Primaries were new. Nobody knew how seriously they would be taken.
It’s one thing to win a lot of primaries.
It’s another thing to go and get the nomination.
A new deal for the American people
Extremism in the defense of liberty
There is no substitute for victory.
The United States of America
Theodore Roosevelt was the greatest sensation in American politics.
People followed him, he was exciting, he was emphatic.
Whatever Roosevelt did became a scene.
Since Abraham Lincoln,
there hadn’t been a President who really took the office and made it strong and effective.
He was a breath of fresh air.
The Industrial Revolution had hit the United States like a gale force.
For the first time in American history the enemy of freedom was not so clearly the government.
Now it was private power concentrated in corporations.
Roosevelt took the first steps to really reform the worst problems that had emerged.
In 1908, many people wanted T.R. to take another term.
He had had part of McKinley’s term and his own term.
And he decided that he didn’t want to violate the two term tradition.
I think as soon as he announced, he regretted it. And he handed the White House to one of
his most loyal cabinet members, William Howard Taft, and went off to hunt in Africa.
That was fun for a while, but he began to get restless
and he began to hear rumors that Taft was going weak, wasn't a worthy successor.
Taft is pretty unpopular by 1912. He just can’t seem to hold the party together.
People see T.R. as a savior. He is the most popular man in America.
Taft had the support of most of the party machinery.
So Roosevelt's only chance to get nominated by the Republican Party was through the primary.
Because of the efforts of Roosevelt, important states including Ohio,
William Howard Taft's home state, enact the primary.
It was the first time that people could directly participate. So all of a sudden they became so engaged
and thousands of people showed up at rallies that the candidates would have.
Roosevelt could talk all day. He was pretty good at the whistle stop.
You go through 30 cities in a day.
There was this soap opera nature to it that also was very exciting. These guys had been best friends
and now they're fighting against each other, calling each other names.
T.R. calls Taft a puzzlewhit. It was sort of an ugly friend-against-friend story.
Taft called Roosevelt a honeyfugler.
And it took me a long time to find out what a honeyfugler means.
The primaries were celebrated as a reform but people noticed right away that you risk
a degeneration of a contest between two parties that stand for something
to a cult of personality, to a personal battle where the candidates attack each other.
I would say that Roosevelt supported the primaries because he did so well in them.
Even though it was only 13 states out of 48 that had primaries,
the Roosevelt camp would argue “You let the people decide.” And they want T.R.
Roosevelt goes to the 1912 Republican Convention about 50 votes short of getting the nomination,
so he runs a whole campaign to get those 50 delegates to change sides.
Only about 8 of them do. Up to this time, the leading candidates did not attend the convention to respect the integrity of the parties,
but before the convention, when Roosevelt heard how badly things were going,
he could pace no longer.
He jumped on a train and came to the convention to take command of his forces.
Just before the final reckoning he gave this rousing talk, including the immortal lines,
“We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
But the Republican establishment made the decision to nominate Taft, who they thought
would almost certainly lose, because they wanted to retain control of the Republican Party.
Roosevelt tells his people to walk out, to refuse to vote in this fraudulent contest
and to leave the convention. They convened in a separate location and there they hatched
the plan to launch a third party, the Progressive Party.
People said, “Roosevelt, you’re too old for this. You’ve already been president, you can’t—“
He said, “I feel as strong as a bull moose.”
Theodore Roosevelt in the Progressive Party puts on the table the modern welfare state.
It’s social security. It’s unemployment insurance, old age pension.
It’s a National Health Service. National Health Insurance, women’s suffrage.
Workman’s compensation, it’s the end of child labor.
And Roosevelt got a lot of votes, but he didn’t get enough. And poor old Taft came in third.
The presidential primary process is only about 100 years old.
It keeps changing over time.
The truth is that Roosevelt wanted presidential primaries
for the same reason that most politicians
want any political arrangement,
and that is for his own self-interest.
He was a politician, and
politicians want things to work their way.
We see the politicians saying the system is rigged.
Well, it's rigged as long as it isn't working for them.