At the end of the day, both men had the same goals—and thought political action was the way to achieve them. But they had different visions of how Washington should go about it. This distinction would have an important legacy on politics through the rest of the twentieth century.
The Home Stretch
By October, the election was all about Roosevelt and Wilson. Eugene Debs was off preaching to the Socialist faithful, but not winning many converts. His campaign schedule was highly unstrategic, planned according to where Debs had the largest numbers of supporters—not according to where the largest numbers of electoral votes were in play. As has happened other times in leftist politics, it was difficult to mobilize a disciplined, well-organized campaign led by people and groups whose political ideology was firmly anti-establishment and anti-hierarchical, and who strongly disdained central organization.
After his victory at the Republican Convention, nearly nothing could go right for William Howard Taft. Even by late July, he was already complaining, “there is no news from me except that I played golf.” By late September, he glumly wrote a friend, “I am already reconciled to defeat.” To add insult to injury, Taft’s vice president James Sherman died about a week before Election Day, forcing him to rustle up a last-minute replacement.37
By that point, no one seemed to notice or care. The Republican Party establishment had concluded that Taft was not going to win, yet the party bosses hated Roosevelt for his betrayal. Instead, they actively campaigned for Wilson. The GOP had imploded on itself, and Wilson was the beneficiary. Roosevelt’s weaknesses, too, were starting to lessen the momentum of the campaign over the fall months. His positions on regulation (rather than breaking up monopolies) as well as his failure to range too far from Republican orthodoxy on the tariff created weak spots Wilson exploited in his increasingly effervescent appearances on the stump.
Figure 8. “The Statesman’s Playtime—Hon. William H. Taft on the Golf Links, at Hot Springs, Virginia,” 1908. President Taft found it difficult to draw the attention of voters and reporters away from the electrifying race between Wilson and Roosevelt. Ignored by the media and isolated from old allies, the incumbent president complained as early as July that “there is no news from me except that I played golf.” Keystone View Company, Library of Congress.
There was still another twist yet to come in this pivotal campaign, however. By 14 October, Roosevelt had visited 32 states since his nomination. He had given over 150 speeches. His voice was hoarse, and despite his incredible strength and endurance, his energy was flagging. Although he’d canceled two speeches in the days before, Roosevelt insisted on speaking in Milwaukee—a Socialist stronghold and a great place to stake his claim as an alternative to Debs and to counter some of Wilson’s attacks.
Just like everywhere on the campaign trail, crowds of admirers surrounded Roosevelt as he climbed into an open-air car to travel from his hotel to the lecture hall. He stood up to wave and shake more hands. As he did so, a man broke from the group, drew a gun, and shot the candidate at close range.
Amazingly, the bullet’s path stopped short of Roosevelt’s heart—blocked by an eyeglass case and the 50-page speech manuscript in Roosevelt’s breast pocket. This saved his life. Bleeding from the chest, Roosevelt insisted on delivering the speech before accepting medical help. He told his audience, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” The shooting and Roosevelt’s extraordinary speech after it dominated the news for the rest of the campaign, bringing voters’ attention back from the World Series and other news of the day. Oddsmakers were rating TR’s chances as 1 in 4 before the assassination attempt. After, his chances improved to almost 1 in 2.
Yet it was not enough to change the course of the race. After suspending his campaign to allow Roosevelt to recover, Wilson went back on the stump for a furious last round of speeches and events.
Election day was 5 November. And it was an electoral landslide for Wilson. He won 40 states. Roosevelt won 6. Taft won 2. The popular vote was less clear-cut. Wilson only won a plurality, not a majority of the popular vote. Roosevelt came in second, with 27 percent. Taft was third, with 23 percent. The Socialists won nearly a million votes, but their total fell far short of what Debs and his colleagues dreamed of at the start of 1912.
Turnout in the election of 1912 demonstrated how much the political system had changed in this age of reform. Overall, less than 60 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. In 1896, before the widespread adoption of the direct primary and other progressive reforms, turnout had been 80 percent. The system had been modernized and the parties’ power curbed, but at the cost of broad-based popular participation. The 1912 turnout set a precedent followed by most presidential elections of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first.
The Legacy
In the aftermath of election, the four candidates went in different directions. Some stayed in the spotlight, and others receded. William Howard Taft got to depart the job he hated and, nine years later, he got the job he always dreamed about, when Warren Harding appointed him chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Eugene Debs would go on to run again for president—including campaigning from prison while awaiting a verdict on charges of sedition—but 1912 would be his finest hour. He and the Socialists would never poll quite as strongly again, and their political legitimacy came under attack in the days during and after World War I, when the Bolshevik Revolution and an increasingly isolationist American public ushered in increasingly anti-immigrant sentiment and marginalized the voices arguing for alternatives to capitalism. By the early 1920s, Socialist leaders like Debs as well as other leftist radicals were being harassed, arrested, and deported. The American Left would not have a major impact on national politics until the Great Depression validated some of their arguments about the failures and inequities of capitalism.
Teddy Roosevelt had lost, and he hated it. Victory had seemed close at certain points, and defeat was made worse by the fact that a progressive candidate won—and that candidate was not Roosevelt. So Roosevelt went hunting again, setting off on a sixteen-month voyage down the Amazon. Along the way, he contracted malaria and a serious leg infection. He came back and stayed active in national affairs, but he never ran for president again. The Progressive Party tried to recruit him as a candidate in 1916, but he declined their offer. Illnesses from the Amazon left him weakened for the rest of his life. The hyperkinetic, ebullient Roosevelt died at the surprisingly young age of sixty in 1919. Taft came to the funeral and stayed longer than anyone else. After the crowds of mourners had dissipated, Taft stood, weeping, by Roosevelt’s grave.
Not only did Wilson win the White House but the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. This meant passage of quite a number of reformist policies that owed a big debt to Teddy Roosevelt’s insurgent progressive campaign. Ironically, although he campaigned against big government, President Wilson presided over a steady increase in central government authority over his two terms. During his term in office, the United States established the Federal Reserve System to reform and regulate banking. A federal income tax imposed limits on the great fortunes of America’s wealthy. Support of labor unions, aid for education and agriculture, and other progressive initiatives brought the country closer to other industrialized nations in its social policy programs. The size and influence of the central government jumped even further after the formal U.S. entry into World