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CHAPTER 2

The Progressive Campaign

Roosevelt continued prevaricating for months, staying in the spotlight, publicly saying he would not run, and privately indicating that his arm might be twisted if circumstance allowed. Yet the circumstances started to become less favorable for a Roosevelt candidacy by the middle of 1911.

Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, perhaps the most prominent Republican progressive after Roosevelt, declared that he would run against Taft. “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette had harbored White House ambitions ever since being elected to the Senate in 1906. He was making the bet that Roosevelt refused to do, running on the belief that the progressive wing was strong enough to triumph over the “stand-patters” in the fight for the 1912 Republican nomination. Some of Roosevelt’s closest supporters became donors to the La Follette campaign, and by October the Wisconsin senator had won the endorsement of the National Progressive Republican Conference (an organization he had helped create one year earlier).¹

Even as Roosevelt continued to dither, the sustained attention paid to both him and La Follette—and the rise of these new sorts of organizations that endorsed candidates but stood apart from the regular party machinery—signaled fundamental changes in the American political system. The nineteenth-century United States was long characterized as “a state of courts and parties,” in which a seemingly small federal bureaucracy and individual political leaders were subsumed in importance by the actions of the judiciary and the power of the two major political parties.²

Nineteenth-century politics was intensely local, and intensely personal. It also was a major source of entertainment. The parties orchestrated torchlight parades, festive rallies, and neighborhood parties. They delivered jobs, political favors, and Thanksgiving turkeys to those who were loyal to them. This system led to extraordinarily high voter turnout. In the 1896 presidential election, close to 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls—and, by and large, voted straight party line tickets.

Yet that same year also introduced new methods of presidential campaigning that upended the old order and created a new partisan apparatus that made campaigning in the twentieth century far different from the nineteenth. Party dominance of all levels of government, from urban political machines to Congressional committees, had begun to decline as progressive reform gained traction in big cities and reform-minded leaders came into power in politics and in the media. Reconfigured party power created an opening for “candidate-centered politics,” in which individual candidates became the axes around which elections revolved. Although the 1896 Republican nominee, William McKinley, and his Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, had radically different political philosophies and campaign styles, both of their campaigns helped define the nature of the new style of modern campaigning. Bryan barnstormed the country with his Jeffersonian message of agrarian populism. Already well known for his oratorical gifts and charismatic self-presentation, he drew large and enthusiastic crowds. McKinley, in contrast, had the crowds come to him. From the front porch of his Canton, Ohio, home, McKinley gave an audience to any who desired one, and gave speeches while standing on a box or chair. This “front-porch campaign” drew thousands of supporters to Canton over the final weeks of the campaign, and won the attention of thousands more through newspaper coverage of this novel campaign strategy.³

Changes in the media landscape of course also contributed to the rise of the candidate-centered campaign. A proliferation of newspapers and magazines competed for readers’ eyeballs by reporting on impassioned speeches and colorful political personalities. At the same time, a press that once was fiercely partisan began to adopt a journalistic ethos of impartiality and objectivity. With all these changes, the candidate, not the party, became the center of attention.⁴

In this new environment, a candidate’s missteps mattered. In 1912, Robert La Follette made many of them. La Follette thought of himself as a game-changer and rabble-rouser, but he was reluctant to leave the comforts of Washington and regular Senate business to go on the stump. He gave speeches and statements that were guarded in their declarations of progressive values. His campaign sputtered through the summer and fall. In February 1912, it received its death knell when La Follette gave a meandering, vitriolic speech in Philadelphia to a group of newspaper publishers that began at midnight and lasted until nearly 2 a.m. His daughter had been ill, the campaign had proved exhausting, and La Follette perhaps had a little too much to drink earlier in the evening. All these triggered a speech that proved a “rambling, disconnected attack on his audience and the sinister influence of the press.” In its wake, the senator, reported to be “on the verge of a physical breakdown,” canceled all his campaign events.⁵ If progressive Republicans wanted a candidate who might win it all, Roosevelt soon seemed to be the best bet.

Back in Washington, reluctant campaigner Taft was baffled and distressed by this politics of personality. “It seems to me that intelligent men have lost their heads and are leaning toward fool, radical views in a way I never thought possible…. The day of the demagogue, the liar, and the silly is on.”⁶

By this time, all the uncertainty and speculation about whether Roosevelt would run destroyed what was left of the Roosevelt-Taft friendship. The stress manifested itself in Taft’s waistline, as he ballooned to 332 pounds. Roosevelt’s opinion of his judicious, loyal lieutenant had plummeted; by August 1911 he was characterizing Taft as “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and common in him.”⁷ Roosevelt’s ego colored his assessment. The rapturous crowds that greeted TR at every turn, and the reporters who trailed his every step, gave the ex-president increased confidence in his chances. His confidantes urged him on, and his letters back to them became more encouraging. By January 1912 he wrote progressive journalist Henry Beach Needham that if a nomination “comes to me as a genuine public movement of course I will accept.”⁸

After La Follette’s Philadelphia meltdown, Roosevelt finally stopped being coy, and announced he would contest Taft for the Republican nomination. On 21 February he traveled to Ohio to deliver a major address designed to kick off his campaign. The speech he delivered rehashed the New Nationalism themes he had been trumpeting for eighteen months, and staked a new, quite radical position supporting the recall of judges whose decisions went against the will of the voters. While Roosevelt indicated he was “pleased over the stir he made,” the address was a thunderbolt for the Republican conservative wing, and ultimately turned out to be quite damaging to Roosevelt’s chances.⁹

Funnily enough, Roosevelt’s decision to run against his former protégé was probably the one thing that fueled Taft to do what he always hated doing: campaign for office. Taft may not have wanted to be president, but he really, really did not want Roosevelt to win. “Sometimes a man in a corner fights,” Taft thundered to an audience in Boston. “I am going to fight.” As Roosevelt had once observed in the happier days of their friendship, Taft was “one of the best haters he had ever known.”¹⁰

Personal politics lit a fire under Taft, but he also had the great advantage of having spent more than a year working the party machinery to win key blocs of support. While Roosevelt was barnstorming, Taft and his aides were doing the quiet, deliberate work of locking up Republican delegates. Individual charisma and media attention had chipped away at the parties’ influence, but the nineteenth-century way of politics still very much held sway in 1912. Moreover, Taft was the sitting president. Having once enjoyed the benefits of incumbency, Roosevelt recognized Taft’s advantages and was quick to characterize them as corrupt. “He has not a chance of being nominated if he relies merely on the people,” TR wrote Andrew Carnegie as the primary season heated up. “His sole chance, and excellent one, lies in having the wish of the people thwarted by the activity of the Federal office holders under him.”¹¹

Roosevelt’s popularity shone through as he won big states like Illinois and sizeable delegate chunks in Pennsylvania. Vote for vote, Roosevelt won the primaries by a big margin; the combination of votes for Teddy and his Progressive competitor La Follette were nearly twice those for conservative Taft. The president was disappointed. “We had hoped by May 1 to have votes enough to nominate,” he wrote his brother Horace. Although things were uncertain, “I shall not withdraw under any condition.” The stakes were too high: “it seems to me that I am the only hope against radicalism and demagogy.”¹²

The New Politics

On the other side of the political aisle, twentieth-century modern campaigning and nineteenth-century partisan traditions were coming into conflict as well. While Roosevelt threw rhetorical bombs and Taft stealthily worked the party machinery, the Democrats also wrestled with the growing divide between old-schoolers and reformers.

After his victory in the New Jersey governor’s race, Woodrow Wilson became a national figure and fresh face for a Democratic Party in need of a new image. Woodrow Wilson Clubs sprang up across the nation, driving support for the New Jersey governor to move to the national stage. A high-minded introvert, Wilson was less a true believer than appearances suggested; “his political convictions,” noted his biographer, “were never as fixed as his ambition.”¹³ In 1911, Wilson sensed that the progressive mood was one he could take all the way to the White House, and he set out on a national tour to build support for his nomination.

Although Woodrow Wilson’s rectitude was a far cry from the red-meat populism of William Jennings Bryan, he was progressive in his advocacy of government action to break up corporate monopolies, reform the tariff and banking systems, and reduce the influence of special interests. While not delivering many policy specifics, Wilson gave stirringly progressive speeches and had a winning manner on the stump, where he liked to open an event by reciting a limerick composed for the occasion. He also had the great advantage of strong support in the New York-based national press, where he had cultivated strong relationships with editors during his years in neighboring New Jersey.

Wilson’s meteoric political career as a national politician was only possible because of the fundamental shifts in the structure and nature of electoral politics put in motion by progressive reform itself. By 1912, the effort to clean up corruption at all levels of government had successfully replaced many patronage jobs with nonpartisan, professional civil service systems. To end the influence of special interests like big railroads and big oil over state legislatures, reformers pushed through innovations like the initiative and referendum, putting ordinary voters in charge of decisions once left to elected officials. Western states like California, Washington, and Oregon became early movers in this system of direct democracy, and in 1911 California elected a new governor, Hiram Johnson, a former Republican who ran on the ticket of the newly formed Progressive Party.¹⁴

A second significant reform was the direct primary. In the nineteenth century, both Democrats and Republicans nominated most of their candidates for office through caucuses or party conventions. Unsurprisingly, these mechanisms gave party insiders the advantage, and made it extremely difficult for reform-minded newcomers to obtain electoral office. Secrecy and insider deal-making also allowed corporations—railroads, steel, oil—to maintain a stranglehold on state and national politics by making sure politicians beholden to their interests were nominated and elected, again and again. In the years leading up to 1912, reformers in many states agitated for replacing these systems with direct primary voting—more public, more professionalized, more democratic. An accompanying reform was adoption of the secret ballot. By 1910, two-thirds of the states had adopted the direct primary.¹⁵

Figure 5. Woodrow Wilson a few hours after nomination, 2 July 1912. While many changes had come to presidential politics by 1912, some old traditions remained, including the practice of candidates not attending nominating conventions. Here, Woodrow Wilson greets reporters from his seaside home in New Jersey after receiving news that he would become the Democrats’ nominee. Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

The diminished party power and the rise of candidate-centered electoral politics set in motion some profound changes in the way people ran for president. In the old system, candidates could stay out of the fray. Political operatives and party leaders did the speeches, led the parades, and mobilized voters. In an era of rough-and-tumble, mudslinging politics, presidential candidates did not need to sully themselves with the daily routines of the stump, much less attend the rowdy and argumentative national political conventions. In stark contrast to modern conventions that serve as multi-day infomercials for party and nominee, early twentieth-century candidates didn’t attend these party gatherings. They left the nominating process to the professionals, and then they gave an acceptance speech at a later date. Incumbency conferred even more insulation from the campaign trail, as most sitting presidents ran “Rose Garden campaigns,” rarely leaving the White House.

In the new system, advantages started to accrue to candidates like Wilson and Roosevelt who hit the road, giving speech after speech. The bigger the crowd, the better. Yet candidates and campaigns needed to be strategic in the places they visited and when they visited them. The rise of the direct primary and decline of party influence shifted the electoral math. Wooing party insiders in key states remained critically important—as Taft’s campaign was showing by mid-1912—but popular momentum built by personal visits by the candidate had a growing effect on electoral outcomes.

The rise of the New York-based national media added fuel to the fire. Technology allowed fast-breaking news—from elections to baseball scores—to be reported across the country. The rise of national newspaper chains meant that the same stories appeared in papers from East to West. The rise in the media also meant other things started grabbing Americans’ attention away from politics and toward sports, or show business, or sensational true-crime stories. This forced candidates and their campaign managers to be more dogged and creative in getting press attention. They could do this either by being charismatic and entertaining, or by making bold, headline-worthy policy proclamations—or both.

Living only a short train ride from the center of the media universe, Wilson not only benefited from the rise of a new journalistic elite but also mastered the art of making headlines. He staked a claim as a leader for a new era, but he was a different breed of Progressive than Roosevelt. Still a Southerner in allegiance and temperament, Wilson was a strong defender of states’ rights and a believer in maintaining the southern racial order. He fell in with many others in his party by having little patience with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, which appeared to put a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the federal government.

Wilsonian progressivism was one that reached more boldly into the corporate capitalist order by arguing that the great trusts should not just be regulated, as Roosevelt advocated, but broken up altogether. He coupled this antitrust stance with support of strong regulation at the state level. Wilson simultaneously carried the conservative banner of limited federal control while articulating a progressive message of a government that fought for the interests of ordinary citizens. While derided in Republican-leaning editorial pages as “the New Jersey school master,” Wilson represented an exciting new hope for a Democratic Party desperate to win the White House. He was a traditionalist of the nineteenth century and technocrat of the twentieth: a potent combination in an election year that blended past and present.¹⁶

The Conventional and Unconventional

For both Democrats and Republicans, the 1912 national conventions became where the tensions between the new politics and the old order burst out into the open. Although conventions during this era were often rowdy affairs, the 1912 editions were remarkable in their furious back-room deal-making, cliffhanger votes, and dramatic public displays of raw emotion and personal animosity. Yet personal feuds were not the sole engine of discord, but merely reflections of bigger, fundamentally divisive policy differences in each party. Both Democratic and Republican unity foundered on divisions of class, region, and political philosophy.

Personal resentments and internal tensions had brewed through the Republican primary season. Taft and Roosevelt’s attacks on each other had gotten fiercer as the spring wore on. Despite the wild popularity of Roosevelt and the uninspiring campaign of Taft, the race was very close. This was mostly the fault of TR, who was so swept up in his celebrity that he mistook popular adoration for real political support, and who spent so much of his time in a Progressive echo chamber of supportive friends that he underestimated the strong support that remained within the GOP for “old-fashioned” issues like the protective tariff. He dismissed the old guard as corrupt and patronage-addled, and came out swinging against some core issues of the Republican platform.

Taft, in contrast, reached out to state delegations and placed allies in critical party positions where they would have control of when, where, and who voted during the Republican Convention. Despite the rise of the direct primary, 15 of the 48 states still adhered to the old system. Even the primaries that were direct were not binding. Convention delegates did not have to follow the will of the people; a state that went one way in the primary did not necessarily have to back the same candidate at the convention.¹⁷

Figure 6. Udo J. Keppler, “Salvation Is Free, But It Doesn’t Appeal to Him,” 7 August 1912. After Taft beat Roosevelt for the Republican nomination, and TR bolted to run as a third-party candidate, the battle for the GOP’s soul began. In this August 1912 cartoon, Puck’s Joseph Keppler satirizes the evangelical fervor of Roosevelt and the conservative recalcitrance of Taft and his allies. In reality, the two men were not all that far apart in matters of policy. Library of Congress.

The stickiness of the math became apparent as the Republican Convention opened in Chicago in early June. Roosevelt and Taft were the leading candidates, but La Follette was still in the race, as were others. There were so many contested delegates that no candidate had the number needed to win the nomination. Letters flew between Roosevelt and his allies darkly predicting that the Taft forces would stop at nothing to obtain the nomination, and framing the contest in stark good-and-evil terms. “My concern for this country has been the attitude of so many educated persons,” wrote Roosevelt on 4 June, while Taft championed “the cause of the political bosses and of special privilege in the business world.”¹⁸

Roosevelt’s greatest fears started to come to fruition as the Republican National Committee came together in Chicago a week before the convention’s start, and started to rule on the 254 delegates not yet committed to a candidate. By the time they were finished, 235 of these votes had been awarded to Taft. By the time the convention formally opened, the president’s forces were in control.

Roosevelt decided it was time for some bold moves. Two days before the opening night of the full convention, in a headline-making break with tradition, he came to Chicago in person. Predictably, he got an overwhelming reception. Amid a summer heat wave, the streets of the city were packed with crowds shouting “we want Teddy!” and brass bands playing rousing marches. Speaking to a packed house of supporters in the same building where the convention would take place, he proclaimed that his fears of vote-stealing had come to pass: “we are fighting for honesty against naked robbery.” In a subsequent letter to the Republican party leaders, he called on them to reverse the actions of the National Committee members, which, Roosevelt asserted, had stolen “eighty or ninety delegates” and “substitute[d] a dishonest for an honest majority.”¹⁹

Things went from bad to worse once the Convention got underway on 17 June. Inside a sweltering convention hall, fistfights broke out. When Taft’s supporters tried to take the floor, Roosevelt’s people whistled and tooted, shouting “steamroller!” When the vote finally was taken, Roosevelt delegates sat on their hands in protest. Roosevelt’s evangelistic outcry had little effect, however, and in fact may have further slimmed his chances of overcoming the old guard. Taft’s supporters dug in their heels. La Follette, who might have been a potent ally in the fight against the stand-patters, refused to join forces with his old rival or displace the Taft men who were running the convention machinery.²⁰

When the vote was taken, 558 went for Taft and 501 for his rivals. While new politics may have dominated the primaries, the GOP convention was old politics at its finest. Taft, the reluctant politician, won.

The Democratic Battle

The smoke was still clearing from the Republican showdown in Chicago when the Democrats gathered in Baltimore at the end of June 1912. When it opened, Woodrow Wilson did not even have close to the majority of delegates, much less the two-thirds majority needed under Democratic Party rules. There were a number of rivals to Wilson, and the leader in the delegate count was Champ Clark, speaker of the House, a plain-talking Missourian and an old-style party politician. Clark was fond of saying things like “I sprang from the loins of the common people, God bless them! And I am one of them.” His campaign theme song had a chorus that went “you gotta quit kickin’ my dawg aroun’.”²¹

Even though he had the delegate lead, the conventional wisdom was that Clark was not up to the job of being president. The other leading contenders—including powerful Alabama Representative Oscar Underwood—seemed old-fashioned, regional candidates. At the same time, an alarming number of delegates were “pledged to favorite sons” or “uncertain,” which in this era meant their votes were controlled by powerful Democratic machines like New York’s Tammany Hall. In the days leading up to the convention, Wilson was not particularly bullish that he could overcome the forces of tradition and inertia. “Just between you and me,” he wrote his close friend Mary Hulbert, “I have not the least idea of being nominated, because the make of the convention is such … that the outcome is in the hands of professional, case-hardened politicians who serve only their own interests.”²²

Yet Wilson had some important advantages. He had a national network of wealthy supporters and endorsement from important newspapers across the continent, including the most powerful Democratic newspaper in the country, the New York World. Wilson stuck with tradition and didn’t set foot in Baltimore, but he had state-of-the-art communications hooked to his seaside home in Sea Girt, New Jersey, that would keep him apprised of news soon after it happened.

The outcome of the Republican Convention altered the political calculus of the Democratic one. With Taft the winner, and Roosevelt likely to bolt and run as a third-party candidate, the drumbeat became stronger for the Democrats to nominate Wilson over conservatives like Clark and Underwood. Only a progressive could defeat TR. Funnily enough, the man who made sure this would come to pass was none other than the man whose defeats had hobbled the Democratic Party’s national power: William Jennings Bryan. Despite the past electoral debacles, Bryan remained a powerful force in the party, and his passionate “Wall Street versus Main Street” populism retained a broad base of support in the Democratic base. Seeing how perilously close the Democrats were coming to nominating a conservative, Bryan launched a media campaign to turn things around. In a 21 June dispatch distributed to papers nationwide, he wrote: “with two reactionaries running for president, [Roosevelt] might win and thus entrench himself in power.”²³

Bryan then proceeded to drive the cause of reform on the floor of the Baltimore convention—seeding the same evangelistic fervor Roosevelt had done with his appearance in Chicago. Still a legendary orator, Bryan egged on progressive supporters in the convention hall and encouraged voters all over the country to telegram their support to the delegates. “The fight is on,” shouted one delegate, “and Bryan is on one side and Wall Street is on the other.”²⁴ The progressive forces took control of the proceedings. Nominating speeches began at midnight on Thursday evening and continued until the next morning. At 7 a.m. the first ballot was taken. Clark won—but not a two-thirds majority. Another vote. Still no clear winner. The behind-the-scenes deal-making was furious. Through Friday and Saturday, vote after vote, Wilson started to chip away at Clark’s lead. The delegates took Sunday off for church and rest—and more negotiations in hotel rooms and barrooms. Over the course of multiple rounds of balloting, day after day of the convention, Wilson steadily increased his support. On Tuesday 2 July—on the 46th round of voting—Wilson secured 990 votes, enough to win the nomination.²⁵

Wilson’s nomination victory had to do with smart politics, good press, the weaknesses of his opponents, the power of his allies, and incredible luck. One Washington pundit later said of Wilson: if he “was to fall out of a sixteen story building … he would hit on a feather bed.” Wilson saw a higher power at work. Later, after his election, he would say quite simply: “God ordained me to be the next president of the United States.”²⁶

Bolting from the Parties

Once William Howard Taft beat Theodore Roosevelt to win the Republican nomination, the ex-president did what most people had suspected for a while: he bolted. He broke with the party that had been his home since the beginning, taking a large cohort of earnest reformers with him. Driven by personal animus and a healthy dose of messianic zeal, Roosevelt became the presidential candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party. His crusade as a third-party candidate was seen by some (then and now) as quixotic and egotistical, yet the ideas he advanced during what came to be known as the “Bull Moose” campaign crystallized ideas about the role of government, and the need for a countervailing force against the power of capitalist markets, that had been percolating for some time. Although running a flawed and ultimately unsuccessful campaign, Roosevelt nonetheless won a greater percentage of votes than any other third-party candidate before or since, and his progressive campaign put radical ideas into the political mainstream in ways that shaped the Wilson presidency, the New Deal, and the character of the American state into the early twenty-first century.

The kickoff for this new political era came in August, when Roosevelt returned to Chicago—the site of the Republican Convention two months before—for the inaugural nominating convention of the Progressive Party. Instead of bejeweled millionaires’ wives sitting in the front row, there were ranks of young women, reformers and settlement workers, in simple white cotton shirtwaists. Reporters repeatedly compared it to a religious revival. “It was more like a Methodist consecration meeting than a political gathering,” commented one scribe.²⁷ Roosevelt himself contributed to the tone by naming his keynote address, “A Confession of Faith.”

As Roosevelt stepped up to deliver it, he first basked in nearly a full hour of cheers, applause, the singing of hymns and patriotic songs. Once the hall finally quieted, he delivered a speech that was part sermon and part stem-winder, putting forth ideas that would have been considered radical only a few years before. “The old parties are husks with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled,” Roosevelt trumpeted. “There must be a new party of nation-wide and non-sectional principles [representing] the cause of human rights and of governmental efficiency.”²⁸

After his speech, everyone in the hall was so moved that all had to join in a singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to pull themselves together. Then came the more routine business of the formal nomination. In her speech seconding the nomination of Roosevelt, settlement house pioneer and Progressive Party leader Jane Addams moved away from religious rhetoric and underscored the global implications of this new political organization: “the American exponent of a world-wide movement towards juster social conditions” and a “modern movement” whose time had come.²⁹ The finishing touch was the nomination of Hiram Johnson of California as Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate, uniting East and West under one national progressive banner.

Through the course of that fall, riding a wave of celebrity and unbound from party doctrine, Roosevelt traveled back and forth across the country spreading the Progressive gospel. He introduced policy ideas that foreshadowed the New Deal his cousin Franklin would usher in more than twenty years later. He called for regulation to ensure on-the-job safety. He talked about development of the impoverished and flood-prone Mississippi River Valley. He proposed a minimum wage for women and restrictions on child labor.³⁰

Figure 7. National Progressive Convention, Chicago, 6 August 1912. Taking place in the same hall the Republicans had occupied earlier in the summer, the Progressive Party convention presented a very different sort of political spectacle. Reporters likened it to a religious revival, and played up the contrast between the bejeweled millionaires’ wives of the GOP convention and the young women who filled the same seats at the Progressive gathering, wearing simple cotton shirtwaists and fervently singing hymns and patriotic songs. Moffett Studio and Kaufmann, Weimer & Fabry Co., Library of Congress.

The Progressive Party wasn’t just Teddy Roosevelt. It ran many candidates in state and local races across the country in 1912. But it was dominated by Roosevelt’s celebrity and outsized personality, so much that it quickly became known by Roosevelt’s own nickname, forever remembered as “The Bull Moose Party.” And if the Democrats and Republicans of 1912 were leaning toward modernity, the Progressives were thundering toward it, shaking off old political machinery, strategically using the press, and bringing new constituencies, especially women, into its tent. However, in becoming so closely associated with one leader, the Progressive Party—like other third-party efforts afterward—lost much of its steam when that leader was no longer at its helm.

In the fall of 1912, however, the Bull Moose was going strong. And his full-throated message of reform was irritating the heck out of Eugene V. Debs.

While Republicans imploded and Democrats battled, the Socialist Party had been steadily building support among working-class constituencies across the country. In the years since Debs had launched his first insurgent presidential campaign in 1904, the Socialists had moved from being seen as ultraradical to nearly respectable. In both 1904 and 1908 Debs had won close to half a million votes. By 1912, both Milwaukee and Syracuse had elected Socialist mayors. The Party had denounced the violent tactics of labor radicals and distanced itself from the anarchist fringe. One socialist paper proclaimed, “the American Socialist is no longer a creature of hoofs and horns.”³¹ While Socialism still operated on the margins of mainstream politics, and Eugene Debs had no illusions he would actually win the presidency, he sensed that 1912 could be the year his party could become a significant electoral force.³²

When he formally kicked off his campaign in June with what a Socialist paper termed a “monster picnic” in Chicago, Debs expressed increasing confidence in the Socialists’ chances as the standard-bearing agent of true reform. “There is no longer even the pretense of difference between the so-called Republican and Democratic parties,” he told the crowd, “they are substantially one in what they stand for.” The infighting of the primary season showed that “both of these old capitalist class machines are going to pieces” and their destruction was imminent, and inevitable.³³

Roosevelt’s breakaway from the Republicans challenged this formulation, but in Debs’s estimation TR was just as much a capitalist tool as ever. So Debs fumed when Roosevelt started saying things leftists had been saying for years. He steamed as Roosevelt brazenly stole the Socialist brand by making a red kerchief a symbol of his Bull Moose campaign. As the fall campaign neared, Debs dismissed the Progressive’s claims of true reform and reminded his working-class audiences that only the Socialists would fight for their interests. “The Republican, Democratic and Progressive conventions were composed in the main and controlled entirely by professional politicians in the service of the ruling class,” he raged in August. “Wage-slaves would not have been tolerated in their company.”³⁴

The problem was that Debs was good at taking others down, and not so good at saying what he would do differently. His speeches were energetic, but skimpy on the policy details. Discontented voters might have turned to Socialism as a third-party alternative, but now the rise of the Progressive Party created another outlet for this voter frustration. Progressives had taken up some radical ideas, and in doing so they had left the true radicals behind.

Woodrow Wilson also saw TR as his chief rival as the fall campaign began. “The contest is between him and me,” he wrote Mary Hulbert, “not Taft and me.” Wilson worried about how he’d stack up. Roosevelt “appeals to their imagination; I do not,” he admitted. “He is a real, vivid person … I am a vague, conjectural personality.” With these concerns in mind, Wilson fired up the progressive rhetoric and the political theatrics as he hit the campaign trail.³⁵

Wilson’s first major address of the fall campaign was on Labor Day in Buffalo to a large, largely working-class crowd. Denouncing corporate greed and worker injustices, he sounded similar themes to TR but drew stark contrasts between how he and his Progressive opponent would address these problems. Regulating business, as Roosevelt proposed to do, was not enough. Creating a large government bureaucracy to manage markets and institute things like the minimum wage would be even worse for the working class than the current order, Wilson argued. “Do you want to be taken care of by a combination of the government and the monopolies?” he asked his audience (a listener shouted out, “No!”).³⁶

This message won Wilson key endorsements, most notably Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, as well as many of the populist Westerners who had once supported Bryan. This well-mannered, professorial candidate was taking on the issues and interests that most appealed to them and speaking eloquently about their individual rights and freedoms.

The notion of individual rights—and the idea that a large, central government threatened personal autonomy and opportunity—was a critical distinction between what Wilson called his “New Freedom” and Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.” For Roosevelt, a strong and more muscular government in Washington could regulate a runaway capitalist system and ensure rights through expert and efficient public administration. Wilson had a states’-rights centered philosophy that argued that the only way to ensure the rights of all was to break up the large corporations and resist the creation of a large central bureaucracies. States and localities should be the loci of government activism. Washington should stay out of the way. This was the debate that had animated partisan politics since the days of Jefferson and Hamilton, updated for the modern industrial era.

At the end of the day, both men had the same goals—and thought political action was the way to achieve them. But they had different visions of how Washington should go about it. This distinction would have an important legacy on politics through the rest of the twentieth century.

The Home Stretch

By October, the election was all about Roosevelt and Wilson. Eugene Debs was off preaching to the Socialist faithful, but not winning many converts. His campaign schedule was highly unstrategic, planned according to where Debs had the largest numbers of supporters—not according to where the largest numbers of electoral votes were in play. As has happened other times in leftist politics, it was difficult to mobilize a disciplined, well-organized campaign led by people and groups whose political ideology was firmly anti-establishment and anti-hierarchical, and who strongly disdained central organization.

After his victory at the Republican Convention, nearly nothing could go right for William Howard Taft. Even by late July, he was already complaining, “there is no news from me except that I played golf.” By late September, he glumly wrote a friend, “I am already reconciled to defeat.” To add insult to injury, Taft’s vice president James Sherman died about a week before Election Day, forcing him to rustle up a last-minute replacement.³⁷

By that point, no one seemed to notice or care. The Republican Party establishment had concluded that Taft was not going to win, yet the party bosses hated Roosevelt for his betrayal. Instead, they actively campaigned for Wilson. The GOP had imploded on itself, and Wilson was the beneficiary. Roosevelt’s weaknesses, too, were starting to lessen the momentum of the campaign over the fall months. His positions on regulation (rather than breaking up monopolies) as well as his failure to range too far from Republican orthodoxy on the tariff created weak spots Wilson exploited in his increasingly effervescent appearances on the stump.

Figure 8. “The Statesman’s Playtime—Hon. William H. Taft on the Golf Links, at Hot Springs, Virginia,” 1908. President Taft found it difficult to draw the attention of voters and reporters away from the electrifying race between Wilson and Roosevelt. Ignored by the media and isolated from old allies, the incumbent president complained as early as July that “there is no news from me except that I played golf.” Keystone View Company, Library of Congress.

There was still another twist yet to come in this pivotal campaign, however. By 14 October, Roosevelt had visited 32 states since his nomination. He had given over 150 speeches. His voice was hoarse, and despite his incredible strength and endurance, his energy was flagging. Although he’d canceled two speeches in the days before, Roosevelt insisted on speaking in Milwaukee—a Socialist stronghold and a great place to stake his claim as an alternative to Debs and to counter some of Wilson’s attacks.

Just like everywhere on the campaign trail, crowds of admirers surrounded Roosevelt as he climbed into an open-air car to travel from his hotel to the lecture hall. He stood up to wave and shake more hands. As he did so, a man broke from the group, drew a gun, and shot the candidate at close range.

Amazingly, the bullet’s path stopped short of Roosevelt’s heart—blocked by an eyeglass case and the 50-page speech manuscript in Roosevelt’s breast pocket. This saved his life. Bleeding from the chest, Roosevelt insisted on delivering the speech before accepting medical help. He told his audience, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” The shooting and Roosevelt’s extraordinary speech after it dominated the news for the rest of the campaign, bringing voters’ attention back from the World Series and other news of the day. Oddsmakers were rating TR’s chances as 1 in 4 before the assassination attempt. After, his chances improved to almost 1 in 2.

Yet it was not enough to change the course of the race. After suspending his campaign to allow Roosevelt to recover, Wilson went back on the stump for a furious last round of speeches and events.

Election day was 5 November. And it was an electoral landslide for Wilson. He won 40 states. Roosevelt won 6. Taft won 2. The popular vote was less clear-cut. Wilson only won a plurality, not a majority of the popular vote. Roosevelt came in second, with 27 percent. Taft was third, with 23 percent. The Socialists won nearly a million votes, but their total fell far short of what Debs and his colleagues dreamed of at the start of 1912.

Turnout in the election of 1912 demonstrated how much the political system had changed in this age of reform. Overall, less than 60 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. In 1896, before the widespread adoption of the direct primary and other progressive reforms, turnout had been 80 percent. The system had been modernized and the parties’ power curbed, but at the cost of broad-based popular participation. The 1912 turnout set a precedent followed by most presidential elections of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first.

The Legacy

In the aftermath of election, the four candidates went in different directions. Some stayed in the spotlight, and others receded. William Howard Taft got to depart the job he hated and, nine years later, he got the job he always dreamed about, when Warren Harding appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Eugene Debs would go on to run again for president—including campaigning from prison while awaiting a verdict on charges of sedition—but 1912 would be his finest hour. He and the Socialists would never poll quite as strongly again, and their political legitimacy came under attack in the days during and after World War I, when the Bolshevik Revolution and an increasingly isolationist American public ushered in increasingly anti-immigrant sentiment and marginalized the voices arguing for alternatives to capitalism. By the early 1920s, Socialist leaders like Debs as well as other leftist radicals were being harassed, arrested, and deported. The American Left would not have a major impact on national politics until the Great Depression validated some of their arguments about the failures and inequities of capitalism.

Teddy Roosevelt had lost, and he hated it. Victory had seemed close at certain points, and defeat was made worse by the fact that a progressive candidate won—and that candidate was not Roosevelt. So Roosevelt went hunting again, setting off on a sixteen-month voyage down the Amazon. Along the way, he contracted malaria and a serious leg infection. He came back and stayed active in national affairs, but he never ran for president again. The Progressive Party tried to recruit him as a candidate in 1916, but he declined their offer. Illnesses from the Amazon left him weakened for the rest of his life. The hyperkinetic, ebullient Roosevelt died at the surprisingly young age of sixty in 1919. Taft came to the funeral and stayed longer than anyone else. After the crowds of mourners had dissipated, Taft stood, weeping, by Roosevelt’s grave.

Not only did Wilson win the White House but the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. This meant passage of quite a number of reformist policies that owed a big debt to Teddy Roosevelt’s insurgent progressive campaign. Ironically, although he campaigned against big government, President Wilson presided over a steady increase in central government authority over his two terms. During his term in office, the United States established the Federal Reserve System to reform and regulate banking. A federal income tax imposed limits on the great fortunes of America’s wealthy. Support of labor unions, aid for education and agriculture, and other progressive initiatives brought the country closer to other industrialized nations in its social policy programs. The size and influence of the central government jumped even further after the formal U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, which created a wartime economy driven by military spending and regulated by federal price controls. By the time Wilson left office, the Democratic Party in many ways had moved away from its nineteenth-century agrarian and regionalist past and toward a modern, technocratic future. Despite the continued prominence of segregationist and agrarian Southern interests, the Democratic Party had begun to exhibit recognizable contours of modern liberalism that William Jennings Bryan had laid out in 1896 and to which Wilson had given added political legitimacy with his win sixteen years later. In 1912, it was unclear which party would become the party of progressive reform. By 1920, it was becoming clear that the Democrats would be that party.³⁸

The election of 1912 was the moment the American political system had its first major reckoning with the challenges of industrial capitalism, and we can draw three important lessons from this. First, the reckoning changed the two major parties—but it didn’t destroy them. This was a moment when either the Democrats or the Republicans could have become the Progressive party, and the title went to the Democrats while the conservatives consolidated their power in the GOP. Although Wilson campaigned on small government, it was the Republicans who went forth in the twentieth century as the party of small government, of unfettered markets, of fiscal conservatism.

There are some lessons about third parties here. The pattern we see in 1912 has repeated itself since. Independent parties introduce new ideas into the political system, turning the radical into the mainstream. But they often lack the organization to sustain the momentum after their celebrity candidates leave the spotlight. Instead, the two major parties open their tent flaps, and bring the new parties and their voters in. As historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed some decades later, “Third parties are like bees. They sting, and then they die.”³⁹

Second, 1912 showcased a new style of politics that had its roots in the 1896 election but had gained important momentum by economic, technological, social, and political changes in the intervening years. Political reform and the new media made elections about candidates, not about parties. Charisma and celebrity mattered, as Teddy Roosevelt’s journey showed. Barnstorming tours and good relationships with the media mattered, as Woodrow Wilson exemplified. Staying put in the White House and relying on party machinery to win elections no longer worked. Taft learned this lesson the hard way.

Third, this election redefined the role of government in industrial America after fifty years of incredible change. It introduced ideas that were under debate a century later. The 1912 election was one where a consensus emerged that a government should do more than deliver the mail and have a standing army. It should protect workers, regulate markets, and ensure basic freedoms. Politicians then, and politicians now, generally agree on this basic principle but differ on the way to get there. Is the United States a nation that has an activist central government? Where markets are strongly regulated? Should government spend big? Should it raise taxes? Or should America be a nation that has less interference in individual lives? Should it deregulate business, and cut taxes?

Now, it wasn’t as if everything changed and stayed that way after 1912. The political road is rarely that straight. Change takes time. While Wilson and a Democrat-led Congress ushered in a remarkable amount of reform, the progressive and activist momentum slowed in the 1920s. A world war, anti-immigrant sentiment, and rising prosperity for many Americans tamped down the urge for change. Even women winning the right to vote did not—to the surprise of many—alter the general political temperament of the American public. Parties adapted to the modern styles of campaigning, and to the reformed, media-driven political system. They regained some of their power. So, in some respects, things seemed to go quiet in the ’20s. As the 30s would show, however, the Progressive impulse was dormant—not dead.

The next chapter explores what happened when those Progressive ideas came back, and continues to examine the legacies of the age of reform on modern presidential politics.