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Essay On Republican Party

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The Republican Party commonly referred to as the GOP (abbreviation for Grand Old Party) is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States. The other one being the Democratic Party, founded by anti-slavery activists in 1854. The GOP dominated politics nationally and in most of the North for most of the period from 1860 to 1932. There has been 18 Republican presidents. The first being Abraham Lincoln, who served from 1861 until his assassination in 1865, and the most recent being George W. Bush, who served two full four-year terms 2001 to 2009. The Republican Party's conservatism involves supporting free markets and limited government, opposing regulation and labor unions, and supporting socially conservative policies.
The first official party convention was held July 6, 1854. In 1860 the Republican Party …show more content…

It was a cartoon that appeared in Harper's Weekly on Nov 7, 1874, Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion's skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. One of those animals, the elephant, was labeled “The Republican Vote.” That's all it took for the elephant to become associated with the Republican Party. The elephant does not represent the Republican party it represents the “Vote”. Cartoonist Thomas Nast took the two examples of the Herald enterprise and put them together in a cartoon for Harper's Weekly. He showed an ass (symbolizing the Herald) wearing a lion's skin (the scary prospect of Caesarism) frightening away the animals in the forest (Central Park). One of the foolish animals in the cartoon was an elephant which was being frightened away from its normal ties by the phony scare of Caesarism. In a subsequent cartoon on Nov. 21, 1874, after the election in which the Republicans did badly, Nast followed up the idea by showing the elephant in a trap, illustrating the way the Republican vote had been decoyed from its normal

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