Republican Party - Navo

• The Republican Party began at a protest meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, on 28 February 1854 as a group of antislavery activists, known as Free Soilers, met to start a new grassroots movement. The first party convention took place in Jackson, Michigan, that same year on 6 July. The group adopted the name of the political party of Thomas Jefferson, which later evolved more directly into the Democratic Party. 
• The Republican Party emerged directly out of the Free Soil Party in the North, a movement embraced at various times by such Democrats as Martin Van Buren, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency on the Free Soil Party ticket in 1848, and David Wilmot, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1845–1851). 
• Numerically more significant was the Republican Party's support from disillusioned northern Whigs. With the collapse of the Whig Party in the 1850s, the Republicans emerged as one of the legatees of the Whig organization.
• The election of Herbert Hoover in 1928 was an important victory for the Republicans. While the Republicans had already won two elections in the 1920s, Hoover's victory was more substantive. Hoover had been director general of the American Relief Administration in the aftermath of World War I. In the midst of general prosperity, 
• Hoover campaigned on the slogan, "A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage." As the Great Depression deepened, Hoover's inability to mount an effective mustering of moral and rhetorical resources was his most significant failure. Hoover was a lukewarm Republican Progressive and, as such, he tried a few half-hearted attempts to stimulate the economy, most notably with the National Recovery Administration.
•  His worst failing was his insistence on old fashioned budget balancing, calling for tax increases as the economy shrank, and reducing government spending as revenues declined.