From the New York Times bestselling author of Democracy Awakening, a comprehensive history of the GOP and its evolving priorities.
“The most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses... an important contribution to understanding where we are today.” ―Los Angeles Times
When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was economic opportunity for all Americans. Yet the party quickly became mired in an identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or the party of moneyed interests?
In To Make Men Free, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Republican Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession. While progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln’s vision and expanded the government, their opponents appealed to Americans’ latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. In the modern era, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles.
To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the party that was once considered America’s greatest political hope, but now lies in disarray.
