The War of 1912

By Patricia O''Toole

When Theodore Roosevelt challenged William Howard Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912, few cheered. Enemies accused him of monumental egotism, and most admirers, foreseeing his defeat, were worried that posterity would frown on his quest for an unprecedented third term. But as Roosevelt saw it, he had to involve himself. He had left the White House in 1909 with the expectation that Taft, his good friend and chosen successor, would continue on the progressive course set by the Roosevelt Administration. Instead, Taft had filled his Cabinet with corporate lawyers, bungled a chance to overhaul an antiquated tariff that enriched manufacturers at consumers' expense and undermined Roosevelt's farsighted environmentalism. Taft means well, Roosevelt would say, "but he means well feebly."

Then came the midterm elections of 1910. The G.O.P. lost control of the House, and Roosevelt began criticizing Taft's policies in print. The final rupture occurred a year later when Taft's Attorney General filed an antitrust suit against the U.S. Steel Corp. because of a 1907 acquisition that Roosevelt had personally approved. T.R. was outraged. The decision to challenge Taft soon followed. T.R.'s campaign would not succeed, but the ideals that he and his Bull Moose Party enunciated in 1912 would resonate in American political life for decades. They still do. They shaped much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and influenced domestic policy until the 1980s, when the Reagan Revolution began dismantling social programs. Even now, echoes of that campaign can be heard in debates on what government should do for citizens and how to make it more accountable.

Roosevelt's odds of unhorsing an incumbent President were long, but not as long as they would have been in previous election years, when nominees were chosen by a handful of bosses and rubber-stamped at state party caucuses. In 1912 a dozen states were letting voters do the choosing in primaries, a political innovation just beginning to catch on. If T.R. could win big in the primaries, he could present himself as the people's choice and Taft as the creature of the bosses.

Collectively, the primaries gave T.R. a shot at 362 votes, and he stunned the party by walking off with 278 of them. Taft finished a distant second, with 48. But in the 36 states without primaries, Roosevelt was outflanked by the bosses. In June, as delegates headed to Chicago for the national convention, Taft's men boasted that their candidate had 557 votes--17 more than he needed for the nomination. T.R. could see that his primary delegates plus delegates from renegade factions elsewhere had left him about 70 votes short. His aides noisily challenged the legitimacy of scores of Taft supporters, but when it became clear that he could not win, T.R. executed one of the gutsiest maneuvers in the annals of American presidential campaigns: he denounced the Republicans as thieves and bolted the convention.

A bolt spared Roosevelt the humiliation of losing to Taft. It also kept his candidacy alive on a brand-new ticket of his own creation, the National Progressive Party, better known as the Bull Moose Party, a nickname that came from the answer T.R. had given when someone in a crowd yelled out to ask how he felt. "Like a bull moose," he yelled back.

The Bull Moose Party got off to a thundering start. Within seven weeks, the Progressives had established the party in nearly every state and were back in Chicago for their first national convention. But who were the Progressives? Although Republicans of the day cast the Progressives as radicals, in truth they were teachers and lawyers, farmers and small-town folk, urban reformers of every ilk, crusaders for peace and women's suffrage, champions of the little guy. They were less a movement than a catch basin for civic-minded men and women impatient with politics as usual but a bit frightened of Eugene V. Debs and his Socialist Party. While many Progressives could not see past their pet causes, T.R. managed to bring them together in a big tent held aloft by the idea that the government, which ought to serve the people, had been hijacked by special interests. "To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day," the Progressive platform declared.

A brief for a strong Federal Government, the Progressive platform was so far ahead of its time on many points (Social Security and the minimum wage, for example) that it would take a generation and another Roosevelt, T.R.'s fifth cousin Franklin, to bring them into being. In hopes of protecting the investing public from swindlers, the Progressives called for federal regulation of stock offerings and fuller disclosure of corporate financial transactions, ideas that found their way into the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.

During his presidency, a time when corporations were growing ever larger, Roosevelt operated on the principle that the Federal Government was the only institution strong enough to combat their Darwinian tendency to crush competitors and maximize profits by keeping wages low and prices high. In 1912 he was even more adamant.

T.R. welcomed African Americans into his new party, but the whites organizing the Progressives of the Deep South insisted that if any black were permitted to hold a party office or serve as a delegate, Southern whites would refuse to join. Left to choose between acquiescence and no presence in the South, Roosevelt acquiesced and was roundly criticized. W.E.B. DuBois and other black leaders saw Roosevelt as a hypocrite and threw their support to the Democratic nominee, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. They would regret it. Southern Democrats were frankly committed to white supremacy. Wilson's Cabinet, dominated by Southerners, soon resegregated the civil service, erasing most of the gains made during the Roosevelt and Taft presidencies.

As the Progressives at the convention moved toward the moment of anointing Roosevelt as their first presidential candidate, his lieutenants were scrambling to line up a Vice President. T.R. yearned for Hiram Johnson, the Progressive Governor of California, but Johnson yearned not to run. He was sure that the Bull Moose Party would lose and that his career would be over. Johnson did not surrender until the last minute, after Roosevelt's men insisted that if the great T.R. did not shrink from defeat in a noble cause, no one else should either.

Whatever Johnson's sentiments, just about everyone else at the convention found it an exhilarating combination of barn raising and revival meeting. They hammered together their platform, belted out hymns and interrupted Roosevelt's acceptance speech 145 times to holler and applaud. When he closed with the best line from his first speech after the bolt--"We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord"--they burst into what may still be history's loudest rendition of Onward, Christian Soldiers.

The battle would be short. Election Day, Nov. 5, was only two months off when the Progressives went forth to proselytize. Taft had already dropped from sight, telling the newspapers that he planned to take a long vacation and would stand on his record. It was said that the ideological difference between Roosevelt and Wilson was the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but on one fundamental they sharply disagreed. Wilson was a states'-rights man who contended that the history of liberty was a history of limiting the power of the national government. Roosevelt was a confirmed nationalist, convinced that the history of social progress proved that only a strong central government could level the playing field.

The urgent questions of the day were economic: how best to regulate the economy and what to do about a tariff policy that kept consumer prices artificially high by protecting American companies from foreign competition. The tariff had been created decades earlier to raise revenue (income tax being a thing of the future) and to nurture a stripling American manufacturing establishment. As the manufacturers prospered, they convinced their captives in Congress that ever thicker blankets of protection were needed to preserve American jobs. Wilson, calling the tariff "stiff and stupid," promised an immediate revision. Roosevelt, arguing that a speedy change would disrupt the economy, proposed a permanent nonpartisan commission of experts able to make impartial recommendations for more gradual reform.

T.R. also campaigned forcefully for a commission to regulate corporations. Its members--accomplished, public-spirited business leaders--would study a company's affairs, require change when there were signs of monopoly and stamp a company "approved" when all was in order. Once approved, the company could operate without fear of prosecution under the country's confusing antitrust law. To Wilson, the corporations commission was a dangerous merger of business and government, sure to enable Big Business to regulate the regulators. Even Taft roused himself to condemn it as "the most monstrous monopoly of power in the history of the world."

While Taft vacationed and Wilson gave as few speeches as possible, Roosevelt raced up the East Coast and down, across the South and into the Midwest. In Milwaukee, Wis., on Oct. 14, as he stood in an open car to salute a cheering crowd, a man a few feet away drew a revolver and fired, hitting Roosevelt in the chest and knocking him back into the car seat.

Three Presidents had been assassinated in T.R.'s lifetime, and he had long ago prepared himself for such a moment. He put his fingers to his lips, saw that he was not bleeding from the mouth and concluded that the bullet had not perforated a lung. The bullet, slowed by the contents of his breast pocket--a steel eyeglass case and a copy of the speech he was about to give--had lodged in a rib. He insisted on proceeding to an auditorium where a crowd of 10,000 was waiting for him. In full command of his political instincts, he showed the audience his bloodstained shirt and said, "I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose." Roosevelt spoke for 90 minutes, then consented to go to a hospital.

From first to last, no candidate in 1912 fought harder than Roosevelt, but in the end, the country chose Wilson. The results resembled those of 1992, when Ross Perot's third-party run deprived Bill Clinton of a popular majority but gave him a victory, with 43% of the vote. Wilson's plurality was 42%. Roosevelt finished with 27% and Taft with 23%. Debs drew 6%, twice the share he had won in 1908. Monday-morning quarterbacks have claimed that if T.R. had sat out 1912, his votes would have gone to Taft. Not so. As the numbers show, 77% of the electorate wanted anyone but Taft.

Roosevelt lost, and in a political culture set in its two-party ways, the Bull Moose Party was destined for a short life. But T.R.'s 1912 campaign still quickens the pulse, in part because his foresight on social policy proved to be 20/20 but even more because he was that rare person able to see past the corruption and mediocrity of his time. Theodore Roosevelt understood what a government devoted to its citizens might achieve, and he got the country talking as seriously as it ever has about what it wanted to be.

o O'Toole is author of When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House (Simon & Schuster)