1912 Presidential Election

5 Key excerpts on "1912 Presidential Election"

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  A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt

  • Serge Ricard(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Twenty-Five THE NEW NATIONALISM AND PROGRESSIVE ISSUES: THE BREAK WITH TAFT AND THE 1912 CAMPAIGN Claire Delahaye

  The 1912 election is acknowledged to have been one of the major elections in American history. First, as Arthur Link and Richard McCormick have pointed out, the 1912 election was in many regards the first modern presidential contest in American history, even more so than the 1896 one: “The use of direct primaries, the challenge to traditional party loyalties, the candidates’ issue orientation, and the prevalence of interest-group political activists all make the election of 1912 look more like that of 1980 than 1896” (Link and McCormick 1983, 43–44). The usage of tools from the new media age, such as mass magazines, motion pictures and recordings, added to the innovativeness and the modernity of this peculiar election. What’s more, the unfolding of the campaign seemed to have been made of the kind of drama written to captivate audiences. Stories of betrayal, sudden twists and unexpected turns, filled with colorful characters and charismatic candidates, gave the election a sensationalist appeal that did not, however, diminish the essential political scope of the debates. The future orientation of American political, social and economic order was being debated in an election that saw the apex of progressivism in politics. In a context of large-scale industrial capitalism, what could the political answers to industrial excesses be? Thus Americans discussed national issues with passion, as four major candidates contended for the highest office: the incumbent, Republican William Howard Taft, Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson, Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs and former president Theodore Roosevelt running for the Progressive Party. John Milton Cooper, Jr., draws a parallel between the 1912 campaign and the 1860 election because of the general impression that the fate of the nation depended on its outcome (Cooper 1983, 140). It was a bitter political and philosophical fight rooted in constitutional issues, but it was also a battle of characters, mostly between Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, who were quickly acknowledged as the two major candidates, but also between TR and Taft – that is, William Howard Taft, who had been TR’s friend and handpicked successor at the White House.

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  Four Hats in the Ring

  The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics

  • Lewis L. Gould(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  The issues of foreign policy played a peripheral role in the run-up to the 1912 contest,. Although the outbreak of World War I was just three years away, the possibility of such an international cataclysm seemed remote as the nation prepared to choose the next president. Newspapers kept the public well informed of events overseas, but to Americans a general European war seemed improbable. Industrial nations, people believed, were too advanced and mature to descend into a pointless conflict that would threaten civilization. There was a revolution in neighboring Mexico in 1911, but even that volatile incident did not intrude on the presidential race. The outside world seemed very distant as Americans looked at the possible contenders for the presidency during the year before the actual campaign commenced.

  In the aftermath of the 1910 elections, politicians in both parties recognized that the presidential contest in 1912 would be competitive in a way that had not occurred for two decades. For the first time since Grover Cleveland’s third race for the White House in 1892, the united Democrats had a serious opportunity to challenge Republicans outside of the states that went for William Jennings Bryan in 1896, 1900, and 1908. No one foresaw a split among Republicans into two rival tickets, as happened eighteen months later, but Democrats believed that they could, with the right candidate, beat their faction-ridden opponents in a two-way race.

  During 1911, many of the key decisions were made that determined the outcome in November 1912. William Howard Taft did not regain his national popularity, but he did seize an advantage in the quest for renomination. Theodore Roosevelt could not make up his mind about challenging the president. As a result, when he did become a candidate in early 1912, he had to play catch-up and never gained the initiative. The third Republican in the race, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, used 1911 to make himself a credible progressive alternative to Roosevelt. The failure of this effort relegated La Follette to subordinate status. He did not recognize how slim his chances were by the end of the year, and his persistence in the contest hurt the chances for a progressive alternative to Taft other than Roosevelt to emerge.

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  Delivering the People's Message

  The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate

  • Julia R. Azari(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  The partisanship, frequency, and defensiveness of Hoover’s mandate rhetoric resembled that of the partisan era that began forty years later. The emphasis on “pledge politics” and the use of the mandate to respond to challenging questions anticipated how a diverse group of later leaders—Nixon, Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama—would employ mandate rhetoric. In contrast with Hoover’s successors who departed quickly from this mold of mandate claiming, presidents in the partisan era have employed it as a rhetorical norm. Political and institutional conditions account for this difference.

  Interpreting the 1932 Election

  The historical significance of the 1932 election can hardly be mistaken. Herbert Hoover was turned out of office and his Democratic rival, Franklin Roosevelt, was elected with more than 57 percent of the popular vote. The new president offered a “New Deal,” which contained a mix of new and old ideas, packaged in terms of national values as well as economic necessity.51 Roosevelt also engineered changes in the Democratic Party’s nomination rules, was the first president inaugurated under the Twentieth Amendment (which moved Inauguration Day from March to January), and became the first (and last) president elected to more than two terms.

  In the evolution of mandate rhetoric, the FDR presidency was also a turning point. FDR neither embraced Wilson’s vision of the party mandate, nor did he use mandate logic frequently when promoting New Deal policies. Both the 1932 and 1936 elections could easily have qualified as party landslides, yet Roosevelt’s mandate rhetoric reveals a more complicated picture. In 1933, when his position was strong and national crisis bolstered the legitimacy of his initial agenda, mandate rhetoric was sparse. After the 1936 election, Roosevelt invoked the election mandate in the context of an institutional clash: the “court-packing” plan of 1937.

  Even with the Great Depression as a backdrop, the meaning of the 1932 election was contested. Newspapers offered a range of interpretations. The superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, Scott McBride told the New York Times, “If the party misinterprets the election as a mandate for beer and a demand for repeal it need not hope to succeed. Most of the wet Democrats who won in this landslide were elected because they were Democrats and not because they were wets.”52 Coverage of the election offered a number of possibilities for its meaning: some emphasized the Democratic victory; some gave the numbers a central place in the narrative; and still others directed attention toward voter anger, suggesting a negative referendum on the incumbent administration rather than a positive one on Roosevelt or the Democrats.53 Charles Hurd reports in the New York Times that “7,000,000” cast their votes in favor of the New Deal and emphasizes both the magnitude of the victory and the party and policy implications of the result, suggesting that the “Democratic triumph entails an implied command to solve the problems of economic dislocation, of prohibition, and the foreign affairs of the United States as they are related to war debt and tariffs.”54 By contrast, the Wall Street Journal questions the partisan and ideological terms in which the victory had been cast by the president and sources sympathetic to him; an article with the subtitle “Strange Bedfellows Made Up the Mass Movement Which Elected Roosevelt” questions Roosevelt’s claim to a “victory of liberal thought” in the postelection radio address and further ponders the role of electoral majorities in the design of the Constitution.55

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  A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt

  • William D. Pederson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Five THE ELECTION OF 1932 Donald A. Ritchie The process of deciphering the 1932 election began as soon as the campaign had ended. It quickly became a truism that the Great Depression had doomed Herbert Hoover’s chances of reelection and paved the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Less attention was therefore devoted to why Roosevelt won than on whether or not his campaign adequately prepared the nation for his New Deal agenda. By all accounts, the 1932 election marked a watershed in American politics. The Great Depression profoundly shook American voters, forcing them to reexamine their political allegiances and expectations for the federal government. After being the dominant political party since the Civil War, Republicans were dethroned and Democrats became the majority party for most of the next half century. Herbert Hoover, who had won the presidency in a landslide four years earlier, lost it in an even greater electoral avalanche. Franklin Roosevelt swept into the presidency promising a new deal for the American people. Democrats added 99 seats in the House and a dozen new senators to give them overwhelming control of Congress, and a readiness to follow the new president wherever he led, to get the nation out of the economic crisis. Citizens’ expectations for the federal government expanded and new programs more directly connected the government to their daily lives. The relevant literature began a year before the election when Ernest K. Lindley, a New York Herald Tribune reporter who covered Roosevelt as governor, published an influential campaign biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy (1931: 7–8, 355). Lindley denied that Roosevelt had solicited him to write the book, but its sympathetic assessment helped to boost his candidacy. In a second edition, released after the election, Lindley added a chapter on the Democratic nomination, reminding readers that there had been nothing inevitable about that outcome

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  The First Modern Clash over Federal Power

  Wilson versus Hughes in the Presidential Election of 1916

  • Lewis L. Gould(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  Hilles, the holdover chair of the Republican National Committee from the Taft administration, predicted “that the Republican party will return to power in 1916.” Furthermore “the issue in 1916 will be squarely on the tariff and on the legislation of the Democratic party.” Labor and business would unite to overthrow Wilson and his party. “The public has sickened of the nostrums and panaceas exploited in the past few years,” Hilles concluded. Two decades after William McKinley had led the Grand Old Party to the White House, Republican leaders did not expect the war to stand in the way of the economic issue that would result in another election victory along the lines of 1896. 25 The big losers in the 1914 contests were Theodore Roosevelt and the dwindling remnants of his Progressive Party. Without the stimulus of a presidential election and even with Roosevelt’s energetic campaign, the third party almost disappeared. Their congressional delegation in the House was cut in half to nine and only one Progressive member remained in the Senate. Such party stalwarts as former secretary of the interior under Roosevelt, James R. Garfield, and former senator Albert J. Beveridge in Indiana made poor showings in gubernatorial races in their states. The reelection of Hiram Johnson as governor of California was the lone bright spot. “East of Indiana,” wrote a disappointed Roosevelt, “it would be mere silliness and fruitful of nothing except a trifle or mischief to endeavor at present to continue action along Progressive lines exactly as we have done.” 26 In the West, Roosevelt concluded, “the party must keep up.” Because the country “was sick and tired of reform,” the best the Progressives could do was to exist only on a state-by-state basis. 27 It was a long way from the optimism of the third party in 1912. The outbreak of the war had traumatized Roosevelt in both a personal and professional sense, and he focused his energies more and more on foreign policy

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