Republicans should welcome a comparison of their party’s history with that of the Democrats – the party of slavery and socialism, Big Government and the Ku Klux Klan.

As Republicans try to repel the socialist onslaught, the way to win – and to deserve to win – is to embrace our party’s original reform agenda.   The patriots who created our Grand Old Party did so in order to preserve the vision of the Founding Fathers.   And the way they did it has valuable lessons for us today.

Let’s first look at the party currently in power.   Democrat ties to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson are negligible.   In fact, the Democratic Party was established in 1832 at a national convention organized by Cabinet secretaries and other prominent supporters of the Andrew Jackson administration.   From the start, the Democratic Party was a top-down organization.   Submission to the grand leader and astroturfing – that is, fake grassroots activity – for the Democrats it’s the same old same old.

In contrast, the Republican Party began as a truly grassroots movement very similar to the Tea Parties now sweeping the nation.   Ordinary people doing extraordinary things – that’s what created the GOP.   For example, at the famous meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin that named the party “Republican” there were no politicians at all, just fifty-three men and women who took a stand.  The first Republican state convention, in Jackson, Michigan, was attended by thousands of farmers and laborers and small businessmen.   From the grassroots upward, that’s the Republican Party at its best.

The Republican Party was born as a civil rights movement.

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The Federal Reserve’s purchase of $300 billion in Treasury debt, as well as its purchase of mortgage-backed securities, has aptly been described as “monetizing the U.S. government debt,” with appropriate concern that it will fuel inflation. 

If President Obama fancies himself a twenty-first century Abraham Lincoln, then we need Timothy Geithner to be his Salmon Chase. Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary was remarkably successful at financing the Civil War, with only limited inflation, and remarkable fidelity to the Constitution.

Chase was a radical Ohio abolitionist before the war (sometimes called the state’s “attorney general for runaway Negroes”), and a relentlessly ambitious rival of Abraham Lincoln. After Lincoln beat Chase for the 1860 Republican nomination, he made him his Secretary of the Treasury. Almost all historians regard Lincoln’s ability to keep Chase on board as one of the marks of his genius as a statesman.

Chase was also a hard-money man, and abhorred paper money—especially the paper emitted by state banks, excoriated (if somewhat exaggeratedly) as “wildcat banks”– creditors were said to have to battle wildcats to attempt to redeem the worthless notes of these reckless frontier banks. Chase believed that the United States needed a national currency, issued by a national banking system. As the Civil War’s costs grew exponentially, Congress pressed him to monetize the government’s debt by issuing Treasury notes unredeemable in gold or silver, and to declare them to be legal tender for all debts—the “greenbacks,” which color our paper money to this day. Chase stuck to his constitutional guns for as long as he could, but finally gave in. But he “hated the crime about to be committed,” as historian Bray Hammond put it. By the end of the war, Chase got his national banking system, and had eliminated unconstitutional state-bank paper currency.

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