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that his arm might be twisted if circumstance allowed. Yet the circumstances started to become less favorable for a Roosevelt candidacy by the middle of 1911.

      Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, perhaps the most prominent Republican progressive after Roosevelt, declared that he would run against Taft. “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette had harbored White House ambitions ever since being elected to the Senate in 1906. He was making the bet that Roosevelt refused to do, running on the belief that the progressive wing was strong enough to triumph over the “stand-patters” in the fight for the 1912 Republican nomination. Some of Roosevelt’s closest supporters became donors to the La Follette campaign, and by October the Wisconsin senator had won the endorsement of the National Progressive Republican Conference (an organization he had helped create one year earlier).¹

      Even as Roosevelt continued to dither, the sustained attention paid to both him and La Follette—and the rise of these new sorts of organizations that endorsed candidates but stood apart from the regular party machinery—signaled fundamental changes in the American political system. The nineteenth-century United States was long characterized as “a state of courts and parties,” in which a seemingly small federal bureaucracy and individual political leaders were subsumed in importance by the actions of the judiciary and the power of the two major political parties.²

      Nineteenth-century politics was intensely local, and intensely personal. It also was a major source of entertainment. The parties orchestrated torchlight parades, festive rallies, and neighborhood parties. They delivered jobs, political favors, and Thanksgiving turkeys to those who were loyal to them. This system led to extraordinarily high voter turnout. In the 1896 presidential election, close to 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls—and, by and large, voted straight party line tickets.

      Yet that same year also introduced new methods of presidential campaigning that upended the old order and created a new partisan apparatus that made campaigning in the twentieth century far different from the nineteenth. Party dominance of all levels of government, from urban political machines to Congressional committees, had begun to decline as progressive reform gained traction in big cities and reform-minded leaders came into power in politics and in the media. Reconfigured party power created an opening for “candidate-centered politics,” in which individual candidates became the axes around which elections revolved. Although the 1896 Republican nominee, William McKinley, and his Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, had radically different political philosophies and campaign styles, both of their campaigns helped define the nature of the new style of modern campaigning. Bryan barnstormed the country with his Jeffersonian message of agrarian populism. Already well known for his oratorical gifts and charismatic self-presentation, he drew large and enthusiastic crowds. McKinley, in contrast, had the crowds come to him. From the front porch of his Canton, Ohio, home, McKinley gave an audience to any who desired one, and gave speeches while standing on a box or chair. This “front-porch campaign” drew thousands of supporters to Canton over the final weeks of the campaign, and won the attention of thousands more through newspaper coverage of this novel campaign strategy.³

      Changes in the media landscape of course also contributed to the rise of the candidate-centered campaign. A proliferation of newspapers and magazines competed for readers’ eyeballs by reporting on impassioned speeches and colorful political personalities. At the same time, a press that once was fiercely partisan began to adopt a journalistic ethos of impartiality and objectivity. With all these changes, the candidate, not the party, became the center of attention.⁴

      In this new environment, a candidate’s missteps mattered. In 1912, Robert La Follette made many of them. La Follette thought of himself as a game-changer and rabble-rouser, but he was reluctant to leave the comforts of Washington and regular Senate business to go on the stump. He gave speeches and statements that were guarded in their declarations of progressive values. His campaign sputtered through the summer and fall. In February 1912, it received its death knell when La Follette gave a meandering, vitriolic speech in Philadelphia to a group of newspaper publishers that began at midnight and lasted until nearly 2 a.m. His daughter had been ill, the campaign had proved exhausting, and La Follette perhaps had a little too much to drink earlier in the evening. All these triggered a speech that proved a “rambling, disconnected attack on his audience and the sinister influence of the press.” In its wake, the senator, reported to be “on the verge of a physical breakdown,” canceled all his campaign events.⁵ If progressive Republicans wanted a candidate who might win it all, Roosevelt soon seemed to be the best bet.

      Back in Washington, reluctant campaigner Taft was baffled and distressed by this politics of personality. “It seems to me that intelligent men have lost their heads and are leaning toward fool, radical views in a way I never thought possible…. The day of the demagogue, the liar, and the silly is on.”⁶

      By this time, all the uncertainty and speculation about whether Roosevelt would run destroyed what was left of the Roosevelt-Taft friendship. The stress manifested itself in Taft’s waistline, as he ballooned to 332 pounds. Roosevelt’s opinion of his judicious, loyal lieutenant had plummeted; by August 1911 he was characterizing Taft as “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and common in him.”⁷ Roosevelt’s ego colored his assessment. The rapturous crowds that greeted TR at every turn, and the reporters who trailed his every step, gave the ex-president increased confidence in his chances. His confidantes urged him on, and his letters back to them became more encouraging. By January 1912 he wrote progressive journalist Henry Beach Needham that if a nomination “comes to me as a genuine public movement of course I will accept.”⁸

      After La Follette’s Philadelphia meltdown, Roosevelt finally stopped being coy, and announced he would contest Taft for the Republican nomination. On 21 February he traveled to Ohio to deliver a major address designed to kick off his campaign. The speech he delivered rehashed the New Nationalism themes he had been trumpeting for eighteen months, and staked a new, quite radical position supporting the recall of judges whose decisions went against the will of the voters. While Roosevelt indicated he was “pleased over the stir he made,” the address was a thunderbolt for the Republican conservative wing, and ultimately turned out to be quite damaging to Roosevelt’s chances.⁹

      Funnily enough, Roosevelt’s decision to run against his former protégé was probably the one thing that fueled Taft to do what he always hated doing: campaign for office. Taft may not have wanted to be president, but he really, really did not want Roosevelt to win. “Sometimes a man in a corner fights,” Taft thundered to an audience in Boston. “I am going to fight.” As Roosevelt had once observed in the happier days of their friendship, Taft was “one of the best haters he had ever known.”¹⁰

      Personal politics lit a fire under Taft, but he also had the great advantage of having spent more than a year working the party machinery to win key blocs of support. While Roosevelt was barnstorming, Taft and his aides were doing the quiet, deliberate work of locking up Republican delegates. Individual charisma and media attention had chipped away at the parties’ influence, but the nineteenth-century way of politics still very much held sway in 1912. Moreover, Taft was the sitting president. Having once enjoyed the benefits of incumbency, Roosevelt recognized Taft’s advantages and was quick to characterize them as corrupt. “He has not a chance of being nominated if he relies merely on the people,” TR wrote Andrew Carnegie as the primary season heated up. “His sole chance, and excellent one, lies in having the wish of the people thwarted by the activity of the Federal office holders under him.”¹¹

      Roosevelt’s popularity shone through as he won big states like Illinois and sizeable delegate chunks in Pennsylvania. Vote for vote, Roosevelt won the primaries by a big margin; the combination of votes for Teddy and his Progressive competitor La Follette were nearly twice those for conservative Taft. The president was disappointed. “We had hoped by May 1 to have votes enough to nominate,” he wrote his brother Horace. Although things were uncertain, “I shall not withdraw under any condition.” The stakes were too high: “it seems to me that I am the only hope against radicalism and demagogy.”¹²

       The New Politics

      On the other side of the political aisle, twentieth-century

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