As we saw in the last posting on this subject, the 1912 presidential campaign was hotly contested, with five different parties fielding candidates. These were the usual Republican and Democrat Parties, but also the Progressive Party, the Prohibition Party, and two socialist parties, the Socialist Party of America and the Socialist Labor Party.
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| Roosevelt the one to beat. |
The only reason
the Populist Party did not run a candidate was because their only semi-viable
candidate, William Jennings Bryan, threw in with the Democratic Party to avoid
splitting the Democrats between the conservatives and the populists. Taft, whose only reason for running was to
ensure that Roosevelt would not win, put the interests of his handlers on Wall
Street above those of either the Republican Party or the country at large.
All in all, then,
Roosevelt was clearly the man to beat. Taft had all but announced that he was
hoping people would only vote for him to prevent Roosevelt from being elected.
Debs was not truly a viable candidate. Chafin and Reimer are not even
remembered today. Only the union of
Wilson’s elitist conservatism and Bryan’s populism, overlaid with a veneer of
superficially progressive goals, had any hope of defeating Roosevelt.
Bringing together
Wilson and Bryan was a masterstroke, as Bryan (a consummate, albeit ethical
politician) realized early on when he supported Wilson’s nomination. By
stressing party unity above all else, and capitalizing on the Republican split,
there was a chance that the Democrats would regain the White House after a
sixteen-year hiatus.
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| William Jennings Bryan |
Had the Democrats
not done this, the party would have fragmented even more quickly than had the
Republicans. Bryan was the one responsible for keeping the progressive
Democrats, the populists, and the moderate socialists in the fold of the
faithful.
Wilson would have
retained the conservatives and reactionaries, but the moderate socialists would
have fled to Debs (and some did), while the progressives and populists would
have gone to Roosevelt. As it was, a significant minority of progressive
Democrats and populists did, in fact, go to Roosevelt, but it was not enough to
shift the election in his favor given Taft’s spoilsport candidacy.
Not that Taft had
it easy. Vice-President James
S. Sherman died in office on October 30, 1912, less than a week before
the election. This left Taft without a
running mate.
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| "America First"? "League of Nations"? |
On October 14,
1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, John Flammang Schrank,
a saloonkeeper from New York, shot Roosevelt while he
was on his way to make a speech. The
bullet lodged in Roosevelt’s chest only after going through his eyeglass case
and a fifty-page single-folded copy of his speech, “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual.”
After ensuring
that Schrank would not be killed by an angry mob, Roosevelt assured the crowd
he was all right, and ordered police to take charge of Schrank and to make sure
no one harmed him. He then delivered his
scheduled speech, speaking for ninety minutes before finishing
and getting medical attention. Roosevelt
carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life.
Both Taft and Wilson
suspended their own campaigning for two weeks until Roosevelt recovered and was
able to resume his. When asked if the
shooting would affect his election campaign, he said to the reporter “I’m fit
as a bull moose,” which inspired the party’s emblem.
Roosevelt
conducted a vigorous national campaign for the Progressive Party, a constant
theme being the way the Republican nomination had been “stolen.” He called his platform “The New
Nationalism” and called for a strong federal role in regulating the economy
and chastising bad corporations.
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| Worst campaign slogan EVER. |
For his part, Wilson
supported what he called “The New Freedom,” a rather
confusing admixture of laissez faire
individualism and socialism, whichever his speechmakers thought would sound
good to whichever group was being addressed.
Left to himself, Wilson had focused on the tariff, until Bryan explained
that he was boring prospective voters to death.
Taft could not
really be said to have campaigned at all, being afraid of winning the election;
he regarded his presidency as a personal nightmare. When he spoke at all, it was of the need for
judges to be more powerful than elected officials (Taft ended as Chief Justice
of the U.S. Supreme Court; Louis Brandeis once commented that he could not
understand how a man who made so many wise decisions on the Bench could have
been such a bad president).
The departure of
the progressive Republicans left the reactionary Republicans firmly in control
of their party until 1916, when many of the progressives returned, the party
having pretty much disintegrated as a truly progressive institution. Today “progressive” is usually a synonym for
extreme radical. Ironically, much of the
Republican effort was designed to discredit Roosevelt as a dangerous radical,
but this had little effect, especially when real radicals like Debs and Reimer
were showing just how radical a candidate could be.
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| Win by condemning everybody |
Speaking of Debs’s
campaign, the Socialists had little money; Debs’s campaign cost approximately
$66,000, mostly for leaflets and travel to rallies organized by local groups. His biggest event was a speech to 15,000
supporters in New York City, where the crowd sang “La Marseillaise”
and “The Internationale.”
Debs condemned “Injunction
Bill Taft” and mocked Roosevelt, calling him “a charlatan, mountebank, and
fraud, and his Progressive promises and pledges as the mouthings of a low and
utterly unprincipled self-seeker and demagogue.” Debs insisted that the
Democrats, Progressives, and Republicans were all financed by the corporations.
Despite his efforts, the labor union movement largely rejected Debs and
supported Wilson.
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| The Wobblies promised an eight-hour day. |
Thanks to Taft
and Bryan, Wilson won the election, and rewarded Bryan with the post of
Secretary of State. Still, Wilson retained
a large measure of suspicion of Bryan, as well as anyone else more ethical or
intelligent than himself . . . which was pretty much everyone. Having been elected on the strength of
promised reforms, especially of the financial system still controlled by
Aldrich and his cronies, Wilson began waffling.
This was
astounding. It suggests that Wilson was so far removed from political,
economic, and social reality as to make one wonder what he was doing in the
Oval Office. The papers of Carter Glass alone, deposited at the University of
Virginia, contain thousands — yes, thousands
— of letters from prominent people across the political spectrum written from
December 1912 to February 1913 demanding reform of the financial system.
The country was
in serious danger, and something had to be done. The question was, would the
measures taken be adequate, and (even if adequate) could they be sustained?
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