reform movements (particularly those led by native-born, middle-class women and men) had their origins in religious and voluntary organizations, it was clear that meaningful reform needed more than churches and charities, settlement houses and orphanages. Only larger, public entities could tackle the multiple challenges created by industrialization. Government needed to do more.
Figure 3. Eugene V. Debs, 1912. Debs’s leadership of the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike of 1894 made him a working-class hero and decisively shifted his political allegiance from the Democrats to the Socialist Party. His 1912 Socialist candidacy was his third bid for the White House. Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress.
The initial push for a larger public role came in big cities, where such problems were most acute and painfully visible. Progressive reformers pushed to clean up corrupt local governments and establish professional civil service systems. Theodore Roosevelt burnished his reform credentials after being appointed to lead New York City Police Board in 1895, where he proceeded to clean up the corrupt institution and pass regulations dear to many reformers’ hearts, such as banning Sunday liquor sales. While the federal government remained largely on the sidelines, reformers within and outside state and local governments in the 1890s and 1900s enacted a range of measures from town planning to workers’ compensation to stricter child labor laws. Cities built infrastructure from bridges to parks, schools, housing, and water and sewer systems.16
The various efforts of middle-class reformers blended particular ideas about morality and correct behavior with a faith in large-scale organization and specialized “expertise.” American reform did not exist in isolation; similar movements and politics arose at the same time throughout the industrialized world, and in many instances American reformers took their cues and inspiration from European models. Often referred to as “Progressivism,” the reform impulse was not an organized political party nor was it a single ideology.17
With the ascension of Theodore Roosevelt to the Oval Office, Progressivism became more central to the national political conversation. After a long succession of rather colorless chief executives who toed the party line, Roosevelt impressed those longing for reform with his forceful personality and willingness to buck the authority of the Republican Party’s conservative leadership. While some of his actions as president were bold—particularly when it came to conservation of natural resources—others left Progressives wishing for more. He did not hesitate use his bully pulpit to call Wall Street bankers and corporate titans on the carpet, but he believed in corporate regulation, not breaking up monopolies altogether.
Roosevelt picked Taft to succeed him because he found him a fitting person to carry on his legacy. The same amiability and loyalty that had earned Taft so many good appointments encouraged Roosevelt to believe that Taft would do little to alter Roosevelt’s reformist agenda. TR had declined to run for a third term, but in Taft he envisioned a third term by proxy.
Within a few months, the new president proved him wrong. Perhaps the most grievous blow was Taft’s firing of Roosevelt’s close advisor Gifford Pinchot, who had been instrumental in creating the U.S. Forest Service and crafting a new federal approach to the management of lands and natural resources. When it came to corporate reform, Taft was actually a little more reform-minded than Roosevelt had been. But his political bumbling and reluctance to break with the GOP stalwarts on ossified approaches to trade and commerce gave many people—Roosevelt included—the impression that he was hardly the Progressive hero they wanted and needed.
In a world of increasingly advanced technology and complex organizations, it no longer made sense to have a U.S. government whose biggest agency was the Post Office. As Progressive era author Herbert Croly put it in 1909, “an American statesman could not longer represent the national interest without becoming a reformer.”18
It was in this atmosphere that the campaign of 1912 began. The United States had had a long and venerable tradition of small government and limited executive power. It was a testament to the incredible changes that had occurred over the four candidates’ lifetimes that they all agreed that more government action and regulation was necessary, and inevitable.
They just disagreed on how to get there.
The End of a Friendship
William Howard Taft seemed like an uninteresting president to many of his contemporaries. It might have been because he was uninterested in being president.
Taft’s greatest dream was to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. After obtaining his law degree, his quick ascent in the world of Republican politics came not through winning elections but through a series of judicial and administrative appointments. He once wrote that his professional rise was due to having his “plate right side up when offices were falling.”19 Yet this self-deprecating characterization belied his true accomplishments. First appointed a judge in 1887, by the mid-1890s Taft had distinguished himself as one of the most prominent and well-regarded jurists in the country, often mentioned as a likely appointee to the Supreme Court. Only his youth—he was less than forty at the time—put him out of serious contention.20
By this time, Taft and Roosevelt had become good friends. Their age, class, and political outlook gave them much in common. Their radically different personalities, extrovert and introvert, complimented one another. In Taft, Roosevelt had an attentive listener and advocate; in Roosevelt, Taft had both entertainment and intellectual stimulation. In the beginning, Taft was the senior of the two, having been appointed by Benjamin Harrison to be the nation’s number-three lawyer, solicitor general, in 1890. Roosevelt had a relatively less important appointment, civil service commissioner. When William McKinley became president in 1897, Taft urged him to appoint Roosevelt assistant secretary of the navy.
That appointment became TR’s springboard to national political celebrity, as he famously quit his job the following year to lead a brigade of roughneck cowboys and mercenaries into battle in Cuba. Despite his middle age and the general unpreparedness of U.S. troops, Roosevelt and his Rough Riders won the Battle of San Juan Hill and catapulted into legend. Riding the wave of postwar celebrity, he became governor of New York. Yet Roosevelt’s thirst for reform made him a thorn in the side of Republican Party bosses in New York, and by 1900 this contributed to his being dislodged from a job he enjoyed into one that had far less influence: the vice presidency of the United States. One commentator observed that the preternaturally vigorous Roosevelt had little desire to be “laid upon the shelf at his time of life.”21 He ended up spending little time on that shelf, however. On 14 September 1901, an assassin’s bullet felled McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt moved into the President’s Office.
The Spanish American War had resulted in Taft getting a new job as well: governor general of the Philippines, one of the remnants of the Spanish empire left in U.S. hands after the guns had been silenced. From 1900 to 1903, Taft took on this high-stakes, high-risk job and—from the perspective of his bosses in Washington—excelled at it. He walked into a political tinderbox. Most Filipinos had little desire to exchange one colonial ruler for another, and had launched a fiercely fought nationalist rebellion that was, in turn, being quite violently repressed by the U.S. military. By the time he left, the Filipino independence movement had been quashed and U.S.-led social and political institutions were in place that maintained civic stability and protected American economic interests. The regime Taft established helped perpetuate U.S. control over the nation and its people for another forty-one years.22
By 1904, Roosevelt had pulled his old friend back home to become his Secretary of War, one of the most powerful positions in Washington. The job further strengthened the relationship between Roosevelt and Taft. After some public dithering about whether to run again in 1908 (he had only been elected once, and the two-term limit then was a tradition rather than a statutory limitation),
