Pivotal Tuesdays. Margaret O'Mara
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 economic and social stake in keeping Jim Crow intact and who were suspicious of a powerful central government that might trample on states’ rights to maintain segregation. Foreign-born immigrants also voted Democratic, in part because of the powerful influence of Democratic machines in large cities. And, like the Republicans, the Democrats included some Progressive reformers. These reformers argued that the Democratic Party, not the GOP, could be the standard-bearer for a more activist central government, for better lives for working people, and for breaking up the monopolies and ushering in a fairer capitalist order.
After his return from abroad in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt had seized on the cresting Progressive wave and went on a nationwide speaking tour, sounding more progressive with every stop. More must be done to keep corporations out of politics, Roosevelt told mesmerized crowds of five, ten, and twenty thousand. Corporate directors whose companies broke the law should be subject to prosecution. The national government must do much, much more. In Osawatomie, Kansas, on 31 August, Roosevelt gave the definitive speech that gave this new philosophy a name—the “New Nationalism”—and declared it would not only fix the problems of industrial capitalism, but also allow the nation to transcend its vexing issues of sectionalism, corruption, and class divides.31
Yet while barnstorming the country like a presidential contender and drawing massive and enthusiastic crowds, Roosevelt continued to swat away all suggestions of running for president. “There is nothing I want less,” he told newspaper editor, leading progressive, and close ally William Allen White as 1910 drew to a close.32
Reluctance to challenge his old protégé Taft seemed the least of the reasons Roosevelt was refraining from a run. Like presidents before and after him, he worried that he might not win. New winds were blowing, but Roosevelt didn’t think the Republican Party was quite ready to swing to the progressive side. He figured he would have better luck remaking his party in 1916. Given the opposition within the party to progressive ideas, Roosevelt worried that, even if he won in 1912, he might ultimately risk his legacy. “I do not see how I could go out of the presidency again with the credit I had when I left it,” he confessed to White. But, as all savvy politicians do, he left the door open. If his supporters and friends felt he was the only hope for the progressive cause, “it would be unpatriotic of me” not to stand for election.33
Figure 4. William H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, 1909. Taft was Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor for the White House, but by the early months of Taft’s presidency the two men’s political alliance—and personal friendship—was in tatters. Brown Brothers, Library of Congress.
Whether motivated by duty, ego, or a combination of both, Roosevelt found it increasingly hard to resist the lure of the campaign trail as 1912 neared. As the next chapter will show, this had huge consequences.
CHAPTER 2
The Progressive Campaign
Roosevelt continued