Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Standpatter Republican


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Seddon talk 08:12, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Standpatter Republican

 * – ( View AfD View log )

This topic is not notable and has little to not coverage in sources. Extensive WP:BEFORE and searches of other databases yield nothing. The few hits that do come up are usually using the term standpatter as an adjective (ie conservative) rather than alluding to a recognised faction or group within the Republican party that went by this name. Some hits just happen to have the words next to each other. Vladimir.copic (talk) 23:41, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete. Reads like a half-baked introductory paragraph to a college essay. KidAd  •  SPEAK  00:08, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * But poor-quality writing is justification for improvement, not deletion.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 01:59, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. ☢️ Radioactive 🎃 (talk) 00:46, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. ☢️ Radioactive 🎃 (talk) 00:46, 5 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Weak keep - it's not really a "faction" in the sense that people gathered together and referred to themselves in those terms, but it does seem to be a part of common political parlance in that particular period. Here is someone being described in those terms in the New York Times in 1915. This book gives a fairly succinct definition of what those described this way believed. This book describes the effect those beliefs had on the politics of the day. This report in the Florida State University Law Review provides further detail. I do think that renaming the article to Standpatter (with explanation therein that it is a term related to particular Republicans) would be a significant improvement.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 01:59, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I would argue that the article is quite definitive in describing this as a faction rather just a descriptive phase. If this is just a descriptive phase then I am not sure it is notable either as you could make this argument for many articles using the formula Adjective + Republican. The sources presented are primary uses of this phrase rather than secondary explanations of it. I will go through the sources you presented as they demonstrate my initial point:
 * The article uses the phrase as follows: "He was the irreconcilable standpatter Republican". This is clearly just using "standpatter" as an adjective to present the conservatism of Cannon and the Republican party.
 * This books sole reference is as follows: "...the 'standpatter' Republican Party sought to maintain advantages for the patrician class, while the populist Democrats sought to...". Again this seems to use the term "standpatter" as an adjective to contrast the Republican's conservatism with the Democrat's populism.
 * Again the term is used once in this book. Is one of the more compelling sources but still really just means 'conservative'. And I'm not sure a single primary usage in a book about a film executive gives this term notability.
 * An incredibly obscure reference which uses the term once without any explanation. Strangely the text speaks about a report given to congress by Sereno Payne (d. 1914) but links to a congressional record from 1919 (five years after his death). I don't have the time or will to check this reference. Either way this seems unreliable or just plain obscure at best.
 * Standpatter already has a well established meaning so it would make little sense (and be confusing) to change the title of the article. Vladimir.copic (talk) 03:07, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's exactly my point - our article gets it wrong and should be corrected. This was not a specific, organised faction, it was a way (in the common parlance of the day) to describe a particular type of Republican. And the definition you give comes from that common usage of the term to describe this particular grouping of like-minded people. As opposed to something like the Tea Party Caucus, or even the related Tea Party movement. I think we could safely rename it without it being conflated with something else. There isn't - from what I can see - some other common use of the term for it to be confused with.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 04:28, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Could you point me to sources that makes this argument? Vladimir.copic (talk) 05:47, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Which argument?  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 05:56, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * This one: This was not a specific, organised faction, it was a way (in the common parlance of the day) to describe a particular type of Republican. And the definition you give comes from that common usage of the term to describe this particular grouping of like-minded people. Am I misunderstanding something, or is this only a view vaguely alluded to by Wolraich? Vladimir.copic (talk) 06:02, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * No, its based on the description from the Merriam-Webster link above. Following Hanna's use of the term, it became a common way to describe people with that view (mostly Republicans) and to "stand pat" (separately) has come to be used in a range of other contexts. So "standpatters" or "stand-patters" as a description of that group (like "stalwarts") or "stand pat" as a verb used elsewhere, and more recently (like "stalwart", which we disambiguate). But they still have the same genesis.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 06:24, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * A source! A source! My kingdom for a source! Vladimir.copic (talk) 06:44, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Beyond the ones in the article?  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 07:09, 5 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep - I had some time and so cleaned the article up a bit. I need to work on the references but the two that provide a specific description of who and what the standpatters were is enough for me. And I'll proposed a name-change following this AfD.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 05:22, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep: Seems to be notable in my view. There are numerous contemporaneous news articles of Standpatter Republicans distincted from Progressive Republicans, and with significant coverage. A newspapers.com search of "Standpatter" with the additional queries of "between 1900 and 1930" and "in the USA" returns a whopping 191,000 articles. I browsed through the thumbnails of the first 50 or so, and all of them are referring to this faction, not some other use of standpatter. Additionally, another search for "Standpatter Republican" (with no additional queries bc I didn't think they were necessary with such a specific term) returns over 1,000 articles. And yeah many are simply passing mentions, but many others provide significant coverage that show this was a notable faction contemporaneously. The article does need work to better integrate it into the encyclopedia; however, it should be kept as it passes WP:GNG. Curbon7 (talk) 03:41, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Number of search results does not give notability. There are nearly a thousand results for Pink Dog - should we give this an article? On a more serious note, "Standpatter Democrat" gives nearly 700 results. Of course any adjective + noun gives a lot of hits and an adjective alone will give many more. As I outlined above, many search results are literally from the two words happening to be next to each other without even being linked. Still waiting for a secondary source explaining the faction, it's history, members etc without that it is just primary uses of a phrase and WP:ORIGINAL. Vladimir.copic (talk) 04:28, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * , A newspaper article is a secondary source... Regardless, I concur with that a page move to 'Standpatter' or 'Standpatter (United States)' is a good Alternative to Deletion, as that would help contextualize and include Standpatter Democrats and the historical meaning and relevance of standpatters, instead of just having multiple itty-bitty stubs on standpatter factions within various American political parties. Curbon7 (talk) 06:06, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * It's already covered here. Remember WP:NOTDIC. In this context the newspapers certainly are primary sources considering we are dealing with a descriptive term that the media used. They are not quoting others in most cases or, as far as a I can see, writing about the term. Vladimir.copic (talk) 06:16, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * , WP:WORDISSUBJECT. Curbon7 (talk) 06:37, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah totally. Just waiting for significant coverage by reliable sources on this phrase to change my mind. Usage of a phrase does not make it notable - that's what dictionaries are for. Vladimir.copic (talk) 06:44, 5 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Note on new sources as usual Stalwart111 has done a valliant job attempting to bring an article from a dusty corner of history up to scratch. I just want to address the new sources provided. I realise that actually reading sources often doesn't have any weight in these discussion so I'm just going to be brief.
 * Michael Wolraich's book is probably the only source I can find that gives significant attention to this idea. He extensively speaks of Standpatter Republicans but this is just a single work and therefore does not provide notability.
 * The rest of the sources fall into the trivial category. Singular or breif usages of the word in much bigger works without any explanation of the term and mostly using it as an adjective . uses the term twice in 370+ page work with no explanation of the term - once to refer to republicans, once to refer to the Supreme Court.  uses the term once in a 400+ page book to refer to conservatives with no explanation of the term.  a few sentences in a 240 page book - gives a brief description of the meaning of the term in how it was applied in a single usage.
 * Some of the usages of the sources in the current article amount to WP:ORIGINAL. Drawing on primary sources to make assertions (particularly the "It is said that the term was so commonly used between 1901 and the 1930s" section).Vladimir.copic (talk) 07:11, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Missed one! places the term exactly where it belongs. In a dictionary with no reference to a standpatter faction or group in the Republican party. Just a synonym for reactionary. If only WP had a sister site that could house this. Vladimir.copic (talk) 07:27, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * That's... not a traditional dictionary. Its a collated history of words and their political contexts. It's what William Safire did and he was pretty famous for it. It won't reference a standpatter faction or group... because there wasn't one.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 07:34, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Ok…so why are you defending this article. We seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding here. I am talking about an article called Standpatter Republican you seem to be talking about a new article called “Stand-Pat”. I have throughout acknowledged that stand-pat is indeed a political descriptive term. I am disputing the crux of this article that it was a group. Stand-pat was used up until at least the 60s to describe republicans and democrats. Make a stand-pat article if you believe it warrants an article. Vladimir.copic (talk) 09:41, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Because it was clear what the article was driving at, but it was clumsily written, sourced and named. But those are fixable and none of those are reasons for deletion. It was clearly about the parlance, in a specific political context, and not a simple dictionary definition of "stand pat" (which arguably does warrant an article of its own). WP:BEFORE is about more than just doing a google search to see if that particular set of words is notable. Is the subject of the article notable? AfD isn't a venue for disputing current article content, or titles. You aren't nominating a set of words for deletion, you're arguing that a subject isn't notable and that we shouldn't have an article about it. So when you demand sources for what was in a previous version of the article, you do yourself and AfD a disservice. Because we aren't (ever) discussing whether a specific previous version of an article should be deleted.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 11:18, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I suppose you are right. I just didn’t realise the point of AfD was to change the subject (and hope to later change the title) of an article while divining the intention of the original author. I simplistically took the article at face value seeing as it spoke about a faction and a list of faction members. Will bear this in mind going forward. Vladimir.copic (talk) 11:39, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, nobody changed the subject but yep, that's exactly what WP:BEFORE and WP:ATD are about.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 11:55, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * What you're probably looking for is William Safire's Political Dictionary, and its variant editions. Yes, in an effort to transcribe information into the article, primary sources were interpreted and that all needs work, refinement, and improvement. Its a work in progress. The "its badly written" argument has been addressed already.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 07:31, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think it is badly written. In fact it is a well written WP:SYNTH. Vladimir.copic (talk) 07:34, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * And now that has been addressed also.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 08:41, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   13:55, 12 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Qwaiiplayer (talk) 14:20, 12 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete, the subject is not notable, and all we're talking about here is a term, so this is a WP:DICDEF, not a suitable subject for a Wikipedia article. The use of WP:PRIMARY sources speaks to a valiant attempt to beef up the DICDEF to look like a sourced article (and an even more valiant attempt to argue down all comers here at AfD), but it's actually a clear case of WP:OR by synthesis. Delete. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:32, 12 August 2021 (UTC)
 * That's a strange way to characterise a civil discussion between two editors (one part as a result of my comment, and the other after a comment in which I was tagged). And given that the use of primary sources and synthesis have both been addressed, and most of the references are clearly secondary, I have to wonder which version of the article you're referring to...  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 02:56, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Relisting comment: Some source material seems to have been found, but if the scope of the article is changing, it isn't clear whether all the material is applicable, and if therefore a standalone article is justified.
 * Keep/merge There may be scope for expansion – see The psychology of the reformer and the stand-patter, for example. The worst case would be merger to a page such as Glossary of American politics, which explains such local language. Andrew🐉(talk) 23:21, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Vanamonde (Talk) 09:35, 20 August 2021 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  MBisanz  talk 18:22, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment - for the sake of clarity: the scope of the article hasn't changed (isn't changing), it was poorly expressed to begin with and that has now been resolved through editing. Multiple sources have now been included in the article, several of which give the subject substantial coverage and none of which have been deemed unreliable. This is about a group of people, clearly well-known to their peers, who were described using this term. In addition, they were well known enough that the term has had a lasting impact on political diologue and has since been used more recently. The original article's use of the term "faction" was a bit of a red herring as none of the reliable sources refer to this group by that term. But the article is still about that group of people and the sources are still about that same group.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 12:53, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep - Per WP:HEY. Sourcing looks good now. The Tidwell article is a nice round-up of usage. Suriname0 (talk) 16:20, 2 September 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.