Pivotal Tuesdays. Margaret O'Mara

and agrarian Southern interests, the Democratic Party had begun to exhibit recognizable contours of modern liberalism that William Jennings Bryan had laid out in 1896 and to which Wilson had given added political legitimacy with his win sixteen years later. In 1912, it was unclear which party would become the party of progressive reform. By 1920, it was becoming clear that the Democrats would be that party.³⁸

      The election of 1912 was the moment the American political system had its first major reckoning with the challenges of industrial capitalism, and we can draw three important lessons from this. First, the reckoning changed the two major parties—but it didn’t destroy them. This was a moment when either the Democrats or the Republicans could have become the Progressive party, and the title went to the Democrats while the conservatives consolidated their power in the GOP. Although Wilson campaigned on small government, it was the Republicans who went forth in the twentieth century as the party of small government, of unfettered markets, of fiscal conservatism.

      There are some lessons about third parties here. The pattern we see in 1912 has repeated itself since. Independent parties introduce new ideas into the political system, turning the radical into the mainstream. But they often lack the organization to sustain the momentum after their celebrity candidates leave the spotlight. Instead, the two major parties open their tent flaps, and bring the new parties and their voters in. As historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed some decades later, “Third parties are like bees. They sting, and then they die.”³⁹

      Second, 1912 showcased a new style of politics that had its roots in the 1896 election but had gained important momentum by economic, technological, social, and political changes in the intervening years. Political reform and the new media made elections about candidates, not about parties. Charisma and celebrity mattered, as Teddy Roosevelt’s journey showed. Barnstorming tours and good relationships with the media mattered, as Woodrow Wilson exemplified. Staying put in the White House and relying on party machinery to win elections no longer worked. Taft learned this lesson the hard way.

      Third, this election redefined the role of government in industrial America after fifty years of incredible change. It introduced ideas that were under debate a century later. The 1912 election was one where a consensus emerged that a government should do more than deliver the mail and have a standing army. It should protect workers, regulate markets, and ensure basic freedoms. Politicians then, and politicians now, generally agree on this basic principle but differ on the way to get there. Is the United States a nation that has an activist central government? Where markets are strongly regulated? Should government spend big? Should it raise taxes? Or should America be a nation that has less interference in individual lives? Should it deregulate business, and cut taxes?

      Now, it wasn’t as if everything changed and stayed that way after 1912. The political road is rarely that straight. Change takes time. While Wilson and a Democrat-led Congress ushered in a remarkable amount of reform, the progressive and activist momentum slowed in the 1920s. A world war, anti-immigrant sentiment, and rising prosperity for many Americans tamped down the urge for change. Even women winning the right to vote did not—to the surprise of many—alter the general political temperament of the American public. Parties adapted to the modern styles of campaigning, and to the reformed, media-driven political system. They regained some of their power. So, in some respects, things seemed to go quiet in the ’20s. As the 30s would show, however, the Progressive impulse was dormant—not dead.

      The next chapter explores what happened when those Progressive ideas came back, and continues to examine the legacies of the age of reform on modern presidential politics.

      PART II

      1932

      CHAPTER 3

      The Road to the New Deal

      If 1912 was a good year to be a Democrat, 1928 most certainly was not. It was, wrote Democratic operative James A. Farley, “a disaster as overwhelming as anything that ever happened in [the Party’s] century of existence.” Although the decade began with the scandal-marred Republican presidency of Warren Harding, the era of his successor Calvin Coolidge had been one of buoyant prosperity and economic optimism, of rising incomes and rising consumption. Coolidge’s secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover embraced this sunny outlook when he became Republican presidential nominee in 1928, proclaiming that “we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” The majority of American voters appeared to agree, giving Hoover a landslide victory. Despondent Democrats, wrote Farley, felt that “breaking the power of the Republican Party seemed impossible.” Perhaps the Democratic Party itself had “outlived its usefulness.”¹

      Even when the stock market crashed in late October 1929—a “Black Tuesday” that came after nearly two months of roller-coaster volatility—many observers regarded it as a blip on the broader economic picture. With only 2 percent of Americans holding any investments in the market, the crash seemed like a crisis for Wall Street, not for Main Street. If history served as a guide, the market would right itself eventually just as it had in other crises and panics, which had occurred with some regularity since the beginning of the industrial age. Stock market crashes were an inevitable side effect of industrial capitalism, so the reasoning went, and the market corrected itself over time.²