The rise of the Tea Party has generated a powerful nostalgia among liberals for a generation of “sane” and “reasonable” Republicans. Once upon a time, so the tale goes, this breed of moderates was willing to compromise, to accommodate many of the basic reforms of the New Deal.

This nostalgic narrative of moderate Republicanism venerates a political moment exemplified by the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who claimed in an oft-quoted letter to his right-wing brother Edgar that total electoral annihilation would greet any Republican who “attempt[ed] to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs.”

Eisenhower’s begrudging accommodation of the welfare state represented a tactical concession to specific elements of the political order brought into existence by the reforms of the New Deal. But another set of Republicans, who first emerged in the 1930s and 1940s at the state and local level across the urban-industrial Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast — the places where working people had mobilized most effectively under the auspices of the New Deal — went further. They made much larger, strategic concessions, as self-identified “liberal Republicans.”