of a powerful central government that might trample on states’ rights to maintain segregation. Foreign-born immigrants also voted Democratic, in part because of the powerful influence of Democratic machines in large cities. And, like the Republicans, the Democrats included some Progressive reformers. These reformers argued that the Democratic Party, not the GOP, could be the standard-bearer for a more activist central government, for better lives for working people, and for breaking up the monopolies and ushering in a fairer capitalist order.
After his return from abroad in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt had seized on the cresting Progressive wave and went on a nationwide speaking tour, sounding more progressive with every stop. More must be done to keep corporations out of politics, Roosevelt told mesmerized crowds of five, ten, and twenty thousand. Corporate directors whose companies broke the law should be subject to prosecution. The national government must do much, much more. In Osawatomie, Kansas, on 31 August, Roosevelt gave the definitive speech that gave this new philosophy a name—the “New Nationalism”—and declared it would not only fix the problems of industrial capitalism, but also allow the nation to transcend its vexing issues of sectionalism, corruption, and class divides.31
Yet while barnstorming the country like a presidential contender and drawing massive and enthusiastic crowds, Roosevelt continued to swat away all suggestions of running for president. “There is nothing I want less,” he told newspaper editor, leading progressive, and close ally William Allen White as 1910 drew to a close.32
Reluctance to challenge his old protégé Taft seemed the least of the reasons Roosevelt was refraining from a run. Like presidents before and after him, he worried that he might not win. New winds were blowing, but Roosevelt didn’t think the Republican Party was quite ready to swing to the progressive side. He figured he would have better luck remaking his party in 1916. Given the opposition within the party to progressive ideas, Roosevelt worried that, even if he won in 1912, he might ultimately risk his legacy. “I do not see how I could go out of the presidency again with the credit I had when I left it,” he confessed to White. But, as all savvy politicians do, he left the door open. If his supporters and friends felt he was the only hope for the progressive cause, “it would be unpatriotic of me” not to stand for election.33
Figure 4. William H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, 1909. Taft was Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor for the White House, but by the early months of Taft’s presidency the two men’s political alliance—and personal friendship—was in tatters. Brown Brothers, Library of Congress.
Whether motivated by duty, ego, or a combination of both, Roosevelt found it increasingly hard to resist the lure of the campaign trail as 1912 neared. As the next chapter will show, this had huge consequences.
CHAPTER 2
The Progressive Campaign
Roosevelt continued prevaricating for months, staying in the spotlight, publicly saying he would not run, and privately indicating that his arm might be twisted if circumstance allowed. Yet the circumstances started to become less favorable for a Roosevelt candidacy by the middle of 1911.
Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, perhaps the most prominent Republican progressive after Roosevelt, declared that he would run against Taft. “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette had harbored White House ambitions ever since being elected to the Senate in 1906. He was making the bet that Roosevelt refused to do, running on the belief that the progressive wing was strong enough to triumph over the “stand-patters” in the fight for the 1912 Republican nomination. Some of Roosevelt’s closest supporters became donors to the La Follette campaign, and by October the Wisconsin senator had won the endorsement of the National Progressive Republican Conference (an organization he had helped create one year earlier).1
Even as Roosevelt continued to dither, the sustained attention paid to both him and La Follette—and the rise of these new sorts of organizations that endorsed candidates but stood apart from the regular party machinery—signaled fundamental changes in the American political system. The nineteenth-century United States was long characterized as “a state of courts and parties,” in which a seemingly small federal bureaucracy and individual political leaders were subsumed in importance by the actions of the judiciary and the power of the two major political parties.2
Nineteenth-century politics was intensely local, and intensely personal. It also was a major source of entertainment. The parties orchestrated torchlight parades, festive rallies, and neighborhood parties. They delivered jobs, political favors, and Thanksgiving turkeys to those who were loyal to them. This system led to extraordinarily high voter turnout. In the 1896 presidential election, close to 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls—and, by and large, voted straight party line tickets.
Yet that same year also introduced new methods of presidential campaigning that upended the old order and created a new partisan apparatus that made campaigning in the twentieth century far different from the nineteenth. Party dominance of all levels of government, from urban political machines to Congressional committees, had begun to decline as progressive reform gained traction in big cities and reform-minded leaders came into power in politics and in the media. Reconfigured party power created an opening for “candidate-centered politics,” in which individual candidates became the axes around which elections revolved. Although the 1896 Republican nominee, William McKinley, and his Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, had radically different political philosophies and campaign styles, both of their campaigns helped define the nature of the new style of modern campaigning. Bryan barnstormed the country with his Jeffersonian message of agrarian populism. Already well known for his oratorical gifts and charismatic self-presentation, he drew large and enthusiastic crowds. McKinley, in contrast, had the crowds come to him. From the front porch of his Canton, Ohio, home, McKinley gave an audience to any who desired one, and gave speeches while standing on a box or chair. This “front-porch campaign” drew thousands of supporters to Canton over the final weeks of the campaign, and won the attention of thousands more through newspaper coverage of this novel campaign strategy.3
Changes in the media landscape of course also contributed to the rise of the candidate-centered campaign. A proliferation of newspapers and magazines competed for readers’ eyeballs by reporting on impassioned speeches and colorful political personalities. At the same time, a press that once was fiercely partisan began to adopt a journalistic ethos of impartiality and objectivity. With all these changes, the candidate, not the party, became the center of attention.4
In this new environment, a candidate’s missteps mattered. In 1912, Robert La Follette made many of them. La Follette thought of himself as a game-changer and rabble-rouser, but he was reluctant to leave the comforts of Washington and regular Senate business to go on the stump. He gave speeches and statements that were guarded in their declarations of progressive values. His campaign sputtered through the summer and fall. In February 1912, it received its death knell when La Follette gave a meandering, vitriolic speech in Philadelphia to a group of newspaper publishers that began at midnight and lasted until nearly 2 a.m. His daughter had been ill, the campaign had proved exhausting, and La Follette perhaps had a little too much to drink earlier in the evening. All these triggered a speech that proved a “rambling, disconnected attack on his audience and the sinister influence of the press.” In its wake, the senator, reported to be “on the verge of a physical breakdown,” canceled all his campaign events.5 If progressive Republicans wanted a candidate who might win it all, Roosevelt soon seemed to be the best bet.
Back in Washington, reluctant campaigner Taft was baffled and distressed by this politics of personality. “It seems to me that intelligent men have lost their heads and are leaning toward
