some of Wilson’s attacks.
Just like everywhere on the campaign trail, crowds of admirers surrounded Roosevelt as he climbed into an open-air car to travel from his hotel to the lecture hall. He stood up to wave and shake more hands. As he did so, a man broke from the group, drew a gun, and shot the candidate at close range.
Amazingly, the bullet’s path stopped short of Roosevelt’s heart—blocked by an eyeglass case and the 50-page speech manuscript in Roosevelt’s breast pocket. This saved his life. Bleeding from the chest, Roosevelt insisted on delivering the speech before accepting medical help. He told his audience, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” The shooting and Roosevelt’s extraordinary speech after it dominated the news for the rest of the campaign, bringing voters’ attention back from the World Series and other news of the day. Oddsmakers were rating TR’s chances as 1 in 4 before the assassination attempt. After, his chances improved to almost 1 in 2.
Yet it was not enough to change the course of the race. After suspending his campaign to allow Roosevelt to recover, Wilson went back on the stump for a furious last round of speeches and events.
Election day was 5 November. And it was an electoral landslide for Wilson. He won 40 states. Roosevelt won 6. Taft won 2. The popular vote was less clear-cut. Wilson only won a plurality, not a majority of the popular vote. Roosevelt came in second, with 27 percent. Taft was third, with 23 percent. The Socialists won nearly a million votes, but their total fell far short of what Debs and his colleagues dreamed of at the start of 1912.
Turnout in the election of 1912 demonstrated how much the political system had changed in this age of reform. Overall, less than 60 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. In 1896, before the widespread adoption of the direct primary and other progressive reforms, turnout had been 80 percent. The system had been modernized and the parties’ power curbed, but at the cost of broad-based popular participation. The 1912 turnout set a precedent followed by most presidential elections of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first.
The Legacy
In the aftermath of election, the four candidates went in different directions. Some stayed in the spotlight, and others receded. William Howard Taft got to depart the job he hated and, nine years later, he got the job he always dreamed about, when Warren Harding appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Eugene Debs would go on to run again for president—including campaigning from prison while awaiting a verdict on charges of sedition—but 1912 would be his finest hour. He and the Socialists would never poll quite as strongly again, and their political legitimacy came under attack in the days during and after World War I, when the Bolshevik Revolution and an increasingly isolationist American public ushered in increasingly anti-immigrant sentiment and marginalized the voices arguing for alternatives to capitalism. By the early 1920s, Socialist leaders like Debs as well as other leftist radicals were being harassed, arrested, and deported. The American Left would not have a major impact on national politics until the Great Depression validated some of their arguments about the failures and inequities of capitalism.
Teddy Roosevelt had lost, and he hated it. Victory had seemed close at certain points, and defeat was made worse by the fact that a progressive candidate won—and that candidate was not Roosevelt. So Roosevelt went hunting again, setting off on a sixteen-month voyage down the Amazon. Along the way, he contracted malaria and a serious leg infection. He came back and stayed active in national affairs, but he never ran for president again. The Progressive Party tried to recruit him as a candidate in 1916, but he declined their offer. Illnesses from the Amazon left him weakened for the rest of his life. The hyperkinetic, ebullient Roosevelt died at the surprisingly young age of sixty in 1919. Taft came to the funeral and stayed longer than anyone else. After the crowds of mourners had dissipated, Taft stood, weeping, by Roosevelt’s grave.
Not only did Wilson win the White House but the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. This meant passage of quite a number of reformist policies that owed a big debt to Teddy Roosevelt’s insurgent progressive campaign. Ironically, although he campaigned against big government, President Wilson presided over a steady increase in central government authority over his two terms. During his term in office, the United States established the Federal Reserve System to reform and regulate banking. A federal income tax imposed limits on the great fortunes of America’s wealthy. Support of labor unions, aid for education and agriculture, and other progressive initiatives brought the country closer to other industrialized nations in its social policy programs. The size and influence of the central government jumped even further after the formal U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, which created a wartime economy driven by military spending and regulated by federal price controls. By the time Wilson left office, the Democratic Party in many ways had moved away from its nineteenth-century agrarian and regionalist past and toward a modern, technocratic future. Despite the continued prominence of segregationist and agrarian Southern interests, the Democratic Party had begun to exhibit recognizable contours of modern liberalism that William Jennings Bryan had laid out in 1896 and to which Wilson had given added political legitimacy with his win sixteen years later. In 1912, it was unclear which party would become the party of progressive reform. By 1920, it was becoming clear that the Democrats would be that party.38
The election of 1912 was the moment the American political system had its first major reckoning with the challenges of industrial capitalism, and we can draw three important lessons from this. First, the reckoning changed the two major parties—but it didn’t destroy them. This was a moment when either the Democrats or the Republicans could have become the Progressive party, and the title went to the Democrats while the conservatives consolidated their power in the GOP. Although Wilson campaigned on small government, it was the Republicans who went forth in the twentieth century as the party of small government, of unfettered markets, of fiscal conservatism.
There are some lessons about third parties here. The pattern we see in 1912 has repeated itself since. Independent parties introduce new ideas into the political system, turning the radical into the mainstream. But they often lack the organization to sustain the momentum after their celebrity candidates leave the spotlight. Instead, the two major parties open their tent flaps, and bring the new parties and their voters in. As historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed some decades later, “Third parties are like bees. They sting, and then they die.”39
Second, 1912 showcased a new style of politics that had its roots in the 1896 election but had gained important momentum by economic, technological, social, and political changes in the intervening years. Political reform and the new media made elections about candidates, not about parties. Charisma and celebrity mattered, as Teddy Roosevelt’s journey showed. Barnstorming tours and good relationships with the media mattered, as Woodrow Wilson exemplified. Staying put in the White House and relying on party machinery to win elections no longer worked. Taft learned this lesson the hard way.
Third, this election redefined the role of government in industrial America after fifty years of incredible change. It introduced ideas that were under debate a century later. The 1912 election was one where a consensus emerged that a government should do more than deliver the mail and have a standing army. It should protect workers, regulate markets, and ensure basic freedoms. Politicians then, and politicians now, generally agree on this basic principle but differ on the way to get there. Is the United States a nation that has an activist central government? Where markets are strongly regulated? Should government spend big? Should it raise taxes? Or should America be a nation that has less interference in individual lives? Should it deregulate business, and cut taxes?
Now, it wasn’t as if everything changed and stayed that way after 1912. The political road is rarely that straight. Change takes time. While Wilson and a Democrat-led Congress ushered in a remarkable amount of reform, the progressive and activist momentum slowed in the 1920s. A world war, anti-immigrant sentiment, and rising prosperity for many Americans tamped down the urge for
