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The Epic Interactive Encyclopedia 1998
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Epic Interactive Encyclopedia, The - 1998 Edition (1998)(Epic Marketing).iso
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Republican_Party
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One of the USA's two main political parties,
formed 1854 by a coalition of slavery
opponents, who elected their first president,
Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. The early
Republican Party supported protective tariffs
and favoured genuine settlers (homesteaders)
over land speculators. Towards the end of the
century the Republican Party was identified
with US imperialism and industrial expansion.
With few intermissions, the Republican Party
controlled Congress from the 1860s until
defeated by the New Deal Democrats 1932.
After an isolationist period before World War
II, the Republican Party adopted an active
foreign policy under Nixon and Ford, but the
latter was defeated by Carter in the
presidential election 1976. However, the
party enjoyed landslide presidential
victories for Reagan and also carried the
Senate 1980-86. Bush won the 1988
presidential election but faced a Democratic
Senate and House of Representatives.
Conservative tendencies and an antagonism of
the legislature to the executive came to the
fore after Lincoln's assassination, when
Andrew Johnson, his Democratic and Southern
successor, was impeached (although not
convicted), and General Grant was elected to
the presidency 1868 and 1872. In the bitter
period following the Civil War the party was
divided into those who considered the South a
beaten nation and those who wished to
reintegrate the South into the country as a
whole, but Grant carried through a liberal
Reconstruction policy in the South. It became
divided during Theodore Roosevelt's attempts
at regulation and control of big business,
and in forming the short-lived Progressive
Party 1912, Roosevelt effectively removed the
liberal influence from the Republican Party.
The Republican Party remained in eclipse
until the election of Eisenhower 1952, more a
personal triumph than that of the party,
whose control of Congress was soon lost and
not regained by the next Republican
president, Nixon, 1968.