The year the GOP turned right

When Teddy Roosevelt lost the 1912 election, the Republicans started down the road that led to George W. Bush.

By James Chace

May 5, 2004 | The year 1912 constitutes a defining moment in American history. Of the four men who sought the presidency that year -- Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs -- not one of them had definitively decided to run after the congressional elections of 1910.

Wilson, who had just been elected governor of New Jersey, had long hoped that someday the White House would be his, but all his experience had been as a college professor and, later, as the president of Princeton. He had been a noted theorist of congressional government, never a practitioner.

Debs had run for president on the Socialist ticket twice before. His firm commitment to social and economic justice targeted him once again as the favorite of Socialist voters, but he himself was weary of campaigning, often too sick to do anything but speak. His thrilling oratory, however, made him invaluable in the struggle against the excesses of industrial capitalism.

Taft, the reluctant incumbent, might well have abandoned the field of battle in 1912 and taught happily at Yale Law School while hoping for an appointment to the Supreme Court. Roosevelt, though lusting after the power of the presidency, still expected to support Taft. T.R., after all, had shown himself to be a consummate politician during his two terms in office and appreciated the potency of the party organization. If Taft could have approached his former mentor directly, confessed his anxieties about dealing with a Congress so dominated by right-wing Republicans that he was finding it impossible to carry out the reformist policies of T.R., he might then have urged Roosevelt to run for a third term. That would have prevented Roosevelt from challenging him for the presidency that Taft had so often loathed.

Had the charismatic Roosevelt received the Republican nomination, he almost surely would have won. He, far more than Taft, was in tune with the progressive spirit of the time. The Republican Party, in his hands, would likely have become a party of domestic reform and internationalist realism in foreign affairs. With his heroic virtues and condemnation of materialism, Roosevelt represents the road not taken by American conservatism.

The vote polled in 1912 by Debs, who garnered the largest share of the popular total ever won by a Socialist candidate, revealed the depth of the reformist forces sweeping the land. Never again would the Socialists show such strength. The Democrats during Wilson's first term quickly picked up many of the social remedies Debs -- and a radicalized Roosevelt -- had championed.

Like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson embraced change, both men recognizing that their own careers could not flourish if they were to hold back the tide of reform. Neither leader believed that repose was essential to the happiness of humankind. The issues at stake were vital if America was to transform itself into a society that would deal effectively with the problems of the new century without sacrificing the democratic values that the founders had envisaged.

With the recent influx of new immigrants, many were condemned to work in squalid sweatshops and live in the deteriorating conditions of the urban poor. Journalists, social workers, ministers, and middle-class Americans were outraged at the widespread corruption of political bossism in the nation's cities.

The threats to the environment by the expansion of industry and population seemed to require a national commitment to conserving the nation's natural resources to avoid further destruction of wildlife and grasslands. The issue of women's suffrage, the safeguarding of the right of black Americans to vote, and the need to end child labor and to regulate factory hours and conditions went to the very heart of the promise of American democracy.

Above all, there was the question of how to curb the excesses of big business, symbolized by the great trusts, which had accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism. For Roosevelt, calling for a "New Nationalism," the role of government was to regulate big business, which was surely here to stay. For Wilson's "New Freedom," the government's task was to restore competition in a world dominated by technology and mass markets that crushed small business. For Debs, America needed federal control of basic industries and a broad-based trade unionism. As for Taft, the White House simply needed to apply laws that were designed to restrain the excesses of industrial capitalism. Indeed, all four men struggled to balance 19th century democratic values with emerging 20th century institutions and technologies. For Roosevelt and Wilson, this required the bold use of executive power; between them they created the modern presidency. In its essence, 1912 introduced a conflict between progressive idealism, later incarnated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal -- and subsequently by Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton -- and conservative values, which reached their fullness with the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The broken friendship between Taft and Roosevelt inflicted wounds on the Republican Party that have never been healed. For the rest of the century and even into the next, the Republican Party was riven by the struggle between reform and reaction, and between unilateralism in foreign relations and cosmopolitan internationalism.

Above all, the contest among Roosevelt, Wilson, Taft and Debs -- over reform at home and later over American involvement abroad -- recalls the great days of Jefferson and Hamilton, as the 1912 presidential campaign tackled the central question of America's exceptional destiny.

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