THIS REPUBLICAN PARTY "PRINCIPLE" HAS NOT CHANGED | 2000-04-22
After Reconstruction ended, the Southern Republican Party began to dwindle. By the beginning of the twentieth century, no one was elected on the Republican ticket to anything in the Deep South, so everybody with any ambition left it.
In fact, there was only one reason to be a Southern Republican by 1900. Every state had a minimum number of delegates to the national Republican Convention every four years. So each four years a tiny group in each state would get together, call themselves Republicans and send some people to sell their convention votes to the highest bidder.
This was not a secret. At the 1912 convention, a reporter asked a drunk Southern delegate how the South would be voting. The delegate replied, "Some of us are for Taft, some of us are for Roosevelt, and ALL of us are for SALE!"
The majority of South Carolina's Republicans in the state senate voted to pull down the Confederate flag that 76% of Republicans in their primary had voted to keep flying over the state house. Their openly stated reason? They said that standing on principle might cost money, estimated at a maximum of a dollar or two per South Carolinian per year. Principle is nice, they agreed, but money is nicer.
So the only difference between the majority of Republican state senators today and Republican delegates in 1912 is that in 1912 they held out for a better price.