Anything for a Vote

by Joseph Cummins

  The Democrats repeatedly made the argument that Taft was merely a proxy for Roosevelt. There was plenty of truth to this. The president sent a steady stream of instructional letters to Taft, including one in which he urged the good-natured candidate to get out on the stump and “hit [Bryan] hard … attack him!” (Taft, tactful as always, replied to this note of Roosevelt’s by writing, “I have your letter … and if any [strategy] can elect me, I believe this letter can.”)

  For the most part, voters liked and trusted Taft. Although never a good orator and prone to gaffes (speaking to some old Union Army veterans, Taft kept harping on the fact that their hero, Ulysses S. Grant, drank too much), he had a childlike good humor. In speeches, he would proudly announce that he was “an honorary locomotive fireman” and boast that he was good friends with everyone in the International Brotherhood of Steam Shovel and Dredge Men. Taft would find that he had plenty of good friends among voters, too.

  THE WINNER: WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

  Taft’s 7,676,258 votes outnumbered Bryan’s 6,406,801 by a margin of 1,269,000 votes—not as big as Roosevelt’s win in 1904, but still pretty impressive. “We beat them to a frazzle!” exclaimed not Taft but a giddy Roosevelt; the new president-elect headed straight to Hot Springs to play golf. His first public statement? “I really did some great work at sleeping last night.”

  The election was William Bryan’s last presidential hurrah, but he would go on to influence the country in other ways—first serving a stint as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state and later crusading against Darwinism (and Clarence Darrow) in the Scopes Monkey Trial.

  TEDDY KNOWS BEST Theodore Roosevelt closely stage-managed William Howard Taft’s run for president, including giving him sage advice in numerous letters: “I hope that your people will do everything they can to prevent one word being sent out about either your fishing or playing golf,” he said in one missive. “The American people regard the campaign as serious business.” He went on: “Let the audience see you smile always, because I feel your nature shines out so transparently when you smile.… You big, generous, high-minded fellow.” He also remonstrated with Taft’s advisors not to let the outsized presidential candidate be allowed on horses: “Dangerous for him and cruelty to the horse.”

  JOBS FOR TAFT Businesses, as usual, were in the Republican corner during the 1908 election, and they made no secret about their loyalty. The vice president of the New York Central Railroad instructed that 2,500 freight and passenger cars be repaired—whether they needed it or not—to give jobs to numerous employees and make the economy appear healthier. The president of a midwestern fire insurance company sent out 2,000 of his door-to-door salesmen with instructions to always slip in a word for Taft while making a sale. A Missouri steel company added 400 men to its payroll just before Election Day in order, the chairman said, to pick up votes for Taft.

  THE PERILS OF BEING UNITARIAN As a Unitarian—considered barely a religion by many Americans—Taft was attacked by Democratic and Republican religious newspapers. “Think of the United States with a President who does not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but looks upon our immaculate Savior as common bastard and low, cunning impostor,” cried one midwestern editor.

  This became such an issue that Theodore Roosevelt made a point of publicly attending Unitarian church with Taft—in the hope, Roosevelt explained, “that it would attract the attention of the sincere but rather ignorant Protestants who support me.”

  Taft, to his credit, made no apologies for his mode of worship: “If the American public is so narrow as not to elect a Unitarian, well and good. I can stand it.”

  At a combined 530-plus pounds, William Taft and James Sherman were the heaviest presidential ticket in U.S. history.

  WOODROW WILSON

  VS.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  VS.

  WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

  “Taft is a fathead … with the brains of a guinea pig!”

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  It’s interesting to note that, with the exception of Grover Cleveland’s two nonconsecutive terms, Republican Party candidates had occupied the White House since 1860—an astonishing 44 years. But things were about to change in an especially acrimonious election that saw the Republican Party literally tear itself apart.

  After Taft’s 1908 victory, Roosevelt headed off to Africa for biggame hunting—the ex-president was personally responsible for killing nine lions, eight elephants, twenty zebras, seven giraffes, and six buffalos.

  Back at home, progressive Republicans had a different kind of big game in their sights: William Howard Taft. The new president was more conservative than his predecessor and soon found himself under the sway of big business. Progressives complained that Taft was selling out, and Taft whined in a letter to Roosevelt, “It is now a year and three months since I assumed office and I have had a hard time.”

  His former mentor was not an ideal confidant. As soon as Roosevelt returned home in 1910, he was besieged by progressive Republicans trying to convince him to run for a second full term. It didn’t take much persuasion. Roosevelt began to criticize Taft’s policies, claiming that he was a pawn of “the bosses and … the great privileged interests.” Taft was stunned to hear such vehement attacks coming from a man he considered a personal friend (not to mention a man that Taft still referred to as “the President”). “If only I knew what the President wanted,” he told an aide, “I would do it.”

  What Roosevelt wanted became very clear in February of 1912, when he declared his candidacy for his party’s nomination for president. “My hat is in the ring!” he roared (unwittingly coining a phrase in the process). “The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff!”

  Taft picked up on the boxing metaphor when he issued his own statement: “I do not want to fight Theodore Roosevelt, but sometimes a man in a corner comes out swinging.… I was a man of straw but I have been a man of straw long enough. Every man who has blood in his body … is forced to fight.”

  At this point in American history, some states had already begun holding primary elections to pick their delegates, a fairly pro forma procedure wherein delegates simply voted for the choice of their party bosses. All that changed during the election of 1912. In what can probably be considered the first-ever contested presidential party primaries, Roosevelt used his clout and charisma to beat Taft nine states to one. Roosevelt even won in Taft’s home state of Ohio. Arriving at the Republican Convention in June, Roosevelt was on a roll, featured in newspapers all over the country, far better public fodder than Taft, who remained quietly in the White House.

  It may be hard for us today, in an age of carefully orchestrated national political conventions, to understand the mayhem that occurred in 1912. But when you consider that Roosevelt showed up on the first day wearing a sombrero, smoking a cigar, and referring to the sitting president as “a rat in a corner,” it’s clear that a lot has changed in the last 100 years.

  There was even more action happening behind the scenes. The delegates Roosevelt won in the primary elections were in the minority—Taft’s conservative political bosses controlled the Republican National Committee and made a point of lining up Taft delegates from the states in the majority, which did not hold primaries. In back-room wheeling and dealing, they also purchased the support of as many as 200 to 300 delegates from southern states—these states would vote Democratic in a national election, but they did have Republican delegates they were willing to trade for favors or cold cash.

  Roosevelt and his men made challenge after challenge when Taft’s men tried to seat these delegates; but their challenges were denied, so much so that progressives began to cry that they were being “steamrolled” (another expression coined in 1912). Tensions ran so high that police squads were brought in and barbed wire put around the stage. Finally, when Taft ended up with a commanding lead in delegates, 561 to Roosevelt’s 107, Roosevelt and his supporters stormed out of the convention. They formed their own independent par
ty made up of everyone from social workers, reformers, and feminists to unhappy mainstream Republicans. They called themselves the Progressive Party but were known popularly as the Bull Moose Party because Roosevelt had proclaimed: “I am fit as a bull moose!”

  Thus, the most successful political party of the last half-century had managed to split itself in two—hardly a recipe for victory, since simple arithmetic showed that Democrats had about forty-five percent of the national vote locked up. As one onlooker said, referring to Taft and Roosevelt, “The only question is, which corpse gets the flowers?”

  THE CANDIDATES

  REPUBLICAN: WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT William Howard Taft reacted poorly to hostility. Although he tried to rally, calling Roosevelt a “destructive radical” and even (in what was becoming fashionable alienist-speak) “neurotic,” he wrote sadly to his wife: “Sometimes I think I might as well give up as far as being a candidate is concerned. There are so many people in the country who don’t like me.”

  Taft’s running mate was his vice president, James Sherman, who unfortunately died just days before the election. Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler agreed to replace him—but only, he told Taft, on the condition that Taft not win.

  PROGRESSIVE-BULL MOOSE: THEODORE ROOSEVELT Since Roosevelt had made the infamous 1904 blunder of declaring that he would never seek another term, he now had to do a little backpeddling. He told voters that what he really meant was that he wouldn’t run for three consecutive terms. In spite of this lame explanation, Roosevelt remained enormously popular in America. Had he wrested the nomination from Taft, it’s likely he would have gone on to take the national election. For his running mate, Roosevelt chose Hiram Johnson, the governor of California.

  DEMOCRAT: WOODROW WILSON The Democratic Convention, held in Baltimore shortly after the Republican slugfest, featured a battle between Missouri Congressman “Champ” Clark, Speaker of the House, and a new type of Democrat entirely: Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University, current governor of New Jersey, a diffident but extremely smart and ambitious man. He was a product of William Jennings Bryan—not a Populist, but the model of a liberal, progressive Democrat.

  Wilson eventually got the nod on the forty-sixth ballot, partly because Champ Clark had made himself a figure of ridicule by doing testimonials for a patent medicine company (“It seemed that all the organs in my body were out of order, but three bottles of Electric Bitters made me all right!”).

  Ever the scholar, Wilson refused to be too joyous about his nomination: “I can’t effervesce in the face of responsibility,” he said. His vice-presidential candidate was Thomas Marshall, governor of Indiana, who is now known in history for having said: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.” A statement as true today as it was then.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  Three evenly matched candidates squared off for the presidency—a scenario unlike any other in American history. Personalities began to dominate the election. Taft was honest but passive, Roosevelt explosive but full of energy, Wilson coherent but perhaps cold.

  Taft, while admitting it was hard to “keep myself in the headlines,” tried anyway. He attacked Roosevelt by saying he “is to be classed with the leaders of religious cults who promote things over their followers by … any sort of manipulation and deception.”

  This was not as far-fetched as it might sound since Roosevelt’s ringing cry was: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!” and his progressive followers had an almost religious fervor. He developed a program he called the New Nationalism, in which he claimed the government would play a strong role in regulating the economy and overseeing greedy and corrupt corporations.

  While Woodrow Wilson attacked Taft and Roosevelt as “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” two sides of the same Republican coin, he knew that the latter posed a real threat because Roosevelt’s progressivism was so close to his own. So Wilson developed his own program, the New Freedom, which placed more emphasis on oversight of monopolies but far less of a powerful role for federal government. The plan would also seek more cooperation with labor unions.

  In his public appearances, Wilson didn’t come off as a traditional politician—he was a bit stiff, hated kissing babies, and whenever a speech called for him to sound forceful, the results were unconvincing. But Wilson was able to laugh at himself (“It is a fine system when some remote, severe, academic schoolmaster may become President of the United States”), and people warmed up to him. He seemed like a good alternative to Roosevelt’s increasing bombast, which had begun to strike many as strident and unnecessarily violent. In the last week of the campaign, gamblers set five-to-one odds in Wilson’s favor.

  THE WINNER: WOODROW WILSON

  Divided, the Republicans fell. Wilson pulled 6,293,152 votes to Roosevelt’s 4,119,207 and Taft’s 3,483,922. Although Wilson had won only 41 percent of the popular vote, he performed strongly in the electoral college, with 435 votes (compared to 88 for Roosevelt and only 8 for Taft). Roosevelt was the first and only third-party presidential candidate in American history to pull more votes than a major party candidate. But while he remained a major force in Republican politics (having rejoined the party after 1912), he would never again run for president.

  ALBUMS AND MOTION PICTURES New forms of technology began to take hold in the election of 1912, not only among the electorate, but among the candidates. Woodrow Wilson spent hours closeted in a tiny, rudimentary recording studio making speeches that were pressed onto 78 RPM phonograph albums and made available for home listening. And Wilson was such a stickler for accuracy that he also brought along a primitive recording device while making campaign speeches so that he could correct any mistakes made by reporters who were hastily scribbling down his words.

  Roosevelt hired a moving picture man, whom he nicknamed “Movie,” to film some of his own whistlestops. If he didn’t have a prepared speech, Roosevelt would sometimes just spout nonsense—“Barnes, Penrose, and Smoot! Recall of judicial decisions! Alice in Wonderland is a great book!”—while waving his arms around, in order to fake scenes for Movie to shoot. To silent-movie audiences of the day, the results were convincing enough.

  A DANGEROUS PROFESSION Being a presidential candidate always has its risks, but 1912 was a particularly tough year. Wilson’s Pullman car was hit by a freight train, which shaved off the little back porch from which the candidate usually spoke. On another occasion, Wilson’s Model T overturned, and doctors had to stitch the candidate’s scalp back together.

  Roosevelt had his own share of train shenanigans: To the horror of reporters and politicians accompanying him, he once took the controls of a locomotive and drove it pell-mell down the tracks. But his worst moment came in Milwaukee on the night of October 14, when a man named John Shrank walked up to him before a speech and shot him in the chest. (Shrank claimed that the ghost of William McKinley had appeared to him and told him to shoot Roosevelt for running for a third term.)

  Shrank was apprehended, and amazingly enough, Roosevelt insisted on carrying on with his speech. In one of the great dramatic moments in American politics, he ascended to the platform and said: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

  And then he pulled out his speech from his breast pocket. It was dripping with blood, and people gasped in horror. With a bullet inside him that had fractured a rib and come perilously close to piercing his lung, Roosevelt still had the presence of mind to blame the shooting on his opponents. “It is a natural thing that weak and violent minds should be inflamed … by the kind of artful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months.”

  He made his speech and then went to the hospital, where doctors said he was saved by the folded papers, a glasses case, and his thick chest muscles. Roosevelt rested for two weeks; in sympathy, the other candidates stopped campaigning during that time as wel
l.

  WILSON’S STOLEN VALISE The only hint of a romantic scandal in this campaign came when Woodrow Wilson’s longtime friendship with a lovely divorcée named Mary Allen Peck was made public knowledge. Many Democrats suspected (but never proved) that Republican operatives stole a valise of Wilson’s, hoping to find incriminating letters and concoct a scandal. No letters were ever produced, but Wilson (who was married) apparently thought they might be. He solemnly assured an aide that “we Southerners like to write mush” but explained that nothing had gone on between him and Peck.

  This was probably true. As Theodore Roosevelt, who could be quite mean, said, “It wouldn’t work. You can’t cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts so much like an apothecary clerk.”

  Teddy Roosevelt was shot before delivering a campaign speech—then addressed the crowd, bleeding from the chest, and blamed the attack on his opponents.

  WOODROW WILSON

  VS. CHARLES HUGHES

  During Woodrow Wilson’s first term in office, Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, which provided for a federal income tax. Horrible as that was, the worst news in the world was that a massive, bloody war was going on in Europe. Most people in the United States, including Woodrow Wilson, wanted to stay out of that conflict, but it was becoming increasingly difficult, especially after a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitana in 1915, killing 124 Americans. Wilson would manage to avoid the war for another two years, but he couldn’t stop anti-German hysteria from escalating.