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Back to Basics for the Republican Party by Michael Zak. 249 pp. Signature Books. $16.95. ISBN 0-9700063-2-2

Washington-DC-based author and lecturer Michael Zak on his website [...] says: “I am offering the solution to a problem most Republicans don't know they have -- that they can be outmaneuvered and thrown on the defensive endlessly, on nearly any issue, because they accept as true Democrat lies about the Republican Party. To correct that misperception and to help the Republican Party get 'back to basics' is why I'm a man on a mission.”

Also Zak wrote in the overview of the book: “To this day, we Republicans owe our Party’s muddled message and inability to battle the Democrats effectively to our own ignorance about the Reconstruction era.” There are myths existing about the Democratic Party that many Democratic voters, especially black Democratic voters, embrace. Bob Parks of Black and Blonde Media exposes one untruth on the Democrats.org website, the official website of the Democratic National Committee: “Democrats are unwavering in their support of equal opportunity of all Americans. That’s why we worked to pass every one of our nation’s Civil Rights laws...On every civil rights issue, Democrats have led the fight.” -- [...]. As to other myths, I have been personally told there are blacks who believe that the Democrats freed the slaves and Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat! (I was even told about a black woman in Illinois who actually believed that it was ILLEGAL for blacks to vote Republican!) In the light of these distortions of true history, Zak simply seeks to “set the record straight” about the history of the Republican party in its embrace of civil rights for black Americans, in its strict upholding of the U.S. Constitution, and in its upholding of free markets.

Zak writes: “How many Americans know why our Republican Party began or what its original purpose was? Not many! How many Americans know, for example, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were reform which our Republican Party struggled for in vain during the Reconstruction ear a hundred years earlier? Fewer still. The 13th Amendment banning slavery, the 14th Amendment extending the Bill of Rights to the states, and the 15th Amendment according voting rights to blacks -- all three were enacted by the much-maligned Radical Republicans in the fact of fierce Democrat opposition. How many Americans know that? Again very few” -- p. 1. He asserts that Republicans themselves are to blame for failing to convince voters to put confidence in them while Republicans lack confidence in their own heritage.

From the 336 reference sources used, Zak carefully focuses on American History from 1774 to 1848 and on the actual history of the Republican Party beginning in 1848 and continuing to the present day. The book lays the foundation for the belief that the original Republican Party adhered to the principles of constitutional rule. It focuses on historical landmarks such as the founding of the Whig Party, the predecessor to the original Republican Party, the founding of the Republican Party, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Turn-of-the-Century political changes, the “New Deal,” and Civil Rights.

This book is not “G.O.P. propaganda,” as one reviewer has alleged. Zak’s history obviously favors the Republican Party, but he does not put any bias on history. For example, Zak shows a great respect for Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt. Zak writes “Roosevelt is to be revered as much for what he did not do as for what he did. The President could have led the country right off a cliff had he been so inclined” -- p.163. He also writes “Republican criticism of the New Deal is misguided and even counterproductive insofar as no distinction is made between its positive and negative aspects -- pp. 165-166.

Zak also criticizes a few Republican presidents for going against the civil rights heritage of the party: “During his second term, President (Theodore) Roosevelt’s approach toward the South underwent a major change. In a bid for southern white support, no longer would he side with oppressed blacks” -- p. 145; “Aiming to rebuild our Republican Party in the South but this time without blacks, President Taft completely ignored our Party’s platform, not only abandoning the oppressed black people of the region but dishonoring the legacy of the Radical Republicans” -- p. 146;” “Worse, neither (Presidents) Harding nor Coolidge undid the racial segregation imposed within the federal government by Woodrow Wilson” -- p. 156.

Part of the “back- to-basics” aspect of the book is the history of fighting for black civil rights. To be sure, Zak highlights the history of slavery, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, Black Codes, etc. and lays that at the doorstep of the Democratic Party. (To find more detailed histories of how the Democratic Party felt towards black Americans and how they were treated by Democrats, read Unfounded Loyalty by Rev. Wayne Perryman and Wrong on Race by Bruce Bartlett.) He writes of “Radical Republican” abolitionists such as Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts: “Sumner was an outspoken critic of slavery, blaming the ‘peculiar institution’ for the degeneracy of the masters as well as the evil inflicted on the slaves” -- p.25. Sumner suffered for his abolitionist principles: “Over the course of two days in May 1856, Sumner delivered a blistering assault on slavery in the South and its Democrat collaborators in the North. Entitled ‘The Crime Against Kansas,’ his speech mocked the slaveholders for presuming to be civilized and gentile, and said the penetration of slavery into Kansas was ‘the rape of a virgin territory.” So infuriated was one Democrat that two days later as Sumner was working at his desk on the Senate floor this South Carolina Representative bashed his head with a heavy cane. Senator Sumner spent the next three years in a wheelchair” -- pp. 25-26.

Another Radical Republican hero who Zak lauds is Senator Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania who “was revered for his tireless work on behalf of the slaves” -- p. 27. An element of his personal history was touched upon in the Steven Spielberg feature film Lincoln: “The firm backing of his constituents is all the more remarkable considering that he was married to a black woman as a white man in those days. In 1843, when he was 51, a widowed free black woman, Lydia Smith, along with her two young sons, moved in with the never-married Stevens to serve as his housekeeper. As demonstrated by their devotion to each other until his death, their relationship evolved into husband and wife. Mindful of the prejudices of the age, Stevens was always careful to refer to her as ‘Mrs. Smith,” but Lancaster neighbors knew to call her Mrs. Stevens’” -- p. 27.

One can appreciate Zak’s highlighting of little-known facts of history to shine light on the attitudes of the day in the antebellum South as some of those attitudes were quite frightening: “Though slavery may have been economically ruinous for the South, it was not all on the verge of death. Just as the cotton gin increased demand for slaves in the 1790’s, industrialization could easily have done so again. Many southern politicians were already calling for the South to industrialize itself though the use of slave labor in mining and manufacturing. Some were even calling for the enslavement of poor whites too. Soviet labor camps and Nazi slave factories proved how readily this system could have been implemented. Just before the Civil War, there was even wild talk throughout the South of conquering the whole Western Empire in order to set up a vast slave empire. If the South were allowed to secede, northerners wondered, how long before the breakaway nation attempted to add parts of the North to its slave empire?” -- p. 32.

A treatment of Republican Reconstruction history would not be complete without touching on blacks, all Republican, being appointed or elected to public office, history that is usually ignored in liberal Democratic accounts of history.. Zak writes that hundreds of blacks were elected to state government during Radical Reconstruction. He also writes: “Corrupt or ill-prepared black politicians were much less common than white supremacist legend would have us believe. Most in fact were conscientious and educated at least as well as the average southern white. Every black person elected to Congress during Reconstruction (and until 1934) was a Republican. Our country’s first black Senator, former Union army chaplain Hiram Revels, was elected in 1870 to Jefferson Davis’ old seat. Representative John Lynch, an ex-slave from Louisiana, later chaired the 1884 Republican National Convention…Many blacks served on police force or in the reconstructed state militias. To their credit, black state legislators or officials never sought vindictive measures against the white populace” – p. 107.

However, in reflecting upon the flaws as well as upon the achievements of the Republican Party, Zak writes that Republicans by 1872 “believed that after four years of warfare and then Reconstruction there was nothing more our Party could do to protect southern blacks from their white oppressors. They wanted civil service reform, lower tariffs, less government infrastructure spending, hard money (that is, not inflating the money supply with greenbacks), and other policies which required Democrat support to be enacted. Rejecting the Radical Republican focus on reconstructing the South, they opposed attempts to build a racially-integrated Republican Party in the South. It was time, they said, to move on” – pp. 113-114. He also writes that “President Eisenhower did not seize the moment” for the Republican Party to reclaim its heritage of fighting for black civil rights under the Constitution in the 1950’s: “The ferocious reaction by white Democrats in the South shamed the nation and afforded our Republican Party a tremendous opportunity to reclaim its heritage” – p. 182.

Zak also challenges conventional Democratic rhetoric: “As early as 1936, Republicans noted that there is no Social Security trust fund. There has never been. Rather, just as were the 19th century greenbacks, these obligations are backed by the promise of the federal government to pay them. Can these financial obligations of the federal government be considered any less imperative than the obligation to honor is other financial obligations, such as its Treasury bonds? Of course not…Talk of shoring up Social Security, or earmarking funds for Medicare, or placing funds in a lockbox – it is all meaningless. Politicians going on about the dire consequences of this or that transfer payments fund running out are either exposing their ignorance or attempting to manipulate the electorate, knowing that confusion is a Democrat’s best friend. Recipients of Social Security, Medicare, and other financial obligations of the federal government are fully guaranteed payment, and efforts to scare them into thinking otherwise are contemptible” – p. 220.

In the last chapter, Zak exhorts Republicans in keeping on the “right path and reach journey’s end, we Republicans must bear in mind the trail-blazing careers of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Stevens knew that for the emancipated slave, acquiring land of his own was a ‘sine qua non,’ meaning ‘without which, nothing.’ If Stevens had succeeded in implementing his proposal to provide each slave family with ’40 acres and a mule,’ countless economic problems would never have arisen. If after the war Sumner’s agenda for rigorous protection of constitutional rights had been enacted and enforced, the Democrats’ political degradation of black Americans might have been prevented” – p. 236.

Overall, Zak’s book quite adequately educates members of the Republican Party of the basics of its history so that the average member will not have a “muddled message” of ideas. Zak in his last chapter shocks the reader embrace a mental paradigm shift, and he admonishes the reader in saying “We Republicans place ourselves at another disadvantage in the battle of ideas by ripping from socialists a label which describes them so well. Opponents of progress are those who want to conserve the age-old rule of the few over the many and the cultural stagnation this entails. Socialists are the true conservatives. Republicans try without success to affix this conservative label properly to our Party, using as adhesive such adjectives as ‘dynamic’ or ‘compassionate’ or ‘progressive.’ Trouble is, though our Republican Party definitely is dynamic and compassionate and progressive, conservative it is not. Ironically, the socialists ripped from our Party a label which suits us so well and them not at all. As the term is understood everywhere in the world except where the Democrats appropriated it as their own, liberals (more accurately “classical liberals” – Ed.) have struggled for liberty by opposing government oppression and championing the free market. To quote Hayek once more: ‘The liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead…Conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about” – p. 228.

Anyone who liked the "Lincoln" movie will love this book. This book is perhaps the best kept secret in all political and history books in America. It is something every politico should read. It puts things into historical perspective like few other books I've read. It challenges conventional through thorough documented history. This is a must read for any student of American history and political science. One regret is that I read the book more than a decade after it was published. It truly is something you feel you missed out on. It is also a book that leaves you wanting to learn more about certain individuals such as Thaddeus Stevens. It's an incredible body of work.

Whether you identify with the Republican party or not this book is essential to understanding what the Republican party stood for and the history behind the party. Unfortunately today the party bares little resemblance to the birth of the Republicans back in 1854.

Back to Basics is very informative and gives you an insight into the history of the party from the early days of Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens to the modern day presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. Crucially though the book doesn't exist to demonize the Democrats (he isn't backwards in coming forwards when giving his opinion on past Republican policies and decisions-providing an excellent balanced view), in fact there are a few well placed nods to the opposition party as well. What the author, Michael Zak, has done is provide a balanced view and giving the reader a fascinating 150 year journey of the Republicans.

In conclusion, this book is a REAL political page turner which will open minds to a wealth of knowledge and history which most are not even aware of. Fantastic buy.

Michael Zak is the author of the under-appreciated book Back to Basics for the Republican Party. He says Republicans need to remember the party's proud legacy.

The theme of his book and the speeches he has delivered across America is that Republicans would benefit from appreciating the heritage of their Grand Old Party. "As you know, Democrats control most of the media, but they also write most of the history books, thereby controlling what even Republican activists think they know about our party's glorious heritage," he writes.

Zak notes that when it comes to civil rights, Republicans have consistently been on the right side of history. The GOP has long fought against Democrats who favored slavery, backed Jim Crow laws, and fought tooth-and-nail against the enactment of civil rights legislation. His book was even cited in a Supreme Court case. Justice Clarence Thomas referenced Zak's work in his dissent in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee.

Although nowadays it may seem that the Republican Party is hardly worth saving, it wasn't always this way.

Not a bad book. Goes into some detail about how the Republicans should get their "stuff" together. Recommend it for up and coming people trying to clean up the mess that has been made in the US today.

Great book

love it - all families should read this

This is also a book which has changed my perspective on the Republican Party.