-By Warner Todd Huston
An excerpt of the 1924 Republican Party Platform:
The prosperity of the American nation rests on the vigor of private initiative which has bred a spirit of independence and self-reliance. The republican party stands now, as always, against all attempts to put the government into business.
American industry should not be compelled to struggle against government competition. The right of the government to regulate, supervise and control public utilities and public interests, we believe, should be strengthened, but we are firmly opposed to the nationalization or government ownership of public utilities.
In 1924 the GOP ran Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge for president. And he won on this platform.
Even then Democrats were trying to tun this country into a less powerful version of Europe by emulating its socialist systems. A proud Republican Party repudiated these socialist tendencies and reiterated its pride in the American way. These principles appealed to the true American spirit and also won elections.
Unfortunately, the very next president, himself a Republican, turned toward socialist, collectivist concepts and set the stage for what later became Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal destruction of the American economic system that compounded a market correction and turned it into “The Great Depression.” And save for a brief time under Ronald Reagan, it appears that the GOP has never recovered its principles as espoused in its 1924 platform.
Where are these strong principles today? Does the GOP stand for free markets, individual responsibility, self-reliance, and the right of the citizen to be left alone by a rapacious federal government under Democrats? It is getting harder and harder to think that the GOP does want to uphold these long-held American principles, those that made this country great.
So, let’s recall the words of the 1924 GOP Party platform and let us strive to return to these first principles.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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What happened to the Republican Party since 1924 is the following, IMO. Evidently even Republicans had not been teaching their children the Constitution and its history, particularly 10th A. protected state sovereignty, for many generations by that time. This is evidenced by the ratification of the ill-conceived, anti-state sovereignty 16th and 17th Amendments in 1913. State sovereignty-impaired voters were probably still in the process of unthinkingly filling federal Senate seats with likewise impaired lawmakers by 1924.
And as this blog indicates, the catastrophic loss of representation for state legislatures in the federal government wouldn’t become glaringly obvious, at least from a historical perspective, until the federal Senate failed to stop constitutionally clueless Socialist FDR and the likewise clueless Congress from wrongly usurping state powers in the 1930s and 40s. Congress’s unthinking overstepping of its constitutional limits is evidenced by it’s giving the green light to FDR’s constitutionally unauthorized New Deal federal spending programs.
The following link should help people to better understand how state sovereignty-ignorant voters have shot themselves in the foot with big, corrupt federal government as a consequence of the ill-conceived, anti-state sovereignty 16th and 17th Amendments.
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=199792