Society & Politics

The big switch was fabricated?

"O’Donnell concludes his summary, noting, “This is as ridiculous as it is easily debunked.”

Any student of history knows that ending slavery was the single, over-arching and driving force creating the Republican Party. The Party’s name was coined by Horace Greeley to describe the union of disaffected anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats joining the fiercely abolitionist Free Soil Party. John C. Fremont, the first Republican Presidential candidate, ran on a ticket to end slavery and to empower women in American politics.

Fremont’s wife, Jessie Benton, daughter of Missouri’s U. S. Senator, became the first Presidential candidate’s spouse to travel the whistle-stop circuit decrying the “twin barbarisms of slavery and polygamy” as she campaigned for her husband. At the first Republican Presidential Convention in American history, the anti-slave crowd chanted, “Fremont, and Jessie too!

Democrats, for their part, would effectively block women’s suffrage for the next half-century, and would oppose extending the full expression of the U. S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights to all Americans, regardless of race, for the next 108 years.

Yes, Republicans made mistakes. The Goldwater “Southern Strategy” was designed to co-opt the issue of “states’ rights” to steal the political wind of the racist George Wallace. But Goldwater, along with his protégé Ronald Reagan, never hid their disdain for the racist Wallace, and exclusively focused their rhetoric on limiting the power of Washington, D. C."

https://www.idahostatejournal.com/freeaccess/opinion-the-great-party-switch-myth/article_e887152c-4bdc-11ed-9ad0-e701c65f7cbd.html

The big switch was fabricated?
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