they visited them. The rise of the direct primary and decline of party influence shifted the electoral math. Wooing party insiders in key states remained critically important—as Taft’s campaign was showing by mid-1912—but popular momentum built by personal visits by the candidate had a growing effect on electoral outcomes.
The rise of the New York-based national media added fuel to the fire. Technology allowed fast-breaking news—from elections to baseball scores—to be reported across the country. The rise of national newspaper chains meant that the same stories appeared in papers from East to West. The rise in the media also meant other things started grabbing Americans’ attention away from politics and toward sports, or show business, or sensational true-crime stories. This forced candidates and their campaign managers to be more dogged and creative in getting press attention. They could do this either by being charismatic and entertaining, or by making bold, headline-worthy policy proclamations—or both.
Living only a short train ride from the center of the media universe, Wilson not only benefited from the rise of a new journalistic elite but also mastered the art of making headlines. He staked a claim as a leader for a new era, but he was a different breed of Progressive than Roosevelt. Still a Southerner in allegiance and temperament, Wilson was a strong defender of states’ rights and a believer in maintaining the southern racial order. He fell in with many others in his party by having little patience with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, which appeared to put a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the federal government.
Wilsonian progressivism was one that reached more boldly into the corporate capitalist order by arguing that the great trusts should not just be regulated, as Roosevelt advocated, but broken up altogether. He coupled this antitrust stance with support of strong regulation at the state level. Wilson simultaneously carried the conservative banner of limited federal control while articulating a progressive message of a government that fought for the interests of ordinary citizens. While derided in Republican-leaning editorial pages as “the New Jersey school master,” Wilson represented an exciting new hope for a Democratic Party desperate to win the White House. He was a traditionalist of the nineteenth century and technocrat of the twentieth: a potent combination in an election year that blended past and present.16
The Conventional and Unconventional
For both Democrats and Republicans, the 1912 national conventions became where the tensions between the new politics and the old order burst out into the open. Although conventions during this era were often rowdy affairs, the 1912 editions were remarkable in their furious back-room deal-making, cliffhanger votes, and dramatic public displays of raw emotion and personal animosity. Yet personal feuds were not the sole engine of discord, but merely reflections of bigger, fundamentally divisive policy differences in each party. Both Democratic and Republican unity foundered on divisions of class, region, and political philosophy.
Personal resentments and internal tensions had brewed through the Republican primary season. Taft and Roosevelt’s attacks on each other had gotten fiercer as the spring wore on. Despite the wild popularity of Roosevelt and the uninspiring campaign of Taft, the race was very close. This was mostly the fault of TR, who was so swept up in his celebrity that he mistook popular adoration for real political support, and who spent so much of his time in a Progressive echo chamber of supportive friends that he underestimated the strong support that remained within the GOP for “old-fashioned” issues like the protective tariff. He dismissed the old guard as corrupt and patronage-addled, and came out swinging against some core issues of the Republican platform.
Taft, in contrast, reached out to state delegations and placed allies in critical party positions where they would have control of when, where, and who voted during the Republican Convention. Despite the rise of the direct primary, 15 of the 48 states still adhered to the old system. Even the primaries that were direct were not binding. Convention delegates did not have to follow the will of the people; a state that went one way in the primary did not necessarily have to back the same candidate at the convention.17
Figure 6. Udo J. Keppler, “Salvation Is Free, But It Doesn’t Appeal to Him,” 7 August 1912. After Taft beat Roosevelt for the Republican nomination, and TR bolted to run as a third-party candidate, the battle for the GOP’s soul began. In this August 1912 cartoon, Puck’s Joseph Keppler satirizes the evangelical fervor of Roosevelt and the conservative recalcitrance of Taft and his allies. In reality, the two men were not all that far apart in matters of policy. Library of Congress.
The stickiness of the math became apparent as the Republican Convention opened in Chicago in early June. Roosevelt and Taft were the leading candidates, but La Follette was still in the race, as were others. There were so many contested delegates that no candidate had the number needed to win the nomination. Letters flew between Roosevelt and his allies darkly predicting that the Taft forces would stop at nothing to obtain the nomination, and framing the contest in stark good-and-evil terms. “My concern for this country has been the attitude of so many educated persons,” wrote Roosevelt on 4 June, while Taft championed “the cause of the political bosses and of special privilege in the business world.”18
Roosevelt’s greatest fears started to come to fruition as the Republican National Committee came together in Chicago a week before the convention’s start, and started to rule on the 254 delegates not yet committed to a candidate. By the time they were finished, 235 of these votes had been awarded to Taft. By the time the convention formally opened, the president’s forces were in control.
Roosevelt decided it was time for some bold moves. Two days before the opening night of the full convention, in a headline-making break with tradition, he came to Chicago in person. Predictably, he got an overwhelming reception. Amid a summer heat wave, the streets of the city were packed with crowds shouting “we want Teddy!” and brass bands playing rousing marches. Speaking to a packed house of supporters in the same building where the convention would take place, he proclaimed that his fears of vote-stealing had come to pass: “we are fighting for honesty against naked robbery.” In a subsequent letter to the Republican party leaders, he called on them to reverse the actions of the National Committee members, which, Roosevelt asserted, had stolen “eighty or ninety delegates” and “substitute[d] a dishonest for an honest majority.”19
Things went from bad to worse once the Convention got underway on 17 June. Inside a sweltering convention hall, fistfights broke out. When Taft’s supporters tried to take the floor, Roosevelt’s people whistled and tooted, shouting “steamroller!” When the vote finally was taken, Roosevelt delegates sat on their hands in protest. Roosevelt’s evangelistic outcry had little effect, however, and in fact may have further slimmed his chances of overcoming the old guard. Taft’s supporters dug in their heels. La Follette, who might have been a potent ally in the fight against the stand-patters, refused to join forces with his old rival or displace the Taft men who were running the convention machinery.20
When the vote was taken, 558 went for Taft and 501 for his rivals. While new politics may have dominated the primaries, the GOP convention was old politics at its finest. Taft, the reluctant politician, won.
The Democratic Battle
The smoke was still clearing from the Republican showdown in Chicago when the Democrats gathered in Baltimore at the end of June 1912. When it opened, Woodrow Wilson did not even have close to the majority of delegates, much less the two-thirds majority needed under Democratic Party rules. There were a number of rivals to Wilson, and the leader in the delegate count was Champ Clark, speaker of the House, a plain-talking Missourian and an old-style party politician. Clark was fond of saying things like “I sprang from the loins of the common people, God bless them! And I am one of them.” His campaign theme song had a chorus that went “you gotta quit kickin’ my dawg aroun’.”21
