It is common, and true in part, to trace the origins of today's Republican Party to the early 1960s, the failure of the intitial Goldwater conservative movement, and the linkage of traditional corporate right with the Southern Strategy of flipping longterm Democratic southern whites to Republicans as a direct result of Civil Rights.
John Judis has a must read piece in today's TNR, that pushes this history (and borrows I suspect from Kim Phillips-Fein's important book Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal) back to the 1930s.
Here is the back story according to Judis:
In four elections from 1930 through 1936, the GOP was decimated, losing 182 House seats and 40 Senate seats. What remained in Congress after 1936 were primarily "Old Guard" conservative Republicans from rural and small-town districts in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and the Prairies. (They were supplemented by a smattering of Eastern establishment Republicans with names like Brewster and Lodge, and by the Western progressives who hadn’t yet bolted to the Democrats.) The "Old Guard" Republicans took their cues from small businesses back home in their districts and from business associations like the National Association of Manufacturers, which, by 1934, were up in arms against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. These Republicans could do little by themselves to halt New Deal legislation. But, by joining forces with conservative Democrats, primarily from the South, they were able to frustrate Roosevelt and his liberal majority.
The Republicans and the business groups charged that the New Deal—by expanding the power of government and backing unionization—was insidiously introducing communism or fascism to the United States. Roosevelt’s Brain Trusters, upstate New York Representative Hamilton Fish argued, "take all their principles and doctrines from Karl Marx just as the communists do." Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg saw the New Deal as a "march toward a totalitarian state." Along with the American Liberty League, the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, and other business groups, they claimed they were defending what Henry Fletcher, the chairman of the GOP, called "constitutional government."
While there were pro-New Deal liberal Democrats in the South (like Florida Senator Claude Pepper), most Southern Democrats were conservatives who represented rural districts, had acquired close ties with business (like Virginia Senator Carter Glass, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee), were eager to prevent the entry of labor unions into the South, and opposed any legislation that they thought might empower African Americans. "The catering by our National Party to the Negro vote," North Carolina Senator Josiah Bailey wrote, "is not only extremely distasteful to me, but very alarming to me."
Indeed, these Democrats—heirs to John Calhoun and the Confederacy—saw almost every New Deal initiative through the prism of race. They feared Roosevelt’s proposal to add Supreme Court justices would allow him to appoint judges who would challenge Jim Crow laws. They claimed that relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration and the Fair Labor Standards Act, would deprive Southern farmers of cheap African American farm labor. They feared that the new industrial unions would promote racial integration.
But, following the lead of their antebellum ancestors, they framed their opposition to the New Deal as a principled defense of the Constitution and of states’ rights—in this case, against the threat of European-style fascism or socialism. Glass described himself as "a relic of constitutional government. ... I entertain the notion that the Constitution of the United States, as it existed in the time of Grover Cleveland, is the same Constitution that exists today." And he described the New Deal as "an utterly dangerous effort of the federal government to transplant Hitlerism to every corner of the nation." In their public rhetoric and in their opposition to specific programs, the Southern Democrats took exactly the same position as the Northern "Old Guard" Republicans.
In 1937, these Democrats and Republicans began working together, and some of them produced a "Conservative Manifesto" drafted by Bailey. It called for balancing the budget but also tax cuts—thus putting the entire burden of balancing the budget on reductions in social spending.
At the time, this conservative coalition accounted for only about one-third of senators and one-fourth of House members. To block initiatives, they needed additional supporters. They got them because of two mistakes Roosevelt made that year. First, in response to the Supreme Court throwing out parts of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed his court-packing plan, which offended some liberals as well as conservatives. It was rejected and put Roosevelt on the defensive for the first time. Second, Roosevelt, heeding the advice of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, cut social spending in 1937 in order to reduce the deficit. These cuts, combined with the introduction of Social Security taxes, precipitated a sharp downturn in an economy that had been growing since 1933.
Conservative Republicans and Democrats charged that the New Deal itself had caused the "Roosevelt recession." Declared upstate New York Republican Representative Bertrand Snell, "Four years ago, we had an emergency. Now we have progressed—yes, we have progressed from an emergency to a crisis. That is the outcome of four years of New Deal effort."
In the 1938 elections, voters, responding to the downturn, abandoned Roosevelt and the Democrats. Republicans won eight new seats in the Senate and 81 in the House, primarily at the expense of liberal Northern Democrats. These gains gave the conservative coalition the votes to stymie Roosevelt’s initiatives. If the coalition couldn’t block a bill outright, it was able to bottle it up in the Rules Committee, where conservatives enjoyed a majority. From 1937 to 1940, the conservative coalition was able to kill the court plan; repeatedly block and then force modification in the Fair Labor Standards bill; cut spending on relief, housing, and public works; and eliminate the tax on undistributed business profits.
But the conservative coalition didn’t stop at parliamentary maneuvering. It adopted a strategy of using congressional investigations to discredit the New Deal. Congress, of course, had been conducting investigations since 1792, but the bulk of those investigations were directed at public scandals and obvious malfeasance, such as Teapot Dome in 1924, or they were aimed at finding explanations and scapegoats for financial panics. Now, the conservative coalition did something else: It used Congress’s investigatory power to back up its charge that the New Deal was the product of a foreign ideology.
Sound familiar...
Judis goes on to tell the story from the 1950s, to the Gingrich 1994-1995 era, and forward to today with a nice summary of why this time -- with the internet, Fox, talk radio, Koch, Tea Party, etc -- the Repubilcans will be even more ideologically extreme, united, uncompromising then they were in 1995.
Now, of course for us history buffs, some of this goes back the Big Business Republican party of the 1880s ever unward. The same folks who helped create the Gilded Era, opposed the Populists and the Democratic Party of William Jennsing Bryan, and even that of Wilson (in a limited way Glenn Beck is right). Who were opposed to the income tax and have been ever since. Who opposed the Progressive movement and pushed Teddy Roosevelt out.
Frankly it has ever been thus, since any attempt by government to reign in plutocracy with any sort of regulation and progressive taxation.
But most start the history with the Great Depression, opposition to FDR and The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal.
P.S.: Full disclosure. Professor Kim Phillips-Fein is the daughter of a single payer colleague, Dr. Oli Fein a dean at Cornell Medical School and the immediate past president of PNHP nationally and continuing president of the NYC local chapter. NYC local chapter.