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If you seriously think the 1850s Republican Party was a socialist one, then there is no point continuing this debate.
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Lists of Heads of Government and Heads of State
- Thread starter Mumby
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Abolitionism carried plenty of fellow travellers of wide ranging opinions, the 1st Governor of California Peter Hardman Burnett was an abolitionist but because he believed that there shouldn't be any non-white people in America and as Provisional Supreme Judge of Oregon established the most extreme racial exclusion laws in American history (he was also a Democrat).
The Republican Party as founded in the 1850s was transformed by the Civil War and then its period of domination after the war, to the point where people like Horace Greeley who helped found it were disgusted enough to stand against it.
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You haven't presented anything to back up your statement you've just said 'haha no'.
You’ve been called out here for just shutting down someone with absolutely no evidence, and when they take the time to reply to you with evidence and a nuanced argument you just cast very wide and generalised dismissive claims. It’s not really good enough.
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I mean, it isn't like the whole Republican transformation came out of nowhere. The Republican Party had plenty of people who we would call Right-Wing in this day and age, even as back as the 1850s. The party as a whole was Abolitionist, yes. But the fellow travellers didn't have as much influence as you might think. The 1856 platform only goes as far as "make sure everyone shares in the prosperity" and the 1860 one seems to have not mentioned anything of the like.
And reminder that Horace Greeley accepted the endorsement of the Democrats and the Liberal Republican Party campaigned against the Radical Republicans and for a speedy end to Reconstruction. So he's not much of a person you would like to point to, as he seems to have shifted as much as his party did.
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I've read the platforms of the 1856 and 1860 Republican Party, and in neither of them do they mention anything socialist. The most they do, is say that everyone should share in the prosperity. And that was in 1856.
I'll note that this argument started when someone flat-out said the Republican Party was founded by socialists. No clarification of some founders. Just a flat-out statement. I logically interpreted that as them saying the Republican Party, at its birth, was a socialist one.
And I'll note that nobody has defended that statement, only added clarifications and quiet backwheeling on it.
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I don't think either me or @AlfieJ ever said that the party as a whole was socialist, but that many of its founders were and calling it 'the party of business' from the outset is wildly anachronistic.
And as for the Liberal Republicans, their main thing was frustration with the Grant Administration's corruption, and was composed of a wide gamut of individuals united only by that common bone of contention. Greeley got the nomination because the party's founder was foreign born and Greeley was well known and a perennial candidate. The Democrats had a choice of either backing Greeley and maybe, possibly, defeating Grant or standing on their own and certainly granting the President a second term. Also your assertion that they campaigned against the Radical Republicans is a bit erroneous given one of their prominent members was Charles Sumner, the chief Radical leader in the Senate.
To say the party was founded by socialists does not mean that the party was socialist in its official policy platform even immediately or later on. We wouldn’t really make that claim with the Labour Party so why make it now? What it demonstrates is the existence of a socialist tendency both in its origins/roots/heritage and in its later figures, which is what you have flatly denied with no justification.
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I think that calling it a party of the "Left" in the 1850s is similarly anachronistic, but I'll accept that I'm wrong by a few decades on the business bit. The Republicans in the 1850s seemed to be a broad-tent party at that point only united by support of abolitionism.
Point granted on the Lib Reps.
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Then why call the Republican Party being Left in a list a "return to its roots" when it was never a party of the Left in the first place?
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Saying that Y was founded by X doesn't mean that it was exclusively founded by X - just as saying 'the Labour Party was founded by Methodists' would also be a hyperbolic statement which we would all understand to be reflective of a strand of the history of Y, but not the whole story. I, for one, took Alfie's post in a similar vibe and don't think later clarifications constitute any sort of backwheeling.
Because it’s founding members were socialist?
You understand that having roots in certain traditions does not need to be the dominant strain of the party itself to still be significant? The Labour Party were never a strictly Methodist party but have that major tradition which could certainly be argued was in its roots.
This is a wikipedia-page level understanding of the American history.
Others have already explained it better than I could, but also: Free Soilers.
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Well, it's clear that I interpreted it in a rather more literal way, which seems backed up by Alfie's later arguments, especially the below.
"Because its founding members were socialist". Once again you shift from "some" to "all". You're the one making generalising statements now, and if I'm rightfully torn apart for mine, you should at least acknowledge yours.
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There was a 'Left' element to the Republicans until probably the 1950s, look at the La Follette Progressives who began as Republicans and reverted back without shifting their positions overmuch, or Fiorello LaGuardia and Vito Marcantonio, New York Republicans who were endorsed by other openly socialist parties.
And I think its obvious by my initial statement 'Getting back to their roots as it were', that it was intended in jest and you've taken it bit seriously and gone a bit over the top trying to prove I am wrong.
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Apologies for that. I won't respond to any further continuation of the argument.
I can't help but feel James Roosevelt was trying to create a stalking horse for himself.
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Names of Katter’s Labor Party
1941-1942: Andrew Fisher Labor [1]
1942-1944: King O’Malley Labor [2]
1944-1952: Frank Barnes Labor [3]
1952-1974: Queensland Labor Party [4]
1974-1978: Queensland Party [5]
1978-1991: Queensland Country Party [6]
1991-1996: Country Labor Party (Qld) [7]
1996-2000: Queensland Solidarity Party [8]
2000-2009: Queensland Country Alliance [9]
2009-2011: New Country Party [10]
2011-: Katter’s Labor Party [11]
[1] - In 1941, Frank Barnes won election to the Queensland Parliament for Bundaberg under the description 'Andrew Fisher Labor' - Andrew Fisher being a former Prime Minister of the Commonwealth who had come from the radical milieu of colonial Queensland (and, not entirely coincidentally, had the dubious honour of being one of the few early ALP Prime Ministers never to defect to the Tories). Queensland was home, even more than Australia at large, to a utopian instinct driven by the attitudes of the early settlers, the barely-exploited plenty of the fertile soils, and the fact that most of the state was cut off from the metropolises of the south when the heavy rains came. As you move North in Queensland, you plunge deeper into a land of agrarian radicalism that expressed itself in the early 20th century as a deeply committed Socialism.
However, the Labor governments elected by these sun-touched souls grew to become the Establishment, and the pressures of office drove their tribunes to take on the trade unions - a betrayal, it was thought, of the steadfast support of the hinterland. In the 1940s, non-Labor radicals came to electoral prominence, among them the Social Credit Party, the Communist Party, and Frank Barnes. Barnes, 'the Bundaberg Bombshell', was a rabble-rousing publican of heterodox opinions and a personality simultaneously beguiling and repulsive: he wore a pith helmet and a white suit, engaged in vituperative attacks on political corruption (real or imagined), and got into regular - perhaps suspiciously regular - scuffles in and around Parliament. He cemented his populist appeal by ranting about Jewish financial conspiracies, and supported Social Credit banking reforms.
[2] - Shortly after Frank Barnes' election, another seat in the radical hinterland, Cairns, became available. Seeking to bolster his position in the Parliament (and guarantee a seconder for his motions), Barnes encouraged his brother Lou to stand, this time as 'King O'Malley Labor'. O'Malley was another self-promoter from the archives of Labor history: born in America, he briefly set up his own fundamentalist Christian sect, but then migrated to Australia and became a staunch campaigner within the ALP for a non-usurious Commonwealth Bank, with which Australia might be able to fend off the 'Money Power'. It goes without saying that O'Malley was a more appropriate role-model for the Barnes brothers than Andrew Fisher, and perhaps this is why Lou Barnes won his by-election.
[3] - The tide of history seemed to be on the side of the Barneses, which explains the next stage of their project. In the 1944 election, both were returned to the Queensland Parliament as 'Frank Barnes Labor', judging that Frank Barnes had a sufficiently high profile and pungent personality in the state that they didn't have to invite litigation by claiming King O'Malley's support - the man was still alive and never endorsed the pair. At this time, the privations of wartime were inspiring yet further discontent among the people of back-country and small-town Queensland against the Labor government in Brisbane, so the logical next step was to field a broader slate of candidates in a swathe of seats. Bill Gresham, a former Social Credit candidate, was the only one of them to meet with success at that stage, but the theory was proven. Unfortunately for the Party, further growth was limited by the Vegemite appeal of Frank's attention-seeking stunts. Late in his career, he managed to get himself suspended from Parliament eight times in a single year.
[4] - The issue was that Frank Barnes wouldn't be around forever, and indeed he died in 1952. Lou gave up politics shortly afterward, so Gresham was forced to find another strong personality to drive the Party organisation. He found one in Tom Aikens, a former ALP Alderman in Townsville who had been expelled from the Party on the pretexts that he was an outrageous drunkard and that he was in a municipal coalition with the Communist Party. The actual reason was that he was a potent rival of an up-and-coming Establishment Labor man. Nevertheless, he founded his own party, which came to be known as the North Queensland Labor Party, and defeated his rival to enter Parliament in 1944. This was amid massive anger in Townsville against the Labor state government, which had failed to support the city financially when its population quadrupled overnight with the building of an American air force base. Aikens fought for a 'Square Deal for the North', until 1952, when he agreed to merge his atrophying organisation with the Barnes Party to form the Queensland Labor Party. Over the next two decades, Aikens and his occasional benchmates delivered secure road and rail links to the North, while keeping the populist pressure on both parties - although Aikens was much less given to conspiracy theories than Frank Barnes had been.
[5] - As Aikens grew old and the ease of communication between the North and Brisbane became greater (thanks largely to the literal bridge-building efforts of the QLP), the radicalism of the colonial generations grew cooler, although it was still latent. Furthermore, the left-populist opposition to a technocratic Labor government was no longer valid, as the party had retreated to semi-permanent Opposition in 1957 when the Catholics split off under Vince Gair to form the Democratic Labor Party. In 1974, both the ALP and the DLP were discredited on both the federal and state levels and the Labor brand was therefore toxic. Aikens decided to drop that part of the name as a matter of electoral survival. However, it was no use, for he lost his seat in 1977 after all his original supporters died off. The only surviving QP MPs were semi-independent agrarians like Rob Katter Sr. and Max Menzel, the former of whom took over the Party.
[6] - Katter found the 'Queensland Party' moniker too vague, and spied an opportunity to challenge Joh Bjelke-Petersen's dominant National Party by stealing their 'Country' designation - which they had dropped earlier in the decade as part of a federal rebrand and a strike into the Brisbane seats. Some rural conservatives were slightly aggrieved at this. Under Katter Sr., emphasis was placed on decentralisation, state support for primary producers, and support for Joh's social agenda. However, the late 70s and 80s saw another development in the QCP: infiltration by the Australian League of Rights, a far-right anti-semitic group. The League of Rights re-introduced anti-elite, anti-banking rhetoric and cheap credit for farmers, along with a forthright turn against immigration. This led to a period of growth for the Party as it staked out a clear ideological position. Meanwhile, the Bjelke-Petersen government slowly lost its gloss and disaffected right-wing voters flowed to Katter. Shortly before he died, the Party won Joh's abandoned seat in a by-election with former National member Trevor Perrett.
[7] - However, a new leader was needed for the 1990s - a new era of Queensland politics which saw the irrelevant old Labor Party return to Government after four decades. In a contested ballot, Max Menzel was chosen. Contrary to the mood of the time, Menzel was seen as a Continuity Joh candidate with appeal only to right-wing hicks, so, to mitigate this, another name change ensued. 'Country Labor Party' was the compromise option selected, but it was seen as an opportunistic approach to the newly existent 'Labor base'. And was reckoning without the NSW Labor Party, which sued Menzel's party on account of the fact that said party used the same label in rural seats on a state level. To appease the litigious Sydneysiders, they had to add an awkward '(Queensland)' to their official designation, which psephologists calculated as causing a 0.7% reduction in their voteshare.
[8] - With the early 90s being a time of missed opportunities, it came as little surprise that Max Menzel was rolled as Leader mere months before the 1996 state election by Trevor Perrett. Perrett was a former Nationals man, but is more notorious for being a member of the LaRoucheite tendency in the Country Labor Party which largely co-operated with the League of Rights - although the LaRoucheites were seen to be more left-wing. Although the LoR were happy to support Perrett in his castigations of the banking and monetary systems and the Jewish Money Power, they were more hesitant about his opposition to GST, anti-union laws and mainstream concert pitch tuning. They defected en masse to Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party shortly after Perrett's faction achieved the renaming of the party to the 'Queensland Solidarity Party', which they believed sent out a far too brazen Socialist message for electoral purposes.
[9] - Perrett's leadership saw a lot of key defeats: electorally in the 1998 state election by the surge of One Nation; in legislative terms by the tightening of gun ownership laws after the Port Arthur massacre (about which event the QSP had 'serious questions for the authorities'); and again electorally by the failure of the 1999 Republic referendum despite the LaRouche movement's best efforts in promoting their groundbreaking discovery that the global drug trade is controlled by Queen Elizabeth II. He was forced out by Peter Pyke, a more traditional populist misfit who merged the QSP with the ex-One Nation MPs in the City Country Alliance to form a new Queensland Country Alliance. This was the height of Pyke's achievements, and he was followed as leader by Jeff Knuth, from the City Country Alliance side of the new party.
[10] - A rapid succession of leadership and name changes, along with frequent electoral underperformances gutted the party in the 90s and 2000s, but the members desperately hoped that one final attempt would do the trick. They bagged a major propaganda victory after Knuth's defeat in 2009, when they lured Liberal National Party candidate John Bjelke-Petersen to take up the reins - JPB was the son of the long-serving Premier. However, this was his sole quality. Maybe it was Bjelke-Petersen's lack of personal charisma which caused his putsching two years into the job, or perhaps it was the woefully focus-grouped new name and logo which seemed to be directed at a very small group of voters who liked Country Party nostalgia and vacuous 'new' branding. In any case, he disappeared from whence he came, to be replaced by a man who traded more exclusively on nostalgia.
[11] - Bob Katter Jr. has been the leader of Katter's Labor Party for nearly a decade. The name itself is a masterclass performance - tapping as it does into the appeal of the Katter name, the original history of the party as a personalist vehicle for Frank Barnes, and also the persistent sentiment that there is room for a party which caters to the 'common man' abandoned by progressive Labor, who doesn't have any truck with renewable energy, gays or rights for immigrant workers. The early radicalism of the Queensland back-country, as you will have seen, has ossified over the decades into a knee-jerk opposition to the trivially powerful, to the banks, to the cities and to urban trendiness. It is a sentiment which can be traced back to the utopian socialism of the colonists of the last century or two - but the sentiment no longer has anything to do with socialism or radical thought.
As to the tale of Katter's leadership and his carving out of a solid electoral niche for the KLP in state and federal politics - I'm not spending any time on it.
1941-1942: Andrew Fisher Labor [1]
1942-1944: King O’Malley Labor [2]
1944-1952: Frank Barnes Labor [3]
1952-1974: Queensland Labor Party [4]
1974-1978: Queensland Party [5]
1978-1991: Queensland Country Party [6]
1991-1996: Country Labor Party (Qld) [7]
1996-2000: Queensland Solidarity Party [8]
2000-2009: Queensland Country Alliance [9]
2009-2011: New Country Party [10]
2011-: Katter’s Labor Party [11]
[1] - In 1941, Frank Barnes won election to the Queensland Parliament for Bundaberg under the description 'Andrew Fisher Labor' - Andrew Fisher being a former Prime Minister of the Commonwealth who had come from the radical milieu of colonial Queensland (and, not entirely coincidentally, had the dubious honour of being one of the few early ALP Prime Ministers never to defect to the Tories). Queensland was home, even more than Australia at large, to a utopian instinct driven by the attitudes of the early settlers, the barely-exploited plenty of the fertile soils, and the fact that most of the state was cut off from the metropolises of the south when the heavy rains came. As you move North in Queensland, you plunge deeper into a land of agrarian radicalism that expressed itself in the early 20th century as a deeply committed Socialism.
However, the Labor governments elected by these sun-touched souls grew to become the Establishment, and the pressures of office drove their tribunes to take on the trade unions - a betrayal, it was thought, of the steadfast support of the hinterland. In the 1940s, non-Labor radicals came to electoral prominence, among them the Social Credit Party, the Communist Party, and Frank Barnes. Barnes, 'the Bundaberg Bombshell', was a rabble-rousing publican of heterodox opinions and a personality simultaneously beguiling and repulsive: he wore a pith helmet and a white suit, engaged in vituperative attacks on political corruption (real or imagined), and got into regular - perhaps suspiciously regular - scuffles in and around Parliament. He cemented his populist appeal by ranting about Jewish financial conspiracies, and supported Social Credit banking reforms.
[2] - Shortly after Frank Barnes' election, another seat in the radical hinterland, Cairns, became available. Seeking to bolster his position in the Parliament (and guarantee a seconder for his motions), Barnes encouraged his brother Lou to stand, this time as 'King O'Malley Labor'. O'Malley was another self-promoter from the archives of Labor history: born in America, he briefly set up his own fundamentalist Christian sect, but then migrated to Australia and became a staunch campaigner within the ALP for a non-usurious Commonwealth Bank, with which Australia might be able to fend off the 'Money Power'. It goes without saying that O'Malley was a more appropriate role-model for the Barnes brothers than Andrew Fisher, and perhaps this is why Lou Barnes won his by-election.
[3] - The tide of history seemed to be on the side of the Barneses, which explains the next stage of their project. In the 1944 election, both were returned to the Queensland Parliament as 'Frank Barnes Labor', judging that Frank Barnes had a sufficiently high profile and pungent personality in the state that they didn't have to invite litigation by claiming King O'Malley's support - the man was still alive and never endorsed the pair. At this time, the privations of wartime were inspiring yet further discontent among the people of back-country and small-town Queensland against the Labor government in Brisbane, so the logical next step was to field a broader slate of candidates in a swathe of seats. Bill Gresham, a former Social Credit candidate, was the only one of them to meet with success at that stage, but the theory was proven. Unfortunately for the Party, further growth was limited by the Vegemite appeal of Frank's attention-seeking stunts. Late in his career, he managed to get himself suspended from Parliament eight times in a single year.
[4] - The issue was that Frank Barnes wouldn't be around forever, and indeed he died in 1952. Lou gave up politics shortly afterward, so Gresham was forced to find another strong personality to drive the Party organisation. He found one in Tom Aikens, a former ALP Alderman in Townsville who had been expelled from the Party on the pretexts that he was an outrageous drunkard and that he was in a municipal coalition with the Communist Party. The actual reason was that he was a potent rival of an up-and-coming Establishment Labor man. Nevertheless, he founded his own party, which came to be known as the North Queensland Labor Party, and defeated his rival to enter Parliament in 1944. This was amid massive anger in Townsville against the Labor state government, which had failed to support the city financially when its population quadrupled overnight with the building of an American air force base. Aikens fought for a 'Square Deal for the North', until 1952, when he agreed to merge his atrophying organisation with the Barnes Party to form the Queensland Labor Party. Over the next two decades, Aikens and his occasional benchmates delivered secure road and rail links to the North, while keeping the populist pressure on both parties - although Aikens was much less given to conspiracy theories than Frank Barnes had been.
[5] - As Aikens grew old and the ease of communication between the North and Brisbane became greater (thanks largely to the literal bridge-building efforts of the QLP), the radicalism of the colonial generations grew cooler, although it was still latent. Furthermore, the left-populist opposition to a technocratic Labor government was no longer valid, as the party had retreated to semi-permanent Opposition in 1957 when the Catholics split off under Vince Gair to form the Democratic Labor Party. In 1974, both the ALP and the DLP were discredited on both the federal and state levels and the Labor brand was therefore toxic. Aikens decided to drop that part of the name as a matter of electoral survival. However, it was no use, for he lost his seat in 1977 after all his original supporters died off. The only surviving QP MPs were semi-independent agrarians like Rob Katter Sr. and Max Menzel, the former of whom took over the Party.
[6] - Katter found the 'Queensland Party' moniker too vague, and spied an opportunity to challenge Joh Bjelke-Petersen's dominant National Party by stealing their 'Country' designation - which they had dropped earlier in the decade as part of a federal rebrand and a strike into the Brisbane seats. Some rural conservatives were slightly aggrieved at this. Under Katter Sr., emphasis was placed on decentralisation, state support for primary producers, and support for Joh's social agenda. However, the late 70s and 80s saw another development in the QCP: infiltration by the Australian League of Rights, a far-right anti-semitic group. The League of Rights re-introduced anti-elite, anti-banking rhetoric and cheap credit for farmers, along with a forthright turn against immigration. This led to a period of growth for the Party as it staked out a clear ideological position. Meanwhile, the Bjelke-Petersen government slowly lost its gloss and disaffected right-wing voters flowed to Katter. Shortly before he died, the Party won Joh's abandoned seat in a by-election with former National member Trevor Perrett.
[7] - However, a new leader was needed for the 1990s - a new era of Queensland politics which saw the irrelevant old Labor Party return to Government after four decades. In a contested ballot, Max Menzel was chosen. Contrary to the mood of the time, Menzel was seen as a Continuity Joh candidate with appeal only to right-wing hicks, so, to mitigate this, another name change ensued. 'Country Labor Party' was the compromise option selected, but it was seen as an opportunistic approach to the newly existent 'Labor base'. And was reckoning without the NSW Labor Party, which sued Menzel's party on account of the fact that said party used the same label in rural seats on a state level. To appease the litigious Sydneysiders, they had to add an awkward '(Queensland)' to their official designation, which psephologists calculated as causing a 0.7% reduction in their voteshare.
[8] - With the early 90s being a time of missed opportunities, it came as little surprise that Max Menzel was rolled as Leader mere months before the 1996 state election by Trevor Perrett. Perrett was a former Nationals man, but is more notorious for being a member of the LaRoucheite tendency in the Country Labor Party which largely co-operated with the League of Rights - although the LaRoucheites were seen to be more left-wing. Although the LoR were happy to support Perrett in his castigations of the banking and monetary systems and the Jewish Money Power, they were more hesitant about his opposition to GST, anti-union laws and mainstream concert pitch tuning. They defected en masse to Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party shortly after Perrett's faction achieved the renaming of the party to the 'Queensland Solidarity Party', which they believed sent out a far too brazen Socialist message for electoral purposes.
[9] - Perrett's leadership saw a lot of key defeats: electorally in the 1998 state election by the surge of One Nation; in legislative terms by the tightening of gun ownership laws after the Port Arthur massacre (about which event the QSP had 'serious questions for the authorities'); and again electorally by the failure of the 1999 Republic referendum despite the LaRouche movement's best efforts in promoting their groundbreaking discovery that the global drug trade is controlled by Queen Elizabeth II. He was forced out by Peter Pyke, a more traditional populist misfit who merged the QSP with the ex-One Nation MPs in the City Country Alliance to form a new Queensland Country Alliance. This was the height of Pyke's achievements, and he was followed as leader by Jeff Knuth, from the City Country Alliance side of the new party.
[10] - A rapid succession of leadership and name changes, along with frequent electoral underperformances gutted the party in the 90s and 2000s, but the members desperately hoped that one final attempt would do the trick. They bagged a major propaganda victory after Knuth's defeat in 2009, when they lured Liberal National Party candidate John Bjelke-Petersen to take up the reins - JPB was the son of the long-serving Premier. However, this was his sole quality. Maybe it was Bjelke-Petersen's lack of personal charisma which caused his putsching two years into the job, or perhaps it was the woefully focus-grouped new name and logo which seemed to be directed at a very small group of voters who liked Country Party nostalgia and vacuous 'new' branding. In any case, he disappeared from whence he came, to be replaced by a man who traded more exclusively on nostalgia.
[11] - Bob Katter Jr. has been the leader of Katter's Labor Party for nearly a decade. The name itself is a masterclass performance - tapping as it does into the appeal of the Katter name, the original history of the party as a personalist vehicle for Frank Barnes, and also the persistent sentiment that there is room for a party which caters to the 'common man' abandoned by progressive Labor, who doesn't have any truck with renewable energy, gays or rights for immigrant workers. The early radicalism of the Queensland back-country, as you will have seen, has ossified over the decades into a knee-jerk opposition to the trivially powerful, to the banks, to the cities and to urban trendiness. It is a sentiment which can be traced back to the utopian socialism of the colonists of the last century or two - but the sentiment no longer has anything to do with socialism or radical thought.
As to the tale of Katter's leadership and his carving out of a solid electoral niche for the KLP in state and federal politics - I'm not spending any time on it.
Walpurgisnacht
It was in the Year of Maximum Danger
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- Banned from the forum
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This is absolutely incredible. It's interesting to think of how LaRoucheism might have spread and become An Actual Thing, and this is frankly the cherry on the cake of an absolutely brilliant list.
Oh,very good.
Say,do you plan on making any timelines again or are you just gonna do vignette and lists?
Cuz I’m fine either way,was just curious
Keep it going,you wondrous stream of talent and phreshness.