Grand Old Party; A History of the Republicans

New York: Random House, 2003. Second Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xv, [3], 597, [9] pages. Frontis Illustration. Illustrations. Notes. Suggestions for Further Reading. Index. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1966, Lewis Ludlow Gould taught history at the University of Texas at Austin until his retirement in 1998. Gould has written and edited numerous articles and books on politics and the American presidency, Derived from a Kirkus review: Gould writes that some early members favored an anti-immigrant, nativist stance; others, more liberal, pressed for a coherent antislavery platform. Gaining national prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the party was tested, following the Civil War, by episodes of ineptitude and corruption. If soft on big business, Gould demonstrates, Republicanism from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was eminently moderate, and dominantly urban and suburban, fielding solidly middle-of-the-road candidates such as Wendell Wilkie and Nelson Rockefeller. Enter the rise of Cold War conservatism, led by the likes of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, on whose heels came Ronald Reagan and his hard-right cohort. The subsequent realignment of the party essentially pushed out moderates. Whence the current leadership, at turns antifederalist and imperialist, isolationist and unilateralist-all characteristics of a GOP past, present, and presumably future.