1912 Presidential Election
The 1912 election in the United States was a significant political event that saw a four-way race between Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Eugene V. Debs. The election marked a turning point in American politics, with Wilson ultimately winning and the Progressive Party gaining prominence. This election also highlighted the growing influence of third-party candidates in national politics.
6 Key excerpts on "1912 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePub- William E. Leuchtenburg(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...7 Tired Radicals In 1914 the progressive movement had reached its zenith. Two years before, the country had been aroused by a four-party contest in which the conservative Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft, had been overwhelmed by his progressive rivals; Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic spokesman for the New Freedom, had ousted Taft from the White House, while Teddy Roosevelt, the Progressive party candidate, had run a strong second. Even Taft, who in 1912 carried only two states in the Electoral College, had established a record as a reformer—particularly by vigorous prosecution of trusts—that would have seemed improbable a short time before. Most startling of all, Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, had polled almost a million votes. Wilson in office had proceeded to carry out the mandate for the New Freedom by driving through Congress an impressive number of reforms. In 1914, progressivism was triumphant; six years later, it was apparently dead as a doornail, buried under the Harding landslide. The controversies aroused by World War I, and the spirit of chauvinism it unleashed, had a devastating impact on progressivism. In 1912, when social reform was at floodtide, the luminaries of the movement were Roosevelt, Wilson, La Follette, Bryan, and Debs. By 1920, these leaders and their followers were snarling enemies, hopelessly divided by the issues of the war. Bryan had resigned from Wilson’s cabinet, to be met by a tirade of abuse from Wilson’s supporters, and, although there was a temporary reconciliation in 1916, he was an outspoken opponent of Wilson’s strategy on the League three years later. Roosevelt’s idolaters viewed Wilson with the angry contempt usually reserved for traitors, and T...
eBook - ePubUnto a Good Land
A History of the American People, Volume 2: From 1865
- David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, John B. Boles, Sally Foreman Griffith(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...Beyond that, the results were unclear. Wilson won by the largest electoral majority yet amassed in a contested presidential election, but he got only 41.8 percent of the popular vote, actually polling 109,411 fewer votes than Bryan four years earlier, and many of his votes were piled up in the Solid South, which would have supported virtually any Democratic presidential nominee. Wilson had defeated a Republican party crippled by internal strife and weakened by a continuing recession. On the other hand, if one views the combined votes of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Debs as an endorsement of reform, about three-fourths of the American electorate can be said to have supported change. In short, while it appeared that the vote gave Wilson a mandate for reform, the results clearly had been skewed by the unusual cast of candidates and the bitter split in the Republican Party. W ILSONIAN P ROGRESSIVISM President Woodrow Wilson assigned a high priority to the passage of new legislation that would solidify and broaden the progressive reform movement. In the first two years of Wilson’s presidency (1913-1914), Congress enacted laws reducing the tariff, establishing a national banking system, and strengthening federal antitrust powers. In the next two years (1915-1916), Congress passed a number of less far-reaching laws that further expanded the government’s regulatory powers. Given sweeping powers by this legislation, Wilson left behind a broadly expanded executive branch. By 1917, American involvement in World War I inevitably drew the country’s attention to foreign affairs and marked an end to the Progressive Era of domestic reform...
eBook - ePubThe American Century
A History of the United States Since the 1890s
- Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, Nancy Woloch(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But in 1911, as his disenchantment with the president grew, Roosevelt changed his mind. Taft's remark that the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War "might have been settled without a fight and ought to have been" offended Roosevelt. Taft's decision to bring an antitrust suit against United States Steel for its acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company in 1907, a merger to which Roosevelt had tacitly assented, infuriated the former president. By the time the Republican convention met in June 1912, the two men, once good political friends, had become bitter personal enemies. If Roosevelt, who had done well in the primaries, was the people's choice, Taft was the convention's. His control of the Republican National Committee and of the party machinery in the South assured Taft's renomination on the first ballot. Reformers walked out in disgust, and in August Roosevelt agreed to run as the candidate of a new Progressive Party. His assertion that "every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it" summarized the party's platform. His cry to the convention—"We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord"—captured the movement's religious fervor. Woodrow Wilson Republican disunity, however, permitted the Democrats to capture the White House for the first time in twenty years. Their candidate, Thomas Wood row Wilson, was born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister. After graduating from Princeton (1879), Wilson studied law at the University of Virginia but gave up his practice for graduate work in political science at Johns Hopkins University. His doctoral dissertation, Congressional Government, appeared in 1885...
eBook - ePubPolitical and Social Change in the United States
A Brief History, with the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Amendments to the Constitution
- Edd Applegate(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Academica Press(Publisher)
...Taft’s conservative position, not to mention his authorization to sell public land to wealthy syndicates, deepened his party’s separation. In 1912 Roosevelt attempted to defeat Taft at the Republican National Convention, but he was not successful. Disappointed, he helped form the Progressive Party, which became known as the Bull Moose Party, and campaigned on a platform called the New Nationalism. Although he opposed Taft and Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, he failed to win the presidency primarily because he and Taft split the Republican Party and voters. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who had campaigned on a platform called the New Freedom, became president. Later, Taft taught law at the Yale Law School and in 1921 was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the most formally educated president in the nation’s history. (Of course, the reader must remember that the founders of the nation lived during the Age of Enlightenment and consequently had read works by the greatest minds of the period.) A Calvinist, Wilson was guided by his religious beliefs and his formal education. However, he was not stuffy. Like Lincoln, he enjoyed telling humorous stories. Wilson had taught in more than one university and had written about history and government before he had served as the president of Princeton University. As a Democrat, he had been elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. Two years later the Democrats had nominated him for president. He had heard about so-called bosses—individuals who had controlled cities—but he had never been intimidated by any. Even those who ran the Democratic Party could not manipulate him. As president, Wilson had the support of the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States primarily because most of the members of both chambers were Democrats...
eBook - ePubTeachers' Guide to Land of Hope
An Invitation to the Great American Story
- Wilfred M. McClay, McBride(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Encounter Books(Publisher)
...His rhetoric also became notably more strident, as he denounced the “malefactors of great wealth” for their “predatory” behavior. Such proposals and such rhetoric still fell far short of a socialist vision, but they were strident enough to antagonize the conservative “Old Guard” of the Republican Party and foreshadow a coming division of the Republican Party that would enable the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912, one of the most exciting and unusual elections in American history, which included the third-party candidacy of TR himself. Like Roosevelt, Wilson was convinced that the U.S. Constitution was defective and favored something closer to the British parliamentary system, which would draw the executive and legislative branches together more closely and make the president as active in the legislative process as he was in the execution of laws. Even the natural-rights doctrines of human equality and fundamental rights were subject to this counterdoctrine of fluidity: “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” he insisted in a 1907 speech; “we are as free as they were to make and unmake governments.” Despite his inexperience, Wilson enjoyed one of the most impressive beginnings of any president in American history. He moved quickly, putting his theories about a parliamentary-style presidency to the test: lowering tariffs, creating a federal income tax, proposing a central banking system to regulate elements of the national economy, and strengthening the Federal Trade Commission as an antitrust instrument. There were many other reforms in his first term: advances in labor organizing, creation of a system of federal farmland banks, a Federal Highways Act to stimulate road construction, child labor laws, an eight-hour workday for rail workers – in short, a dazzling array of legislative and executive accomplishment...
eBook - ePubHow Did We Get Here?
From TR to Donald Trump
- Robert Dallek(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Harper(Publisher)
...Since part of the political process was to disguise your intent to run to discourage an early campaign against your candidacy, no one attacked a future candidate’s credibility for having denied his interest. In fact, it was considered smart politics. But there was also some truth to it. Privately, Wilson said that while “he did not dread the burden of high office, what depressed” him about being president was “the thought of all the trivia and distractions he would have to endure—hateful work that counted for nothing.” 5 Wilson understood that the path to the Democratic nomination in 1912 would require shifting to more liberal pronouncements that won the support of populist William Jennings Bryan and those who had backed his three earlier Democratic Party nominations. But the contest for the prize was a hard-fought battle that pitted Wilson against the Speaker of the House, Missouri’s Champ Clark, and the House majority leader, Alabama’s Oscar Underwood. While Wilson’s turn toward progressivism served his purposes, a split in the then-liberal Republican Party between incumbent president William Howard Taft and the former chief executive Theodore Roosevelt (who ran as a candidate in the newly formed Bull Moose Party) improved Wilson’s chances of success, but also raised questions about his ability to best Roosevelt. Although Wilson barely won the nomination, the competition demonstrated his keen political skills. Having opposed Bryan’s runs for the presidency, including in a 1907 letter that declared, “Would that we could. . . knock Mr. Bryan once and for all into a cocked hat!” Wilson openly courted and praised Bryan up to and during the party’s convention in the summer of 1912, including a rumored secret promise to make Bryan secretary of state despite his parochialism...
