wisdom was that Clark was not up to the job of being president. The other leading contenders—including powerful Alabama Representative Oscar Underwood—seemed old-fashioned, regional candidates. At the same time, an alarming number of delegates were “pledged to favorite sons” or “uncertain,” which in this era meant their votes were controlled by powerful Democratic machines like New York’s Tammany Hall. In the days leading up to the convention, Wilson was not particularly bullish that he could overcome the forces of tradition and inertia. “Just between you and me,” he wrote his close friend Mary Hulbert, “I have not the least idea of being nominated, because the make of the convention is such … that the outcome is in the hands of professional, case-hardened politicians who serve only their own interests.”22
Yet Wilson had some important advantages. He had a national network of wealthy supporters and endorsement from important newspapers across the continent, including the most powerful Democratic newspaper in the country, the New York World. Wilson stuck with tradition and didn’t set foot in Baltimore, but he had state-of-the-art communications hooked to his seaside home in Sea Girt, New Jersey, that would keep him apprised of news soon after it happened.
The outcome of the Republican Convention altered the political calculus of the Democratic one. With Taft the winner, and Roosevelt likely to bolt and run as a third-party candidate, the drumbeat became stronger for the Democrats to nominate Wilson over conservatives like Clark and Underwood. Only a progressive could defeat TR. Funnily enough, the man who made sure this would come to pass was none other than the man whose defeats had hobbled the Democratic Party’s national power: William Jennings Bryan. Despite the past electoral debacles, Bryan remained a powerful force in the party, and his passionate “Wall Street versus Main Street” populism retained a broad base of support in the Democratic base. Seeing how perilously close the Democrats were coming to nominating a conservative, Bryan launched a media campaign to turn things around. In a 21 June dispatch distributed to papers nationwide, he wrote: “with two reactionaries running for president, [Roosevelt] might win and thus entrench himself in power.”23
Bryan then proceeded to drive the cause of reform on the floor of the Baltimore convention—seeding the same evangelistic fervor Roosevelt had done with his appearance in Chicago. Still a legendary orator, Bryan egged on progressive supporters in the convention hall and encouraged voters all over the country to telegram their support to the delegates. “The fight is on,” shouted one delegate, “and Bryan is on one side and Wall Street is on the other.”24 The progressive forces took control of the proceedings. Nominating speeches began at midnight on Thursday evening and continued until the next morning. At 7 a.m. the first ballot was taken. Clark won—but not a two-thirds majority. Another vote. Still no clear winner. The behind-the-scenes deal-making was furious. Through Friday and Saturday, vote after vote, Wilson started to chip away at Clark’s lead. The delegates took Sunday off for church and rest—and more negotiations in hotel rooms and barrooms. Over the course of multiple rounds of balloting, day after day of the convention, Wilson steadily increased his support. On Tuesday 2 July—on the 46th round of voting—Wilson secured 990 votes, enough to win the nomination.25
Wilson’s nomination victory had to do with smart politics, good press, the weaknesses of his opponents, the power of his allies, and incredible luck. One Washington pundit later said of Wilson: if he “was to fall out of a sixteen story building … he would hit on a feather bed.” Wilson saw a higher power at work. Later, after his election, he would say quite simply: “God ordained me to be the next president of the United States.”26
Bolting from the Parties
Once William Howard Taft beat Theodore Roosevelt to win the Republican nomination, the ex-president did what most people had suspected for a while: he bolted. He broke with the party that had been his home since the beginning, taking a large cohort of earnest reformers with him. Driven by personal animus and a healthy dose of messianic zeal, Roosevelt became the presidential candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party. His crusade as a third-party candidate was seen by some (then and now) as quixotic and egotistical, yet the ideas he advanced during what came to be known as the “Bull Moose” campaign crystallized ideas about the role of government, and the need for a countervailing force against the power of capitalist markets, that had been percolating for some time. Although running a flawed and ultimately unsuccessful campaign, Roosevelt nonetheless won a greater percentage of votes than any other third-party candidate before or since, and his progressive campaign put radical ideas into the political mainstream in ways that shaped the Wilson presidency, the New Deal, and the character of the American state into the early twenty-first century.
The kickoff for this new political era came in August, when Roosevelt returned to Chicago—the site of the Republican Convention two months before—for the inaugural nominating convention of the Progressive Party. Instead of bejeweled millionaires’ wives sitting in the front row, there were ranks of young women, reformers and settlement workers, in simple white cotton shirtwaists. Reporters repeatedly compared it to a religious revival. “It was more like a Methodist consecration meeting than a political gathering,” commented one scribe.27 Roosevelt himself contributed to the tone by naming his keynote address, “A Confession of Faith.”
As Roosevelt stepped up to deliver it, he first basked in nearly a full hour of cheers, applause, the singing of hymns and patriotic songs. Once the hall finally quieted, he delivered a speech that was part sermon and part stem-winder, putting forth ideas that would have been considered radical only a few years before. “The old parties are husks with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled,” Roosevelt trumpeted. “There must be a new party of nation-wide and non-sectional principles [representing] the cause of human rights and of governmental efficiency.”28
After his speech, everyone in the hall was so moved that all had to join in a singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to pull themselves together. Then came the more routine business of the formal nomination. In her speech seconding the nomination of Roosevelt, settlement house pioneer and Progressive Party leader Jane Addams moved away from religious rhetoric and underscored the global implications of this new political organization: “the American exponent of a world-wide movement towards juster social conditions” and a “modern movement” whose time had come.29 The finishing touch was the nomination of Hiram Johnson of California as Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate, uniting East and West under one national progressive banner.
Through the course of that fall, riding a wave of celebrity and unbound from party doctrine, Roosevelt traveled back and forth across the country spreading the Progressive gospel. He introduced policy ideas that foreshadowed the New Deal his cousin Franklin would usher in more than twenty years later. He called for regulation to ensure on-the-job safety. He talked about development of the impoverished and flood-prone Mississippi River Valley. He proposed a minimum wage for women and restrictions on child labor.30
Figure 7. National Progressive Convention, Chicago, 6 August 1912. Taking place in the same hall the Republicans had occupied earlier in the summer, the Progressive Party convention presented a very different sort of political spectacle. Reporters likened it to a religious revival, and played up the contrast between the bejeweled millionaires’ wives of the GOP convention and the young women who filled the same seats at the Progressive gathering, wearing simple cotton shirtwaists and fervently singing hymns and patriotic songs. Moffett Studio and Kaufmann, Weimer & Fabry Co., Library of Congress.
The Progressive Party wasn’t just Teddy Roosevelt. It ran many candidates in state and local races across the country in 1912. But it was dominated by Roosevelt’s celebrity and outsized personality, so much that it quickly became known by Roosevelt’s own nickname, forever remembered as “The Bull Moose Party.” And if the Democrats and Republicans of 1912 were leaning toward
