The varied successes of the Republican Party since World War II reflect its ability to simultaneously retain its moderate eastern and more conservative midwestern and western membership while attracting new populations of voters, especially southern whites.
A party long in the minority because of its association with the stock market crash of the Great Depression, the Republicans held a congressional majority in both houses for only four years between 1945 and 1968. War hero Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the presidency by a broad consensus in 1952 and 1956, perhaps representing the waning bipartisan spirit of an earlier era. Later party successes, including the election of President Richard M. Nixon in 1968, depended on a new electoral coalition of white southerners, blue-collar workers, and fiscal conservatives. This shift reflected the rising ascendancy of the party’s conservative wing.
In 1946, the Republicans captured a majority in the House and Senate. In the elections of 1948, however, they failed to capitalize on white southern resentment of inte-grationist policies pursued by the administration of Harry S. Truman. Rather than casting their votes for the favored Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey, a majority of voters in four southern states chose J. Strom Thurmond of the States’ Rights Party. Americans reelected Truman and the Republicans lost control of Congress.
Popular disquiet about international events, including the fall of China to communism, the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb, and the American military involvement in Korea, was beneficial to Republican candidates in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Shrewdly, the party drafted General Dwight D. Eisenhower as its presidential candidate in 1952. Eisenhower was largely indifferent to party politics; few Americans knew his party affiliation until January of the election year. Nevertheless, his appeal was broad and nonpartisan: Two in four Democrats polled in the summer of 1952 hoped their party would nominate Eisenhower if Republicans failed to do so. With such widespread backing, Eisenhower easily defeated the intellectual, and divorced, Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Eisenhower, or “Ike,” as he was popularly known, was overwhelmingly favored by voters in every region of the country including the Deep South, where he made modest inroads on once solidly Democratic territory.
The revitalized party also took both houses of Congress in 1952, although it would hold them for only two years. Led by Ohio senator Robert A. Taet, the Republicans expressed skepticism about the U. S. role in international affairs, especially the United Nations. Many Republicans also voiced criticism of the “Socialist” New Deal programs, accusing Democrats in their 1952 platform of “seizing powers never granted.” During the Eisenhower presidency, however, many New Deal programs were protected or even enlarged. The federal government expanded social security and unemployment benefits, and, in 1953, created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts narrowly defeated Vice President Richard Nixon for the presidency. Nixon, a vehement anticommunist as a U. S. congressman and senator, was accused by some of losing because of his acquiescence to the party’s more liberal, eastern wing. Yet his defeat may have hinged on public sentiment that the United States was losing the arms race, as well as on Nixon’s inability to master the new political medium of television. The two wings of the Republican Party subsequently fought bitterly for control of the party. In 1964, the party turned to Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The conservative Goldwater announced that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” a sentiment his Democratic opponents were able to turn against him. Goldwater was victorious only in the Deep South and in his home state of Arizona. As resounding as this defeat was, it signaled a dramatic regional realignment of American voters, a trend Nixon exploited four years later.
In the tumultuous year of 1968, Nixon won the White House by portraying himself as a critic of the Vietnam War, and a defender of such “traditional” American ideals as patriotism and law and order. Nixon appealed to blue-collar workers and southern whites, two groups increasingly drawn to the Republican Party, and to opponents of integrationist policies such as school busing. During the primaries, Nixon headed off attacks from the right by rival Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. At the same time, he claimed to have a “secret plan” to end the costly and now unpopular Vietnam War, drawing support away from moderate Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller of New York. In November, Nixon narrowly defeated Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, whose campaign was hampered by segregationist George C. Wallace, former governor of Alabama, who ran as a third party candidate, capturing five southern states. In victory, Nixon had apparently tapped into the “silent majority” he often mentioned during the campaign. These Americans, a mix of blue-collar workers, middle-class suburbanites, and white southerners, represented the new coalition of American voters, one which would propel the GOP into the White House in four out of the five elections held after 1968.
Further reading: John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert Allen Rutland, The Republicans: From Lincoln to Bush (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996).
—Patrick J. Walsh
Reuther, Walter (1907-1970) union leader Walter Reuther was an active union leader and president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) for 24 years who fought throughout his entire career for workers’ rights and stability in the union.
Reuther was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on September 1, 1907. His father, Valentine Reuther, was a German immigrant who had come to the United States during the late 19th century. Valentine was an active union member in Wheeling, where he helped to establish the International Union of Brewery Workers, and he was also a member of the American socialist movement. Reuther only attended school through the eighth grade, before going to work in a Wheeling steel mill by the age of 16. At the age of 19, he grew discontented with his life in West Virginia and left for Detroit to enter the budding automobile industry. There he worked for the Ford Motor Corporation, and in his spare time finished high school. He then went on to complete three years at Wayne State University.
While working at Ford, Reuther began to take part in trade union activity, and, as a result, he was laid off in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. He then left the country for three years with his brother Victor and traveled to Europe, eventually ending up in the Soviet Union. The brothers worked for nearly two years in an automobile factory in Gorky. During his time in the Soviet Union, Reuther saw the lack of rights and freedom that the people had under the communist government, and he vowed to fight socialist influence in unions when he returned to the United States.
On his return to Detroit in 1935, Reuther joined Local 174 of the UAW, and he soon became president. He put Local 174 in the spotlight by organizing sit-down strikes against General Motors (GM) in 1937, in which workers sat down at their posts and refused to leave the factory until settlement of the strike. GM finally recognized the UAW as the main bargaining body for the strike, and, in 1939, the UAW became a part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a new organization challenging the older craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Reuther continued to move up the ladder in the UAW. He was elected vice president in 1942 and president in 1946. By 1952, he was also the president of the CIO, and he played a pivotal role in the merger of the CIO with the AFL. As president of the CIO, Reuther was second only to George Meany, the president of the amalgamated AFL-CIO.
Under Reuther, the UAW continued to grow to more than 1 million workers. Throughout his career, Reuther fought for the rights of the workingman in the automobile industry. He wanted to make sure that the members of the UAW benefited from the large-scale consumerism going on in the postwar United States. The car companies were selling automobiles at a rapid rate, making massive profits. Reuther insisted that unskilled autoworkers receive increased pay from the increased profits. He no longer wanted just small wage gains, but, rather, guaranteed annual wages, profit sharing, pension plans, and more holidays for the autoworkers. Reuther was successful in his efforts.
Meanwhile, Reuther’s relationship with George Meany deteriorated. Reuther criticized AFL-CIO president George Meany for running the AFL-CIO dictatorially, and he opposed Meany’s conservatism and inaction. Reuther felt that Meany did nothing to benefit the working class that he represented. His opposition to Meany eventually ended when Reuther led the UAW out of the AFL-CIO in 1968. The following year, Reuther joined the UAW in an alliance with the Teamsters Union, expelled from the AFL-CIO earlier because of corruption.
In 1970, Reuther and his wife May were flying in a chartered plane over Michigan when it crashed and killed them both. In his lifetime, he made a lasting impression on labor unions and the UAW, gaining for his constituents many of the rights and benefits they still enjoy.
Further reading: Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
—Matthew Escovar
World History
