split in a similar ratio. Wikipedia's history of the Republican Party.

As the last couple of sentences point out the Democratic party grew at the expense of the Republican party. The few minutes of research I have available to me don't permit me to discover whether the GOP tried to preserve the party's record on civil rights, what strategies (if any) they tried, and why those strategies were ultimately ineffective. I suspect without any particular evidence that the issues that brought FDR to power and kept him there were, in the short term, perceived as more important to critical segments of the electorate than civil rights.

Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater are cited as the visionaries for the resurgence of the Republican Party. Both supported civil rights, and Rockefeller had a fairly strong and positive civil rights record. Goldwater in his 1964 election campaign made a strategic decision that federalism and states rights were more important than the Civil Rights Act.

In 1964, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized "states' rights".[16] Goldwater's 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation and had supported the original senate version of the bill, Goldwater made the decision to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do or not do business with whomever they chose. Wikipedia attributes this assertion to Donaldson.

You could therefore argue that Goldwater is responsible for the shift, but I think that oversimplifies the process of politics.

Note with emphasis. I've done my best to be as neutral and academic as possible, since discussions of political priorities and agendas tend to get heated. I'm not so arrogant as to assume that "my best" is the same as "fully successful", so I'm throwing this open to community wiki in the hopes that anyone who can tell the story better will revise.

Answer 4

The Wikipedia article on the U.S. Democratic Party cites JFK and LBJ next to FDR (whom @Mark C. Wallace cited above) in this context. I have read biographies of all three Presidents, and based primarily on evidence from Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson I would vote for LBJ's case being the strongest even among those three. Here's an excerpt from the introduction of Book Three: Master of the Senate (2002):

Icons of the fight for social justice -- the Humphreys and Douglases and Lehmans and the generations of liberal senators before them, eloquent, courageous senators, men of principles and ideals -- had been trying for decades to pass a civil rights bill, with absolutely no success. It was not until Lyndon Johnson, who had never before fought in their cause, picked up the banner of civil rights that it was carried at last nearer to its goal. It took a Lyndon Johnson, with his threats and deceits, with his relentlessness with which he insisted on victory and the savagery with which he fought for it, to ram that legislation through. As I wrote in the second volume of this work, "Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life." His great voting rights legislation, the supreme accomplishment of his life and his career, would be passed during his presidency, of course; it was then that he most firmly took the hands of black Americans. But he first reached for their hands not as President, but in the Senate.