GOP Officers’ Blog

 Grand County Republicans would like to recognize March as Women’s History Month, and applaud the remarkable work and achievement of American women throughout our country’s history and the great strength that women have given our national character.  

We especially want to Celebrate the 19^th Amendment to our Constitution. Beginning in the 1800s, women organized, petitioned, and picketed to win the right to vote, but it took them decades to accomplish their purpose. Between 1878, when the amendment was first introduced in Congress, and August 18, 1920, when it was ratified, champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but strategies for achieving their goal varied. Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in each state—nine western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. Others challenged male-only voting laws in the courts. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Often supporters met fierce resistance. Opponents heckled, jailed, and sometimes physically abused them.

By 1916, most major suffrage organizations were united behind the goal of a constitutional amendment. When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift.

On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and 2 weeks later, the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, the amendment passed its final hurdle of obtaining the agreement of three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on August 26, 1920, changing the face of the American electorate forever.

March is also a time to celebrate the official founding of the Republican Party on March 20th.  The Party arose from a coalition of Free Soil and Liberty Party adherents, disaffected Democrats, and members of a collapsed Whig Party that was fatally fractured by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  This act incited violence and power-grabbing in territories that were seeking to become states, at which time these areas would be able to democratically determine if they would legalize slavery or criminalize it.

March 18th is also President Grover Cleveland’s birthday.  Cleveland, a Democrat, became the first U.S. President to be elected to serve 2 non-consecutive terms in office, as both the 22nd and the 24th POTUS. Cleveland was a New Jersey boy, who at 16 was the breadwinner for his widowed mother and 8 siblings, and had no formal education credentials.  Later in upstate New York, he worked eagerly to become a lawyer and worked short stints as a sheriff of Erie County, Mayor of Buffalo, and later Governor of New York.  He bucked the powerful NY political machine of the day, Tammany Hall, which among other enterprises was involved in large-scale migration and associated profiteering and harnessing of immigrants as voters.  He succeeded due to his desire to disassociate himself from the dirty side of American politics and the people responded.  As elected president in 1884, he targeted the corrupted spoils system of the day where corporate-political partnerships and alliances enriched ultra-wealthy Robber-Baron Industrialists and their political associates.  He worked on behalf of the American people, ended fraudulent payments to Civil War vets, limited or ended wasteful government programs, and made enemies of the insiders who were grifting and exploiting the vast resources of the West and restored 81,000,000 acres of land that the elitist robber barons had claimed for themselves . He married a woman 27 years younger than himself and was disparaged about his lack of education as well as previous affairs and foibles by those who were his political adversaries. His push to discard tariffs, while popular with middle class and small business would ultimately lose his re-election as the big money poured into Ben Harrison’s campaign and Cleveland, without enlisting Tammany Hall, narrowly lost New York’s 36 electoral votes to the Republicans in the 1888 election by 14,373 votes out of a total 1,319,748 ballots cast.

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