Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Robert Goodloe Harper, Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser, 30 May 1800 and “Burleigh,” Connecticut Courant, 1 August 1800, both quoted in Charles O. Lerche, “Jefferson and the Election of 1800: A Case Study in the Political Smear,” William and Mary Quarterly 5, 4 (October 1948): 485; “Burleigh,” Connecticut Courant, 20 September 1800, quoted in Michael Bellesiles, “‘The Soil Will Be Soaked with Blood’: Taking the Revolution of 1800 Seriously,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, ed. James P. P. Horn, Jan Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 59.

  2. Aurora, 20 May, 24 April 1800, quoted in John E. Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 146, 148.

  3. Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson, 154, Lerche, “Jefferson and the Election of 1800,” 487; James Roger Sharp, The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 105–6.

  4. George Washington, Farewell Address, 17 September 1796, 17, The Papers of George Washington, http://gwpapers.virginia.edu. Historian Joanne B. Freeman emphasizes the central importance of personal honor and reputation in understanding early clashes of faction and party, particularly in the election of 1800. See Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

  5. Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Viking, 1975), 561–64.

  6. For discussion of the debate over “the revolution of 1800,” see Sharp, The Deadlocked Election of 1800, 169–78, as well as Horn et al., The Revolution of 1800.

  7. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, 17 February 1941, 61–65.

  8. V. O. Key, Jr., first advanced the theory of political realignments in “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics 17 (1955): 3–18. E. E. Schattschneider put forth his own theory of realigning moments a few years later, followed in later decades by James L. Sundquist, Walter Dean Burnham, and others. A review and trenchant critique of the literature can be found in David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002). Another strand of scholarship examines the realignment of the American presidency itself, locating a “big bang” between traditional and modern constructs of the executive around the time of the New Deal and Second World War. For discussion and critique, see Stephen Skowronek, “Presidency and American Political Development: A Third Look,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 32, 4 (December 2002): 743–54. American political historians found the realignment idea a useful construct for periodization, and continued to do so after political scientists had begun to question the utility of this construct. See Richard L. McCormick, “The Realignment Synthesis in American History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13, 1 (Summer 1982): 85–105. The cyclic model of national politics is most closely associated with the two Arthur M. Schlesingers, the junior one in particular. For example, see Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). The Schlesingerian pendulum may now be out of favor, but regimes and periods are not; a more recent and expansive update of this approach is Morton Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  9. Work exploring such connections has helped propel a revitalization of the field of American political history in the early twenty-first century. For a review, see Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–19.

  10. For discussion on Theodore Roosevelt and the power of the presidency, particularly his use of the media, see David Greenberg, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Image of American Activism,” Social Research 78, 4 (Winter 2011): 1057–88. For a useful review of work discussing of the significance of the presidency and executive power in twentieth-century American politics, see Julian E. Zelizer, “Beyond the Presidential Synthesis: Reordering Political Time,” in Zelizer, Governing America: The Revival of Political History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 11–40.

  11. On the rise of interest groups, see Brian Balogh, “‘Mirrors of Desires’: Interest Groups, Elections, and the Targeted Style in Twentieth-Century America,” in Jacobs, Novak, and Zelizer, The Democratic Experiment, 222–49. On the decline of parties and the rise of new forms of both organization and political communication, see Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On presidents’ use of the media, see Kenneth Osgood and Andrew Frank, Selling War: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010).

  12. Jefferson to Adams, 21 January 1812, from Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959).

  13. Jefferson to Adams, 15 February 1825, from Cappon, The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

  Chapter 1. The Great Transformation

  1. Additional accounts of Roosevelt’s homecoming can be found in the collected letters of his longtime aide Archibald Willingham Butt, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1930), as well as James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs: The Election That Changed the Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004) and Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

  2. Taft, “A Welcome to Mr. Roosevelt: From the President,” Outlook 95, 7 (18 June 1910): 342.

  3. Roosevelt, “Letter to William Howard Taft,” 20 June 1910, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 7: 93.

  4. For discussion of the Democratic gains and losses of the 1890s, see R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 21–45.

  5. Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 8–9.

  6. The biggest Democratic gain came in the House of Representatives, Republican-dominated since 1894, where Democrats not only regained control but won a 67-seat majority. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 20.

  7. These and the demographic statistics that follow in this chapter can be found in U.S. Census Bureau, Selected Historical Decennial Population and Housing Counts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census, 1990), http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/hiscendata.html.

  8. Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York: Viking, 1990). For more on migration and the role of the “annihilation of space and time” brought about by the railroads, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011).

  9. Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1978). This economy, while largely agricultural and technologically lagging, played a critical role in networks of global capital, supplying the overwhelming majority of cotton consumed by Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. See Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109, 5 (2004): 1405.

  10. This Southern upbringing informed how Wilson approached the politics of racial equity and civil rights as a candidate and as a president, believing that change should proceed slowly and states’ rights ruled supreme. For discussions of white Southern antebellum culture, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethnics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford Universi
ty Press, 1982); for discussion of Progressives and race, including the racial politics of the 1912 election, see David W. Southern, The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917 (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2005). Wilson’s own segregation policies as president are explored in Nicholas Patler, Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004).

  11. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). The transition was a long one, however, and the trauma of the war left its mark on multiple dimensions of American life from the personal to the institutional. As veterans aged and the war approached its fiftieth anniversary, however, a growing national consensus around sectional reconciliation made itself apparent in monuments, rituals, and political rhetoric that sought to at last put the Civil War in the past. The 1912 election occurred in this nationalist frame. See Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. (New York: Knopf, 2008); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).

  12. The literature on the urban-industrial transformation of nineteenth century America is voluminous. Important recent syntheses include Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a survey of the urban immigrant experience, see John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

  13. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure, Philips, 1904), 9.

  14. “Machine Politics in New York City,” The Century, November 1886.

  15. David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, eds., The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  16. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

  17. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

  18. Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 59.

  19. Quoted in David Henry Burton, Taft, Roosevelt, and the Limits of Friendship (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 48.

  20. Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft: A Biography (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), 148.

  21. “Lodge, Beveridge, Roosevelt, Spooner,” Wichita Daily Eagle, 2 May 1900, 4.

  22. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  23. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, 238, 249.

  24. Quoted in Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, “William Howard Taft,” in Freidel and Sidey, The Presidents of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 1995).

  25. Theodore Roosevelt, Letter to William Howard Taft (personal), 10 November 1908, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 6: 1340.

  26. Roosevelt to Mark Sullivan, 2 March 1909, quoted in Chace, 1912, 13.

  27. Sidney Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 34. Milkis’s work provides an extended and nuanced analysis of Roosevelt’s evolving Progressive philosophy during this period, see especially 1–37.

  28. Helpful and analytically rich discussion of Taft’s positions on the tariff issue and its role in the events of this election year can be found in Gould, Four Hats in the Ring. Gould notes, “1912 was the last presidential election in which the tariff played a significant role in the outcome” (xi) as the enactment of the national income tax in 1913 displaced the tariff as the federal government’s chief source of revenue.

  29. Archibald Butt, Letter to Mrs. Lewis F. (Clara) Butt, 28 March 1909, in Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 1: 30.

  30. “Roosevelt and Taft in a Warm Embrace,” New York Times, 1 July 1910.

  31. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, 40.

  32. Roosevelt to White, 12 December 1910, Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 7: 181.

  33. Ibid.

  Chapter 2. The Progressive Campaign

  1. Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 37–39; Sidney Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 44–54. For more on La Follette, see Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  2. Recent scholarship by historians and political scientists has countered this interpretation by showing the extent to which government institutions and national policy shaped markets and culture throughout the nineteenth century. See Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Richard R. John, “Farewell to the Party Period’: Political Economy in Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of Policy History 16, 2 (2004): 117–25.

  3. On McKinley’s front porch campaign, see R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 129–45.

  4. This term employed by Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, 44–54. Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  5. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 54; “La Follette Breaks Down, Quits Work,” New-York Tribune, 4 February 1912, A1.

  6. Taft to C. P. Taft, 6 September 1911, quoted in Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft: A Biography (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939) 761.

  7. Roosevelt to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., 22 August 1911, quoted in Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 49–50.

  8. Quoted in Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 52.

  9. “Roosevelt Back to Storm Boston,” New York Times, 23 February 1912.

  10. “Taft Opens Fire on Roosevelt,” New York Times, 26 April 1912, quoted in Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 63; Archibald Butt, letter to Mrs. Lewis F. (Clara) Butt, 4 April 1909, in Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide (Port Washington, N.Y.: Garden Kennijkat Press, 1930).

  11. Roosevelt to Andrew Carnegie, 5 March 1912, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Manuscripts division, Library of Congress, http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o224921. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Dickinson State University (accessed 30 January 2013).

  12. Taft to Horace D. Taft, 14 April 1912, quoted in Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, 772.

  13. Link, Woodrow Wilson, 10.

  14. George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Spencer C. Olin, California’s Prodigal Sons: Hiram Johnson and the Progressives, 1911–1917 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). While both Mowry and Olin focus on white middle-class men like Johnson, the broad-based nature of California Progressivism—and the role of women and ethnic groups in advancing it—is explored in William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

  15. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), 257–59; Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The America
n North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  16. “President Taft’s Increasing Strength,” Los Angeles Times, 18 July 1912, 114. On Wilsonian progressivism, see Sidney M. Milkis, “Why the Election of 1912 Changed America,” Claremont Review of Books 3, 1 (Winter 2002).

  17. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, 756–74; Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 46–49; Chace, 1912, 93–123.

  18. Roosevelt to Albert Cross, 4 June 1912, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 7: 554.

  19. Roosevelt to the Republican National Convention, 22 June 1912, Letters, 7: 562. For description of Roosevelt’s journey to Chicago, see Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 70.

  20. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 70–73.

  21. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 33–35, 76–89; also see Theodore Dreiser, “Champ Clark, The Man and His District,” in Theodore Dreiser’s Uncollected Magazine Articles, 1897–1902 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 66–77; Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (New York: Harper, 1920).

  22. Wilson to Mary Hulbert, 9 June 1912, quoted in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, vol. 3, 1910–1913 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931), 321.

  23. Quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson, 3: 334.

  24. Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Committee, 13, quoted in Baker, Woodrow Wilson, 3: 341.

  25. Baker, Woodrow Wilson, 3: 322–63; Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 91–95.

  26. Quoted in Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 77.

  27. “Roosevelt Named, Shows Emotion,” New York Times, 8 August 1912, 1.

  28. Roosevelt, “A Confession of Faith Before the National Convention of the Progressive Party,” 6 August 1912 (New York: Allied Printing, 1912).

  29. “Roosevelt Named, Shows Emotion.”

  30. Lewis L. Gould, ed., Bull Moose on the Stump: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

  31. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 35.