The Republican Party was born in a public meeting in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin on March 20, 1854. That claim has been widely - and officially- accpeted since the days of the Civil War. Early historians of American politics acknowledged it; President Ulysses S. Grant's Vice President gave Ripon the nod, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acknowledged it in 1954, and since the 1880s the G.O.P.'s own offical historians have consistently anointed Ripon, a college town of 7,200 souls, 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee as the place of the party's birth.