A 20th century battle of ideas

Presidential elections are a seamless web, especially now in the days of the “permanent campaign.” Who doubts that the presidential campaign of 2004 began as soon as the Supreme Court selected George W. Bush as the winner in 2000? James Chace’s “1912” chronicles the dramatic four-cornered contest that year among Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Eugene Debs, arguably the clearest choices in our history. He provides sharply etched portraits of bright, articulate spokesmen who managed to develop their own thoughts, even write their own speeches.

The 1912 campaign began four years earlier when Roosevelt handpicked Taft as his successor. Taft had been his secretary of War, a distinguished federal judge and president of the Philippines Commission who ended the native insurrection. Taft preferred occupying a judicial place, although he twice spurned Roosevelt’s offer of a Supreme Court seat, largely because his wife and brothers nursed political ambitions for him. Taft probably never should have been president; most assuredly, Roosevelt never should have left office in 1909. Youthful and blessed with remarkable vitality and energy, Roosevelt, known to his contemporaries as “TR,” was no retiring man; he loved the arena of life and politics, not the sidelines. He served all but six months of the assassinated William McKinley’s term. Reluctantly, TR yielded to the two-term tradition, but the temptation to attempt a return to the White House would prove irresistible.

Taft quickly succumbed to powerful conservative forces that dominated the Republican Party in Congress. Fifteen months into his presidency, he worried about his standing in Roosevelt’s eyes. Writing to the former president, Taft confessed, “I do not know that I have had harder luck than other presidents but I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than have others. I have been conscientiously trying to carry our your policies, but my method for doing so has not worked smoothly.” Roosevelt liked Taft. He told a friend in 1909 that the president “means well and he’ll do his best. But he’s weak.”

Chace traces the familiar story of the Republican split, a fissure that reflected Roosevelt’s ambitions but involved more than personalities. The Progressive movement, which began with municipal and state reforms early in the century, had steadily gathered national momentum. In a 1910 speech, before he formally challenged Taft, Roosevelt gave voice to the rising Progressive tide, endorsing a graduated income tax, inheritance taxes, the abolition of child labor, tariff reductions and increased national authority to regulate all corporations in interstate business. His “New Nationalism” boldly endorsed labor’s right to organize: “Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration....” he said. “I wish to see labor organizations powerful.” He frontally assaulted the Republicans’ core, complaining that the most capable men had thrown their whole energy into “moneymaking” and, above all, “the exploitation and exhaustion, at the most rapid rate possible, of our natural resources....”

Roosevelt endorsed Alexander Hamilton’s vision of a vigorous central government to advance the “general welfare,” and he renewed an earlier theme that the president was “the steward” of public welfare. His campaign, Chace concludes, “remains one of the most radical ever waged by a major American political figure.” It also had the unintended consequence of discrediting progressivism within the party. Today, Roosevelt is a Republican icon, yet, curiously, one invoked by those who believe in limited government, reject public responsibility for ensuring welfare, scorn concern for the environment and know nothing of Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt never ran against Washington.

Roosevelt inevitably challenged Taft. But Taft and his allies had been apt students of Roosevelt’s presidential control of the party and now used it to deny him the Republican nomination. Instead, Roosevelt created the Progressive Party and split the Republicans. Taft was doomed. Roosevelt dramatically viewed the forthcoming struggle as “Armageddon” and thought his forces would “battle for the Lord” -- a rare religious intrusion on public life for Roosevelt. Handbills in Chicago, the convention city, announced that Teddy would walk on the waters of Lake Michigan. He campaigned energetically; in one swing from Fargo, N.D., to Helena, Mont., he covered more miles than Taft did in the entire campaign.

Taft and the Republican conservatives simply were not factors in the election, except to deny Roosevelt a victory. Socialist Eugene Debs’ campaign endorsed similar Progressive aims, but his emphasis on class struggle ran counter to prevailing sentiments.

The nation’s choice really rested between Roosevelt and the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was a formidable intellectual -- lawyer, historian and political scientist. He served as president of Princeton, but his strident, fixed beliefs and inability to respect the views of others eventually led to his loss of power. He became a mildly reformist governor of New Jersey. Prominent supporters pushed him for the presidency, and in 1912 the Democrats selected him after 46 ballots. Wilson benefited from the Republican split, edging Roosevelt in the popular vote while gaining a huge margin in the electoral college.

Wilson was an old-fashioned Southern states-rights and limited-government apostle. But he, too, responded to the Progressive mood and took up the cause of reform. He spoke a simple Jeffersonianism when he said, “The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” Roosevelt dismissed Wilson as a traditional laissez-faire economist. Wilson’s doctrine, he warned, meant “the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power.” After his defeat, Taft became one of our most useful former presidents. Happily serving as he wished, he had a more notable career after he became chief justice from 1921 until his death nine years later. His expansive views of national powers provided the precedents the Supreme Court drew upon in the next decade in validating much of the New Deal. Taft was substantially more than a mossback reactionary opposing Roosevelt’s vision of the future.

Debs’ heroic leadership in the Pullman strike in 1894, and his prophetic social goals of 1912, make him a compelling historical figure. In 1918, during World War I, the Wilson administration arrested and convicted Debs for violating the Sedition Act. Roosevelt had assailed Wilson’s sedition measures and told his son that he dared Wilson to send him to jail because it “would make my voice carry further.” At a talk in Canton, Ohio, Debs questioned the war. “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles,” Debs said. “The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose -- especially their lives.” For this, Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Debs ran for president in 1920 from his Atlanta jail cell and did almost as well as in his 1912 campaign. Wilson, never one to suffer enemies, refused to commute his sentence. The next Christmas Day, President Warren G. Harding ordered Debs released -- and invited him to the White House. Alas, no tapes exist, but we know that Harding shook Debs’ hand and said, “Well, I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that now I am very glad to meet you personally.” Debs said he thought Harding “a kind gentleman, one whom I believe possesses human impulses. We understand each other perfectly.” Debs’ plight is a monument to official repression and the vindictiveness of Wilson.

Roosevelt and Wilson are regularly invoked as part of our usable history. Theodore Roosevelt has been justly celebrated across party lines for his leadership of the Progressive movement, his attention to the preservation of the environment and his grasp of the presidency -- particularly his use of it as a bully pulpit, educating Americans on such diverse subjects as national pride, the conservation of natural resources and simplified spelling. He was anything but ordinary. Taft knew it best: “His rousing of public conscience ... his power over the imagination and his inspiration of the public conscience is his predominant claim to greatness.” Shortly before Roosevelt’s break with Taft and the party, his former aide (and Taft’s) noted that “his horizon seemed to be greater.... He is bigger, broader, capable of greater good or greater evil.”

Wilson’s “New Freedom,” too, was part of the Progressive tide. Wilson pushed for the creation of the Federal Reserve System that, for the first time in 80 years, provided central banking to the nation. How ironic. The Jeffersonian Wilson abandoned his belief in traditional states-rights’ doctrines and subscribed to the central tenet in the hated Hamilton’s financial program. But he supported the abolition of child labor only as he prepared for reelection in 1915. Wilson’s Southern origins, his political allies and his beliefs combined to make him our most overtly racist president as he imposed segregation on the institutions of the federal government.

Wilson never has captured the passion and admiration that Roosevelt inspired in his time and has since. Unlike Roosevelt, who had a vast corps of friends around the world and throughout American life, Wilson seemed unapproachable, and his circle circumscribed. Wilson, a minister’s son, was remote, austere -- and so rigid. When he submitted the flawed Treaty of Versailles and his proposed League of Nations to the Senate, he said: “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God, who led us in this way.”

No negotiations, no compromise; take it or leave it. When the Senate rejected the treaty, after Wilson and the “irreconcilables” refused to compromise, he announced that the election of 1920 would be a “solemn referendum” on the treaty; instead, exhausted from all that stern moralistic preaching, the nation turned to Warren G. Harding, who promised little more than healing and normality. Wilson captured the essential contradiction of his presidency. As he took office, in March 1913, he noted, “It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs, for all my preparation has been in domestic affairs.” But Wilson took the initiative, and within two years he became the greatest interventionist in American history, committing the United States to military actions in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and, of course, Europe.

A moral mission long has been part of American foreign policy, but Wilson lent it heightened fervor and commitment. He set his course in 1912: “I believe that God planted in us visions of liberty . . . that we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.” Interventionism, moral crusading and “making the world safe for democracy” have champions today in the highest councils of government. But the history is clear: Today’s neoconservative admirers notwithstanding, Wilson’s record constituted almost perfect failure.

Roosevelt understood the realities of political compromise and its relation to leadership. Yet his campaign curiously left Republican Progressive forces in disarray, many of whom linked up with Democrats two decades later, as the two parties reversed their historical roles. Chace is aware that they never again were the party’s dominant voice, yet he might have filled in more detail about the decline of the Roosevelt tradition. In any event, the lineage of American progress for social justice and world responsibility runs from Theodore to Franklin D. Roosevelt and not through Wilson.

Chace has ably captured the men and issues of the campaign. But this is more than history in a bottle, for he goes beyond the 1912 election to locate its continuing effects on and significance in subsequent American history. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transcended their own times, and, for better or worse, they have remained powerful American figures for nearly a century. Their policies and ideas are vital to our present landscape; Chace provides us with another, worthwhile look. *