Republican Party (United States)

"We believe the strength of our nation lies with the individual and that each person's dignity, freedom, ability and responsibility must be honored... We believe in equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless or race, creed, sex, age or disability... We believe free enterprise and encouraging individual initiative have brought this nation opportunity, economic growth and prosperity... We believe government must practice fiscal responsibility and allow individuals to keep more of the money they earn... We believe the proper role of government is to provide for the people only those critical functions that cannot be performed by individuals or private organizations and that the best government is that which governs least... We believe the most effective, responsible and responsive government is government closest to the people... We believe Americans must retain the principles that have made us strong while developing new and innovative ideas to meet the challenges of changing times... We believe Americans value and should preserve our national strength and pride while working to extend peace, freedom and human rights throughout the world."

"And as I understand the Republican party, while it steadily holds that slavery is in itself a wrong, it does not forget human conditions and the actual state of things, and, therefore, that the questions of planting slavery in fresh territory and of removing it where it is in wrought in a system of society are very different, as different as the prevention and the cure of disease. The question of the moment, then, is simply whether the most unrelenting and permanent despotism can be justified by the Constitution of the United States. That is, whether the makers of the government meant that the democratic-republican principle should gradually, but surely, disappear from that government. There are, therefore, but two parties, one holding that a system of free society, the other that one of slave society, is the real intention of the government. These parties are sectionally divided in situation, but they both aim to have their idea become the national policy. The party of slavery, indeed, is divided in its own camp, but only upon a minor question."

"It is genuinely terrifying that someone (Donald Trump) who advances such offensive and ridiculous proposals could win the nomination of a party once led by Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote more books than Mr. Trump has probably read."

"I confess I secretly suspect the Republicanism of an orator who is more anxious to show his hearers that he respects what he calls the rights of slavery than that he loves the rights of man. If God be just and the human instinct true, slavery has no rights at all. It has only a legalized toleration. Have I a right to catch a weaker man than I, and appropriate him, his industry, and his family, forever, against his will, to my service? Because if I have, any man stronger than I has the same right over me. But if I have not, what possible right is represented by the two thousand million dollars of property in human beings in this country? It is the right of Captain Kidd on the sea, of Dick Turpin on the land. I certainly do not say that every slave-holder is a bad man, because I know the contrary. The complicity of many with the system is inherited, and often unwilling. But to rob a man of his liberty, to make him so far as possible a brute and a thing, is not less a crime against human nature because it is organized into a hereditary system of frightful proportions. A wrong does not become a right by being vested."

"The Republican Party was born 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. The Republicans of their day 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 19th 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 1930s and 40s, 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."

"Republicans have a long and rich history with 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 mid term elections way back 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 'GOP', and party faithfuls 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 depend every campaign year on the hard work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get out and vote and push people to support the causes of the Republican Party."

"Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican. That's just a fact of life."

"This... must inevitably raise a few questions—principally, whether or not the GOP remains a gaggle of thieves willing to sell each other’s grandmothers out at a moment’s notice to save their own skin politically, an end-of-times spectacle of an increasingly unstable oligarchy too drunk on its own material excess to save itself from its own decadence and corruption? Another question that springs to mind is whether it’s now in fact degenerated even further into something even more horrible again — a raging collective psychosis of pathological entitlement, collective narcissism, hypernationalist tribalism and jingoism, and death-cult supremacism."

"I hate Republicans."

"The Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea around us."

"Gentleman, I am a republican, a radical republican, a Black republican, a republican dyed in the wool, and for one I want the republican party to live as long as I do… It is the party of law and order, of liberty and progress, of honor and honesty, as against disloyalty, moral stagnation, dishonest voting, and repudiation."

"There are parallels between the 1890s and today in voter suppression laws motivated by white conservatives' fears of growing minority strength at the ballot box. In the 1890s, the suppressors were Democrats. Now they are Republicans... African Americans still supported the Republicans, the party of Lincoln and liberty. Slavery, which almost all Democrats supported before the Civil War, was gone. But, the Democrats were still the party of white supremacy... Abraham Lincoln, the country's first Republican president, led the Union to victory in the Civil War and put slavery on the road to extinction. After the war, the GOP was responsible for constitutional amendments that finished off slavery, made African Americans citizens and put the ballot in the hands of black men. It is one of the great tragedies of our time that that party, the party of Lincoln and liberty, is long gone."

"There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the "party of ideas," because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks. ... In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers."

"Like all Republicans, I knew that my party was founded in opposition to slavery. But I hadn't understood why this was so necessary until I came to realize how deeply entranced racism was in Congress and just how critical the power of the south was in presidential politics... McCarthy was a Republican. The Democrats, however, have skeletons in their own closet and it's worth remembering them, too. For example, Democrat Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, who was just as rabid an anti-Communist as McCarthy, did far more to repress free speech and political freedom than McCarthy ever attempted. It wasn't a Republican president who locked up thousands of loyal Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps for years. It was Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. And it wasn't a Republican who wiretapped and snooped on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but Democrats John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, who signed the order as Attorney General."

"The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property, which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion, and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn't any kind of law or codification of those principles. The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence's equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party."

"The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite. The party came together in the 1850s in opposition to the wealthy slaveholders who controlled the federal government. Democrats acting on their behalf insisted that America’s primary principle was the Constitution's protection of property, and they pushed legislation to let planters monopolize the country’s resources at the expense of the working... Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity. Northerners and hardscrabble Westerners flocked to that vision, and elected Lincoln to the White House in 1860."

"It’s hard to know exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the "stupid party." ... After decades of masquerading as the "stupid party," that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter."

"The Republicans had fielded an army and navy of more than 2.5 million men, had invented national banking, currency, and taxation, had provided schools and homes for poor Americans, and had freed the country's four million slaves... Republicans have taken the stand that economic opportunity is central to the American ideal and that it is the government's responsibility to make it possible for everyone to rise."

"Republicans are very good at propaganda; but there are limits to such strategies."

"I won't vote for Trump. My hope is that he will lose by a landslide, and the Republican Party will come to its senses, rejecting both his ugly, nativist populism and the extreme, holier-than-thou conservatism represented by Ted Cruz."

"I was always raised to think that Republicans were about limited government, about individual liberty, about fiscal responsibility, about balanced budgets, about a wariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement to business. There's a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are categorically against every single one of those things. So if they're Republicans, I'm not. But I'm really not a very comfortable Democrat. I mean the Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to be a bunch of dithering pussies... and it was pathetic. So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone."

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"

"The GOP finally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase of the south's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region's growing and confident communities, not its declining and fearful ones... Most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law."

"As soon as Rockefeller proposed adding the anti-Bircher amendment to the platform, the crowd shouted, “No! No!” A rumbling of boos resounded through the hall. Rockefeller pushed on: “It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrine —” Another cascade of jeers interrupted him. He smiled and waited for it to subside. At least he was now showing the world the true nature of this new Goldwater-bewitched GOP. In Goldwater’s command center, top campaign aides dispatched a message to their delegates: Knock it off. A defiant Rockefeller continued, assailing “any doctrinaire militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher.” The booing got louder. Rockefeller noted that Eisenhower, addressing the convention two hours earlier, had called on the GOP to reject radicalism of the left and right. He quoted himself — from a speech he had given a year before — warning that the Republican Party “is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, highly disciplined” minority that was “wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism.” More boos. He was clearly referring to the Birchers, and he urged his fellow Republicans to heed “this extremist threat” and “its danger to the party.” As veteran political correspondent Theodore White, who was present, later put it, Rockefeller “was the man who called them kooks, and now, like kooks, they responded to prove his point,” and the “kooks” were “hating and screaming and reveling in their own frenzy.” A call for reasonableness, a plea to spurn the paranoid, irrational, and conspiratorial tenets of the far right — this was not what Goldwater’s people wanted to hear. Some reporters feared Goldwater supporters were about to storm the stage and physically attack the governor. Maintaining a wry and cocky smile, Rockefeller told the audience, “This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” and he condemned the “infiltration and takeover of established political parties by Communist and Nazi methods.” He added, “Some of you don’t like to hear it ... but it’s the truth.” He declared, “The Republican Party must repudiate these people.""

"Clenching his square jaw, Rockefeller had hit the stage with an immediate task: to speak in favor of a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform denouncing extremism, specifically that of the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the ultraconservative, red-baiting John Birch Society. The platform committee, controlled by Goldwater loyalists, had rejected this resolution. Yet the moderates hadn’t given up. On the opening night of the convention, Gov. Mark Hatfield of Oregon had declared, “There are bigots in this nation who spew forth their venom of hate. They parade under hundreds of labels, including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society. They must be overcome.” That was not the predominant sentiment within the Cow Palace. Hatfield was met with a barrage of hisses and boos. He later called the response “frightening” and reflected, “It spoke to me not merely of strong political disagreement, but of a spiteful kind of enmity waiting to be unleashed to destroy any-one seen as the enemy — domestic or foreign.” The delegates were strident anticommunists — many feared evil reds were subverting the government and the nation’s most revered institutions — and for them, Goldwater was the leader of a do-or-die crusade against leftism. They would eagerly back a resolution reviling commies. And though the Grand Old Party — founded a century earlier by antislavery politicians — was now actively moving to court racist Southern voters opposed to desegregation and civil rights, they might disavow the Klan. But including the John Birch Society in this lineup of extremists to be deplored was a not-subtle-at-all dig at Goldwater and his fanatic followers. Everyone in the room knew what — and who — this resolution was aimed at."

"Republican Party is dead. It was wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise. Now it has been killed by Donald Trump."

"During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft, not one of whom sought to evade it. They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race."

"I cannot control what the Republicans leak and what they are contending."

"He (Ronald Reagan) was pro-free trade and pro-immigration. He believed in limited government at home and American leadership abroad. That's what I believed in too — and that's what I thought the Republican Party stood for."

"Stop the handwringing about @aoc and concentration camps. First of all, she's right. Second of all, she has single-handedly forced a debate about the barbaric and inhumane treatment of migrants at our Southern Border. She is smart, moral and correct."

"Congress incorporated birthright citizenship and legal equality into the Constitution via the Fourteenth Amendment. In recent decades, the courts have used this amendment to expand the legal rights of numerous groups, most recently, gay men and women. As the Republican editor George William Curtis wrote, the Fourteenth Amendment changed a Constitution 'for white men' to one 'for mankind'. It also marked a significant change in the federal balance of power, empowering the national government to protect the rights of citizens against violations by the states. In 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, again over Johnson’s veto. These set in motion the establishment of new governments in the South, empowered Southern black men to vote and temporarily barred several thousand leading Confederates from the ballot. Soon after, the 15th Amendment extended black male suffrage to the entire nation. The Reconstruction Acts inaugurated the period of Radical Reconstruction, when a politically mobilized black community, with its white allies, brought the Republican Party to power throughout the South. For the first time, African-Americans voted in large numbers and held public office at every level of government. It was a remarkable, unprecedented effort to build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery. Most offices remained in the hands of white Republicans. But the advent of African-Americans in positions of political power aroused bitter hostility from Reconstruction's opponents."

"Lincoln shared many of the prevailing prejudices of his era. But, he insisted, there was a bedrock principle of equality that transcended race. The equal right to the fruits of one's labor. There are many grounds for condemning the institution of slavery. Moral, religious, political, economic. Lincoln referred to all of them at one time or another. But ultimately he saw slavery as a form of theft, of one person appropriating the labor of another. Using a black woman as an illustration, he explained the kind of equality in which he believed, 'In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others'. Shortly before the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery like Lincoln, who worked within the political system rather than outside it. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of 'translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action'. The constitution barred interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, antislavery action meant not attacking slavery where it was but working to prevent slavery's westward expansion. Lincoln, however, did talk about a future without slavery. The aim of the Republican Party, he insisted, was to put the institution on the road to 'ultimate extinction, a phrase he borrowed from Henry Clay. Ultimate extinction could take a long time. Lincoln once said that slavery might survive for another hundred years. But to the south, Lincoln seemed as dangerous as an abolitionist, because he was committed to the eventual end of slavery. This was why his election in 1860 led inexorably to secession and civil war."

"The League of Nations had no sooner been created than it received an almost mortal blow. The United States abandoned President Wilson’s offspring. The President himself, ready to do battle for his ideals, suffered a paralytic stroke just as he was setting forth on his campaign, and lingered henceforward a futile wreck for a great part of two long and vital years, at the end of which his party and his policy were swept away by the Republican Presidential victory of 1920. Across the Atlantic on the morrow of the Republican success isolationist conceptions prevailed. Europe must be left to stew in its own juice, and must pay its lawful debts. At the same time tariffs were raised to prevent the entry of the goods by which alone these debts could be discharged. At the Washington Conference of 1921, far-reaching proposals for naval disarmament were made by the United States, and the British and American Governments proceeded to sink their battleships and break up their military establishments with gusto. It was argued in odd logic that it would be immoral to disarm the vanquished unless the victors also stripped themselves of their weapons. The finger of Anglo-American reprobation was presently to be pointed at France, deprived alike of the Rhine frontier and of her treaty guarantee, for maintaining, even on a greatly reduced scale, a French Army based upon universal service."

"That the United States was a 'white man's government' had been a widely held article of political faith before the Civil War. Reconstruction Republicans rejected this premise."

"Republicans did develop a policy which recognized the essential humanity of the Negro, and demanded protection for certain basic rights which the Democrats denied him. Although deeply flawed by an acceptance of many racial stereotypes, and limited by the free labor ideology's assumption that the major responsibility for a person's success or failure rested with himself and not society, the Republicans stand on race relations went against the prevailing opinion of the 1850s, and proved a distinct political liability in a racist society."

"The Fourteenth Amendment was for many decades considered a crowning achievement of what once called itself the party of Lincoln."

"I would suggest that the Republican Party get to work demanding an apology by the Democratic Party to the descendants of the slaves and to all the descendants of all those Republican congressmen who voted for the slew of anti-lynching laws blocked by Democratic senatorial filibusters."

"I have this calm belief that that 40 percent of the Republican Party wants their party back"

"The Democratic Party said to the Republicans, If you elect the man of your choice as President of the United States we will shoot your government to death; but the people of this country, refusing to be coerced by threats or violence, voted as they pleased, and lawfully elected Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States."

"Human slavery... The Democratic Party taught that it was divine; God's institution. They defended it, they stood around it, they followed it to its grave as a mourner. But here it lies, dead by the hand of Abraham Lincoln; dead by the power of the Republican Party, dead by the justice of Almighty God... Is there any death here in our camp? Yes, yes! Three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, the noblest band that ever trod the earth, died to make this camp a camp of glory and of liberty forever. But there are no dead issues here. There are no dead ideas here. Hang out our banner from under the blue sky this night, until it shall sweep the green turf under your feet. It hangs over our camp. Read away up under the stars the inscription we have written on it, lo these twenty-five years... Twenty-five years ago the Republican Party was married to liberty, and this is our silver wedding, fellow-citizens... Come down the glorious steps of our banner. Every great record we have made we have vindicated with our blood and with our truth. It sweeps the ground, and it touches the stars. Come here, young man, and put in your young life where all is living, and where nothing is dead but the heroes that defended it."

"The United States is on pace to spend over $7 trillion over the next ten years for the Pentagon. To put that number in perspective, the U.S. spends more each year on the military than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and Australia combined. While Republicans and Democrats are in sharp disagreements over the much smaller Build Back Better legislation, there is largely a bipartisan consensus when it comes to the military budget and foreign military intervention..."

"I wouldn't confuse the conservative movement and the Republican Party, 'cause they're two different things. The Republican Party is sometimes a vehicle for the conservative movement."

"The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party, while it attracts to itself by its creed, the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government; anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose."

"The problem comes in viewing Goldwater as an example rather than as a warning. Conservatives sometimes describe his defeat as a necessary, preliminary step — a clarifying and purifying struggle — in the Reagan revolution. In fact, it was an electoral catastrophe that awarded Lyndon Johnson a powerful legislative majority, increased the liberal ambitions of the Great Society and caused massive distrust of the GOP among poor and ethnic voters. The party has never quite recovered. Ronald Reagan was, in part, elected president by undoing Goldwater’s impression of radicalism. And all of Reagan’s domestic achievements involved cleaning up just a small portion of the excesses that Goldwater's epic loss enabled. The Republican Party needs internal debate and populist energy. But it is not helped by nostalgia for a disaster."

"Here is the problem in sum. Republicans have not been given the option of choosing the lesser of two evils. The GOP has selected someone who is unfit to be president, lacking the temperament, stability, judgment and compassion to occupy the office. This is a terrible error, which has probably cost conservatives a majority on the Supreme Court. But the mistake was made by Republican primary voters in choosing."

"[M]any of us will never be able to think about the Republican Party in quite the same way again. It still carries many of the ideological convictions I share. Collectively, however, it has failed one of the most basic tests of public justice... Don't support racists — or candidates who appeal to racism — for public office. If this commitment is not a primary, non-negotiable element of Republican identity, then the party of Lincoln is dead."

"[T]he nation has need of Republican vertebrates."

"I'm not a libertarian. If you are, you're welcome to vote for me and help this party, but we're not gonna build the party around libertarian ideas."

"Former racists of both parties renounced their old views, as Kevin D. Williamson points out, Lyndon Johnson himself voted against anti-lynching laws and poll-tax repeals, and neither party has a perfect record on racial matters by any stretch. But it is a libel to suggest that the Republican party, the anti-slavery party, the party of Lincoln, and the party that traditionally supported civil rights, anti-lynching laws, and integration, became the racist party after 1964. The 'solid south' Democratic voting pattern began to break down not in the 1960s in response to civil rights but in the 1950s in response to economic development and the Cold War. Black voters in the north, who had been reliable Republicans, began to abandon the GOP in response to the New Deal, encouraged by activists like Robert Vann to 'turn Lincoln's picture to the wall. That debt has been paid in full'. In the 1940s, the GOP garnered only about 25 percent of southern votes. The big break came with Eisenhower's victories. Significant percentages of white southerners voted for Ike even though the Democratic party remained firmly segregationist and even though Eisenhower backed two civil-rights bills and enforced the Brown decision by federalizing the National Guard. They also began to send GOP representatives to the House. These Republican gains came not from the most rural and 'deep south' regions, but rather from the newer cities and suburbs. If the new southern Republican voters were white racists, one would have expected Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to be the first to turn."