Both the Republicans and the Democrats were divided with conservative and progressive factions. Discontent with both parties turned many toward the Socialist Party.
The nomination was sought by incumbent President William Howard Taft, who had aligned himself with the Old Guard or conservative faction, and by former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had assumed the leadership of the Insurgent or progressive wing of the party. Roosevelt had won 278 of the 382 delegates to the national convention elected by primary elections, but Taft controlled the Republican National Committee and the party machinery. At the convention, the Taft-controlled Credentials Committee awarded most of the 254 seats challenged by Roosevelt to Taft, who won the nomination on the first ballot. Roosevelt supporters abstained or walked out. The Republican platform was moderately progressive, but the Old Guard dominated the party.
The Democratic National Convention voted forty-six times before Woodrow Wilson, the reform governor of New Jersey, secured the necessary two-thirds vote for nomination. His principal opponent was the more conservative speaker of the House of Representatives, J. Beauchamp (Champ) Clark of Missouri. William Jennings Bryan threw the support of most of the old populist wing of the party to Wilson. Wilson’s platform, called the New Freedom, proposed the elimination of special privileges for big interests by restoring competition through the breakup of monopolies. The checks and balances of the free enterprise system would then function automatically to protect the public interest. It also advocated lower tariffs and reform of the money and banking system.
Roosevelt supporters assembled in August after the regular conventions to form the Progressive or Bull Moose Party with Roosevelt as its presidential nominee. Roosevelt’s platform, the New Nationalism, proposed that business monopolies be left intact and controlled or counterbalanced by government regulation in the public interest. He also endorsed federal old age, unemployment, and accident insurance; the eight-hour day; woman suffrage; the abolition of child labor; and expanded public health services.
Perennial candidate Eugene V. Debs was the nominee. The platform proposed a gradual transition to government ownership of major industries.
Wilson carried 41 states for 435 electoral votes with 6,286,000 popular votes, or 41.9 percent of the total. Roosevelt carried 6 states for 88 electoral votes with 4,126,000 popular votes. Taft carried 2 states for 8 electoral votes with 3,484,000 popular votes, and Debs polled a surprising 897,000 popular votes.
Wilson was only the second Democrat (Cleveland was the first) elected president since the Civil War. He was born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and was reared and educated in the South. After earning a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, he taught history and political science at Princeton, and in 1902 became president of that university. In 1910 he was elected governor of New Jersey as a reform or progressive Democrat.
The key appointments were William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state and William Gibbs McAdoo as secretary of the treasury.
Wilson called the Congress, now controlled by Democrats, into a special session beginning April 7, 1913 to consider three topics:
On April 8 he appeared personally before Congress, the first president since John Adams to do so, to promote his program.
Average rates were reduced to about twenty-nine percent as compared with thirty-seven to forty percent under the previous Payne-Aldrich Tariff. A graduated income tax was included in the law to compensate for lost tariff revenue. It ranged from a tax of one percent on personal and corporate incomes over $4,000, a figure well above the annual income of the average worker, to seven percent on incomes over $500,000. The sixteenth amendment to the Constitution, ratified in February 1913, authorized the income tax.
Background. Following the Panic of 1907, it was generally agreed that there was need for more stability in the banking industry and for a currency supply which would expand and contract to meet business needs. Three points of view on the subject developed:
The bill which finally passed in December 1913 was a compromise measure. Provisions of the law were as follows:
This law supplemented and interpreted the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The principal provisions were as follows:
The law prohibited all unfair trade practices without defining them, and created a commission of five members appointed by the president. The commission was empowered to issue cease and desist orders to corporations to stop actions considered to be in restraint of trade, and to bring suit in the courts if the orders were not obeyed. Firms could also contest the orders in court. Under previous antitrust legislation, the government could act against corporations only by bringing suit.
The Underwood-Simmons Tariff, the Federal Reserve Act, and the Clayton Act were clearly in accord with the principles of the New Freedom, but the Federal Trade Commission reflected a move toward the kind of government regulation advocated by Roosevelt in his New Nationalism. Nonetheless, in 1914 and 1915 Wilson continued to oppose federal government action in such matters as loans to farmers, child labor regulation, and woman suffrage.
The Progressive Party dissolved rapidly after the election of 1912. The Republicans made major gains in Congress and in the state governments in the 1914 elections, and their victory in 1916 seemed probable. Early in 1916 Wilson and the Democrats abandoned most of their limited government and states’ rights positions in favor of a legislative program of broad economic and social reforms designed to win the support of the former Progressives for the Democratic Party in the election of 1916. The urgency of their concern was increased by the fact that Theodore Roosevelt intended to seek the Republican nomination in 1916.
Wilson’s first action marking the adoption of the new program was the appointment on January 28, 1916 of Louis D. Brandeis, considered by many to be the principal advocate of social justice in the nation, as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
The law divided the country into twelve regions and established a Federal Land Bank in each region. Funded primarily with federal money, the banks made farm mortgage loans at reasonable interest rates. Wilson had threatened to veto similar legislation in 1914.
This law, earlier opposed by Wilson, forbade shipment in interstate commerce of products whose production had involved the labor of children under fourteen or sixteen, depending on the products. The legislation was especially significant because it was the first time that Congress regulated labor within a state using the interstate commerce power. The law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1918 on the grounds that it interfered with the powers of the states.
The minority party nationally in terms of voter registration, the Democrats nominated Wilson and adopted his platform calling for continued progressive reforms and neutrality in the European war. “He kept us out of war” became the principal campaign slogan of Democratic politicians.
The convention bypassed Theodore Roosevelt, who had decided not to run as a Progressive and had sought the Republican nomination. On the first ballot it chose Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice of the Supreme Court and formerly a progressive Republican governor of New York. Hughes, an ineffective campaigner, avoided the neutrality issue because of divisions among the Republicans, and found it difficult to attack the progressive reforms of the Democrats. He emphasized what he considered the inefficiency of the Democrats, and failed to find a popular issue.
Wilson won the election with 277 electoral votes and 9,129,000 popular votes, almost three million more than he received in 1912. Hughes received 254 electoral votes and 8,538,221 popular votes. The Democrats controlled Congress by a narrow margin. While Wilson’s victory seemed close, the fact that he had increased his popular vote by almost fifty percent over four years previous was remarkable. It appears that most of his additional votes came from people who had voted for the Progressive or Socialist tickets in 1912.
In 1913 Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo and Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson segregated workers in some parts of their departments with no objection from Wilson. Many northern blacks and whites protested, especially black leader W. E. B. DuBois, who had supported Wilson in 1912. William Monroe Trotter, militant editor of the Boston Guardian, led a protest delegation to Washington and clashed verbally with the president. No further segregation in government agencies was initiated, but Wilson had gained a reputation for being inimical to civil rights.
The movement for woman suffrage, led by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was increasing in momentum at the time Wilson became president, and several states had granted the vote to women. Wilson opposed a federal woman suffrage amendment, maintaining that the franchise should be controlled by the states. Later he changed his view and supported the nineteenth amendment.