As a native Californian, I, as a woman, had the right to vote (assuming I were 21 years old as of election day) and therefore, would have participated in the 1912 California presidential primary election (which appeared to count unlike those from 1976 through 2004). Out of the thirteen states that held a presidential primary that year, only California women had full voting rights.
Yes, I would have been a Republican in 1912. That’s who progressives affiliated with (plus my ancestors had sided with the Union). I undoubtedly would have approved of challenging Taft for the nomination. However, I would have had conventional objections to Roosevelt who seemed too much informed more by his ego even if he was championing the public good. Thus, my vote would have gone to La Follette, the loser:
Taft: 24.7%
Roosevelt: 54.6%
La Follette: 18.1%
That would have been fine because lefties in the US are under no illusions that a majority ever sees the light until way after the fact. In the interim we can do no more than comfort ourselves with the knowledge that being right is more important than being popular and try to rationalize voting for the least bad, available option. However, in 1912 the CA winner wouldn’t have been unacceptable (the same way RFK and HHH in 1968 wouldn’t have been unacceptable).
So, it was off to the convention. And a spectacle.
…
For years, the tensions within the Grand Old Party had been building over the issue of government regulation. During his presidency, Roosevelt had advocated a “Square Deal” between capital and labor in American society. By the time he left the White House in March 1909, Roosevelt believed that the federal government must do more to supervise large corporations, improve the lot of women and children who worked long hours for low wages in industry, and conserve natural resources. …
(Note: 1909 was before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the “Bread and Roses” strike.)
In the days before radio and TV, presidential elections revolved less around personalities, but Teddy and Taft did manage to loom large as personalities. Yet, the 1912 Republican convention was an ideological battle for the soul of the party (a battle that didn’t happen again until 1964).
Roosevelt won all the Republican primaries against Taft except in Massachusetts [no women voters there]. Taft dominated the caucuses that sent delegates to the state conventions. When the voting was done, neither man had the 540 delegates needed to win. Roosevelt had 411, Taft had 367 and minor candidates had 46, leaving 254 up for grabs. …
Primary contests were still too new and novel for TPTB to have figured out that controlling them might be a good idea which would have avoided a sticky situation:
The convention was not Armageddon, but to observers it seemed a close second. Shouts of “liar” and cries of “steamroller” punctuated the proceedings. One pro-Taft observer said that “a tension pervaded the Coliseum breathing the general feeling that a parting of the ways was imminent.” William Allen White, the famous Kansas editor, looked down from the press tables “into the human caldron that was boiling all around me.”
That wasn’t unique in US history. Factions and candidates for the nomination have often had long and bitter convention fights when no one candidate has the requisite number of delegates. But Roosevelt did make history in 2012.
On the first day, the Roosevelt forces lost a test vote on the temporary chairman. Taft’s man, Elihu Root, prevailed. Roosevelt’s supporters tried to have 72 of their delegates substituted for Taft partisans on the list of those officially allowed to take part in the convention. When that initiative failed, Roosevelt knew that he could not win, and had earlier rejected the idea of a compromise third candidate. “I’ll name the compromise candidate. He’ll be me. I’ll name the compromise platform. It will be our platform.” With that, he bolted from the party and instructed his delegates not to take part in the voting; Taft easily won on the first ballot. Roosevelt, meanwhile, said he was going “to nominate for the presidency a Progressive on a Progressive platform.”
Interestingly enough, forty years later the legacy Taft candidate had won the most votes and delegates in the primaries, caucuses, and state conventions, but he got shafted by the 1952 PTB. (Karma doesn’t operate as quickly as mere mortals wish it would.) The 1952 PTB wanted the most “electable” nominee; so, personality more than any ideological differences was the principle criteria for the delegates. An echo of the 2008 Democratic nomination, and in both of those instances got it right.
Doesn’t take much imagination to know how 1912 Frog Ponders would have divided on the question of Roosevelt’s move. Party over principle folks are who they are. They were surely bullying people like me to vote for Taft. Today they fear that Bernie and people like me will be the 21st Bull Moose Party and break up their cozy club. And today the choices for those like me aren’t all that different from those of one hundred four years ago.
The opposing party is still the home of the racists, misogynists, bigots, nativists, and christian fundies. Yet, both remain imperialists in some form and deeply entwined with the wealthy, individuals and corporations, and with limited regard for the people. Roosevelt did take a stand that led to the 1912 (and subsequent 1916) loss for the GOP, but the party accepted the loss over reform and was back in the saddle eight years later. So were Roosevelt and those that supported/voted for him losers? To be mocked and reviled?
Would I have gotten cold feet and voted for Taft in the general election? (I like to think that I would have remained principled, but Roosevelt might have gotten my vote.)
Are there any takeaway lessons in this for those of us that supported Sanders over the machine?
Sanders owes the Democratic Party a hell of a lot less than Teddy did the GOP. But in bailing from his Party, Teddy may have had some reasonable expectation that he could win and Woodrow Wilson wasn’t being raised as the specter of the next devil incarnate that would destroy the world. Would the course of history have differed if Teddy had accepted his defeat for the nomination? Perhaps not. (At the presidential level, it was six of one or half a dozen of the other for the next two decades.) His near-term reputation and legacy may have been better than it was, but history may have been less kind to him because he would have been less identified with doing the right thing.
Or perhaps history was molded by the Republicans tendency not demonize one of their own that who causes them to lose an election. A major difference from how Democrats operate. Teddy Roosevelt, at least up until Reagan, was respected by Republicans. Similarly, (until this election cycle) they haven’t trashed their losing Presidential nominees. They welcomed Nixon and GHWB (by proxy) back into the fold eight years after their respective losses. Goldwater retained stature within the party after 1964. Decades after the fact, McGovern and Carter remain Democratic Party boogiemen. And Al Gore isn’t far behind them. Republicans do seem confident that they’ll bounce back in the future; whereas, Democrats seem to be perpetually insecure and never seem to grasp why they lose and view every loss as the end of the world. (Some members (mostly delusional) of both parties seem given to projecting the imminent demise of the other party and a perpetual majority for their own.)
So, that leaves Sanders and his supporters forced to entertain the prospect of becoming pariahs among Democrats or once again vote for the lesser evil. Forty years of that hasn’t worked out so well for the country. Excluding the insanity of the Vietnam War and Cold War, other aspects of the US experience were improving for everyone through the early 1970s. It’s been downhill since then, and none of the related crises since then aroused a majority of the populace to demand proper corrective changes. (The value of overfeeding (literally) a population?)
As both parties are the problem and therefore, not the solution and viable third parties don’t exist, are there no options that aren’t futile like the Bull Moose Party?
