and able to spout snappy sound bites rather than long-winded speeches. By 1992, the 24-hour news cycle propelled by the rise of cable television news not only created a demand for perpetual feeding of the media “beast” but allowed campaigns ample air time to take their messages, and their campaign “spin,” directly to the voters.
All these themes are intertwined and interdependent. Changing modes of political communication contributed to the decline in partisan attachments and helped third-party candidates gain traction. New technologies gave politicians fresh ways to communicate to voters, and an ability to talk to citizens directly without the mediating influence of party organization. At the same time, innovations in the way American elections worked encouraged the widespread adaptation of new media. Late nineteenth-century reforms like the adoption of the secret ballot made more direct means of political communication and persuasion necessary, sowing the seeds of entirely new fields of campaign communications and political advertising. The rise of organized political interest groups in the early decades of the twentieth century helped propel the growth of print media and radio as means of political communication, as different lobbies appealed to voters’ hearts and heads through ever more sophisticated appeals. Successive waves of communication innovation, from radio to television to the Internet, allowed third-party candidates to spread their message and win voter support. More broadly, the rapid expansion of the electorate due to population growth, immigration, and women’s suffrage meant communication needed to be carried out on a scale that was simultaneously mass in its reach and targeted in its messages.11
Ultimately, presidential elections are places where the ordinary and the extraordinary meet. While it is wrong to assert that certain elections “changed everything,” they are nonetheless singular and significant events in the historical landscape, with effects that resonate far beyond the first Tuesday in November. Elections are driven by giant personalities and increasingly complex and expensive campaign organizations, but for all their bluster and spin and hanging chads, they are instruments of democracy. Once every four years on the first Tuesday in November, American voters make their choices, mark their ballots, and determine who wins and who loses. The heat and light of a presidential campaign leaves an indelible mark on all who decide to run, and especially those who win. Even the fiercest political rivals ultimately bond together because of the shared experience of being president.
Once friends, Jefferson and Adams became bitterly divided by the election of 1800. With the passage of time and the mellowing of old age, however, their enmity began to thaw. In 1812, Adams finally reached out to Jefferson, writing a letter to which Jefferson quickly and warmly responded. Adams’s letter, he wrote “carries me back to the times when … we were laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.”12 Thus began a lively and affectionate correspondence between the two old rivals that continued until the end of their lives. On hearing of the election of Adams’s son John Quincy to the presidency, Jefferson wrote: “I sincerely congratulate you on the high gratification which the issue of the late election must have afforded you…. So deeply are the principles of order, and of obedience to law impressed on the minds of our citizens generally that I am persuaded there will be as immediate an acquiescence in the will of the majority as if Mr. Adams had been the choice of every man.”13 Elections come and go, Jefferson seemed to say, but the values of democracy endured.
Remarkably, Jefferson and Adams died on the same day: 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Politics had consumed most of their lives and torn apart their friendship, but they ultimately found common cause in the democratic ideas that had made them revolutionaries. In the decades that followed, many other giant personalities occupied the office of the presidency. It was not until the turn of a new century, however, that the great debate that had consumed the early republic—big government or small government? a nation of farms or a nation of factories?—took center stage once more in presidential politics.
PART I
1912
CHAPTER 1
The Great Transformation
In the early morning of 18 June 1910, the ocean liner Kaiserin Augusta Victoria steamed into a fog-shrouded New York Harbor. The mist and intermittent drizzle of the morning had not kept a large flotilla of boats—from battleships to pleasure cruisers—from crowding the harbor, nor had it dissuaded the thousands of people who lined the streets in anticipation of the day to come. For the liner Kaiserin was bringing home former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was returning to the United States after more than a year overseas. Roosevelt was not only New York City’s favorite son, but a beloved national figure. On African safari for eleven months, and then on a tour of Europe for another four, he had been gone but hardly forgotten. Instead, his celebrity seemed to have increased over his prolonged absence.
The celebration that followed on that June day showed what a major public presence the ex-president continued to be, fifteen months after he turned over the White House to his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft. American flags waved as the day turned sunny. Roosevelt paraded down Manhattan streets, tipping his top hat to the jostling spectators, as policemen held back the eager crowds. A band played “Roosevelt’s Grand Triumphal March,” specially commissioned for the occasion.
On an outdoor stage festooned with bunting, he gave a classic, rousing speech to the assembled throng. Immediately below, reporters scribbled furiously in their notebooks, composing hyperbolic accounts that appeared on the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast. “Well, He’s ‘Back from Elba,’” proclaimed a banner headline in the Tacoma Times in far-off Washington State, calling it the “greatest welcome in the nation’s history.”1
Figure 1. Theodore Roosevelt’s triumphal return to the New York City after many months abroad made front-page news across the country. Tacoma Times, 18 June 1910, 1.
Political leaders also showered Roosevelt with praise. In the pages of a leading national magazine, President Taft gave the returning leader a flattering welcome. “After the heavy cares of the presidential office for eight strenuous years, he sought rest by contrast in the depths of the African forest and in great physical exertion in the hunting of large game,” Taft wrote. “His path since the time he landed in Europe until he sailed has been a royal progress,” a rapturous reception that “shows the deep impress his character, his aims, and his methods as a civil and social reformer have made on the world at large.”2
In a letter Roosevelt wrote Taft two days later, he could hardly contain his glee at the rapturous reception, even as he professed a desire to stay away from public life. “I am having a perfect fight to avoid being made to give lectures, and even of the invitations I have accepted there are at least half of them I wish I had not.”3
If bets were being made in June 1910 about the man most likely to win the presidency in 1912, the good money was on Theodore Roosevelt. The odds weighed in his favor not only because of his fame and biography, but also because of the weakness of any other possible contender. Chief among the weak was the incumbent in the White House. TR would have been a hard act for any politician to follow, but it was doubly difficult for Taft—amiable, intelligent, but lacking the political instincts and personality of his predecessor. His political missteps on bedrock Republican issues like the protective tariff had shaken the faith of both the GOP leadership and key constituencies. His more cautious and incremental approach to progressive issues like corporate regulation and conservation
