Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation
John Hendrickson
Nov. 19, 2014
The Grand Old Party (GOP) has changed tremendously since its founding in the mid-19th century in Ripon, Wisconsin. There are few issues on which the GOP has evolved more than trade policy. Today a solid majority of Republicans are supporters of free trade. This was not the case for most of the GOP’s history. In fact the principle of protectionism was a sacred pillar of the Republican Party. This philosophy was carried over from the Federalist and Whig economic programs of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican elected president, championed a protective tariff. A tariff was used both for revenues and to protect the American economy from Europe.
[...]
Even during his post-presidency Coolidge continued to defend the policy of protection:
The greatest asset of our whole economic system is its effect upon commerce, agriculture, industry, the wage earner, and the farmer, and practically all our producers and distributors, is our incomparable home market. It has always been a fundamental principle of the Republican Party that this market should be reserved in the first instance for the consumption of our domestic products…Our only defense against the cheap production, low wages and low standard of living which exist abroad, and our only method of maintaining our own standards, is through a protective tariff. We need protection as a national policy, to be applied wherever it is required.[7]
More... https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/grand-old-protectionists-calvin-coolidge-and-the-full-dinner-pail/
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Hendrickson scores a bullseye!
Arguably the worst political example of R protectionism
was Jackass McKinley from Ohio and later POTUS.
He blathered on the House Floor that Free Trade was an
abomination and plague which would keep us from
protecting our "infant industries".
BS to the contrary, his spirit lives on within the GOP!
