In a letter Roosevelt wrote Taft two days later, he could hardly contain his glee at the rapturous reception, even as he professed a desire to stay away from public life. “I am having a perfect fight to avoid being made to give lectures, and even of the invitations I have accepted there are at least half of them I wish I had not.”3
If bets were being made in June 1910 about the man most likely to win the presidency in 1912, the good money was on Theodore Roosevelt. The odds weighed in his favor not only because of his fame and biography, but also because of the weakness of any other possible contender. Chief among the weak was the incumbent in the White House. TR would have been a hard act for any politician to follow, but it was doubly difficult for Taft—amiable, intelligent, but lacking the political instincts and personality of his predecessor. His political missteps on bedrock Republican issues like the protective tariff had shaken the faith of both the GOP leadership and key constituencies. His more cautious and incremental approach to progressive issues like corporate regulation and conservation had alienated those who desired reform.
On the other side of the aisle, discord and frustration consumed the Democrats. The party had run the same man—William Jennings Bryan—as their nominee in three of the previous four presidential elections. He had lost every time. Grover Cleveland had been the only Democrat elected president since the Civil War. Although Bryan’s fiery populism had roused mass support among discontented farmers and working people, it failed as a national political strategy. The inroads that Democrats had made into some traditionally Republican states of the Northeast and Midwest during the Cleveland years had dissipated, and the Party now struggled to rebuild a coalition that could win the White House.4
Making the landscape even rockier for the two major parties were independent political movements bubbling up on the leftward end of the political spectrum. The Socialist Party was the most powerful among them, having brought together a range of left-leaning groups and ideologies into a political organization with a powerful and persuasive message about the inequities of industrial capitalism. The Socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs, had run for president in 1904 and 1908 with impressive, if not election-altering results.
Yet seasoned political observers know not to predict election outcomes too far in advance. The odds-makers of July 1910 might have been amazed to learn that the 1912 race would go to a man who, on the day of TR’s triumphant homecoming, had not yet been elected to political office.
Woodrow Wilson was a scholarly type who, although politically savvy, disliked the sorts of political spectacles Roosevelt relished. A Southerner of moderate-to-conservative views, the highest office he had obtained prior to 1910 was the presidency of Princeton University, from which he had rather unceremoniously stepped down after attempting dramatic reforms of campus traditions and institutions. Despite this setback, Wilson had already started to build a national political reputation as a leading voice for a new kind of Democratic ideology—an alternative to the populism of Bryan, but one that still supported public action to curb the power of corporations and protect individual rights. To a national Democratic Party looking rather desperately for a fresh face, Wilson provided it.5
Two months after Roosevelt’s “return from Elba,” Wilson won the Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey. In a spectacular fall campaign, he turned on the machine politicians who had been responsible for securing his nomination and ran as a modern reformer. In November, Wilson secured the governorship, part of a Democratic wave in the midterm elections that signaled deep trouble for the national Republican Party.6
In the two years that followed, the political fortunes of the four men who became the significant candidates of 1912—Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, and Debs—shifted dramatically, as did those of the other men who tried, and failed, to win the presidency. Friendships frayed. Alliances imploded. And as their prospects rose and fell, as new people entered the battle and others faded out of it, these politicians engaged in a debate about the nature of citizenship, corporate power, and government responsibility that had not been seen before in American politics. The men and women who supported their campaigns joined in the conversation, helping turn the nation’s focus away from the political issues that had consumed the nineteenth century and toward the ideas that defined the twentieth.
This extraordinary election brought ideas into the political mainstream that had been considered radical only a few years earlier. It realigned both the Democratic and Republican Parties in subtle but significant ways, and showed the power of third-party insurgencies to disrupt—but not overturn—the two-party system. It demonstrated how far the system had come from the styles and methods of politicking that had characterized national races since the days of Jefferson and Adams, and institutionalized an entirely new breed of campaign rituals and strategies that had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and became business as usual in the twentieth.
America Transformed
Like all presidential contests, the 1912 election only can be fully understood in the context of the changes the United States had experienced in the years leading up to it. And for this election, we must go back farther than 1910, or even 1890 or 1870, but all the way to the eve of the Civil War to comprehend the men who ran and the people who protested, organized, agitated, and voted for them.
A good place to begin is 5 November 1855, when future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs was born into a family of French immigrant grocers in Terre Haute, Indiana. The America baby Gene came into was a place where three of four people lived in the countryside or small towns. Most of them were farmers. No city in the U.S. had more than a million people.7 While new technologies like the mechanized loom and the cotton gin were transforming markets, and new transportation networks of canal and rail were enabling new flows of goods, people, and communication, most Americans lived according to preindustrial rhythms. People wore watches and consulted clocks, but local time was not standardized and remained governed by the rising and setting of the sun. Families like the Debses immigrated across oceans while native-born white Americans continually migrated westward across the continent, but travel was slow and news moved just as slowly.8
Preindustrial rhythms of life held strongest sway in the pre-Civil War American South, where well over 90 percent of the population were rural, the manufacturing economy was minuscule, and roads and railroads were far scarcer than in the North.9 This was the world into which Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in December 1858, the son of a clergyman in Staunton, Virginia. Moving as a baby to Georgia, and then to South Carolina, Wilson had a childhood surrounded by war’s terror and its devastating aftermath.10
The human suffering and physical destruction wrought by the war propelled a turning point in America’s understanding of itself. Before the Civil War, the country had operated as a sometimes tenuously connected “union” of self-governing states with markedly different economies, demographics, and cultural sensibilities. Afterward, the country increasingly came to be understood as, and function as, a “nation” whose federal government wielded increasing power and whose citizens shared common values and culture. As historian James McPherson writes, “the war marked the transition of the United States to a singular noun.”11
The end of war also escalated remarkable changes already underway in the American economy. In the span of a few decades, the United States became an industrial colossus, home to some of the largest corporations and richest people on the planet. Rapid industrialization triggered foreign immigration and urbanization of unprecedented scale and speed. As the population swelled, a growing nation became a giant consumer market for products made in American factories.
Some of this change became evident well before the Civil War in New York City, where Theodore Roosevelt was born to affluent parents in October 1858. Always a polyglot, multiethnic metropolis, New York had become intensely more so since the 1820s, as waves of immigrants from Ireland and continental Europe arrived at its docks and stayed
for good, squeezing into overcrowded tenements and urban slums. Many of these immigrants—and the millions who would follow them in the decades to come—went to work in the new factories that were growing up in New York and cities like it. Men, women, and children alike worked long hours, six days a week, in factory jobs that ranged from moderately to extremely dangerous. They worked for low pay, few benefits, and no safety net if they got injured on the job.12
One year before and a thousand miles to the southwest, William Howard Taft had been born into prosperity in the Midwestern river city of Cincinnati. While his family were not quite as rich as Roosevelt’s, they were nonetheless quite comfortable and politically influential. Taft’s father, Alphonso, was a powerful Republican who served in President Ulysses S. Grant’s cabinet as attorney general and as secretary of war. Both a political power broker and an attentive father, the elder Taft had high expectations of his son Billy. The younger Taft rose to them. Although he struggled with obesity throughout his life, he was a natural athlete and became a star baseball player in high school, only giving it up when his parents cautioned him not to neglect his academic studies. He excelled in those as well, winning high grades and following his father and half-brother to Yale in 1874.
By this time, teenage “Teedie” Roosevelt was spending hours in the boxing gym and on the wrestling mat in an attempt to bulk up his skinny physique. Gene Debs had dropped out of school to support his family and was working on the railroad, first as a painter and cleaner, and then as a locomotive fireman. Tommy Wilson was preparing to leave the Reconstruction-era South and head North to college.
By the mid-1880s, Taft was an assistant county prosecutor in Ohio. After graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt had dropped out of law school but still managed to get himself elected to the New York State Assembly. Wilson received one of the very first Ph.D.s in history and was a junior faculty member trying to write his first book. Debs had become a full-time labor organizer for his fellow railroad workers.
In these two decades of change in the four men’s lives, the United States was undergoing an extraordinary transformation. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad had linked the West and East coasts. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell had filed his patent for the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison had developed his first incandescent light bulb. Beginning in the 1880s, the predominantly Northern European character of the nation began to change with the arrival of new waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. As new arrivals had done before and since, they took on the dirtiest and hardest jobs, from urban factories to Western mines and oilfields. An increasingly diverse United States became home to millions who brought with them new languages, cultural traditions, and political ideologies.
Everything grew bigger. Farm production doubled. The U.S. population tripled. The value of manufacturing became six times larger. Cities grew up and out; between 1860 and 1910, the number of people living in American cities grew from 6 million to 44 million.
America lacked the institutions and governmental organizations to cope with such massive growth. It was the apex of the era of machine politics in the cities, kickbacks and bribery in the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures, and chaos nearly everywhere else. As muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens put it in his 1904 expose of urban political machines, the debilitating effects of this “boodle”—aka, political corruption—were “so complex, various, and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them.”13
Figure 2. Joseph Keppler, “The Bosses of the Senate,” 23 January 1889. Political corruption accompanied the explosive growth of the American industrial economy after the Civil War, and many in the U.S. Congress fell under the sway of big railroads and big oil. Library of Congress.
Meanwhile, the firms that ran the railroads, owned the mines and oilfields, and controlled the factories grew into enormous corporations and conglomerates of extraordinary power and reach. Their power overshadowed that of the government. In 1891, the Pennsylvania Railroad had 110,000 employees. The entire U.S army was less than a third that size. Federal government spending per capita was about $129, less than 10 percent of gross domestic product.
The speed and scale of change, and the failure of American social institutions to manage it, spurred Americans of all classes, regions, and political ideologies to question the status quo and agitate for alternative approaches. While grassroots protest and reform movements had been part of American civil society since before the Revolution, fast and ubiquitous national and transnational communications networks allowed reform ideas to gather force more rapidly and widely than before. News of strikes and protests crackled across telegraph wires in moments, students returned from abroad with radical new ideas, newspapers printed fiery speeches, and magazine editors filled pages with long-form investigative reporting on the excesses of the era. Cheaper printing, far-reaching networks of road and rail, and higher literacy rates expanded publishing and readership.
Farmers and laborers in the Midwest and West cursed the far-off bankers and corporate titans whose stranglehold on markets drove down crop prices and drove up shipping costs. They mobilized locally in the 1880s through organizations like the Grange, and nationally in the 1890s through the Populist Party, using modern media and charismatic leaders to voice their discontent with the modern order. A new wave of Democratic leaders seized the opportunity to broaden the Party’s regional constituencies and pushed for the adoption of key Populist Party principles into its 1896 party platform as well as nominating Bryan, populist firebrand and powerful orator, three times running.
Yet with a Congress under the sway of corporate “boodle” and a series of White House occupants more beholden to party bosses than to changing the status quo, much of the reform energy prior to 1900 emanated from outside national political institutions. Critiques of the industrial order ranged from moderate to radical. Some began to advocate for some regulation of the monopolistic companies that controlled disproportionate chunks of the national economy. Others thought the only solution was to break up the corporate giants altogether. The most ardent anti-monopolists advocated property reform and mandatory wealth redistribution.
Working-class people went on strike and mobilized into labor unions. Their middle-class allies joined them in crusading for workplace safety, workers compensation, and child labor laws. Socialists, communists, and anarchists argued that the entire capitalist system needed to be replaced. Some resorted to violence to express their fury at the system, resulting in a number of acts of domestic terrorism, including the 1901 assassination of William McKinley—the act that propelled Theodore Roosevelt into the President’s Office. Women, who didn’t get the right to vote in most states until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, played prominent roles in many of these movements, from the anarchist fringe to the “respectable” middle.
The four candidates of 1912 resided at different places in this spectrum of reform. Roosevelt entered politics in 1882 when elected to the New York State Assembly, believing that more men of his class—educated, enlightened—needed to become involved in what he called “the raw coarseness and the eager struggle of political life.”14 Wilson, in contrast, spent the first three decades of his career in academia. While conservative when it came to social issues like race relations, his long tenure outside formal politics perhaps made him bolder when it came to bucking the party bosses; by the time he ran for president, he would argue for breaking up business monopolies. William Howard Taft was a good Republican Party man, winning a series of plum judicial and administrative appointments as a reward for his competence and amiability. Although sympathetic to Progressive causes, he was a quiet, unshowy sort of reformer.
The rise of Eugene Debs, on the other hand, attested to the great anguish and political discontent among the working people who suffered the most in the new industrial economy. By the early 1890s, Debs had given up working on the railroad and instead was working to represent the interests of railroad workers, becoming head of the powerful Amer
ican Railway Union in 1893. The following year, workers at the Pullman Company went on strike to secure better wages and working conditions. Pullman was America’s leading manufacturer of railway sleeping cars, a critical cog in the railway machine. Debs organized a nationwide railway boycott of the Pullman cars in support. Workers in railway yards across the country refused to couple the Pullman cars to trains. Engineers refused to drive them. The entire national rail system ground to a complete halt.15
The railroad was so important to the functioning of the national economy that the federal government intervened. Democratic President Grover Cleveland sided with Pullman, not its workers, and dispatched U.S. soldiers to Chicago to restore the peace. Although Debs already had exhorted his members to keep the main trains running and mitigate the worst effects of the strike, the Cleveland administration still sent him to prison for blocking interstate commerce. He emerged a national celebrity and a hero of the workingman. A lifelong Democrat, he was so disgusted at Cleveland’s actions that he switched to the Socialist Party, first running for president on its ticket in 1904.
By this time, the many currents of protest and calls for reform had started to have significant policy implications. While many reform movements (particularly those led by native-born, middle-class women and men) had their origins in religious and voluntary organizations, it was clear that meaningful reform needed more than churches and charities, settlement houses and orphanages. Only larger, public entities could tackle the multiple challenges created by industrialization. Government needed to do more.
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