A Nov. 16, 1912, Harper’s Weekly cartoon distilled the election’s outcome: In the original caption, Taft, as the GOP elephant, says to his opponent, Bull Moose Roosevelt: “Well, you’ve helped rip me apart and ‘downed’ yourself! Now I hope you’re satisfied!”
AS MEMBERS OF THE PROGRESSIVE Party began filling Chicago’s hotels in preparation for the August 5, 1912, opening of the “Bull Moose Convention,” journalists remarked that “no man could go through the lobbies” without confronting a gathering of people that “looked less like the average Republican or Democratic Convention than anything you ever saw.” There was “not a saloon-keeper in the crowd”; the delegates were younger and more earnest than the usual convention goers. Petticoats were everywhere. Hundreds of social workers, suffragettes, and advocates for working girls’ rights had enlisted in the new party. “Instead of forcing your way through a crowd of tobacco-stained political veterans,” the New York Times observed, “you raise your hat politely and say, ‘Pardon me, Madam.’ ”
A sense of “great adventure” was in the air, William Allen White observed in the Boston Daily Globe, despite the certainty of “a convention seemingly without contest or climax, a convention apparently devoid of chance or speculation.” No one questioned who the nominee would be or how it would come about. There would be “no dead places” in the convention hall, “no blocks of delegates seated with arms folded, with faces set and sullen while other delegates behaved like dancing dervishes.” There was little dissent on any major issue; almost everyone believed in the Social Gospel. They had come to Chicago as crusaders, “satisfied that they were in the right.”
Roosevelt had already contrived his response to the only issue that threatened this near-perfect accord. Though the new party embraced a number of Negro delegates from the North (“more, in fact,” he noted, “than ever before figured in a National convention”), there would not be a single Negro delegate from the South. The Colonel had given southern progressives permission to send solely white delegations. Hoping to break into the “Solid South,” he had persuaded himself that true justice would only come to Negro residents of old Confederate states by enlisting the efforts of “high-minded white men.” Roosevelt’s policy “was riddled with contradictions and paradoxes,” as the historian John Gable succinctly observes. “He wanted to establish the New Nationalism on a nationwide basis by using a sectionalist approach; he sought to bring an end to racism by a racist strategy.” When word of Roosevelt’s “lily-white” delegations leaked, discord surfaced among party members attending the convention. But once Roosevelt made it clear that he absolutely would “not budge,” the issue quickly faded from discussion. It was evident to all that Roosevelt himself was “the whole show,” the rhyme and reason for the new party.
Once again, Chicago went mad with Theodore Roosevelt’s arrival. The streets were blocked, all work came to a halt, and the sidewalks were filled with thousands of people. Standing in the rear of an open automobile as he made his way to the same hotel suite where he had stayed during the Republican Convention, Roosevelt was buoyant: “My friends,” he proclaimed, “it is a great pleasure for me to be in Chicago again, and this time at the birth of a new party and not at the death of an old party.” Reaching the Congress Hotel, he settled in to work on his all-important speech. He had deliberately scheduled his address before the platform was voted on, informing delegates that he would accept their nomination only if the party’s agenda corresponded to the views he intended to outline in his “Confession of Faith.”
When Roosevelt stepped onto the stage of the Coliseum, he received perhaps one of “the greatest personal demonstrations that has ever been given a man in public life.” Seasoned reporters were long accustomed to staged political rallies. Over the years, they had witnessed “hundreds of men marching about with signs and banners, and shouting themselves hoarse”; but this display of genuine emotion was unprecedented. The men and women gathering in Chicago had left past affiliations behind, having decided to “cast their lots together” under the banner of a fledgling movement. They signaled their collective identity with a unique “battle flag”—a red bandanna, chosen to represent “the plain people,” the heart of the country. Every man wore the party’s emblem around his neck; every woman had one around her wrist. One delegate had even fastened a red bandanna around the neck of a stuffed bull moose, strategically placed at the front of the auditorium.
Roosevelt “stood smiling in the center of the storm,” waving his bandanna at friends in various delegations. Twenty thousand voices spontaneously rose in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the assembled crusaders finding courage and unity in the stirring words and soaring melody. During the nearly hour-long demonstration, Roosevelt’s managers invited a procession of people onto the platform to shake hands with the Colonel. When Jane Addams was led to the stage, the delegates “sprang to their feet and yelled,” offering a moving tribute to the settlement house worker who had committed her life to helping the poor and the underprivileged. “I have been fighting for progressive principles for thirty years,” she said. “This is the first time there has been a chance to make them effective. This is the biggest day of my life.”
When it seemed that the ecstatic tumult would never end, Roosevelt looked toward his wife, seated in a box near the stage. While Edith had dreaded her husband’s entry into the race, she knew that once he had committed himself to the fight, he had to carry it through. Noting her “jovial smile and bright eye,” Roosevelt beamed. He took off his hat and hailed her, inspiring the delegates to follow suit. Then, en masse, they gave homage to the former first lady, doffing their hats and cheering with abandon. “Mrs. Roosevelt shrank into her chair,” Richard Harding Davis reported. “Her confusion, her pleasure, her distress, were as pretty as was the compliment the men strove to pay her. Before their onslaught of good will and admiration she blushed and looked like a young girl.” The cheering continued unabated until she rose from her seat and bowed to the crowd. “That curtsy she made,” exclaimed a correspondent who had covered the Roosevelt family since their days in Albany, “was the most prominent part I ever saw Mrs. Roosevelt take in public life!”
At last, the crowd composed itself enough for Roosevelt to speak. “At present,” he began, “both the old parties are controlled by professional politicians in the interests of the privileged classes.” Together, they would forge a new Progressive Party, based on “the right of the people to rule.”Though the delegates cheered the familiar litany of progressive proposals to establish popular sovereignty through presidential primaries, direct election of senators, and the publication of campaign contributions, they reserved their most sustained applause for the Colonel’s pledge to secure women the right to the vote. “In most cases where men applaud the mention of woman suffrage, they do it with a grin,” one reporter remarked, but at this convention, “old men and young men alike got up on their chairs, yelled like wild Indians and waved anything available and portable.”
Each new reform that Roosevelt projected, the New York Times noted, even the most radical, “fell on willing ears”—the call for “a living wage,” the prohibition of child labor, federal regulation of interstate corporations, a graduated inheritance tax, an eight-hour workday for women, new standards for workmen’s compensation, and, finally, a system of social insurance designed to protect citizens against “the hazards of sickness . . . involuntary unemployment, and old age” to which employers and employees would both contribute. “Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are engaged,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “Whatever fate may at the moment overtake any of us, the movement itself will not stop.” He closed his two-hour address with the same stirring lines he had uttered seven weeks earlier in Chicago: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
The following day, the platform—“a purely Rooseveltian document,” embracing everything the Colonel wanted—was approved. Nominations followed for the presidency. Jane Addams was among those who seconded Roosevelt’s nomination, marking “the first time a woman ever had made a seconding speech in a national convention of a big party.” After Roosevelt’s unanimous election, the delegates chose California governor Hiram Johnson as the vice-presidential nominee. When the two men entered the hall, “wave upon wave of emotion swept over the audience.” And when Roosevelt, equally moved, began to speak, “his voice trembled and he seemed to forget all the little tricks” he commonly deployed when trying to reach an audience. He simply thanked the delegates from the bottom of his heart, saying, “I have been President and I measure my words when I say I hold it by far the greatest honor and the greatest opportunity that has ever come to me to be called by you to the leadership for the time being of this great movement.”
“THE BULL MOOSE PARTY HAS attained more strength & following than I thought possible at first,” Ray Baker recorded in his journal not long after Roosevelt’s powerfully emotional speech. “It includes no small number of high idealistic sincere men. Its platform is excellent. I can accept the planks nearly every one. A great figure in it is Miss Addams. It has aroused in some quarters almost a fanatical interest.” Despite—or perhaps because of—his allegiance to the new party’s principles, Baker could not shake a sense of disenchantment with its presidential nominee. “It is odd to me—as though the scales had suddenly fallen from my eyes,” he reflected, “to see how different I regard T.R. from what I did a few years ago. There was no more enthusiastic & earnest admirer of him than I was. I felt that he was doing a great work—as I still believe he did do—the work of a great moral revivalist.” But at this juncture, Baker believed, the Progressive movement needed a steadier hand, a leader “great enough to forget himself” in service of the cause. Roosevelt’s titanic persona, the reporter lamented, “obscures everything,” reducing the campaign to a referendum on his personal popularity rather than a discussion of vital reform issues.
In the end, Baker’s concern over Roosevelt’s distracting cult of personality was strong enough to shift his political allegiance. “As for me,” Baker declared that August, “I shall vote for Wilson. I distrust the old party behind him & some of the things it stands for, but I have great confidence in the man and in the faction of the party (the progressive-Bryan faction) which he represents. And I like his clear, calm way of putting things.” Baker had first encountered Woodrow Wilson two years earlier as he prepared an article on the forerunners of the 1912 campaign. “I left Princeton,” he recalled years later, “convinced that I had met the finest mind in the field of statesmanship to be found in American public life.” After that striking first impression, Baker followed Wilson’s “meteoric career” with great interest; “overjoyed” by Wilson’s subsequent nomination for the presidency, Baker “even dared to make speeches” on the Democratic nominee’s behalf.
William Allen White had initially shared Baker’s concerns, believing that the Progressive Party would be diminished if conceived as “a personal party.” He had advised Roosevelt against bolting from the Republicans, preferring that he remain an “ace” for the future, when the new party had developed more fully. On a personal level, White found Wilson “a cold fish,” with “a highty tighty way.” The hand Wilson extended when the two men first met felt “like a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper—irresponsive and lifeless.” Nevertheless, White recognized that Wilson “had done a fine liberal job” as governor of New Jersey and would most likely make a good president.
Once Roosevelt mortgaged his own future to the new party, however, White never looked back. He quit his post as Republican national committeeman, joined the Progressive Party, and resolved to do everything possible for his hero and the Progressive cause. Playing a central role on the platform committee, White spent “four days and the better part of three nights” at the Congress Hotel in the week prior to the convention, drafting and reworking every section of the document before the delegates arrived. “Our social philosophy,” he proudly remarked, could be “simmered down” to a single phrase—“using government as an agency of human welfare!”
Witnessing Roosevelt during the heady days of the Bull Moose Convention, White was impressed anew with his old friend’s remarkable vitality—“He seemed full of animal spirits, exhaustless at all hours, exuding cheer and confidence.” The rage that had consumed the Colonel during the Republican National Convention seemed transformed into ebullience with the birth of the new party: “What if he was a little obvious now and then as he grabbed the steering wheel of events and guided that convention not too shyly?” White later reflected, explaining, “I felt the joy and delight of his presence and, knowing his weakness, still gave him my loyalty—the great rumbling, roaring, jocund tornado of a man.”
While White was transfixed by Roosevelt’s performance during the Bull Moose Convention, his colleague Ida Tarbell was stuck in Europe. “It makes me crazy to get back,” she wrote to Bert Boyden. “Of course T.R. is a wonder. But what about those Negro delegates? It looks to us here like a suicidal operation. But of course nothing he does counts.” Though Tarbell had long been ambivalent about Roosevelt, she believed the financial and industrial powers arrayed against him were “a thousand times more dangerous than he.” Months earlier, she had written to John Phillips suggesting that the magazine ought to address the widespread fearmongering that equated Roosevelt’s pursuit of a third term with a slide into absolute monarchy. “Why stop with a third term?” opponents repeatedly warned. “The same reasons will apply for a fourth term, or for any number of terms.” Without term limits, they argued, Roosevelt would simply stay in power for life. “We’ve got a King now,” Tarbell parried, “this Wall Street—petty boss—Tammany—High Protection crowd. It’s a real king—not a possible one like T.R. It’s not one man; it’s a tight combine of men. It’s not impulsive, generous, full of human faults, but always for the human right.” The priority, implored Tarbell, must be to destroy “this very able alliance that’s got us all in its grip . . . that must be made clear. Then if T.R. needs to be batted a bit—we can do it.” The American Magazinenever ran a specific piece to counter criticism of “King Roosevelt,” but John Phillips, Albert Boyden, John Siddall, and Finley Peter Dunne all finally supported Roosevelt and the Progressive Party.
Another of McClure’s old team, Lincoln Steffens, was less well disposed toward Theodore Roosevelt when the campaign season opened. Months earlier, the two men had crossed swords over the sensational trial of two union leaders, the brothers John and James McNamara, who had been accused of setting off a bomb at the Los Angeles Times building. The blast, directed at the anti-union newspaper publisher Harrison Gray Otis, killed twenty-one workingmen and injured one hundred others. Labor leaders across the country rose to the defense of the two union men. Steffens publicly defended the brothers, labeling the bombing an act of “social revolution” rather than a crime. Roosevelt was disgusted by such a justification. “It seems to me that Steffens made an utter fool of himself,” he told a California friend. “Murder is murder,” he proclaimed in an Outlookeditorial, “and the foolish sentimentalists or sinister wrong-doers who try to apologize for it as ‘an incident of labor warfare’ are not only morally culpable but are enemies of the American people, and, above all, are enemies of American wage-workers.”
But even fierce disagreement with Roosevelt over the culpability of the McNamara brothers did not prevent Steffens from sympathizing with both the Progressive Party and the Colonel’s continuing struggle against the titans of Wall Street. “It looks like Wilson out here,” the journalist reported to his brother-in-law after canvassing a wide range of opinion; “all the interests are determined to beat T.R. at any rate. They have given up Taft, and they don’t care for Wilson, but the man they hate is the Bull Moose and they are bound to beat him if they can. It’s personal, you see.”
EARLY ON, WILLIAM TAFT MADE it clear that he had no plans to engage in “a whirlwind campaign.” Though he planned to deliver a few prepared speeches in Washington or Beverly, he would observe the time-honored precedent that “a President who is a candidate for reelection should remain at home and leave it to the judgment of the people to decide whether or not his record of achievement” deserved a second term. He believed “in his heart” that he had executed his office with dignity and fairness, endeavoring in a judicial manner to decide all issues on their merits without regard to personal advantage. He had revitalized an aging Supreme Court by appointing a staggering six justices to the bench—all distinguished lawyers, half of them Democrats. Most important, Taft’s countrymen had enjoyed four years of peace and prosperity under his administration. While the federal government could not bid “the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow,” Taft remarked, it could, by pursuing wrongheaded policies, “halt enterprise, paralyze investment,” or cause “hundreds of thousands of workingmen” to lose their jobs. William Taft trusted that “the negative virtue of having taken no step to interfere with the coming of prosperity and the comfort of the people is one that ought highly to commend an administration, and the party responsible for it, as worthy of further continuance of power.”
Taft’s campaign managers accepted his refusal to go on the stump, but worried that both Roosevelt and Wilson would dominate the headlines while their candidate seemed detached from the battle. Without active leadership from the White House, RNC chairman Charles Hilles found it difficult to raise funds, engage surrogate speakers, or keep the public’s attention on the president. “It always makes me impatient,” Taft confided in Nellie, “as if I were running a P. T. Barnum show, with two or three shows across the street, as if I ought to have as much advertising as the rest.” When advisers suggested that he replicate the aggressive demeanor of the Bull Moose, he circuitously declared: “I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”
Clearly, the campaign had savagely exacerbated existing tensions between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. “As the campaign goes on,” Taft told Nellie, “it is hard for me to realize that we are talking about the same man as that man whom we knew in the Presidency.” As for his “personal relations” with his erstwhile friend, Taft bluntly added, “they don’t exist.” Seriously hurt by the rift, Taft preferred to recall his old friend and mentor as almost a separate person from the belligerent, insult-hurling foe against whom he currently contended. He now looked upon Roosevelt simply “as an historical character of a most peculiar type in whom are embodied elements of real greatness, together with certain traits that have now shown themselves in unfitting him for any trust or confidence.” Taft was particularly incensed by the open contempt Roosevelt displayed both toward him personally and for the nation’s highest office. When an audience member solicited comment on the president, Roosevelt mockingly replied: “I never discuss dead issues.” Before another audience, he repeated a variation of this jest, observing that all the old Republican bosses were shifting allegiance to Wilson, recognizing that the president “was a dead cock in the pit.” Nor, Roosevelt elaborated, was the Republican platform even “worthy of serious discussion,” given that it was adopted at a convention “organized by theft.”
The fall campaign was already in full swing before the president yielded to his supporters’ pleas. Standing before an audience of 2,500 cheering Republicans on the lawn of his summer home in Beverly, he delivered a spirited attack on Roosevelt’s third party. One issue stood above all others, he declared, eclipsing the traditional partisan wrangling between Republicans and Democrats over the tariff and the trusts—the issue of “the preservation of the institutions of civil liberty as they were handed down to us by our forefathers.” Splitting away from the Republican Party, a third party had been created “merely to gratify personal ambition and vengeance.” In the pursuit of votes, this new party had employed “every new fad and theory, some of them good, some of them utterly preposterous and impracticable, some of them as Socialistic as anything that has been proposed in the countries of Europe”; all had been stuffed into the Progressive platform. Taken together, the president warned, these reforms suggested “an entire willingness to destroy every limitation of constitutional representative government.” So long as Republicans remained true to their heritage, he predicted, this radical movement would surely fail. “The great bulk of our people are not emotional, undiscriminating, superficially minded, non-thinking, or hero worshipping,” he asserted; “they have the virtue of second sober thought.”
Expanding on the same theme two days later at the Beverly Republican Club, Taft predicted that the secession of the third party would prompt a “new vitality” among traditional Republicans. “We know that we are a better set of men than we are now called by those who were very glad at one time to be known as leading Republicans. No student of history can deny that the grandeur of this Nation, and the height that it has reached among the Nations during the last sixty years, has been due to the guidance, and the force, and the energy, and the enterprise of the Republican Party.”
WELL AWARE FROM THE OUTSET that the Republican split made victory in November “very improbable,” Roosevelt nevertheless resolved to give every ounce of his energy to the campaign. He embarked upon an unprecedented speaking tour, covering forty states in every region of the country, including the solid Democratic South. He planned to travel by train, making whistle-stops at hundreds of small towns along the way. Although he anticipated a “deluge of travel and dust and howling and irritated fatigue,” he would willingly invest “a tremendous amount of very hard work” so long as there was “a chance” of victory. In addition to three or four prepared addresses each day, he agreed to appear on the train’s rear platform wherever a crowd assembled, to ride in parades, attend banquets, and meet with local committeemen. “I am perfectly happy,” he told his British friend Arthur Hamilton Lee, “for I have never in my life been in a movement into which I could enter as heartily as into this.”
The Colonel opened his campaign in Providence, Rhode Island. Journalists noted with amazement that even in this “boss-ridden” and “rock-ribbed” Republican state, immense crowds welcomed him. The 7,000 cheering people who thronged the streets, mostly workers from the textile mills and nearby shops, were markedly different from the usual Republican crowds. Speaking that evening to an overflow audience at Infantry Hall, Roosevelt decried the “rule of the bosses,” beseeching his listeners to help establish “the rule of the people” in its place. Echoing the crusading spirit of the Progressive Convention, the audience launched into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” A massive banner above the speaker’s rostrum bore the legend: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.” Buoyed by his enthusiastic reception, Roosevelt predicted that Progressives could triumph anywhere “if they could get the people to realize what they were trying to accomplish.”
Governor Wilson had initially hoped to confine his campaign appearances to a few well-prepared speeches. “My private judgment,” he told a Washington Times correspondent, “is that extended stumping tours are not the most effective method of conducting a campaign. You must remember that I am governor of New Jersey and that I must keep in touch with the business of the State.” He hoped to reach the public through a reasoned discussion of the issues and a clear explication of his political philosophy. He had no appetite for the kind of whistle-stop tour that would require him to stand on a train platform and shout extemporaneous remarks to a boisterous crowd.
Convinced from the beginning that Taft would run third, Woodrow Wilson viewed Roosevelt as his chief adversary. “I am by no means confident,” he admitted to a friend. “He appeals to their imagination; I do not. He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.” The Colonel’s headlong campaign would demand sustained exertion. “I haven’t a Bull Moose’s strength,” Wilson reflected, “as Roosevelt seems to have.”
Despite his reservations, Wilson eventually agreed to make an extensive tour of the Midwest during the month of September, followed by a second trip “as far west as Colorado” in October. The governor “had, in reality, only one speech to make,” Baker observed, and “he made it again and again.” He urged listeners to envision a more expansive future for themselves and their country. He delivered his words with “such consummate skill as an orator” that each audience came away convinced that the candidate had spoken directly to their hopes and needs. “Wilson was a new personality in American public life,” Ray Baker explained. “He profited by antithesis. He had the unfamiliar glamour, to the popular eye, of the scholar, the thinker, the historian. There had been enough heat in politics; what was needed now was light. Wilson was expository rather than denunciatory. He was asking the country to look at its problems: he was not offering panaceas.” With disarming honesty, the candidate repeatedly stated: “I do not want to promise heaven unless I can bring it to you. I can only see a little distance up the road.”
Positive responses from both audiences and the traveling press corps bolstered the governor’s confidence. Speaking at Boston’s Tremont Temple on September 27, he relaxed enough to offer a playful barb at Roosevelt’s expense: “Suppose you choose the leader of the third party as President. Don’t you think he will be pretty lonely? Not that he’ll mind it, because I believe he finds himself rather good company.” Wilson’s lighthearted ribbing of Roosevelt’s majestic ego underscored a serious point—without a majority party behind him in Congress, the Colonel would likely find it difficult to get anything done.
RETIRING TO THE COPLEY PLAZA Hotel after his speech, Wilson discovered that President Taft was in the banquet hall for a dinner address to the International Congress of Chambers of Commerce. The governor sent word that he would be “very glad of the opportunity” to meet with the president before the evening ended. Shortly before midnight, a meeting was arranged in a private suite on the fifth floor. “I hope the campaigning has not worn you out,” Taft remarked. “It has been quite a hard week,” the governor acknowledged. Indeed, his voice had gotten “a bit husky” from overuse. “Well,” Taft cordially responded, “there are three men that can sympathize with you, Mr. Bryan, Mr. Roosevelt, and myself.” The mutual regard between Taft and Wilson was evident as the conversation continued. “It was a very delightful meeting,” Wilson told reporters waiting in the corridor. “I am very fond of President Taft.”
The natural warmth President Taft showed to Governor Wilson reflected an odd tranquility about the election. While Taft occasionally detected “currents of air” that seemed to be “blowing in the right direction,” he acknowledged to friends that he would “probably be defeated.” Winning the nomination had been the all-important victory—and not simply because he had bested Roosevelt. He had long believed that a loss at the convention would have been regarded as a personal rejection, whereas defeat in the fall election reflected a more general reverse for the party. “I seem to think that we have won what there was to fight about, and that what follows is less important,” he told Nellie without a trace of defensive rationalization.
Nellie shared her husband’s equanimity. “I wanted him to be re-elected, naturally,” she later wrote, “but I never entertained the slightest expectation of it and only longed for the end of the turmoil when he could rest his weary mind and get back into association with the pleasant things of life.” In the aftermath of Nellie’s stroke, her close family circle had sustained her. Her children were thriving: Robert was an editor of the Harvard Law Review; Helen would soon be returning to Bryn Mawr; and irrepressible Charlie was getting excellent grades at the Taft School in Connecticut, where Horace kept a watchful eye over him. As the election approached, Nellie remained in Beverly, content to be removed from the political fray. “She is in a condition where defeat will not disappoint her, if at all,” Taft reported to Horace. “I am glad to say she is in a happy frame of mind.”
AS THE BULL MOOSE CANDIDATE headed west through Iowa and North Dakota to Oregon and California, he continued to attract huge crowds; nonetheless, his managers fretted that he “was going stale,” repeating tired arguments about the Republican Convention, the collusion of business and politics, and the dangers of vesting too much power in the courts. Instead of “rehashing” these matters, they pressed him to engage Woodrow Wilson directly. To prepare for such a confrontation, Roosevelt commenced to study the governor’s record, receiving daily briefings on his speeches and closely following his rival’s campaign. A select group at Roosevelt’s headquarters prepared a lengthy report that outlined Wilson’s positions on every question—from the minimum wage and woman suffrage to labor and the trusts. From that point forward, remarked Roosevelt’s publicity chief, Oscar King Davis, “it was Wilson, Wilson, Wilson, all the time in the private car, and nothing but Wilson and his record in the Colonel’s talks.”
Roosevelt launched the “first direct assault” on his Democratic opponent in San Francisco, with what the New York Times deemed the “most important speech of his campaign since his ‘Confession of Faith.’ ” His criticism addressed the fundamental role of the government in a democratic society. “Mr. Wilson is fond of asserting his platonic devotion to the purposes of the Progressive Party,” Roosevelt began, “but such platonic devotion is utterly worthless from a political standpoint because he antagonizes the only means by which those purposes can be made effective.” Roosevelt claimed that “the key to Mr. Wilson’s position” could be found in a single line he had recently voiced in New York: “The history of liberty,” Wilson had stated, “is the history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” Such an understanding, Roosevelt charged, was a reincarnation of the old “laissez faire doctrine,” which, if restored, would mean “the undoing of every particle of social and industrial advance we have made.” Under Wilson’s theory of limited governmental power, Roosevelt charged, “every railroad must be left unchecked, every great industrial concern can do as it chooses with its employees and with the general public; women must be permitted to work as many hours a day as their taskmasters bid them.” By contrast, his own party would build on laws recently established to protect the nation’s consumers and workers. His “New Nationalism” proposed “to use the whole power of the Government to protect all those who, under Mr. Wilson’s laissez-faire system, are trodden down in the ferocious, scrambling rush of an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism.”
Of course, the single line excerpted from Wilson’s address did not represent the full measure of the candidate’s thinking about governmental power. In other speeches, Wilson articulated his conviction that “freedom to-day is something more than being let alone.” In the modern industrial world, he explained, laws were needed to ensure “fair play.” In keeping with the traditional Democratic philosophy Wilson insisted that these laws should emanate from state capitals, not Washington. He understood that the expansion of federal power was anathema to the southern base of the Democratic Party, where states’ rights safeguarded segregation. Despite his more progressive personal views, Wilson could not abandon his party’s historic commitment to the Jeffersonian ideal of a smaller, less expansive federal government.
Roosevelt’s “declaration of war” against his opponent’s concept of limited national government prompted Wilson to articulate a more positive strategy to expand the nation’s prosperity. In a speech at Indianapolis, he called upon his countrymen to “open again the fields of competition, so that new men with brains, new men with capital, new men with energy in their veins, may build up enterprises in America.” While Roosevelt accepted trusts as inevitable and strove, through centralized federal power, to regulate them in the interests of the public, Wilson argued that the very size of the corporations posed a problem. He called upon the American people “to organize the forces of liberty in our time to make conquest of a new freedom.”
Wilson’s “New Freedom” slogan caught on, providing a counterpoint to Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.” Expanding on his theme as the campaign progressed, Wilson argued that “the wealth of America” lay in its small businesses, its towns and villages. “Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago,” he asserted; “it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the borders of the town.” By reinforcing the anti-trust law and by “abolishing tariff favors” and “credit denials,” he would return genuine free enterprise to America.
Never one to shy from a fight, Roosevelt delighted in the escalating policy debate with Wilson, vigorously defending his regulatory approach and claiming that Wilson’s proposal to break up big corporations defied the realities of modern life. Drawing on his own experience, he pointed out that when the Supreme Court dissolved Standard Oil, the company simply “split up into a lot of smaller companies,” which continued to operate “in such close alliance” that they remained, in effect, under Standard’s control. The result was higher prices for the consumer and even lower wages for the workers. Only the owners had benefited: “The price of the stock has gone up over 100 percent,” Roosevelt observed, “so that Mr. Rockefeller and his associates have actually seen their fortunes doubled by the policy which Mr. Wilson advocates and which Mr. Taft defends.” Little wonder, the Colonel sardonically concluded, that Wall Street prayed for either Wilson or Taft’s policies in preference to his own commitment to put all these companies under a powerful Federal Commission.
By early October, it was “becoming more and more plain that the fight was between Wilson and Roosevelt,” Oscar Davis remarked. “Taft was steadily fading into the background.” The Republican Party receded as both front-runners directed their energies to the task of distinguishing the New Freedom from the New Nationalism. The two doctrines “were as close as fraternal twins” compared with the platform embraced by the Socialist Party candidate, Eugene Debs. On the presidential ballot for a fourth time, Debs maintained that the capitalist system was “utterly incapable” of dealing with the problems of the industrial age. His Socialist Party platform called for “the collective ownership” of transportation and communication, of land (wherever it was practical), and of the banking system. To ensure more direct democracy, the Socialist platform proposed the abolition of the U.S. Senate, the elimination of the president’s veto power, and the removal of the Supreme Court’s power to declare laws passed by Congress unconstitutional.
ON THE NIGHT OF MONDAY, October 14, Roosevelt was scheduled to deliver a speech to a large Milwaukee audience. Two days earlier, as a bitter wind blew through the open flaps of “a mammoth tent” on Chicago’s west side, he had shouted himself so hoarse that he could barely speak beyond a whisper. But over the emphatic resistance of Dr. Scurry Terrell, his throat specialist, Roosevelt insisted on honoring his commitment to the people of Milwaukee—which included participating in a parade through the city streets, a banquet at the Gilpatrick Hotel, and a public address. “I want to be a good Indian,” he declared.
An open touring car stood in front of the hotel, waiting to convey the Roosevelt party to the Auditorium after dinner. Roosevelt entered first, followed by Henry Cochems, head of the Progressive Party’s speaker’s bureau. Gathered on the opposite curb, the crowd started clapping and cheering. Roosevelt acknowledged the ovation by standing and doffing his hat. At that moment, a man at the front of the crowd raised a large pistol and fired. “It was point-blank range,” Oscar Davis observed, “and almost impossible to miss.” As the bullet hit the right side of the Colonel’s chest, he lurched and collapsed on the seat. Just as the man with the pistol prepared to fire a second shot, Roosevelt’s stenographer, Elbert Martin, leapt on the assailant. A former football player, Martin quickly disarmed the man and began to strangle him. “I wasn’t trying to take him prisoner,” Martin later admitted, “I was trying to kill him.” The inflamed crowd spurred him on, shouting, “Lynch him,” “Kill him.” In the midst of the chaos, Roosevelt struggled to his feet and called out to Martin, “Bring him here,” he ordered, “don’t hurt him.” The stenographer grudgingly obeyed, dragging the man toward the car. Roosevelt lifted his would-be assassin’s head to look directly at his face. “What did you do it for?” he asked, but marking the dead expression in the man’s eyes, he added, “Oh, what’s the use. Turn him over to the police.”
Falling back on his seat once again, Roosevelt ordered the chauffeur to go straight to the Auditorium, against the insistence of Dr. Terrell, who demanded that they stop first at the emergency room of the hospital to have him examined. “You get me to that speech,” Roosevelt shouted. Only when they reached the green room in the Auditorium did Roosevelt allow the doctor to look closely at the wound, which was located just under his right nipple. “It was bleeding slightly,” Oscar Davis noted, “the blood-spot on his white shirt being about the size of a man’s hand.” Unable to determine where the bullet had lodged, Dr. Terrell again demanded a thorough hospital examination. “It’s all right,” Roosevelt said, inhaling deeply several times. “I don’t get any pain from this breathing.” And with a handkerchief secured to his chest as a bandage, he headed for the stage.
When told of the shooting, the audience cried out in shock, but Roosevelt quieted them down. “It’s true,” he informed them, “but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He withdrew his spectacles and his speech from the inside pocket of his coat. The speech had been typed on fifty heavy sheets of paper folded in half to fit into his breast pocket. Seeing the hole the bullet had ripped through the pages, and the dented spectacle case, Roosevelt suddenly understood “how narrowly he had escaped.” Indeed, the bullet would have gone “straight into his heart” if it had not been deflected upward by the buffering combination of his thick manuscript and metal eyeglass case; instead, it struck the fourth rib on the right side, fracturing the bone but coming to a halt.
Roosevelt had spoken for about half an hour when Oscar Davis, standing at the side of the stage, noticed that the color had drained from his face and he was “laboring very hard to go on.” He approached, suggesting that the Colonel bring the speech to a close. “No, sir,” Roosevelt replied, with a ferocious expression. “I will not stop until I have finished.” Though “his heart was racing,” he ignored the “knifelike pain in his ribs” and continued to speak for an additional hour. Finally reaching the last page of the script, he turned to Dr. Terrell and murmured, “Now I am ready to go with you and do what you want.”
While Roosevelt was being examined at Milwaukee Hospital, police interrogated the attacker, John F. Schrank. A thirty-six-year-old former saloonkeeper from the East Side of Manhattan, Schrank produced a written manifesto that described a dream in which President McKinley had risen from his coffin and indicted Roosevelt as his murderer. He told police that he had first begun “to think seriously” of Roosevelt “as a menace to his country” when he heard the Colonel shout “Thief” at the Republican Convention and announce his decision to run for a third term on a new party. “Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot,” Schrank declared. He was fully persuaded, he added, “that if Colonel Roosevelt was defeated at the fall election he would again cry ‘Thief!’ and that his action would plunge the country into a bloody civil war.” Schrank confessed that he had followed Roosevelt to Charleston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Chattanooga with the intention of shooting him, but the right opportunity had never presented itself.
At Milwaukee Hospital, Roosevelt was in good spirits, joking with doctors as they examined the wound and took X-rays to reveal the location of the bullet. The decision was made to transfer him to Mercy Hospital in Chicago, where chest surgeons would determine if they needed to operate to remove the bullet. “There are only three possible dangers,” Roosevelt explained to reporters when he reached Mercy Hospital, “pleurisy, pneumonia, and blood poisoning. If we can get safely past these three there isn’t a thing in the world to prevent me from resuming my campaign.”
President Taft was at the Hotel Astor in New York to attend a banquet in honor of his cabinet when the head of the Associated Press approached his table with news of the shooting. “All over the room conversation died down,” the New York Tribune reported; “whispers of ‘Roosevelt!’ and ‘Impossible!’ were heard.” The dinner guests got up from their tables to rush to the telephones. Later that night, Taft issued a short statement to the press, and the following morning he sent a sympathetic telegram to Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson offered to suspend his campaign while his opponent remained hospitalized, but Roosevelt swiftly declined his offer: “The fight should go on to its conclusion, just as it would in case of battle,” he argued, “even though the commanding general might be struck down.”
Edith Roosevelt had been enjoying a musical comedy in New York when she received word of the attack on her husband. She left the theatre and straightaway made arrangements to travel to Chicago the following day, accompanied by Theodore Junior, Ethel, and the family doctor, Alexander Lambert. “It’s the best news I’ve heard since I got here,” Roosevelt said. Edith took command as soon as she reached the hospital, consulting with the medical staff, limiting visits, and making sure that her husband followed the doctors’ orders. “He has been as meek as a lamb since the Boss arrived,” noted the New York Times correspondent. Despite Roosevelt’s pleas to let more people into his room, she insisted that he needed rest. “This thing about ours being a campaign against boss rule is a fake,” he said with chagrin. “I never was so boss ruled in my life as I am at this moment.”
By the following Saturday, doctors determined that the danger of infection was past, that the bullet was lodged “outside of the rib” and could most likely “be allowed to live there permanently.” The Colonel’s color and appetite had returned, though his broken rib continued to make it painful to breathe. So long as he remained “in absolute quiet” for several days, the hospital medical staff agreed to release him after the weekend. By Monday morning, he was cleared to leave. An ambulance transferred him to his railroad car, where he slept and read until the train reached New York.
“I am in fine shape,” he reported to Bamie a few days later. Though his wound remained “open” and the doctors would not allow him to return to the campaign trail, the indomitable Colonel still hoped to make one final appearance at Madison Square Garden at the end of October, the week before the election.
The shooting forced the cancelation of scores of campaign events, yet the dramatic attack upon the stalwart and stoic former president had rekindled the nation’s empathy, and speculation swirled about how it might reshape the election. “Encouraging reports are coming in from all over,” Ethel Roosevelt noted to Bamie; “things look better for us than they ever have.” While immense crowds continued to cheer Governor Wilson at every stop of his final campaign tour, a Democratic speaker at an Oakland rally articulated the worst fears of the Wilson camp. “The bullet that rests in Roosevelt’s chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency,” he said. Taft recognized the difficulty of anticipating the political impact of such an event. With his usual equanimity, he took a more philosophical approach to the furor. “What effect the incident will have on the election,” he remarked, “is difficult to conjecture.”
SPECIAL PRECAUTIONS WERE TAKEN TO protect Roosevelt from “the rush of the crowd” as he made his way to Madison Square Garden on October 30 to deliver his “farewell manifesto.” At dinner with Edith and Dr. Lambert earlier that evening, the Colonel had expressed surprise that the simple journey to the city had fatigued him, but he “looked to the excitement of the moment to carry him through.” Aware that his voice had not “regained its accustomed power,” he was anxious to begin speaking as soon as he took the stage. Catching sight of him, however, the audience of 16,000 poured forth a spontaneous and emotional tribute for forty-two minutes, despite Roosevelt’s best efforts to dampen the crowd.
“Perhaps once in a generation,” Roosevelt at last began, “there comes a chance for the people of a country to play their part wisely and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.” Perhaps less dramatic than the struggles their fathers and forefathers had faced, the battle for social justice was “well-nigh as important.” If the problems created by the industrial age were left unattended, Roosevelt cautioned, America would eventually be “sundered by those dreadful lines of division” that set “the haves” and the “have-nots” against one another.
“We know that there are in life injustices which we are powerless to remedy,” Roosevelt acknowledged, “but we know also that there is much injustice which can be remedied.” The Progressive Party, he pledged, would harness the “collective power of the people through their governmental agencies” to move the country forward. “We propose to lift the burdens from the lowly and the weary, from the poor and the oppressed,” he asserted. “We propose to stand for the sacred rights of childhood and womanhood. Nay, more, we propose to see that manhood is not crushed out of the men who toil, by excessive hours of labor, by underpayment, by injustice and oppression. . . . Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than this.” And, finally, contemplating this cause so much larger than any individual, Roosevelt concluded: “Win or lose I am glad beyond measure that I am one of the many who in this fight have stood ready to spend and be spent.”
Throughout, his face and manner had revealed strain, but the voice was “as clear as a bell.” Those who had witnessed scores of earlier appearances felt they heard “a new Roosevelt” on this night, free from “the old violence and the old sarcasm.” He uttered not a single word against his opponents, focusing his remarks solely on the principles for which the Progressive Party stood. Even his nemesis, the New York Sun, praised his lyrical and passionate presentation, lauding the “good taste” he exhibited in avoiding the “temptation to misuse an unparalleled opportunity for self-exhibition.”
On the Friday before the election, President Taft sat down with New York World reporter Louis Seibold for an extended interview. Aware that his chance for outright victory was small, Taft nevertheless hoped to outpoll Roosevelt. A frank discussion of the circumstances surrounding his break with Roosevelt, the reporter suggested, might help to influence public opinion. Taft was “in excellent spirits,” Seibold later recalled. The lengthy conversation, transcribed by the president’s stenographer, was scheduled to run the following day—not only in the World but in newspapers across the country through release to the Associated Press.
When he entered the presidency, Taft explained, he had been “anxious to carry out the promises of the platform,” but he was hindered by long-developing factions within the Republican Party. Asked by Seibold if Roosevelt had “fomented” these factions, Taft cast no blame. “No,” he replied, “the party naturally divided itself.” The rupture was caused by a widening division between eastern manufacturing interests, desiring a high protective tariff, and western farmers, calling for serious tariff reductions. He had moved “in the right direction” when he signed the Payne Bill, but “the genius of publicity,” the president admitted, was an attribute he never possessed. “The training of a Judge is something that leads you to depend upon the opinion published and the decree entered as speaking for themselves,” he reflected, endeavoring to justify his lack of engagement with the press. As a result, he never properly educated the country about the benefits of the tariff bill, the corporation tax, or any of the other measures he was proud to have passed.
When the reporter sought Taft’s comment on anything “beyond the personal ambition of Mr. Roosevelt” that had propelled the former president into the race, Taft demurred. There had been “personalities enough in the preconvention campaign,” he cryptically remarked. Under Seibold’s persistent probing to explain the bitterness of Roosevelt’s commentary during the primary contest, Taft eventually offered a benign explanation: “Mr. Roosevelt is so constituted that it is impossible for him to go into a controversy without becoming personal.” Roosevelt had once told him that in every fight he strove to “get close up to a man,” attacking “not only the man’s argument but the man himself. He could not ascribe to the man differing from him radically any other than an improper motive.”
Would Roosevelt have entered the race if he had foreseen “the wrecking of the Republican party,” Seibold wondered. “I can not tell,” Taft replied, loath to publicly ascribe malicious motives to his adversary. “I don’t think he went deliberately into it that way,” noting that Roosevelt was not “a planner” but simply a man who “acts from day to day.” Taft himself remained “in a philosophical state” as he considered the upcoming election. “I have had to be. The experience I have had in the Presidency has made me so,” he explained, “and what I am very hopeful is that whatever happens, the country will go on to ultimate happiness.”
After the interview, Seibold was told he could have the transcript upon its completion, but later that afternoon he received word that the president wanted time to make “minor corrections.” Taft invited the reporter to join him on the evening train to New York, as the presidential party traveled to attend the funeral of Vice President James Sherman, who had died from heart disease two days earlier. Seibold agreed but emphasized the practical need to get the interview into production; “space was being saved in every newspaper.” Still Taft procrastinated, insisting that he needed time for edits, and furthermore wanted to consult Root and Wickersham when the train reached New York. “I’m afraid that’s too late,” Seibold warned. “But Roosevelt was my closest friend,” Taft objected.
The interview never ran.
ON ELECTION EVE, TAFT ARRIVED in his home city of Cincinnati following a twenty-eight-hour train ride from New York. He had chosen a “leisurely” route through Ohio, allowing him to greet and visit the friendly crowds gathered at train stations along the way. He refrained from mentioning politics, indulging instead in pleasantries about the prosperous economy and local events. Upon reaching Cincinnati, he went directly to his brother Charley’s mansion, where he would receive election returns among family and friends. Nellie had not made the trip, choosing instead to accompany Helen and young Charlie to New York, where the Republican National Committee chairman had arranged a small dinner party.
On election day, November 5, Taft reportedly “slept late, ate a good breakfast, smiled profusely and acted generally as though some sixteen million men were not voting on the subject of his political fate.” At noon, he motored to his regular polling place on Madison Road, stopping first to visit Nick Longworth, who was in a tight race to retain his congressional seat. The polling place was crowded, but the president “stood in line and waited his turn,” chatting with friends and posing for pictures. After casting his vote, he spent a quiet afternoon at his brother’s Pike Street house.
Roosevelt passed “a busy morning” catching up on his voluminous correspondence; at noon, he motored to the small firehouse in Oyster Bay where he traditionally cast his vote. Accompanied by his gardeners, coachman, and chauffeur, he was greeted with cheers from “a crowd of villagers.” After signing the register, he headed toward the booth. “Here goes another Bull Mooser vote,” a man shouted, eliciting a broad smile from the Colonel. That afternoon, Theodore and Edith took “a long ramble in the woods” before returning to dress for dinner and prepare for the election returns.
After a final campaigning push the night before the election, Woodrow Wilson returned home to Princeton, thrilled to be back with his family on election day. “He felt like a boy out of school on a lark,” he told reporters that morning, relieved that for once “he didn’t have to jump out and make a speech somewhere.” After breakfast, Wilson walked to his polling place at the Chambers Street fire station. Directly across the street stood the boardinghouse where he had lived more than three decades earlier when he came to Princeton as a college freshman. Wilson had spent the better part of his life in Princeton, Ray Baker noted, and he knew “every nook and corner of the old town.” After casting his vote, the governor had lunch with his wife and daughters, answered letters, posed for press photographs, and took a walk through the countryside with his secretary and an old friend.
The small dinner party at Wilson’s home that night, the New York Times reported, “was much in the nature of a celebration, for every minute or two it was interrupted by messages from the telegraph room, every one of which brought news that the tide was running strongly in the Governor’s favor.” Before long, such bulletins made it clear to both the president and the former president that neither man could win the election. By the time Taft and Roosevelt each sat down for dinner, “an air of gloom and despondency” pervaded Pike Street and Sagamore Hill alike.
Official word of Governor Wilson’s victory was confirmed after 10 p.m. via telegraph. Ellen Wilson delivered the welcome news to her husband, who stood talking to friends before a bright fire in the parlor. “My dear,” she said, kissing him, “I want to be the first to congratulate you.” The bells atop historic Nassau Hall began to ring, and soon several thousand Princeton students arrived at Wilson’s house, waving flags and carrying torches. Speaking with “great emotion, even with tears in his eyes,” Wilson told the students that he understood the serious challenges he faced. “I look almost with pleading to you, the young men of America, to stand behind me, to support me in the new administration.”
Wilson had achieved an immense victory in the Electoral College. He captured forty of the forty-eight states, bringing him 435 electoral votes; Roosevelt took six states, producing 88 votes; Taft won only Vermont and Utah, for a total of 8 electoral votes. The popular vote was somewhat less emphatic. Wilson won nearly 6.3 million votes, compared to 4.1 million for Roosevelt, and a little short of 3.5 million for Taft. Eugene Debs secured over 900,000 votes, the highest total the Socialist Party had ever reached. The split between Taft and Roosevelt had clearly hurt both men: their combined vote exceeded Wilson’s by nearly 1.3 million. And together, they had captured over 50 percent of the electorate, leaving only 41.9 percent with the new president, Woodrow Wilson.
At 11:30 p.m., President Taft sent a warm congratulatory telegram to Governor Wilson, extending his “best wishes for a successful Administration.” By then, it was already clear that Taft had suffered an overwhelming defeat, coming in third. Four years earlier, he had celebrated victory with dozens of jubilant friends. On that auspicious night, “several thousand of his fellow townsmen with blatant horns and red fire thronged about the mansion.” On this night, “the streets were deserted and the only persons in the vicinity were the policemen on guard around the house.”
As news of Wilson’s victory came over the wires, Roosevelt sent word to the press that he would receive them at eleven o’clock. “They went in rather more subdued than usual,” the New York Times reported, “filled with a great curiosity to see just how he was taking the defeat.” He was seated at his desk, “with a log wood blaze shining softly from the big fireplace,” when the group of journalists arrived. “Now old friends,” Roosevelt remarked, “I’m really glad to see you.” He then proceeded to recite from memory the telegram he had sent to the president-elect: “ ‘The American people, by a great plurality, have conferred upon you the highest honor in their gift. I congratulate you thereon.’ ” After finishing, he laughed softly and said: “That’s all.”
NOT SURPRISINGLY, ROOSEVELT WAS HIT harder by the defeat than the president, who appeared to make a quick recovery. As Taft boarded the train for his return to Washington, he “chatted as gaily as he did before the election,” appearing to reporters as if “a great load had been taken from his shoulders.” He acknowledged that while he had been “hopeful” that he might secure victory in a close election, he had not been “so hopeful” that he had experienced “any shock of real disappointment.” To a lifelong friend he humbly explained his composure: “The people of the United States did not owe me another election. I hope that I am properly grateful for the one term of the Presidency which they gave me, and the fact that they withheld the second is no occasion for my resentment or feeling of injustice.” Most important, he reflected to another friend: “As I look back over the record of the administration, I feel very well satisfied that a great deal was accomplished which will be useful to the people in the future, and that, after all, is the only real satisfaction one gets out of any public service.”
Although Roosevelt had been realistic about his chances, he was deeply unsettled by the magnitude of the loss. In the two weeks following the attempt on his life, there had been such an outpouring of “popular feeling,” Edith explained to Kermit, that Progressive leaders felt victory might truly be possible—not only for Roosevelt but for the party. When the election returns were fully counted, the Progressives actually captured just a single governorship and a dozen congressional seats. The Democrats not only increased their majority in the House but also seized control of the Senate for the first time in nearly two decades. “There is no use disguising the fact that the defeat at the polls is overwhelming,” a disappointed Roosevelt wrote his British friend Arthur Hamilton Lee, allowing that he “had expected we would make a better showing.” Several days later, his assessment appeared darker as he told Gifford Pinchot: “We must face the fact that our cutting loose from the Republican Party was followed by disaster to the Progressive cause in most of the States where it won two years ago.”
Only in time would Roosevelt’s perspective on the defeat grow more sanguine. “It was a phenomenal thing to be able to bring the new party into second place and to beat out the Republicans,” he told Henry White that November, recognizing the remarkable achievement of an association that had, in a mere three months, managed to gather more support than a sitting president, and defeat a political party that had held sway over national politics for fifty years.
In the aftermath of the election, Roosevelt reiterated to reporters his view that “the leader for the time being is of little consequence, but the cause itself must triumph, for its triumph is essential to the wellbeing of the American people.” Rather than a rationalization to assuage the bitterness of his loss, his statement would prove remarkably prescient. Although the Progressive Party met defeat, the progressive causes would continue to influence American politics for years to come. Within the coming decade alone, three signal amendments would be added to the Constitution: the Sixteenth, giving the national government the power to levy a progressive income tax, without which many of the New Deal’s social programs might not have been possible; the Seventeenth, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators; and the Nineteenth, finally granting American women the right to vote.
While William Howard Taft had embraced the role of the conservative during the presidential race, he, too, had long since rejected the laissez-faire philosophy that had dominated politics since the Civil War, committing himself instead to the core progressive belief that government had a responsibility to remedy social problems, improve working conditions, safeguard public health, and protect our natural heritage. Though the two men had strikingly different temperaments—Roosevelt’s original and active nature at odds with Taft’s ruminative and judicial disposition—their opposing qualities actually proved complementary, allowing them to forge a powerful camaraderie and rare collaboration. There was a time, at the height of their careers, when Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft stood shoulder to shoulder as they charted a different role for the U.S. government that would fundamentally enlarge the bounds of economic opportunity and social justice.