So, we're still talking about progressive politics in the early 20th Century
and in this segment
I want to particularly emphasize an election that I
usually emphasize in US History Survey
as one of the more important or most important I should say elections,
the election of 1912. As you may recall
Theodore Roosevelt, progressive Republican president, had
sort of hand-picked William Howard Taft
to undertake the presidency. He was his sort of hand-selected nominee and
Taft
wins the presidency in 1908. In 1909,
Theodore Roosevelt leaves the United States. He goes to Africa. He goes on
safari.
He returns in 1910. By the time he does return,
the Republican Party is already showing some
very definite divisions and Taft is
in the middle of it. In the 1910
midterm elections, these are congressional elections and
non-presidential election
years, in the 1910 midterm elections
progressive reform candidates won
approximately 40 seats in the House of Representatives.
Now that suggests
that the American public was attuned to the ideas of progressive reform.
But for the Republicans
who are themselves divided over progressive reform
it's not necessarily a good thing
politically because in that same election - 1910 -
the Democrats take over the House of Representatives.
For the Republican party then
that's not necessarily a good thing and the battle
over progressive reform further divides the Republican party - the question of
what to do,
and one element of that is that Roosevelt...
Theodore Roosevelt will instead of being
the friend of William Howard Taft become one of Raft's
sort of bitter enemies and that sets the stage
for a fascinating election in 1912
and for what happens with the Republican party.
The Republicans in 1912 held their convention in Chicago Illinois
and there were some 254 delegates
in dispute. Roosevelt needed to capture
approximately a hundred disputed delegate votes
in order to clinch the nomination. You could argue that Roosevelt
at least had a sense that he was fairly close to returning
if not to the presidency then to being the Republican Party's
chosen candidate. Theodore Roosevelt had won
all 13 of the Republican presidential primaries and these were relatively new
in the early 20th Century. They are
an outgrowth of progressive election reform.
Well Roosevelt had won. There's no reason to think he wouldn't get the nomination.
Taft was disliked by at least half the party in a big way.
Of course Roosevelt by the other half, I suppose, but it turned out
that the fix was in sort of,
that the votes that seemed to be up for grabs - many of them had already been
claimed by
the Taft supporters - that they had gotten an early and gotten in fast and hard and
secured the vote for Taft. The result
is that Taft receives the nomination.
Roosevelt and his supporters are incensed
because Taft is sort of a progressive but he's also sort of a conservative
of the McKinley stripe. Now
there had already been a move remember a division sort of
in the Republican party lead,
at least the progressive side, led by a figure
named Robert La Follette from Wisconsin
and there was already a sense that, should the nomination go to Taft, and
arguably the conservative side, that these progressives might well break away
and consider a third-party run at the presidency.
It looked as if I Bob LaFollette, Robert LaFollette, would be
in fact the nominee. So
the progressives do decide to run and they hold a convention also in Chicago in
August of 1912.
The progressive Republicans gather around Theodore Roosevelt.
He's such an iconic figure.
Robert La Follette begs off for illness
and that opens the door for Theodore Roosevelt to say that
he is as fit as a bull moose.
Now a bull moose of course is a large masculine
male moose and it becomes the iconic symbol
of the Progressive Party, often referred to as the Bull Moose party.
The Democrats meanwhile will meet in Baltimore,
in June, Baltimore Maryland,
and they'll hold their convention and after forty-six ballots
they will nominate Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson who has a sort of progressive background...
provenance... and along with Wilson
as his vice presidential candidate they will nominate Champ Clark
who was quite conservative and
who was Wilson's chief opposition
for the nomination. So what we have in 1912 in both the Democratic and the Republican
Party
are deep divisions
between those delegates, those
politicians who wish to take the country
in the progressive direction and that conservative element that wants to sort
of pull back
from progressive reform.
For Taft it was pretty unlikely
for a number of reasons that he actually had much of a chance of winning this
election.
It could have happened. You never discount someone but it just didn't seem
like there was much of a chance and from the very beginning Taft seemed to have this
sense that he was just
so disliked it wasn't going to happen. In fact,
he is quoted as saying... let me make sure I get this correct... "There are so many
people
in the country who don't like me." Not exactly the words of a winner,
if you know, if you understand there what I'm saying. Meanwhile, Roosevelt is out
just
you know out really pounding the campaign trail.
He proposes as early as 1910
in Osawatomie Kansas...
he proposes a program that will come to be known as the new nationalism
and in this program he suggests that he will continue
vigorous efforts by the federal government to achieve
social justice and I think that's in many ways
kind of old standard for Roosevelt, suggesting that
maybe he's become a wee bit more radical, a wee bit more progressive since his
last administration, but ultimately
he sees the idea of social justice for the American people
bound up with the idea of national interests.
That the two are the same. That they're linked.
A graduated income tax,
an inheritance tax, become part of his program. He also begins to talk about
worker compensation
and perhaps most important and even radically something that Taft himself had
approved of or backed and that was
regulation, government regulation, covering female
and child labor. It's a reform that had been called
for, called for, called for for decades and here in 1912
we're absolutely talking about it. Rosevelt also called for tariff
revision and for the further regulation
of big business. So that's sort of the progressive
situation. Woodrow Wilson,
who would become the candidate for
the Democratic Party, had that long-time progressive pedigree
as well, not unlike Theodore Roosevelt.
But Woodrow Wilson is a fascinating figure. Wilson, a Democrat, was born in Stanton
Virginia. He grew up during the Civil War and Reconstruction
in the south and to some extent that had to have affected his opinions and his
perspective
but much of his professional career was spent not in the south
but actually in the northern United States and in New Jersey.
He had gone to Princeton
University to study law and then he had gone on to
Johns Hopkins University
to seek a doctorare in political science
and in 1902
had become the president
of Princeton University. There
he fought for academic reform and
he demonstrated a trait
that would sort of identify his presidency,
identify his political career. First of all,
maybe coming from his political science background, there was this tendency
to think of American party politics in almost a sort of
British parliamentary sense where
discipline, party discipline, holding together the ranks
for achieving the purposes of the party becomes
all-important.
And the fact is that Wilson demonstrated even as university president that he could be
a taskmaster,
that he could have definite ideas, that he was the leader.
So a bit authoritarian perhaps but also
that he had about himself a sense of moral righteousness - that
it was enough that Wilson believed it was important
to make it important, to make it right.
Listen to Wilson. You don't, you'll pay the price, but
that he's right. It's a sort of confidence, even overconfident sometimes
that will really haunt I think
his political career. He goes on in 1910
to become the governor of New Jersey and there
as governor he establishes a pretty successful record of progressive
legislation, but in the process
and because of a deep unwillingness to give up on his sense of self
and a deep unwillingness to compromise,
to move beyond simple discipline, to move away from his position,
and to compromise with other members of his party or the opposition,
Wilson finds himself alienated
not only from much of his party but from the electorate
of New Jersey. And probably
had he not left the governorship to run for the presidency in 1912,
had he sought re-election in other words for the governorship of New Jersey,
most likely Wilson would not have won.
And it's kind of like the Roosevelt story in New York where Roosevelt because of
his just personality because of his
desperate press to be successful with progressive legislation
Roosevelt sort of moves to the national political realm
to get him out of New York. Similarly here,
Wilson has managed to
move to the national realm of politics in part because of how sour things had
become
in New Jersey.
Wilson puts forward for his 1912 run for the presidency
a sort of alternative progressive platform and he calls it the new freedom.
It's not so different from the new nationalism. In fact, I often say in
you know regular classes that I'm teaching that these two things...
these programs are fairly similar after all.
Wilson will talk about social justice, he'll talk about
income tax, he'll talk about female and child labour regulation,
all of that. I guess the major point of differentiation
for the new freedom is Wilson's sort of ideas about big business
and trust-busting.
On the one hand, I think Wilson as a Democrat
has more of a fear of the federal government
then Roosevelt does. More of a fear
of a president using that executive power
to use the federal government to political
or ideological ends. Roosevelt you recall had started this process that Taft had
continued
of going after the trusts and busting them for unreasonable restraint of trade
under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Really
though Wilson tends to believe, tends to see
trusts as inherently ineffective.
It's not that he likes the trust. In fact it's just the opposite. He dislikes
the trust.
But rather than use government to try and bust them up
after the fact Wilson leans toward policies that will stop
this growth of trusts and combinations which he inherently sees as
unreasonable restraints to trade in the free market.
Wilson wants to stop them in their infancy before
they really expand and become powerful...
powerful factors in the national economy.
So again he's more interested...
he's less interested in using government but he's just as interested in dealing
with the trusts.
It's just that Wilson wants to see them destroyed before they grow
and he's willing to use government but in very limited ways
to make this happen.
Well the election itself is quite fascinating.
It's a three-way, at least a three-way, four if you consider Eugene Debs.
Roosevelt takes 27% of the vote, of the popular vote,
and wins 6 States. So an independent party,
a third party in American political speak,
has actually beat out the Republican Party,
William Howard Taft's 23% of the popular vote
and two states in the electoral college.
Debs and the Socialists manage about 6%
of the popular vote
but it's Woodrow Wilson who while he doesn't win that clear a majority
taking him over 50%,
Wilson with his 42% of the popular vote
will win 435 of 531
electoral votes. Clear win in the electoral college and in American politics
that's what matters. The result
flows from the fact that the Republicans had split.
In no small part, the Republicans had split and that brings a Democrat
to the White House for the first time since Grover Cleveland,
going back to the 1880's for his first term.
Now if you think about that for just a moment
and it seems like, wow, you know, it goes all the way back to reconstruction. It
goes back because remember Wilson was born in the south
but of course he professionally is from New Jersey
and from higher education, from academia.
But the real importance here I think in the election in 1912 is not
the split in the Republican party, as fascinating as that is, or
the emergence of a third-party competitor. Of course
a lot of it had to do with Roosevelt's personality.
It's not even so much the emergence of the Democrats, though that is important
because remember they controlled the House
and now they controlled the presidency in 1912.
What's really fascinating to me is that if you think about it another way
70% of the United States electorate
supported clear progressive change.
They supported either
Roosevelt or Wilson,
and if you want to consider as I have suggested Taft as sort of a forgotten
progressive,
it just goes to show the degree to which progressive ideas
had emerged as the dominant force in American politics
by 1912 and this election.
So we've spent quite a few lectures on the progressives and
progressive politics and progressive ideas
and the ways in which progressive ideas emerge from
the threats and the radicalism and
the needs that the middle class saw for reform.
Well by 1912 here it is.
What's going to happen in the next year - 1913 -
will be absolutely amazing in terms of progressive reform
and we'll get to that in the next segment.