loyal, a strategic problem-solver—seemed like an eminently sensible choice to carry on the TR legacy.
It was not easy to convince Taft to run; he still had the Supreme Court highest in his mind. “The President and the Congress,” he once said, “are all very well in their way … but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they really thought.” He had repeatedly denied, publicly and privately, that he would ever agree to be put in the running for the presidency.23 However, Roosevelt had an ally in Taft’s ambitious wife Nellie, who had been aspiring to the First Ladyship since her husband’s earliest days in politics. Faced with the combined persuasive powers of Teddy and Nellie, Taft agreed to do it. He later called the 1908 campaign “the most uncomfortable four months of my life.”24 He won, quite decisively vanquishing William Jennings Bryan, who would never run for president again.
The next day, Roosevelt sat down to write Taft a congratulatory letter that, while effusive, reflected the complicated nature of the two men’s friendship. Taft was the winner, but Roosevelt saw the victory as a validation of his own good judgment. “Dear Will,” TR wrote. “The returns of the election make it evident to me that you are the only man who we could have nominated that could have been elected. You have won a great personal victory as well as a great victory for the party, and all those who love you, who admire and believe in you, and are proud of your great and fine qualities, must feel a thrill of exultation over the way in which the American people have shown their insight into character, their adherence to high principle.”25
Within days, however, Taft began to disappoint Roosevelt’s high expectations. The note of thanks the president-elect wrote his predecessor in response expressed great gratitude for all Roosevelt had done to help the campaign, but it also gave some credit to Taft’s brother Charles, a Republican Party moneyman and political fixer. Roosevelt fumed. To him, Charlie Taft was a hack; Roosevelt was a statesman. Would Billy Taft be in the White House without Roosevelt’s endorsement and encouragement? Was this any way to repay a friend?
Rumors of rift started buzzing in the early months of 1909, as Roosevelt prepared to hand over the reins to his successor. And Roosevelt did little to stop them. “He means well and he’ll do his best,” he told a sympathetic journalist on the last day of his presidency. “But he’s weak.”26 With that, the ex-president steamed away on safari. He and Taft did not correspond for a year.
The real problem was bigger than a breach in etiquette. Theodore Roosevelt had a hard time not being president any more. He was fifty years old, healthy and energetic, and unemployed. He was hugely popular. He also was spending a lot of time thinking and absorbing new ideas as he traveled abroad. Touring Europe in the first months of 1910, he was presented by a range of political ideas and policy solutions more audacious and far-reaching than American reforms. The sweeping social insurance programs of Germany, the support for mothers and children in France, the worker housing programs of Great Britain: all these impressed Roosevelt in their scope and ambition. They presented a new potential for national government to intervene in the workings of markets, to remedy inequity, to promote economic security.
The speeches he gave on this European tour intensified in their bold proclamation of reformist ideas. In Paris, he talked of human rights being more important than property rights. In Oxford, he spoke about income inequality and the need for an “acceptance of responsibility, one for each and one for all.” While he refrained from prescribing solutions, he began to develop a more audacious, more compelling language around the need for reform. Coming from a leader of such charisma and passion, the progressive message that TR returned home with in the summer of 1910 was poised to win over American hearts and minds.27
In the meantime, the new president had been stepping into one public relations fiasco after another. He flip-flopped on critical issues like the tariff in ways that left pretty much everyone unhappy with him.28 And as his old boss moved to the left, Taft appeared to move to the right, joining in closer alliances with old guard Republicans in Congress. In reality, Taft and Roosevelt were not that far apart on many issues, but political flubs and media missteps tended to magnify their differences. One aide remarked that Taft “does not understand the art of giving out news” in the way his predecessor had done so masterfully.29
Adding to Taft’s public relations woes was the mounting gossip about the sour turn that the Roosevelt and Taft friendship had taken. In an effort to quell them, Roosevelt orchestrated an elaborate photo opportunity by paying a visit to Taft at his summer home in Massachusetts on his return to the United States in the summer of 1910—accompanied by 200 scribbling reporters. The New York Times reported the meeting as “a warm embrace” involving much laughter and backslapping.30 Yet this was merely a photo op. The restless Roosevelt continued to complain privately to friends about Taft’s job performance.
The Taft-Roosevelt rift was personal and sometimes petty, but it became politically significant because it mirrored a broader identity crisis in the Republican Party as the issues that drove politics in the nineteenth century gave way to the debates that would shape politics and policymaking in the twentieth. Mainstream Republicans of 1912 were the party of industry and enterprise, and they were supporters of tariffs on foreign imports to protect domestic manufacturing. Having controlled both Congress and the White House for most of the late nineteenth century, the mainstream GOP was less a party of reform than one of status quo. Yet this relative conservatism was hardly a laissez faire, small-government philosophy. The Republicans were, after all, the party of Reconstruction, of major public infrastructure projects like the transcontinental railroad and the land grant colleges, and of major welfare programs like the veterans’ pension system. In 1912, the advocates of small government and states’ rights hailed from the Democratic Party, not the Republican.
Republican constituencies in 1912 also were far different than what they would become over the course of the twentieth century. In 1912, the GOP was still the party of Lincoln. African Americans usually voted Republican, when they could vote, but racially motivated maneuvers like poll taxes and literacy tests in the Jim Crow South had largely disenfranchised the Southern black population. The key to the Republican Party’s dominance of national politics in the post-Civil War years was its strong presence in the urban Northeast and Midwest, where the majority of Americans lived at the time. Yet by the beginning of the twentieth century, the growing size of the Republican base in Western states was beginning to shift this regional hegemony. The manufacturing-heavy Northeast and Midwest was the bastion of pro-tariff, pro-business Republicanism. The agrarian Far West represented a vastly different set of interests, ones that blended anti-monopolist politics with crusading middle-class moralism.
While Republicans had held majorities in a political system that was staggering in its level of corruption and favoritism, the GOP was not simply a party of cronies. It was the party of Progressives. Many of the middle-class, native-born reformers came from the base of the Republican electorate, and had very different ideas about the party’s destiny. Many of these new Progressive voices came from West of the Mississippi. The GOP, they argued, no longer should be the party of modest market regulation. It should be the party of action. The defining issues of modern politics, the progressive faction argued, was cleaning up an electoral process that favored party insiders, and replacing patronage with efficient, professionalized government bureaucracies. The government was the only possible counterweight to the power of the huge industrial corporations, and government needed to pass and enforce more aggressive laws protecting workers, conserving natural resources, and alleviating poverty. They generated momentum for reform at all levels of government that began to shift the Republican Party from the one of the status quo to the one of hope and change.
The Republicans were not the only political party with an identity crisis on its hands. The Democratic Party had multiple constituencies with quite different visions of the American future. By 1912, the Democrats’ big tent encompassed the populists of the Great Plains and West who were demanding national government action on monetary reform and regulation of Wall Street. It included Southern whites with a huge
