The Republican Party, which gave us Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus
Stevens, Charles Sumner, William Seward in the years of the
1850s and 1860s; which gave us Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La
Follette, Sr, George Norris, William Borah, Hiram Johnson in the
1900s-1940s; which gave us Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nelson
Rockefeller, William Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr,, George
Romney in the 1950s-1960s; and which gave us Mark Hatfield,
Charles Mathias, Charles Percy, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Gerald
Ford in the 1970s–1990s, reached its 159th birthday today. The
Republican Party began as an anti slavery expansion party, with
elements of abolitionism also present when the party began on
this day in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854. It became the party of
civil rights legislation, three civil rights constitutional
amendments, progressive legislation, and supportive of much
bipartisan legislation with Democrats in the New Deal and Great
Society eras. Of course, they had their evil elements, including
McCarthyism, nativism, and tying them