David Frum

And above all, avoid anything that smacks of reform.

It's the old flag.

It's the old cause.

It's a Republican Party based in the Protestant small towns of the North.

And we remain very suspicious of the Democratic big cities and certainly suspicious of the South.

That's coalition one.

Coalition 2 said, no, we need to modernize.

We need to bring some rationality to the tariff system.

We need to suppress the post-war inflation with a new kind of monetary system and new kind of banking system.

We need to have a much more professional government.

And that coalition means making inroads into the democratic big cities of the North.

And that means, of necessity, jettisoning concern for the freed slaves.

And the people who took this approach to politics, unlike the stalwarts who took the first, they were known as the half-breeds.

And a lot of the battle of the

1870s and 1880s, are these battles between stalwarts and half-breeds?

Should you have a reconstruction politics or should you have a modernization politics?

I've simplified this enormously, and people who are versed in the period will detect many errors of nuance and emphasis in what I just said, but that's basically the problem.

And without telling people who are long dead what they should have done, understanding that problem helps us to understand the period, and it helps us to understand ourselves, because their choices were ugly, and our choices are often ugly too.

And political success goes to those who best manage the choice.

Garfield became president in 1880 and inaugurated in 1881, not because he was a hero.