WHY THE REPUBLICAN
PARTY IS THE ‘GOP’
G'day folks,
I bet you have always wondered about this.
The initials
synonymous with the Republican Party—“GOP”—stand for “grand old party.” As
early as the 1870s, politicians and newspapers began to refer to the Republican
Party as both the “grand old party” and the “gallant old party” to emphasize
its role in preserving the Union during the Civil War.
The Republican Party of
Minnesota, for instance, adopted a platform in 1874 that it said “guarantees
that the grand old party that saved the country is still true to the principles
that gave it birth.” In spite of its nickname, though, the “grand old party”
was only a mere teenager in the early 1870s since the Republican Party had been
formed in 1854 by former Whig Party members to oppose the expansion of slavery
into western territories.
The “grand old
party” moniker was actually first adopted by the Republicans’ elder rival—the
Democratic Party—which traced its roots back to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew
Jackson. In his 1859 inaugural address, Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Beriah
Magoffin proclaimed, “The grand old party has never changed its name, its
purposes, or its principles, nor has it ever broken its pledges.” The following
year a Democratic newspaper in New Haven, Connecticut, looked ahead to the
presidential election of 1860 and warned that “this grand old party is divided
and in danger of defeat.”
“Safire’s
Political Dictionary” reports that the Republican’s GOP acronym began to appear
in print in 1884. Newspapers in 1936 credited T.B. Dowden, a Cincinnati Gazette
typesetter, with coining the initials after receiving a story about 1884
Republican presidential nominee James Blaine shortly before press time that ran
too long. “My copy ends with ‘Grand Old Party,’ and I have two words left over
after I’ve set the 10 lines. What shall I do?” Dowden asked his foreman.
“Abbreviate ’em, use initials, do anything, but hurry up!” came the reply. In a
rush, Dowden shortened the name of Blaine’s planned speech from “Achievements
of the Grand Old Party” to “Achievements of the GOP.”
Clancy's comment: But, do they use an elephant as part of their symbol? Apparently so, but why? Well, they say that cartoonist Thomas Nast used the Democratic donkey
in newspaper cartoons and made the symbol famous. Nast invented another
famous symbol—the Republican elephant. In a cartoon that appeared in
Harper's Weekly in 1874, Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion's skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. Mm ...
I'm ...
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