RIPON, Wis. — The distance between Ripon 1854 and Milwaukee 2024 seems far greater than 86 miles or 170 years.
It was in this small Wisconsin town, during a raging March snowstorm seven years before the start of the Civil War, that a band of local men huddled under candlelight in a one-room schoolhouse heated by a cast-iron potbelly stove to discuss the formation of the same political party that is convening this week in the state’s largest city to reanoint Donald Trump.
The citizens who came in from the freezing cold that long-ago night were Whigs and Democrats and Free Soilers, farmers and lawyers and merchants, capitalists and Fourierite communal socialists, many of them recent arrivals into the prairie wilderness from New York, a diverse group unified by one powerful idea — that the spread of slavery in the United States was an evil that had to stop and would require a bold new party to accomplish that mission.
Whether Ripon is the literal birthplace of the Republican Party is open to dispute. Other northern cities, including Jackson, Mich., and Exeter, N.H., also lay claim, but Ripon is where calling the incipient party Republican was first discussed, and its Little White Schoolhouse has come to symbolize the GOP’s modest roots in heartland America.
Open to considerably more dispute are any connections between Ripon’s foundational meaning as a beacon for racial equality and the Trumpian MAGA inheritors who now dominate the Republican Party.
Variations of that idea are the most common questions posed by visitors to the party shrine here. Tim Lyke, former longtime owner of the Ripon Commonwealth Press, who still writes editorials for the undogmatic but traditionally Republican weekly, said that what happened in his hometown in 1854 marked an effort to bring unity to the country in terms of race and class. In 2024, Lyke asserted, the Republican Party is more interested in demonizing the “other … too often dividing us, whether by economic class, race, gender or sexual preference.”
Luther Olsen, a retired Republican state senator who represented the area in the Wisconsin legislature, said he was proud of what happened in Ripon 170 years ago when its leaders joined against slavery. He also described it as a manifestation of unity. “Could that happen today? I don’t think so … today everybody wants what they want and are not willing to compromise,” Olsen said. “This [coming together of Whigs, Democrats and Free Soilers] was a serious compromise taking place for the betterment of the country.”
The Little White Schoolhouse where the antislavery Riponites met still exists as a restored historic site. One can reach it from Milwaukee by tooling up Interstate 41 for an hour to Fond du Lac at the southern rim of Lake Winnebago, hanging a left on State Highway 23 and driving west for about a half-hour. The old museum house sits along a modern suburban strip at the far edge of town, nestled between a local Jeep dealer and Culver’s butterburgers.
The schoolhouse has been moved six times over the decades, at times the subject of local political disputes, at times neglected and on the verge of demolition. Its latter-day moment of national fame came in 1954, during its hundredth anniversary celebration, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent an electronic signal from the White House that ignited a Freedom Torch in front of the schoolhouse. The torch is long gone, but the schoolhouse now appears here to stay.
Inside, one might encounter Mandy Kimes, the enthusiastic executive director of the Ripon Area Chamber of Commerce who serves as point person for the Little White Schoolhouse. Her chamber owns and operates it as a nonpartisan museum and educational center where schoolchildren are taught its history as an example of grass-roots activism and challenged to ponder the courage of ancestors taking a stand for a meaningful cause. Some days, as was the case last Monday morning, no one stops in; other days school groups and tourists fill the room. Kimes estimates it receives about a thousand visitors each year. She hopes those numbers will get a boost this week with conventioneers making pilgrimages from Milwaukee, but is sanguine about the prospect of Trump delegates paying homage to the birthplace of an abolitionist movement.
Along with wooden benches and a replica stove, the schoolroom walls are lined with panels outlining its history, only one of which — a poster with the portraits of all 19 Republican presidents, ranging in chronology and ideology from Abraham Lincoln to Trump — appears overtly partisan. The hero of the museum, if one can be singled out, is Alvan Earle Bovay, a staunch abolitionist who moved west to Ripon in 1850 from New York, where he was a close friend of Horace Greeley, the influential antislavery publisher of the New York Tribune.
Disturbing events in Washington and closer to home compelled Bovay to call for two meetings of townspeople of divergent political persuasions who shared an aversion to slavery. At the first meeting in February 1854, inside the Congregational Church, Bovay and his compatriots railed against the imminent passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would nullify the earlier Missouri Compromise and allow for the expansion of slavery into western territories. The second meeting, at the Little White Schoolhouse, combined fury about what Congress was doing with another issue involving human freedom, the apprehension of Joshua Glover, who had escaped from slavery two years earlier but was at that time being held in a Milwaukee jail under the Fugitive Slave Act that allowed enslavers to hunt down and bring back former enslaved people who had fled to the north.
It was not long after that second meeting and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that the Whig party collapsed and ferment for a new Republican Party spread from Wisconsin to New England, with southern Whigs leaving for a nativist anti-immigrant American Party, also known as the Know Nothings. History coming around on itself. By 1856 the Republican Party was staging its first convention in Philadelphia, and four years later it would nominate Lincoln, a lawyer and former lawmaker from Illinois, for the presidency at its convention in Chicago.
In Ripon, at least on the surface, the hostility and political divisiveness that marks the current era seems less evident. One member of the Little White Schoolhouse board is John Splitt, a six-times great-grandson of Amos Loper, one of Bovay’s contemporary founders. Splitt, a carpenter, describes himself as a moderate-to-conservative Republican who supports Trump but is not “one of the crazies.” At various Ripon parades, he can be seen behind the wheel of his wife’s old red 1950 pickup hauling a 1/3-scale replica of the Little White Schoolhouse, built in shop class by Ripon High students.
Even Glenn Grothman, the Trump-defending Republican congressman who represents Ripon in Wisconsin’s 6th District, has been supportive of the Little White Schoolhouse, at least to the extent that his office has publicly supported an effort to get it relisted on the National Register of Historic Places, an honor it lost after its move to the suburban strip. Lyke has written scores of editorials at the newspaper criticizing Grothman, arguing that his political positions — belittling the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., calling Kwanzaa “not a real holiday,” disparaging gay rights, and opposing kindergarten for 4-year-olds — are the antithesis of what the Ripon story represents.
That story will be told in Milwaukee this week, but outside the Fiserv Forum where Trump will again be anointed the Republican nominee. In the outdoors festival area, Kimes will stand by the replica version of the Little White Schoolhouse. It was driven down from Ripon by Olsen in a trailer attached to the back of his black Ford 150 pickup. He was nervous about taking the model out on the highway beyond “parade speed,” but made it safely. Olsen said he voted for Trump during the first two elections, but could not bring himself to support him again after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. There was a time when the former legislator might have stayed around for the action in Milwaukee, but no longer. This time he high-tailed it home, preferring a concert of Abba replica music to palling around with Republican conventioneers. “Mamma Mia,” he said.
The Ripon to Milwaukee story has another unlikely connection that resonates in various ways with current events — Spencer Tracy, the actor. Tracy grew up in Milwaukee and attended Ripon College, the small liberal arts institution nestled on a hill above downtown Ripon, before dropping out to become a leading man in Hollywood.
In the 1948 movie “State of the Union,” directed by Frank Capra, Tracy plays a wealthy war veteran and airplane industrialist with an appealing maverick streak who is groomed to run for president by an unscrupulous and flirtatious newspaper publisher played by Angela Lansbury. His candidacy advances only after he compromises his principles, tailoring his once bold speeches to his audiences and allowing his handlers to make backroom deals with self-serving power brokers. But in the final scene, at what was meant to be a winning national television speech from his home, he realizes how all of this has disillusioned his idealistic and long-suffering wife, played by Katharine Hepburn. He tears up the script, apologizes for his waywardness, confesses that his entire candidacy was a fraud based on “lies, fear, and corruption,” and withdraws from the race while delivering a Capraesque ode to American goodness. Life does not always imitate art.
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