The "Wide Awakes" young exuberant supporters pushed Abraham Lincoln into power

[JHB]

4. Here's an indication of the diversity of the early Republicans. Anything look familiar?

Last edited Tue Sep 4, 2012, 07:21 PM - Edit history (1)

Check out this 1860 political cartoon against them and play a drinking game with the teabagger tropes that are still with us:

Person enamored with charisma or celebrity: take a shot (was said about JFK and Obama)
Person who conservatives consider a sexual deviant: take a shot (then: "free love element"; now: gays)
Person who conservatives consider a religious deviant: take a shot and make it double: it's the Mormons! (now: Muslims and secularists)
Minority caricature wanting special rights: take a shot
Women's rights person hates men: take a shot
Collection of layabouts, foreigners, and thugs: chug, chug, chug!

And a candidate who will give the lot of them everything they want: just stick your head under the tap and have the whole barrel (beer, wine, whiskey, doesn't matter at this point)

The Republican Party going to the right House


Title: The Republican Party going to the right House
Creator(s): Currier & Ives.,
Related Names:
Maurer, Louis, 1832-1932 , artist
Date Created/Published: : Published by Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau St. N.Y., c1860.
Medium: 1 print on wove paper : lithograph ; image 24 x 40 cm.
Summary: Abraham Lincoln's supporters are portrayed as radicals and eccentrics of various stripes. The satire is loosely based on an anti-Fremont cartoon from the previous presidential race, "The Great Republican Reform Party" (no. 1856-22), also issued by Nathaniel Currier. Here Lincoln, sitting astride a wooden rail borne by Horace Greeley, leads his followers toward a lunatic asylum. Greeley instructs him, "Hold on to me Abe, and we'll go in here by the unanimous consent of the people." Lincoln exhorts his followers, "Now my friends I'm almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted." At the head of the group is a bearded man, arm-in-arm with a woman and a Mormon. He claims to "represent the free love element, and expect to have free license to carry out its principles." The woman looks at Lincoln, saying "Oh! what a beautiful man he is, I feel a passionate attraction' every time I see his lovely face." The Mormon adds, "I want religion abolished and the book of Mormon made the standard of morality." They are followed by a dandified free black, who announces, "De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect' I want dat understood." Behind him an aging suffragette says, "I want womans rights enforced, and man reduced in subjection to her authority." Next a ragged socialist or Fourierist, holding a liquor bottle, asserts, "I want everybody to have a share of everybody elses property." At the end of the group are three hooligans, one demanding "a hotel established by government, where people that aint inclined to work, can board free of expense, and be found in rum and tobacco." The second, a thief, wants "the right to examine every other citizen's pockets without interruption by Policemen." The last, an Irish street tough, says, "I want all the stations houses burned up, and the M.P.s killed, so that the bohoys can run with the machine and have a muss when they please."
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-1990 (b&w film copy neg.)
Call Number: PGA - Currier & Ives--Republican Party going... (B size)
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a05729/