Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  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 Samu
el 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.