How The Progressive Party Presidential Campaigns Showed Failings They Still Have Today, Part 1: 1912 and Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Run

 

 

I feel that often the best way to tell much about our political future is from the past. Therefore many of my articles having to do with this year’s elections will showcase Presidential campaign of the past, many of which will deal with the twentieth century.

And since so much of today’s politics has to do with the progressive, I feel it’s best to start with the three Presidential elections in which one of the parties running bore the name ‘Progressive’.

I was going to do some variation on it as some point because I know all too well how leftists have loved to rewrite history so it fits their narrative. I also know that while they cling to the label of progressive with fierceness, they will go out of their way to deny its origin because of their binary attitude towards politics – which only qualify for the last half a century at most. They also will do everything in their power to deny the existence of the three different parties they had with the label ‘Progressive’ because they are, each in their own, proof of the biggest truth about their label – that no matter how much they want to admit, they can not stand without the help of a coalition and that goes against the model of purity that has been the cause of their undoing time after time after time.

So in this brief series I will deal with each of the three campaigns that deal with Progressive Parties and how they turned out. Each time there was a lesson to be learned by Progressives – and each time, they chose to ignore it.

I’ll start with the most famous one.

Because the left had decided that all Republicans de facto are evil and always have been, they have decided that must apply to all Presidents who have borne that title. So naturally over the last several years they have turned their venom onto Theodore Roosevelt.

In an earlier article I demonstrated just how this proves how willing the left is to cut their nose off to spite their face because not only was Teddy Roosevelt one of the greatest Presidents in history, by any measure he was also the most progressive President to that point in time.

T.R. never fit easily into either major political party now or then. The Roosevelt family came from the millionaire class and Roosevelt became a loyal Republican from the moment he entered politics. But at the same time, the old guard of the GOP, which was firmly conservative, was visibly afraid of the kind of Republicanism he practiced. The Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s, was present in both party but it was always stronger in the GOP and that terrified the party bosses such as Tom Platt, who controlled New York politics and looked at Roosevelt’s rise – which climaxed with him becoming governor in 1898  - with horror.

The national party, led by Mark Hanna, felt the same way when they heard that Roosevelt, as early as 1899, that Roosevelt was a ‘presidential probability’ in 1904. When William McKinley’s Vice President, Garrett Hobart, died in late 1899, the bosses figured the best way to rid themselves of their headache was to make TR McKinley’s running mate in 1900. The Vice Presidency had been the funeral for any political career since Martin Van Buren had been elected in his own right, and that was in 1836.

When TR took the job (despite Hanna’s screams: “Don’t you know there’s only one life between that damn cowboy and the White House!”) he knew it very well. When McKinley was reelected, he told reporters that ‘this was the end of his political life.’ And he truly believed that….until September 6, 1901 when Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley. Eight days later, McKinley died and that cowboy was President.

TR was always  immensely popular with the American public and the voter than he ever was with the Republican Party. Indeed, leading up the 1904 election the GOP bosses were setting up Mark Hanna to become the nominee instead of TR – which was thwarted when Hanna died in 1903. TR spent as much more time in the White House fighting with the Republicans in Congress then he ever did with the Democrats. Nearly thirty-five years of mediocre or conservative Presidents had given Congress far more control of the policy of the country than they had before and TR upset that relationship.

He did so, it’s worth recalling, for a list of achievements that most of today’s progressives are still leaning on: he constantly fought with the one percent in order to bring about rights for the working man. In 1903, he promised The Square Deal in which he became the first President to engage in an idea of that for any of the working class. He established the Food and Drug Administration, was the first President to have a policy involving conservation and laid the groundworks for the National Park system. He was known among Americans for his willingness to go against trusts and monopolies, which Progressives have been leaning towards for a century. And he negotiated a successful treaty to end the Russo-Japanese War, which eventually made him the first President to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Many of his decisions during that time were controversial in retrospect – causing a revolution in Colombia in order to let the Panama Canal be built, his treatment of a unit of African-American soldiers in the aftermath of an attack at Brownsville – but that is true of every President. And his decision to have Booker T. Washington dine at the White House was so controversial, it damaged his reputation among many Americans. That today African Americans have chosen to turn on Washington in general says more about imposing the values of today to turn of the century of America.

TR is a personal hero of mine, and I consider him one of the five or six greatest Presidents in American history. And I believe given the foresight he had in foreign affairs, had he been in the White House during the 1910s, he might very well have been able to either to prevent World War I or certainly help it end quicker and with far fewer long term consequences for the world.

But that does not mean that I am unaware of the flaws of his character and they became very apparent once he left the White House in 1909. Indeed, there are quite a few parallels between TR’s behavior and so much of the campaign that we are facing today in the Republican Party.

With TR’s case the parallels are both similar and different. After his reelection, he had announced that, even though he was both immensely popular and there was nothing in the Constitution at the time to prevent it, he would not seek a third term. He quickly regretted that decision but stuck to it and in 1908 convinced his Secretary of War William Howard Taft to run for the Presidency. Taft did so and won election in a near landslide.

Much has been written and discussed about the feud between Taft and TR over the years and I won’t add to the discussion on policy. Always part of the discussion is the fact that Roosevelt probably would have difficulty with anyone being his successor. There was also the factor of his youth (he had only been fifty when he left the Whit House) and his ambitious spirit. Taft’s administration was progressive, but he wasn’t Roosevelt. To the old guard that was a strength. To the progressive wing of the party, as it has always been, it was a fatal flaw.

One of the many ironies among this is that had Roosevelt just sat on his hands and done nothing, he almost certainly would have been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. There was also a very good chance that Taft, left to his own devices, might have decided not to run for reelection anyone. But Roosevelt could never stand still and the next decade would begin to reveal an unpleasant part of his personality – an egocentric desire that only he could be the one to lead the country and his willingness to publicly demean and denounce any of his opposition.

To be fair TR had the knowledge the public was still with him. In what would be the first Presidential primary campaign in history, TR would enter 10 GOP primaries and beat Taft in nine of them, including Taft’s home state of Ohio. (I’ll discuss the man who won the remaining two in the next article.) But he could also argue, validly, that the game was ‘rigged’ – the Old Guard controlled all the state delegations and they made sure that all of them endorsed Taft at the convention. So the will of the people had been ‘subverted’.

The problem came at the convention where TR fundamentally made the campaign that followed ‘all about him’. Asked by a reporter if he would compromise he said: “I will recommend a compromise candidate. It will be me. I will name a compromise platform. It will be our platform.” Reporters could justifiably argue that TR was dividing the party and making the campaign issue him – something that the press, which had been loyal to TR throughout his administration, was beginning to seize on.

Taft was nominated for President on the first ballot at Chicago. The progressive wing of the party was justifiably concerned  - the cause had always been bigger than Roosevelt and now it was clear that it was in Jeopardy. They persuaded TR to run on a third party ticket. Out of his fury at being snubbed, he agreed to do so.

The Progressive Party – soon to be known as the Bull Moose Party – had the furor of a religious revival. During his acceptance speech Roosevelt famously said: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.” ‘Onward Christian Soldiers was played after his speech.

The Progressive platform was the most radical one to date for any major party. It was the first party to endorse woman suffrage, direct election of senator’s, primary elections, national health service, limits on campaign contributions, social insurance, an eight hour work day, worker’s compensation and easier amending of the Constitution. It also argued for direct democracy, recalls, referendums, initiative and judicial recall. It also argued for a strong foreign policy.

From the start the campaign was structurally defective. Because it ran complete tickets against Republicans in most states, Republican politicians on the ballot would have to abandon the party to endorse Roosevelt. Only five of the fifteen most progressive Republicans senators joined the party and across the board few Republican legislators did. Even fewer Democrats ever joined. Roosevelt’s own son-in-law, Nicholas Longworth, who would one day become Speaker of the House, supported Taft. His wife Alice, her father’s most energetic cheerleader, split with her husband on the campaign. Their marriage never recovered.

Roosevelt also insisted on excluding the few African American Republican supporters from the South and then alienated White Southern supporters on the eve of election day when he publicly dined with black people in a Rhode Island hotel. And most fatally because the campaign centered on Roosevelt’s election to the White House, the Progressive campaign undercut most of the 200 candidates running for office under the Progressive banner.

The split in the Republican ticket all but assured Woodrow Wilson’s election, something that Taft and TR knew from the start. Wilson won the election with 42% of the popular vote – the lowest percentage of a winning candidate since Lincoln had managed to win election in 1860 with just over 40 % of the vote. TR had managed to with 27 percent of the popular vote to Taft’s 23 % and won 88 electoral votes to Taft’s 8. But he only carried six states to Wilson’s 40 along with 435 electoral votes. Wilson would never have become President without TR’s help

At a legislative level, the Progressive party did horribly. Most of their candidates were in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Massachusetts. They carried California, only because Hiram Johnson (governor and TR’s running mate) controlled the party apparatus. No Progressives became governor and only nine got to the House. 250 Progressives were elected to local offices. Across the country they would average between 10 to 30 percent of the vote, but again the Democrats would benefit from the split across the board.

The biggest blow after the 1912 election was to the progressive wing of the GOP. Few of the candidates who lost stayed with the movement afterward; some went back to the GOP and others changed parties and joined ranks with Wilson. But after this election the conservative wing of the GOP was in control and, with some exceptions in the 1940s and 1950s, never let go.

TR himself showed little gratitude for the party that had done so much for him. In 1914, he did some campaigning for the Progressive Party during the midterms but by then he was positioning himself to become the GOP nominee for President in 1916. For the next two years his goal was to get both the Republican and Progressive nominations for President so he could defeat Wilson, a man he had quickly come to despise.

During the 1916 convention the Progressives proposed reunification with the Republicans. After the Republicans nominated Hughes for President, the Progressives suggested to Roosevelt that he be their nominee. TR proposed his friend Henry Cabot Lodge as an alternative. They immediately nominated TR. TR refused to accept the nomination. The party promptly disintegrated with most of the ones who were left reverting to the Republicans. Harold Ickes of Chicago was so upset he campaigned for Wilson. (We’ll be seeing him again.)

Many of the progressive reforms ended up getting passed over the next decade under the administration of Wilson. But well before that TR had more or less abandoned the progressive banner and spent that period campaigning for involvement in World War I, a position that would put a wedge between him and many of his supporters, particularly the suffragists. It is worth noting the last decade of Roosevelt’s time in the public culture show an increasingly bitter man towards the men who defeated him. He called Taft a ‘fathead’, referred to Hughes as ‘the bearded iceberg’ even after he was the nominee and spent the last six years of his life hurtling abuse on Woodrow Wilson. His campaign speeches in the last three campaigns he was a part had little to do with his party’s agenda and almost entirely his own: in campaign speeches for Hughes, he barely mentioned his name. His behavior on the campaign trail could often be filled with bloody rhetoric and some journalists questioned his sanity. At one point, he sued one of them for libel.

I believe Theodore Roosevelt was a great man and that he sincerely believed in many of the progressive causes he campaigned for. But one cannot ignore how much his ego would dominate politics in the 1910s to the point that it would do damage to the Republican Party at a national level. That the Progressives chose to embrace him as their standard bearer also shows a willingness to embrace a cult of personality rather than to try and find a middle ground that would allow victory to their goals long term. It would not be the first time they would do that.

In the next article I will deal with Robert LaFollette, a Senator who deservedly bore the term Progressive, perhaps even better than Roosevelt did, and his two failed campaigns for the White House.