Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  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.

  PART II

  1932

  CHAPTER 3

  The Road to the New Deal

  If 1912 was a good year to be a Democrat, 1928 most certainly was not. It was, wrote Democratic operative James A. Farley, “a disaster as overwhelming as anything that ever happened in [the Party’s] century of existence.” Although the decade began with the scandal-marred Republican presidency of Warren Harding, the era of his successor Calvin Coolidge had been one of buoyant prosperity and economic optimism, of rising incomes and rising consumption. Coolidge’s secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover embraced this sunny outlook when he became Republican presidential nominee in 1928, proclaiming that “we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” The majority of American voters appeared to agree, giving Hoover a landslide victory. Despondent Democrats, wrote Farley, felt that “breaking the power of the Republican Party seemed impossible.” Perhaps the Democratic Party itself had “outlived its usefulness.”1

  Even when the stock market crashed in late October 1929—a “Black Tuesday” that came after nearly two months of roller-coaster volatility—many observers regarded it as a blip on the broader economic picture. With only 2 percent of Americans holding any investments in the market, the crash seemed like a crisis for Wall Street, not for Main Street. If history served as a guide, the market would right itself eventually just as it had in other crises and panics, which had occurred with some regularity since the beginning of the industrial age. Stock market crashes were an inevitable side effect of industrial capitalism, so the reasoning went, and the market corrected itself over time.2

  One person who did not buy into the conventional wisdom was President Herbert Hoover, who looked at Wall Street with some worry. Things were different from what they had been in previous market dips. In the wake of World War I, the U.S. economy was tied far more tightly than before to Europe, and European economies had been stumbling for close to two years. In war-ravaged Germany, which had been further hobbled by punitive sanctions and reparations obligations to the Allies, business failures were up and stock prices were falling by the summer of 1928. Stocks started plummeting in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden as well. In other industrialized nations like Canada and Japan, industrial output dropped and wholesale commodities prices rose. By the time what Hoover termed the “orgy of stock speculation” crested in the United States in the summer of 1929, driven by rising consumption and the ebullient public attitude that had helped get him elected, the ties that bound global commerce were pulling the United States in Europe’s direction. As Hoover put it, “some readjustments were due.”3

  The global nature of the recession prompted Hoover to try to persuade American political and business leaders to take a more interventionist approach. Reassuring nervous markets was key, he recognized, but “it is action that counts.”4 A month after the Crash, he summoned the nation’s business leaders to the White House for two weeks of intense discussion, emerging with some unprecedented measures to stabilize the economy, including an agreement that industries would not cut workers’ pay. In an economy that had become driven by consumer spending, Hoover felt this concession by the industrialists was critical to economic stabilization.5

  Hoover then turned to the nation’s governors and mayors, urging them to do their part by fast-tracking infrastructure and construction projects that would put people to work and get the economy humming. He asked Congress for an additional $140 million to build new federal office buildings and facilities. The requests for new expenditures in a time of recession sat uncomfortably with some political leaders, including New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Spending should not exceed available revenues, Roosevelt warned, and with tax receipts down there was a limited amount his state should do. In a private letter to a friend, he looked on Hoover’s energetic interventions with a jaundiced eye. “I am very much opposed to the extension of Federal action in most economy social problems,” he wrote.6

  How ironic, then, that four years after Hoover’s landslide victory and three years after the Crash that he had worked so energetically to mitigate, he lost the presidency to Roosevelt. The governor who had expressed skepticism about the usefulness of federal intervention had campaigned on a bold message of government help and hope, attacking his opponent as hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-touch. Hoover, a thoroughly modern workaholic who considered himself innovative in his thinking and effective in his leadership, could not believe what had befallen him. As he plaintively wrote in his memoirs, after recounting all that he had done to respond to the Depression, “it is not given even to Presidents to see the future.”7

  Yet the 1932 election set in motion that future: one in which the federal government had a much larger presence in Americans’ lives than ever before, one where the personal connection of the president with the people mattered more than in the past, one shaped by media and political strategy and stagecraft. The broad contours of the defeat of Hoover and victory of Roosevelt have become familiar to readers of history textbooks and followers of presidential politics. As often happens, popular characterizations about the election and its legacy can diverge sharply, depending on who is making them. To some on the left, the election of 1932 is one in which the enlightened, bold White Knight triumphs over the old-fashioned and hardhearted bumbler. Conservatives see it differently, as the triumph of a reckless ideologue over a prudent and effective statesman,
and a disastrous start down a road of government bloat and high spending antithetical to the nation’s founding principles and individual freedoms.8

  The reality was not so linear, and much more interesting. For most of their lives, Hoover and Roosevelt traveled in the same circles and shared many ideas about the role of government. They were ideological heirs to TR and Wilson; they were progressive-minded technocrats rather than old-school partisans. For both men, these philosophies were tested and transformed by the economic disaster that unfolded after October 1929, and they emerged with distinctly different ideas about what the government should do and how it should do it. Over the course of a sharply fought and combative campaign, their relationship went from one of warm and respectful collegiality to one of mutual loathing. Out of the aftermath of the election, the two rivals went dramatically different ways, one presiding over an unprecedented expansion of the federal state and the other loudly urging that such expansions endangered the rights and liberties on which the country was founded. These political battle lines remain over eight decades later, and have shaped every election in between.

  The Not-So-Roaring 1920s

  As the story of the 1912 election showed, the massive changes of industrialization precipitated a flurry of Progressive debate and action between 1900 and 1920. The thirst for reform seemed to ebb with the end of the Wilson presidency, however. The national state had grown in size and activism during the Wilson years, thanks in no small measure to Democrats controlling both houses of Congress as well as the White House, enabling them to push through long-debated measures like creation of the Federal Reserve System and establishment of a national income tax soon after Wilson took office. As Republicans retrenched, Democrats became the home base for many reformers, especially those fighting for the rights of working people to form trade unions, to have safe workplaces, and to ensure support in case of disability or death. After Roosevelt’s Bull Moose run, the Progressive Party became a far less viable national political force, although insurgent third-party runs continued into the 1920s, siphoning reformist energy away from the two major parties.