Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien gave a speech at the Republican National Convention two days ago. In that speech, O’Brien declared, “The Teamsters are not interested if you have D, R, or an I next to your name. We want to know one thing: what are you doing to help American workers.” It was an insistence that the union is not beholden to any party or candidate.

A day after O’Brien’s speech, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, wrote of the virtues of a pro-labor conservatism. He claims that O’Brien’s speech should be a call to return to the Republican tradition of Theodore Roosevelt — a tradition that John Gerring called “National Republicanism.”

That period of the party might sound similar to the Trumpian tunes of today. Roosevelt, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft called for high tariffs, developing national manufacturing, and a rejection of the free-market ideology so closely associated with modern Republicanism. In that era, advocates of free-market theories were seen as cranks whose “knowledge of Political Economy was obtained in the closet.”