The Campaign of 1912, one of the most theatric in American political history, generated a host of ear-snagging and mind-catching phrases, including “New Freedom,” “New Nationalism,” “Bull Moose Party,” “Covenant with the People,” “Bryanized,” “My Hat Is in the Ring and I’m Stripped to the Buff!” “Have Another Cup of Coffee?” “I’ll Do the Best I Can but There Is a Bullet in My Body,” “What This Country Needs Is a Good Five-Cent Cigar,” and finally, one that was more likely appealing to those who were the equivalent to our own present-day wonks, “Regulated Competition versus Regulated Monopoly.” The campaign also involved a blistering contest between three candidates of considerable substance, and one that was electrified with a sudden and bitter rivalry between two formerly close friends, now fallen into harsh enmity. When the dust cleared, a respected academic named Woodrow Wilson would enter the national stage to signal a new direction for the development of the federal government in the United States.
The incumbent president William Howard Taft enjoyed considerable success during the first three years of his administration. In spite of his more conservative tendencies when compared to his predecessor, former president Theodore Roosevelt, he nonetheless continued the administration of the progressive agenda by dismantling trusts and supporting the enactment by Congress of progressive laws, achievements that were all built on the Roosevelt legacy. In trust busting alone, Taft proved his progressive credentials, as his administration actually dissolved more monopolies than Roosevelt, who had himself broken so many trusts that he picked up another nickname, the “Great Trustbuster.” Indeed, as Taft set the enormous company U.S. Steel in his crosshairs, even the former president’s concern was raised, worried that Taft’s trust-busting was perhaps a little too indiscriminate. Unlike Roosevelt, Taft seemed less amenable to the notion that there were “bad trusts” and “good trusts.” Taft also successfully helped to break the massive Standard Oil Trust as well as the American Tobacco Trust, and in so doing, he again surpassed the already significant achievements of the Great Trustbuster. Thus Taft’s conservative disposition did not interfere with his commitment to continuing, and in many ways expanding, Roosevelt’s reforms. The economy for the most part was sound, and general prosperity had been under way since the turn of the century; with the exception of a limited downturn in 1907 (occurring under Roosevelt), the nation’s wealth and employment had been steadily improving. Taft’s presidency had in many ways proven a successful heir to the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations.
Nonetheless, Taft encountered problems. His political troubles were already somewhat evident as early as 1910, even though his administration was accomplished in promoting continued reform. As his term moved into its latter months, Taft seemed to be devoting increasingly more time to socializing with his more conservative chums, in a way allowing himself to become distracted, less interested in the kind of progressive reforms that he adopted in the first part of his administration. Thus as the general election year of 1912 opened, Taft’s incumbency was surprisingly vulnerable, and not since the defection of Liberal Republicans who were opposed to Grant in the election of 1872 was a Republican incumbent faced with this level of resistance from within his own party. Even the Plumed Knight, James Blaine, at his lowest moment still commanded considerable allegiance within the party; but President Taft was now facing large-scale abandonment. Those troubles stemmed from a split within the party that further divided the progressive wing from the conservative wing, and while Taft’s policies had often followed the progressive agenda, he was readily identified as the leader of the conservatives. Former president Roosevelt was still regarded as the true great progressive, and he still commanded the unflagging loyalties of the party’s reformist elements. In 1872, President Grant was able to quash the challenge from the Liberal Republicans and their eccentric candidate, Horace Greeley; but Taft now faced Roosevelt, the Great Man, which threw him into an impossibly difficult situation.
Owing to Taft’s support of a number of reformist policies, the explanation for his troubles is more complex than the perception by some progressives—and in particular Roosevelt—that he had deserted them. The trouble began as early as the White House transition, as Taft did not retain key members of the Roosevelt cabinet, to the chagrin of the outgoing president, a man one did not want to vex. In particular, Taft replaced Roosevelt’s trusted secretary of the interior, James R. Garfield, the son of slain president James A. Garfield, with Richard Ballinger, who then returned to private use millions of acres of land that had been reserved for conservation under the leadership of Roosevelt and Garfield. Conservation was dear to the former president, and this act alone promised to drive a wedge between Roosevelt and Taft. To add fuel to the fire that was already intensifying, President Taft fired another member of Roosevelt’s administration, Gifford Pinchot, originally an appointee of President McKinley, who had been running the U.S. Forest Service for Roosevelt since 1905. Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, was, among others, highly critical of Ballinger and convinced that Taft’s new secretary of the interior would erase all progress made in the area of conservation. During the first two years of the Taft administration, the president, while continuing to support progressive legislation, nonetheless remained conservative in his inclinations and personal loyalties, which would eventually lead him to gradually abandon the trust-busting policies of the first part of his term, and in the end it would raise suspicions within his party’s progressive wing.
From the left side of the party, Taft seemed too cozy with the oligarchs, a perception that completely ignored Taft’s extensive public record as a reformer. By the midterm elections of 1910, the isolation of Taft was under way, and by 1911 it was evident that he had become associated with the conservative opponents of reform, a conclusion that, upon reflection, was unfairly drawn. But in campaign politics, the power of appearance is difficult to neutralize; and as Taft’s administration moved closer toward the general election of 1912, some of his actions began to, at least in part, mirror the appearance while reshaping the reality. One such example is provided in Taft’s reversal of his position on the tariff, now supporting protectionist legislation that, for his critics, signaled the negation of many of the earlier reforms that he had executed. For the progressives, high tariffs were closely allied to monopolies; thus, in switching from his former reformist policies to what now appeared to be a renewed protectionism, he raised another alarm.
As factions within the two parties began to quarrel, Roosevelt publicly refused to support either side, but privately he was displeased with the conservatives, and his old ally Taft had now seemed to join their number. The rift grew into a schism, and the schism tore a friendship apart. Four years out of office, an African safari and a European tour behind him, and again “feeling like a Bull Moose,” Teddy Roosevelt charged back into the thicket of presidential politics like a force of nature determined to reclaim the Republican Party for the progressive cause. Friend and political benefactor to Taft just four years earlier, Roosevelt felt betrayed by both Taft and the conservative wing of the party, and he steeled himself to run for an unprecedented third term. Roosevelt hurled unkind epithets at his former friend, the “fathead” Taft, opening an irreconcilable breach. Taft defended himself, wildly claiming that Roosevelt had become too radical and warning voters that the election of the former president would initiate a “reign of terror” reminiscent of the darkest days of the French Revolution. Between an animated Roosevelt and the emerging Midwestern progressive star Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who was also vying for the nomination, Taft’s position in the party was undermined, and his very presidency now drifted in the doldrums at the launching of his own reelection campaign.
Roosevelt, back in the arena, loomed like a titan over the political landscape; but political parties traditionally favor incumbents, and this was no different in 1912, even with the popular Rough Rider again back in the fray. Taft still enjoyed the full support of party leaders—now largely conservative—and the institutional party’s full endorsement. But Roosevelt remained universally beloved among the party regulars, and with the introduction of nonbinding presidential primary elections in the previous election year, now in practice in thirteen states, Taft’s weakness was soon evident. The president was routinely beaten by Roosevelt in the primaries, in spite of the fact that he actively campaigned at the primary level, the first incumbent president to do so. Roosevelt took nine states in the primaries, La Follette surprisingly claimed two, and Taft managed to win only one. Even Taft’s home state of Ohio went against him, an embarrassment for any presidential candidate under any set of circumstances, and exponentially worse for an incumbent president.
But in 1912, the primaries did not choose the nominee as they do today; the convention still did, and at the convention, it was Taft, not his former benefactor, who held the cards. It is also important to remember that even with Roosevelt’s victories in the primaries, the majority of states still selected delegates in state conventions, and it was there that Taft still enjoyed influence and loyalty. Finally, the party itself made the final determination on the credentials of any delegate, primary politics notwithstanding. Roosevelt, as potent as ever in terms of his popularity among the electorate, still could not dislodge the party elite. At the Chicago convention, the Taft forces won the day. Vice President James S. Sherman was also chosen to continue as Taft’s running mate on the first ballot, becoming the first incumbent vice president ever to be renominated for a second term at a national party convention (i.e., since the beginning of the national convention system in the late 1820s–early 1830s). By comparison, Vice President Richard Johnson, who served under President Van Buren and who did run with him twice, was not renominated but simply tacitly accepted in 1840 when the convention sought not to seek a replacement; and three previous two-term vice presidents, George Clinton (vice president under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, one term each), David Tompkins (vice president during the two-term administration of James Monroe), and John C. Calhoun (vice president under John Quincy Adams and part of the first term of Andrew Jackson prior to his resignation), preceded the national nominating convention. That said, Vice President Sherman unfortunately died on October 12, just a few weeks before the general election. Nicholas M. Butler, the president of Columbia University, was promptly selected to receive Sherman’s electoral votes.
Undeterred by his failure to win over the party leadership and thus the convention, Roosevelt broke from the party (undertaking an action that he once found distasteful; he had once refused to bolt with the Mugwumps against the nominee, Blaine, in 1884), declared his candidacy as an independent, and promptly formed the Progressive Party, which naturally assumed the Bull Moose nickname, and which nominated the progressive governor of California, Hiram Johnson, as his running mate. This snapped the Republican Party in two: Taft, representing the conservative element friendlier to business—in spite of his proven record against trusts; and Roosevelt, the last eminent champion of progressive reform within the GOP. During the campaign, Roosevelt promoted what he referred to as his “New Nationalism,” a conceptual vision for American politics that included the continuation of progressive reforms such as a proposed graduated income tax, close monitoring of corporations, lower tariffs, the expansion of the practice of direct presidential primaries, the initiative and referendum, and continued conservation efforts. As indicated above, Roosevelt had tempered some of his attitudes toward monopolies, arguing that in some cases they could be allowed (the “good trusts”) and preferring tighter regulation to actual dissolution (a point in which Roosevelt appeared more conservative than Taft, who, it will be remembered, had attempted to disband U.S. Steel, another sore spot between the two men). For Roosevelt, if monopolies were accountable to government and the public it represented, they could, in some cases, be sustained under close scrutiny. In the final analysis, Lincoln’s party was battling over its future and its soul, and in so doing, it opened the way to the first Democratic victory in a presidential campaign since Grover Cleveland’s return to office in 1892.
Three-time Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, finally realizing his diminished appeal, concentrated his energies on helping to reshape the mentality of the Democrats. Even though he failed to gain the White House in three tries, Bryan nonetheless had made a lasting impact on American democracy. In large part due to Bryan’s efforts, progressivism infused both parties, each battling its conservative wing, and Bryan had been a major figure at the center of the movement. Even Roosevelt acknowledged Bryan’s qualified influence on his own proposals, admitting, “I have [taken ideas from Bryan]. That is quite true,” but also adding the disclaimer, “I have taken every one of them except those suited for the inmates of lunatic asylums.” More importantly, Bryan’s failure to gain the presidency obscured his success at changing the ideological framework in his own party. The older states’ rights, laissez-faire strain was still present in the Democratic Party, but it was fast becoming a minority voice representing the thinking of the past. Led forward by Bryan, the party was embracing the full scope of progressivism. The Democrats favored electoral and governmental reform that went beyond trust-busting and envisioned the remaking of American politics into a far more participatory form of democracy. Conservatives in both parties recoiled, but the tide was in favor of the reformers. The party was fully “Bryanized,” but the Great Commoner would not lead it into victory; that task would fall upon a new Democratic hero, the erudite professor from Princeton.
As the Democratic convention opened in Baltimore, Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri, who had recently replaced the legendary Joe Cannon in that position, was considered the front-runner based on his success in the nonbinding primaries that gave him the pre-convention lead in delegates. He was followed by the scholar/governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, along with Ohio’s Governor Judson Harmon and House majority leader Oscar Underwood of Alabama. Clark, a progressive ally of Bryan, seemed the easy choice for the nomination. Wilson was harder to pin down ideologically. As a professor and university president, as well as in his early political career, Wilson adopted a more conservative tenor; but as governor of New Jersey, he became a reformist, supporting state legislation of a progressive nature. By 1912, Wilson was regarded as having become more liberal than Clark, who was now viewed as something of a moderate.
Clark had the lead as the convention proceeded in Baltimore, but he could not manage to gain the needed two-thirds majority to secure the nomination. According to some accounts, Clark lost his edge when Tammany Hall declared its support for him, a move that seemed to have locked up his nomination on the tenth ballot, but one that led Bryan and his loyalists to withdraw their support, a move that negated Tammany’s influence. Bryan did not openly support Wilson, but rather he withdrew from Clark, leading some commentators to conclude that this was the turning point that drove the convention’s delegates toward the professor. A speech by Bryan explaining the Nebraska delegation’s sudden reversal against Clark is viewed by some observers as having been the decisive act leading to Wilson’s nomination; in other words, it was Bryan who once again determined who would carry the party’s standard, this time handing it to another candidate rather than embracing it himself. Other accounts tell a slightly different tale, that it was not so much the association of Clark with Tammany or the withdrawal of Bryan from Clark that ended his run, but rather skilled and subtle negotiations behind the scenes by William G. McAdoo and William F. McCombs on behalf of Wilson, who patiently held himself out of the spotlight while his allies discretely marshaled their forces. Even after the speech by Bryan, Wilson was not nominated until the forty-sixth ballot, perhaps lending some credence to this second account. Once the nomination was won by Wilson, Indiana’s governor Thomas Marshall was quickly selected as his running mate without controversy.
The Democratic platform combined progressivism and the more agrarian strains of populism, and it was well received by both industrial labor and farmers. Even though former president Roosevelt had formed an independent Progressive Party that held nearly identical positions, it was clear to voters that among the two major parties, which still both had progressive wings, the Democratic Party was moving more in that direction than the GOP. Progressive Republicans were either following Roosevelt into his Bull Moose Party or considering the Democrats. With the renomination of Taft, the perception, whether fair or not, was that the Republican Party was abandoning its progressive agenda. Some progressive Republicans did, in the end, reconsider their initial enthusiasm for Roosevelt and, in so doing, returned to their own party. Progressivism was not entirely dead in the GOP, but there were signs that it was no longer the force that it had been just four years earlier.
Wilson possessed a different kind of charisma in contrast to Roosevelt’s inexhaustible ebullience and bravado or Bryan’s melodramatic yet emotively effective histrionics. Wilson lacked Roosevelt’s colorful and domineering persona, but he possessed charms of his own that were more than capable of moving public audiences. Articulate, confident, astute, persuasive, professorial, quietly devout, indifferent to crowd pleasing, possessing a quick wit, and brimming with intelligence, Wilson knew how to communicate effectively. He neither spoke with the impassioned rhetoric of Bryan nor cut the commanding image of Roosevelt, but his audience immediately respected him, recognizing in him a sober, prudent approach combined with a larger vision of a greater purpose. He was the first Southerner (born and educated in Virginia, now a transplant to New Jersey) to win a major nomination since 1860, and the first (and to this day, the last) PhD to run for the White House. Recognizing the similarities shared by the progressive wings of both parties, Wilson redefined their respective positions on his own terms. Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, which held much in common with the Democratic agenda, was reinterpreted by Wilson as a series of ideas and policies that actually worked to preserve monopoly power rather than eliminate it. Roosevelt, in Wilson’s view, merely wanted to mildly regulate existing trusts but not banish the trust from the American economy. Wilson claimed to be the genuine trustbuster, and his own vision that he called the “New Freedom” was advanced as a way to restore real competition and opportunity to the American dream through the thoroughgoing abolition of a monopolist system. Wilson’s message was strikingly effective in drawing out the contrasts within the progressive movement. In a sense, the “Bryanized” Wilson had succeeded in “Wilsonizing” Bryan, and in so doing, he regained the thunder for the Democrats that Bryan had accused Roosevelt of stealing away for the Republicans.
And so Taft, Roosevelt, and Wilson, three of the United States’ most important historical figures, squared off in a single election. But they were not the only players drawing attention. The Socialist Party, showing optimism after slowly gaining votes in recent general elections as the leading third-party alternative, was now also enjoying considerable electoral success across the nation at various levels. But it too faced its own internal problems. The majority of the party in many ways resembled the progressive wings of the two major parties, and it advocated a gradualist approach toward the promotion and eventual development of a socialist society. However, a small but decidedly influential minority led by an outsized personality, Big Bill Haywood, and linked through close ties to the International Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the “Wobblies”), scolded the moderate majority for its doctrinal concessions, advocating a far more radical and revolutionary approach to the struggle. Eugene V. Debs himself, the party’s standard-bearer for the past three elections, was closer to the radical position, at least in 1912, but he was seen by the moderates as the most appealing and reliable candidate, and thus he easily won renomination. In so doing, Debs became at this point in history the only person to be nominated four times to run for president (Bryan and Grover Cleveland had each been nominated three times to run on behalf of the Democratic Party). Eventually the radicals were expelled from the party; American socialism, at least to the Socialist Party, would employ the ballot and other peaceful methods, eschewing more extreme measures, to work toward the transformation of the political culture in the name of a more just and equitable society. Joining the Socialists against the mainstream, the small but inexplicably influential Prohibition Party tapped Eugene Chafin, its candidate in 1908, to again lead the charge in the general election of 1912.
During the campaign, Taft set aside his considerable record as a reformer and embraced the label of conservative. While he spoke against what he perceived to be the dangerous “schemes” of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, he nonetheless considered Wilson to be the bigger problem, the real challenge; thus most of his campaign statements were directed against the Democrats. As the nation had enjoyed prosperity during the Taft years, the president stressed that this was the result of the leadership of the Republican Party and argued that with the Democrats in power, their low-tariff, free-trade policies would blunt any further economic progress. But Taft saw the handwriting on the wall; he realized, from the moment that Roosevelt bolted the party and took the progressives with him, that his presidency was fated for one term.
Typically, Roosevelt traveled widely, stumping hard for his reformist principles. “I have been growing more radical instead of less radical,” Roosevelt declared. “I’m even going further than the [Progressive Party] platform.” He emphasized the conservatism of both the Republicans and even Wilson, describing the Democratic candidate as an “ultra-conservative” and claiming that the former professor’s rise to political prominence was due to the support of his friends on Wall Street. Roosevelt frequently referred to Wilson’s more conservative positions held in the past, reminding voters that Wilson had only just recently adopted these more liberal views. Roosevelt was still a captivating speaker, but he addressed audiences less dramatically than he had in the past, projecting a more modest image even as his ideas were more provocative.
Some have referred to the policies proposed in Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose campaign as one of the more radical agendas in American history, at least by a candidate of such prominence, exceeding even the future 1936 campaign of his cousin Franklin Roosevelt and the 1948 campaign of Harry Truman in the extent of its reformist message. While the Great Man roamed far and wide, delivering his message from coast to coast and from the North into the Deep South, Wilson preferred economy of effort, going only as far west as Denver and ignoring the South altogether, which he knew to be loyal to the Democrats and not needing to be won over, save for stops in the border states of Missouri and Delaware, which had been close in recent years. He focused his rhetoric on distinguishing his New Freedom progressivism from Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, and in so doing, at times he did reveal traces of a more conservative, non-Bryanist streak. For all his talk of reform, Wilson distrusted the power of government, and while he expressed sympathy with labor, he cautioned workers not to become too dependent on government to fight their battles, warning that if the government became too involved in the labor movement, the workers might become less independent and in the end actually resemble wards of the state. In this way, Wilson reminded reporters more of President Cleveland, the old Bourbon Democrat, than either William Jennings Bryan or President Roosevelt.
One of the more outrageous moments of the campaign involved a bizarre and dangerous attempt to assassinate Roosevelt. A delusional saloon keeper, still embittered by Roosevelt’s enforcement of temperance ordinances during his tenure as a New York City police commissioner three decades earlier, ambushed the former president in Milwaukee, where he was due to give a speech, and shot him in the chest. The bullet was partially deflected by both Roosevelt’s eyeglasses case and a multi-paged copy of his speech, and thus as the bullet lodged in his body, its momentum had been slowed considerably. But it was a life-threatening incident nonetheless. Ever fearless, Roosevelt calmly assessed his wound, concluded that it was not serious, and, to a stunned audience, nonchalantly proceeded to deliver his speech, which clocked in at around ninety minutes. In addressing the crowd, Roosevelt’s initial remarks carried the following off-the-cuff disclaimer: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” Upon medical examination, doctors concluded that the candidate was right—the wound was not a particularly serious one. But it was still serious enough that the bullet’s removal was determined to be potentially risky; thus Roosevelt carried the bullet in his chest for the remainder of his life. The entire incident epitomizes the incomparable character of the Rough Rider, further evidence that he was a man larger than his image, even larger than his age.
Even though the 1912 campaign was ideologically deeper than any campaign since 1860 and rhetorically more interesting than any campaign since 1896, the outcome of the election had more to do with the numbers game of electoral politics than with the high ideas under discussion or the provocative slogans that were spun out by the strategists. Due to the divisions between the Republican and Bull Moose progressives, Wilson won the election with slightly fewer than 6,300,000 popular votes (only 42%), which nonetheless converted to a stunning 435 votes (or 82%) in the Electoral College. Thus, even though Wilson’s plurality in the popular vote was the third lowest for a winning candidate in history and second lowest in the era of the modern political party (only Lincoln’s 39.7% in the four-candidate race of 1860 polled lower to win; and it should also be added that John Quincy Adams polled even lower at 30% in 1824, just before the beginnings of the modern political party), he paradoxically won more total electoral votes than any candidate before him in history, although this Electoral College landslide was not the biggest in terms of percentages. Since the 1804 election, wherein the Electoral College first began voting for the president and vice president separately, only Jefferson in 1804, Monroe in 1816 and 1824, Pierce in 1852, and Lincoln in 1864 (in an election that excluded eleven states) finished with a higher percentage in the electoral college than Wilson in 1912—this, of course, does not include Washington’s unanimous support for the presidency for both of his two terms. Wilson won the presidency by holding, as expected, the entire South, still the Democrats’ unyielding fortress, and making critical inroads into the North, which included winning in the ever-pivotal New York (which now carried 45 electoral votes), as well as the Midwest, where he won every state that Taft had managed to win in 1908 except Minnesota and Michigan (included in Wilson’s tally was Taft’s home of Ohio). Roosevelt succeeded in gaining more votes than any third-party candidate in history, winning over 4,100,000 popular votes and carrying six states in the Electoral College (California, Washington, South Dakota, and Pennsylvania in addition to Minnesota and Michigan) for a total of 88 electoral votes. Roosevelt became and would remain the only third-party candidate to outpace an incumbent president, and he did it in both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote.
Taft’s loss was devastating—an incumbent president winning just under 3,500,000 votes and carrying only two states (New Hampshire and Utah) for a total of 8 electoral votes, showing third place against the challengers. This is all the more puzzling when looking at the overall record of the Taft administration, which on the whole was marked by a level of competence that exceeds that of a few chief executives who did manage to win a second term. But a divided Republican Party could not defeat the unified Democrats, particularly given the political muscle that Roosevelt quixotically took with him into his third party. The GOP lost in every region of the country, even in its northeastern/midwestern stronghold (e.g., for the first time in history, the Republican Party failed to carry Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota). Had Roosevelt allied with Taft, they would have easily outpolled Wilson by 1.3 million votes, and the GOP could have maintained its long dominance of the White House. It has been noted, and it is important to do so, that Wilson in victory won fewer popular votes than Bryan in any of his three defeats; thus it is evident that the Democratic Party actually suffered a loss of popular support within the electorate in the 1912 election, even though it had enjoyed an Electoral College landslide on a scale seldom seen. The Democrats did experience a resurgence in Congress, taking majorities in both chambers for the first time since the 1850s, a boon that again was likely due to the split in the Republican Party. Meanwhile, Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party rode the progressive wave to their highest point to date, gathering more than 900,000 votes with increasing support in all states, and flexing considerable “third-party muscle” of their own. But the story of 1912 is more about division than unity. Even if all the minor-party votes went to the Democrats—and they would not have—the Republicans, if they had managed to prevent their split and combine their forces, still would have likely won the day, returned Taft to the White House, and held Congress as well. That said, the electorate was, at least for the moment, fragmented, and the two major parties were now facing new challenges. The vote total for the Socialists was nearly twice that of 1908; thus, in spite of its own internal divisions, the Debs campaign enjoyed a remarkable stride forward for the party, which would have been all the more impressive had it not been overshadowed by Roosevelt’s Progressive campaign. The Prohibition Party won just over 208,000 votes, down from the nearly 255,000 votes that it won four years earlier. On Election Day at least, the Progressives and Socialists seemed to be pointing toward a new direction for the American electorate. As a nod to his role in supporting Wilson, and perhaps also for his role in helping to reshape both the mission of the Democratic Party and the language of American politics, William Jennings Bryan would serve as the incoming president Wilson’s secretary of state.
But in the end, it was Wilson’s victory, regardless of how it came about, and the Democrats were returned to the White House for the first time since President Cleveland left in 1897. Woodrow Wilson was only the second Democrat to win the White House since the Civil War, but it is significant to note that neither Cleveland’s two victories nor Wilson’s recent victory was won with a popular majority. Cleveland won in 1884 with 48.5 percent of the popular vote and in 1892 with slightly over 46 percent to give him a nonconsecutive second term, while Wilson’s 1912 victory was even lower at 42 percent. It was thus still apparent that the Democratic Party did not command the broad electoral base still enjoyed by the Republicans. But even though the Democrats had not convincingly broken through in terms of electoral allegiances, in the battle of ideas, the Republicans were in trouble. Thus, still more significantly, given the dominance of the Campaign of 1912 by the reform candidates—i.e., Wilson, Roosevelt, and Debs—it appeared that there was indeed a shift in attitudes among voters with regard to the responsibilities of governance in the direction of society. The American electorate was clearly focused on which vision would guide the country in the twentieth century. But the groundswell for new ideas would soon subside. Unlike in the Campaigns of 1900 and 1904, events abroad were scarcely considered during the election year of 1912; but before long, events abroad would soon signal to American voters that new priorities, and new anxieties, would again alter political necessities.
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