The kickoff for this new political era came in August, when Roosevelt returned to Chicago—the site of the Republican Convention two months before—for the inaugural nominating convention of the Progressive Party. Instead of bejeweled millionaires’ wives sitting in the front row, there were ranks of young women, reformers and settlement workers, in simple white cotton shirtwaists. Reporters repeatedly compared it to a religious revival. “It was more like a Methodist consecration meeting than a political gathering,” commented one scribe.27 Roosevelt himself contributed to the tone by naming his keynote address, “A Confession of Faith.”
As Roosevelt stepped up to deliver it, he first basked in nearly a full hour of cheers, applause, the singing of hymns and patriotic songs. Once the hall finally quieted, he delivered a speech that was part sermon and part stem-winder, putting forth ideas that would have been considered radical only a few years before. “The old parties are husks with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled,” Roosevelt trumpeted. “There must be a new party of nation-wide and non-sectional principles [representing] the cause of human rights and of governmental efficiency.”28
After his speech, everyone in the hall was so moved that all had to join in a singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to pull themselves together. Then came the more routine business of the formal nomination. In her speech seconding the nomination of Roosevelt, settlement house pioneer and Progressive Party leader Jane Addams moved away from religious rhetoric and underscored the global implications of this new political organization: “the American exponent of a world-wide movement towards juster social conditions” and a “modern movement” whose time had come.29 The finishing touch was the nomination of Hiram Johnson of California as Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate, uniting East and West under one national progressive banner.
Through the course of that fall, riding a wave of celebrity and unbound from party doctrine, Roosevelt traveled back and forth across the country spreading the Progressive gospel. He introduced policy ideas that foreshadowed the New Deal his cousin Franklin would usher in more than twenty years later. He called for regulation to ensure on-the-job safety. He talked about development of the impoverished and flood-prone Mississippi River Valley. He proposed a minimum wage for women and restrictions on child labor.30
Figure 7. National Progressive Convention, Chicago, 6 August 1912. Taking place in the same hall the Republicans had occupied earlier in the summer, the Progressive Party convention presented a very different sort of political spectacle. Reporters likened it to a religious revival, and played up the contrast between the bejeweled millionaires’ wives of the GOP convention and the young women who filled the same seats at the Progressive gathering, wearing simple cotton shirtwaists and fervently singing hymns and patriotic songs. Moffett Studio and Kaufmann, Weimer & Fabry Co., Library of Congress.
The Progressive Party wasn’t just Teddy Roosevelt. It ran many candidates in state and local races across the country in 1912. But it was dominated by Roosevelt’s celebrity and outsized personality, so much that it quickly became known by Roosevelt’s own nickname, forever remembered as “The Bull Moose Party.” And if the Democrats and Republicans of 1912 were leaning toward modernity, the Progressives were thundering toward it, shaking off old political machinery, strategically using the press, and bringing new constituencies, especially women, into its tent. However, in becoming so closely associated with one leader, the Progressive Party—like other third-party efforts afterward—lost much of its steam when that leader was no longer at its helm.
In the fall of 1912, however, the Bull Moose was going strong. And his full-throated message of reform was irritating the heck out of Eugene V. Debs.
While Republicans imploded and Democrats battled, the Socialist Party had been steadily building support among working-class constituencies across the country. In the years since Debs had launched his first insurgent presidential campaign in 1904, the Socialists had moved from being seen as ultraradical to nearly respectable. In both 1904 and 1908 Debs had won close to half a million votes. By 1912, both Milwaukee and Syracuse had elected Socialist mayors. The Party had denounced the violent tactics of labor radicals and distanced itself from the anarchist fringe. One socialist paper proclaimed, “the American Socialist is no longer a creature of hoofs and horns.”31 While Socialism still operated on the margins of mainstream politics, and Eugene Debs had no illusions he would actually win the presidency, he sensed that 1912 could be the year his party could become a significant electoral force.32
When he formally kicked off his campaign in June with what a Socialist paper termed a “monster picnic” in Chicago, Debs expressed increasing confidence in the Socialists’ chances as the standard-bearing agent of true reform. “There is no longer even the pretense of difference between the so-called Republican and Democratic parties,” he told the crowd, “they are substantially one in what they stand for.” The infighting of the primary season showed that “both of these old capitalist class machines are going to pieces” and their destruction was imminent, and inevitable.33
Roosevelt’s breakaway from the Republicans challenged this formulation, but in Debs’s estimation TR was just as much a capitalist tool as ever. So Debs fumed when Roosevelt started saying things leftists had been saying for years. He steamed as Roosevelt brazenly stole the Socialist brand by making a red kerchief a symbol of his Bull Moose campaign. As the fall campaign neared, Debs dismissed the Progressive’s claims of true reform and reminded his working-class audiences that only the Socialists would fight for their interests. “The Republican, Democratic and Progressive conventions were composed in the main and controlled entirely by professional politicians in the service of the ruling class,” he raged in August. “Wage-slaves would not have been tolerated in their company.”34
The problem was that Debs was good at taking others down, and not so good at saying what he would do differently. His speeches were energetic, but skimpy on the policy details. Discontented voters might have turned to Socialism as a third-party alternative, but now the rise of the Progressive Party created another outlet for this voter frustration. Progressives had taken up some radical ideas, and in doing so they had left the true radicals behind.
Woodrow Wilson also saw TR as his chief rival as the fall campaign began. “The contest is between him and me,” he wrote Mary Hulbert, “not Taft and me.” Wilson worried about how he’d stack up. Roosevelt “appeals to their imagination; I do not,” he admitted. “He is a real, vivid person … I am a vague, conjectural personality.” With these concerns in mind, Wilson fired up the progressive rhetoric and the political theatrics as he hit the campaign trail.35
Wilson’s first major address of the fall campaign was on Labor Day in Buffalo to a large, largely working-class crowd. Denouncing corporate greed and worker injustices, he sounded similar themes to TR but drew stark contrasts between how he and his Progressive opponent would address these problems. Regulating business, as Roosevelt proposed to do, was not enough. Creating a large government bureaucracy to manage markets and institute things like the minimum wage would be even worse for the working class than the current order, Wilson argued. “Do you want to be taken care of by a combination of the government and the monopolies?” he asked his audience (a listener shouted out, “No!”).36
This message won Wilson key endorsements, most notably Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, as well as many of the populist Westerners who had once supported Bryan. This well-mannered, professorial candidate was taking on the issues and interests that most appealed to them and speaking eloquently