The Election of 1912 575authorized during the panic of 1907. The govern-
ment’s antitrust brief made Roosevelt appear to have
been either a proponent of the monopoly or, far
worse, a fool who had been duped by the steel corpo-
ration. Early in 1912 he declared himself a candidate
for the Republican presidential nomination.
Roosevelt plunged into the preconvention
campaign with typical energy. He was almost uniformly
victorious in states that held presidential primaries, car-
rying even Ohio, Taft’s home state. However, the pres-
ident controlled the party machinery and entered the
national convention with a small majority of the dele-
gates. Since some Taft delegates had been chosen
under questionable circumstances, the Roosevelt forces
challenged the right of 254 of them to their seats. The
Taft-controlled credentials committee, paying little
attention to the evidence, gave all but a few of the dis-
puted seats to the president, who then won the nomi-
nation on the first ballot.
Roosevelt was understandably outraged by the
ruthless manner in which the Taft “steamroller” had
overridden his forces. When his leading supporters
urged him to organize a third party, and when two of
them, George W. Perkins, formerly a partner of the
banker J. P. Morgan, and the publisher Frank
Munsey, offered to finance the campaign, Roosevelt
agreed to make the race.
In August, amid scenes of hysterical enthusiasm,
the first convention of the Progressive party met at
Chicago and nominated him for president. Announcing
that he felt “as strong as a bull moose,” Roosevelt deliv-
ered a stirring “confession of faith,” calling for strict
regulation of corporations, a tariff commission, national
presidential primaries, minimum wage and workers’
compensation laws, the elimination of child labor, and
many other reforms.
Bull Moose Campaign Speechat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
The Election of 1912
The Democrats made the most of the opportunity
offered by the Republican schism. Had they nomi-
nated a conservative or allowed Bryan a fourth
chance, they would probably have ensured
Roosevelt’s election. Instead, after battling through
forty-six ballots at their convention in Baltimore, they
nominated Woodrow Wilson, who had achieved a
remarkable liberal record as governor of New Jersey.
Incidentally, Wilson, a Virginia native, was one of
three southern candidates for the nomination, further
evidence that the sectional conflicts of Reconstruction
had been forgotten.
Although as a political scientist Wilson had crit-
icized the status quo and taken a pragmatic
WatchtheVideoapproach to the idea of government regulation of
the economy, he had objected strongly to Bryan’s
brand of politics. In 1896 he voted for the Gold
Democratic party candidate instead of Bryan. But
by 1912, influenced partly by ambition and partly
by the spirit of the times, he had been converted to
progressivism. He called his brand of reform the
New Freedom.
The federal government could best advance the
cause of social justice, Wilson reasoned, by eradicating
the special privileges that enabled the “interests” to
flourish. Where Roosevelt had lost faith in competition
as a way of protecting the public against monopolies,
Wilson insisted that competition could be restored.
The government must break up the great trusts, estab-
lish fair rules for doing business, and subject violators
to stiff punishments. Thereafter, the free enterprise sys-
tem would protect the public from exploitation with-
out destroying individual initiative and opportunity. “If
America is not to have free enterprise, then she can
have freedom of no sort whatever,” he said. Although
rather vague, this argument appealed to thousands of
voters who found the growing power of large corpora-
tions disturbing, but who hesitated to make the thor-
oughgoing commitment to government control of
business that Roosevelt was advocating.
Roosevelt’s reasoning was perhaps theoretically
more sound. He called for a New Nationalism.
Laissez-faire made less sense than it had in earlier
times. The complexities of the modern world
seemed to call for a positive approach, a plan, the
close application of human intelligence to social and
economic problems.
But being more in line with American experi-
ence than the New Nationalism, Wilson’s New1912Democratic (Wilson)
Progressive (T. Roosevelt)
Republican (Taft)
1912: Divided Republicans, Democratic VictoryIn 1912, when
Theodore Roosevelt chose to run as a Progressive, he took away
millions of votes from the Republican Taft. This ensured Democrat
Woodrow Wilson’s landslide election.