On the other side of the aisle, discord and frustration consumed the Democrats. The party had run the same man—William Jennings Bryan—as their nominee in three of the previous four presidential elections. He had lost every time. Grover Cleveland had been the only Democrat elected president since the Civil War. Although Bryan’s fiery populism had roused mass support among discontented farmers and working people, it failed as a national political strategy. The inroads that Democrats had made into some traditionally Republican states of the Northeast and Midwest during the Cleveland years had dissipated, and the Party now struggled to rebuild a coalition that could win the White House.4
Making the landscape even rockier for the two major parties were independent political movements bubbling up on the leftward end of the political spectrum. The Socialist Party was the most powerful among them, having brought together a range of left-leaning groups and ideologies into a political organization with a powerful and persuasive message about the inequities of industrial capitalism. The Socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs, had run for president in 1904 and 1908 with impressive, if not election-altering results.
Yet seasoned political observers know not to predict election outcomes too far in advance. The odds-makers of July 1910 might have been amazed to learn that the 1912 race would go to a man who, on the day of TR’s triumphant homecoming, had not yet been elected to political office.
Woodrow Wilson was a scholarly type who, although politically savvy, disliked the sorts of political spectacles Roosevelt relished. A Southerner of moderate-to-conservative views, the highest office he had obtained prior to 1910 was the presidency of Princeton University, from which he had rather unceremoniously stepped down after attempting dramatic reforms of campus traditions and institutions. Despite this setback, Wilson had already started to build a national political reputation as a leading voice for a new kind of Democratic ideology—an alternative to the populism of Bryan, but one that still supported public action to curb the power of corporations and protect individual rights. To a national Democratic Party looking rather desperately for a fresh face, Wilson provided it.5
Two months after Roosevelt’s “return from Elba,” Wilson won the Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey. In a spectacular fall campaign, he turned on the machine politicians who had been responsible for securing his nomination and ran as a modern reformer. In November, Wilson secured the governorship, part of a Democratic wave in the midterm elections that signaled deep trouble for the national Republican Party.6
In the two years that followed, the political fortunes of the four men who became the significant candidates of 1912—Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, and Debs—shifted dramatically, as did those of the other men who tried, and failed, to win the presidency. Friendships frayed. Alliances imploded. And as their prospects rose and fell, as new people entered the battle and others faded out of it, these politicians engaged in a debate about the nature of citizenship, corporate power, and government responsibility that had not been seen before in American politics. The men and women who supported their campaigns joined in the conversation, helping turn the nation’s focus away from the political issues that had consumed the nineteenth century and toward the ideas that defined the twentieth.
This extraordinary election brought ideas into the political mainstream that had been considered radical only a few years earlier. It realigned both the Democratic and Republican Parties in subtle but significant ways, and showed the power of third-party insurgencies to disrupt—but not overturn—the two-party system. It demonstrated how far the system had come from the styles and methods of politicking that had characterized national races since the days of Jefferson and Adams, and institutionalized an entirely new breed of campaign rituals and strategies that had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and became business as usual in the twentieth.
America Transformed
Like all presidential contests, the 1912 election only can be fully understood in the context of the changes the United States had experienced in the years leading up to it. And for this election, we must go back farther than 1910, or even 1890 or 1870, but all the way to the eve of the Civil War to comprehend the men who ran and the people who protested, organized, agitated, and voted for them.
A good place to begin is 5 November 1855, when future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs was born into a family of French immigrant grocers in Terre Haute, Indiana. The America baby Gene came into was a place where three of four people lived in the countryside or small towns. Most of them were farmers. No city in the U.S. had more than a million people.7 While new technologies like the mechanized loom and the cotton gin were transforming markets, and new transportation networks of canal and rail were enabling new flows of goods, people, and communication, most Americans lived according to preindustrial rhythms. People wore watches and consulted clocks, but local time was not standardized and remained governed by the rising and setting of the sun. Families like the Debses immigrated across oceans while native-born white Americans continually migrated westward across the continent, but travel was slow and news moved just as slowly.8
Preindustrial rhythms of life held strongest sway in the pre-Civil War American South, where well over 90 percent of the population were rural, the manufacturing economy was minuscule, and roads and railroads were far scarcer than in the North.9 This was the world into which Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in December 1858, the son of a clergyman in Staunton, Virginia. Moving as a baby to Georgia, and then to South Carolina, Wilson had a childhood surrounded by war’s terror and its devastating aftermath.10
The human suffering and physical destruction wrought by the war propelled a turning point in America’s understanding of itself. Before the Civil War, the country had operated as a sometimes tenuously connected “union” of self-governing states with markedly different economies, demographics, and cultural sensibilities. Afterward, the country increasingly came to be understood as, and function as, a “nation” whose federal government wielded increasing power and whose citizens shared common values and culture. As historian James McPherson writes, “the war marked the transition of the United States to a singular noun.”11
The end of war also escalated remarkable changes already underway in the American economy. In the span of a few decades, the United States became an industrial colossus, home to some of the largest corporations and richest people on the planet. Rapid industrialization triggered foreign immigration and urbanization of unprecedented scale and speed. As the population swelled, a growing nation became a giant consumer market for products made in American factories.
Some of this change became evident well before the Civil War in New York City, where Theodore Roosevelt was born to affluent parents in October 1858. Always a polyglot, multiethnic metropolis, New York had become intensely more so since the 1820s, as waves of immigrants from Ireland and continental Europe arrived at its docks and stayed for good, squeezing into overcrowded tenements and urban slums. Many of these immigrants—and the millions who would follow them in the decades to come—went to work in the new factories that were growing up in New York and cities like it. Men, women, and children alike worked long hours, six days a week, in factory jobs that ranged from moderately to extremely dangerous. They worked for low pay, few benefits, and no safety net if they got injured on the job.12
One year before and a thousand miles to the southwest, William Howard Taft had been born into prosperity in the Midwestern river city of Cincinnati. While his family were not quite as rich as Roosevelt’s, they were nonetheless quite comfortable and politically influential. Taft’s father, Alphonso, was a powerful Republican who served in President Ulysses S. Grant’s cabinet as attorney general and as secretary of war. Both a political power broker and an attentive father, the elder Taft had high expectations of his son Billy. The younger Taft rose to them. Although he struggled with obesity throughout his life, he was a natural athlete and became a star baseball player in high school, only giving it up when his parents cautioned him not to neglect
