winning high grades and following his father and half-brother to Yale in 1874.
By this time, teenage “Teedie” Roosevelt was spending hours in the boxing gym and on the wrestling mat in an attempt to bulk up his skinny physique. Gene Debs had dropped out of school to support his family and was working on the railroad, first as a painter and cleaner, and then as a locomotive fireman. Tommy Wilson was preparing to leave the Reconstruction-era South and head North to college.
By the mid-1880s, Taft was an assistant county prosecutor in Ohio. After graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt had dropped out of law school but still managed to get himself elected to the New York State Assembly. Wilson received one of the very first Ph.D.s in history and was a junior faculty member trying to write his first book. Debs had become a full-time labor organizer for his fellow railroad workers.
In these two decades of change in the four men’s lives, the United States was undergoing an extraordinary transformation. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad had linked the West and East coasts. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell had filed his patent for the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison had developed his first incandescent light bulb. Beginning in the 1880s, the predominantly Northern European character of the nation began to change with the arrival of new waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. As new arrivals had done before and since, they took on the dirtiest and hardest jobs, from urban factories to Western mines and oilfields. An increasingly diverse United States became home to millions who brought with them new languages, cultural traditions, and political ideologies.
Everything grew bigger. Farm production doubled. The U.S. population tripled. The value of manufacturing became six times larger. Cities grew up and out; between 1860 and 1910, the number of people living in American cities grew from 6 million to 44 million.
America lacked the institutions and governmental organizations to cope with such massive growth. It was the apex of the era of machine politics in the cities, kickbacks and bribery in the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures, and chaos nearly everywhere else. As muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens put it in his 1904 expose of urban political machines, the debilitating effects of this “boodle”—aka, political corruption—were “so complex, various, and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them.”13
Figure 2. Joseph Keppler, “The Bosses of the Senate,” 23 January 1889. Political corruption accompanied the explosive growth of the American industrial economy after the Civil War, and many in the U.S. Congress fell under the sway of big railroads and big oil. Library of Congress.
Meanwhile, the firms that ran the railroads, owned the mines and oilfields, and controlled the factories grew into enormous corporations and conglomerates of extraordinary power and reach. Their power overshadowed that of the government. In 1891, the Pennsylvania Railroad had 110,000 employees. The entire U.S army was less than a third that size. Federal government spending per capita was about $129, less than 10 percent of gross domestic product.
The speed and scale of change, and the failure of American social institutions to manage it, spurred Americans of all classes, regions, and political ideologies to question the status quo and agitate for alternative approaches. While grassroots protest and reform movements had been part of American civil society since before the Revolution, fast and ubiquitous national and transnational communications networks allowed reform ideas to gather force more rapidly and widely than before. News of strikes and protests crackled across telegraph wires in moments, students returned from abroad with radical new ideas, newspapers printed fiery speeches, and magazine editors filled pages with long-form investigative reporting on the excesses of the era. Cheaper printing, far-reaching networks of road and rail, and higher literacy rates expanded publishing and readership.
Farmers and laborers in the Midwest and West cursed the far-off bankers and corporate titans whose stranglehold on markets drove down crop prices and drove up shipping costs. They mobilized locally in the 1880s through organizations like the Grange, and nationally in the 1890s through the Populist Party, using modern media and charismatic leaders to voice their discontent with the modern order. A new wave of Democratic leaders seized the opportunity to broaden the Party’s regional constituencies and pushed for the adoption of key Populist Party principles into its 1896 party platform as well as nominating Bryan, populist firebrand and powerful orator, three times running.
Yet with a Congress under the sway of corporate “boodle” and a series of White House occupants more beholden to party bosses than to changing the status quo, much of the reform energy prior to 1900 emanated from outside national political institutions. Critiques of the industrial order ranged from moderate to radical. Some began to advocate for some regulation of the monopolistic companies that controlled disproportionate chunks of the national economy. Others thought the only solution was to break up the corporate giants altogether. The most ardent anti-monopolists advocated property reform and mandatory wealth redistribution.
Working-class people went on strike and mobilized into labor unions. Their middle-class allies joined them in crusading for workplace safety, workers compensation, and child labor laws. Socialists, communists, and anarchists argued that the entire capitalist system needed to be replaced. Some resorted to violence to express their fury at the system, resulting in a number of acts of domestic terrorism, including the 1901 assassination of William McKinley—the act that propelled Theodore Roosevelt into the President’s Office. Women, who didn’t get the right to vote in most states until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, played prominent roles in many of these movements, from the anarchist fringe to the “respectable” middle.
The four candidates of 1912 resided at different places in this spectrum of reform. Roosevelt entered politics in 1882 when elected to the New York State Assembly, believing that more men of his class—educated, enlightened—needed to become involved in what he called “the raw coarseness and the eager struggle of political life.”14 Wilson, in contrast, spent the first three decades of his career in academia. While conservative when it came to social issues like race relations, his long tenure outside formal politics perhaps made him bolder when it came to bucking the party bosses; by the time he ran for president, he would argue for breaking up business monopolies. William Howard Taft was a good Republican Party man, winning a series of plum judicial and administrative appointments as a reward for his competence and amiability. Although sympathetic to Progressive causes, he was a quiet, unshowy sort of reformer.
The rise of Eugene Debs, on the other hand, attested to the great anguish and political discontent among the working people who suffered the most in the new industrial economy. By the early 1890s, Debs had given up working on the railroad and instead was working to represent the interests of railroad workers, becoming head of the powerful American Railway Union in 1893. The following year, workers at the Pullman Company went on strike to secure better wages and working conditions. Pullman was America’s leading manufacturer of railway sleeping cars, a critical cog in the railway machine. Debs organized a nationwide railway boycott of the Pullman cars in support. Workers in railway yards across the country refused to couple the Pullman cars to trains. Engineers refused to drive them. The entire national rail system ground to a complete halt.15
The railroad was so important to the functioning of the national economy that the federal government intervened. Democratic President Grover Cleveland sided with Pullman, not its workers, and dispatched U.S. soldiers to Chicago to restore the peace. Although Debs already had exhorted his members to keep the main trains running and mitigate the worst effects of the strike, the Cleveland administration still sent him to prison for blocking interstate commerce. He emerged a national celebrity and a hero of the workingman. A lifelong Democrat, he was so disgusted at Cleveland’s actions that he switched to the Socialist Party, first running for president on its ticket in 1904.
By this time, the many currents of protest and calls for reform
