Book Review: Back to Basics for the Republican Party by Michael Zak

I saw Michael Zak, author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party, speak Friday night. I went to the dinner because I wanted to meet the host, but found myself intrigued by this author. Most Republicans know we are the party of Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves. Less known is that the Republican Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation freeing the slaves and that legislation was attached to the Proclamation.

I was at Antietam Battlefield in April. Antietam, the bloodiest day in US history, was, according to the explanatory documentaries, the impetus for the Emancipation Proclamation. No one mentioned any legislative involvement.

Zak suggested that this focus on Lincoln is purposeful by non-Republican authors in order to deify Lincoln and diminish the broad-based support of civil rights within the Republican party. I am not sure I’d go that far but I know that the Republican reputation for the white Christian party does not match the experience I have had since I became a Republican in the last decade. This book gives the objective evidence that matches my own subjective experience, meeting black Republicans, gay Republicans and Latino Republicans in a state that does not make it easy to be Republican.

Zak takes the history of the Republican party through the next 150 years. I was most interested in the last 40 years, the time I lived through and am the most familiar with. The federal government, under Republican Eisenhower, was on the side of desegregation and Eisenhower himself rewrote the federal government’s brief asking that it be implemented immediately. Republicans in Congress supported the Civil Rights Act in greater percentage than Democrats did. The story of Martin Luther King Jr endorsing Nixon over Kennedy and how that direct endorsement was overshadowed by the indirect endorsement of Kennedy by King’s father which seemed to be from MLK Jr., leading the black vote to the Democratic nominee, is fascinating.

Article Author: Justene Adamec

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