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Pivotal Tuesdays. Margaret O'Mara
Читать онлайн.Название Pivotal Tuesdays
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isbn 9780812291711
Автор произведения Margaret O'Mara
Издательство Ingram
After his victory in the New Jersey governor’s race, Woodrow Wilson became a national figure and fresh face for a Democratic Party in need of a new image. Woodrow Wilson Clubs sprang up across the nation, driving support for the New Jersey governor to move to the national stage. A high-minded introvert, Wilson was less a true believer than appearances suggested; “his political convictions,” noted his biographer, “were never as fixed as his ambition.”13 In 1911, Wilson sensed that the progressive mood was one he could take all the way to the White House, and he set out on a national tour to build support for his nomination.
Although Woodrow Wilson’s rectitude was a far cry from the red-meat populism of William Jennings Bryan, he was progressive in his advocacy of government action to break up corporate monopolies, reform the tariff and banking systems, and reduce the influence of special interests. While not delivering many policy specifics, Wilson gave stirringly progressive speeches and had a winning manner on the stump, where he liked to open an event by reciting a limerick composed for the occasion. He also had the great advantage of strong support in the New York-based national press, where he had cultivated strong relationships with editors during his years in neighboring New Jersey.
Wilson’s meteoric political career as a national politician was only possible because of the fundamental shifts in the structure and nature of electoral politics put in motion by progressive reform itself. By 1912, the effort to clean up corruption at all levels of government had successfully replaced many patronage jobs with nonpartisan, professional civil service systems. To end the influence of special interests like big railroads and big oil over state legislatures, reformers pushed through innovations like the initiative and referendum, putting ordinary voters in charge of decisions once left to elected officials. Western states like California, Washington, and Oregon became early movers in this system of direct democracy, and in 1911 California elected a new governor, Hiram Johnson, a former Republican who ran on the ticket of the newly formed Progressive Party.14
A second significant reform was the direct primary. In the nineteenth century, both Democrats and Republicans nominated most of their candidates for office through caucuses or party conventions. Unsurprisingly, these mechanisms gave party insiders the advantage, and made it extremely difficult for reform-minded newcomers to obtain electoral office. Secrecy and insider deal-making also allowed corporations—railroads, steel, oil—to maintain a stranglehold on state and national politics by making sure politicians beholden to their interests were nominated and elected, again and again. In the years leading up to 1912, reformers in many states agitated for replacing these systems with direct primary voting—more public, more professionalized, more democratic. An accompanying reform was adoption of the secret ballot. By 1910, two-thirds of the states had adopted the direct primary.15
Figure 5. Woodrow Wilson a few hours after nomination, 2 July 1912. While many changes had come to presidential politics by 1912, some old traditions remained, including the practice of candidates not attending nominating conventions. Here, Woodrow Wilson greets reporters from his seaside home in New Jersey after receiving news that he would become the Democrats’ nominee. Bain News Service, Library of Congress.
The diminished party power and the rise of candidate-centered electoral politics set in motion some profound changes in the way people ran for president. In the old system, candidates could stay out of the fray. Political operatives and party leaders did the speeches, led the parades, and mobilized voters. In an era of rough-and-tumble, mudslinging politics, presidential candidates did not need to sully themselves with the daily routines of the stump, much less attend the rowdy and argumentative national political conventions. In stark contrast to modern conventions that serve as multi-day infomercials for party and nominee, early twentieth-century candidates didn’t attend these party gatherings. They left the nominating process to the professionals, and then they gave an acceptance speech at a later date. Incumbency conferred even more insulation from the campaign trail, as most sitting presidents ran “Rose Garden campaigns,” rarely leaving the White House.
In the new system, advantages started to accrue to candidates like Wilson and Roosevelt who hit the road, giving speech after speech. The bigger the crowd, the better. Yet candidates and campaigns needed to be strategic in the places they visited and when they visited them. The rise of the direct primary and decline of party influence shifted the electoral math. Wooing party insiders in key states remained critically important—as Taft’s campaign was showing by mid-1912—but popular momentum built by personal visits by the candidate had a growing effect on electoral outcomes.
The rise of the New York-based national media added fuel to the fire. Technology allowed fast-breaking news—from elections to baseball scores—to be reported across the country. The rise of national newspaper chains meant that the same stories appeared in papers from East to West. The rise in the media also meant other things started grabbing Americans’ attention away from politics and toward sports, or show business, or sensational true-crime stories. This forced candidates and their campaign managers to be more dogged and creative in getting press attention. They could do this either by being charismatic and entertaining, or by making bold, headline-worthy policy proclamations—or both.
Living only a short train ride from the center of the media universe, Wilson not only benefited from the rise of a new journalistic elite but also mastered the art of making headlines. He staked a claim as a leader for a new era, but he was a different breed of Progressive than Roosevelt. Still a Southerner in allegiance and temperament, Wilson was a strong defender of states’ rights and a believer in maintaining the southern racial order. He fell in with many others in his party by having little patience with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, which appeared to put a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the federal government.
Wilsonian progressivism was one that reached more boldly into the corporate capitalist order by arguing that the great trusts should not just be regulated, as Roosevelt advocated, but broken up altogether. He coupled this antitrust stance with support of strong regulation at the state level. Wilson simultaneously carried the conservative banner of limited federal control while articulating a progressive message of a government that fought for the interests of ordinary citizens. While derided in Republican-leaning editorial pages as “the New Jersey school master,” Wilson represented an exciting new hope for a Democratic Party desperate to win the White House. He was a traditionalist of the nineteenth century and technocrat of the twentieth: a potent combination in an election year that blended past and present.16
The Conventional and Unconventional
For both Democrats and Republicans, the 1912 national conventions became where the tensions between the new politics and the old order burst out into the open. Although conventions during this era were often rowdy affairs, the 1912 editions were remarkable in their furious back-room deal-making, cliffhanger votes, and dramatic public displays of raw emotion and personal animosity. Yet personal feuds were not the sole engine of discord, but merely reflections of bigger, fundamentally divisive policy differences in each party. Both Democratic and Republican unity foundered on divisions of class, region, and political philosophy.
Personal resentments and internal tensions had brewed through the Republican primary season. Taft and Roosevelt’s attacks on each other had gotten fiercer as the spring wore on. Despite the wild popularity of Roosevelt and the uninspiring campaign of Taft, the race was very close. This was mostly the fault of TR, who was so swept up in his celebrity that he mistook popular adoration for real political support, and who spent so much of his time in a Progressive echo chamber of supportive friends that he underestimated the strong support that remained within the GOP for “old-fashioned” issues like the protective tariff. He dismissed the old guard as corrupt and patronage-addled, and came out swinging against some core issues of the Republican platform.
Taft, in contrast, reached out to state delegations and placed allies in critical party positions where they would have control of when, where, and who voted