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      Figure 6. Udo J. Keppler, “Salvation Is Free, But It Doesn’t Appeal to Him,” 7 August 1912. After Taft beat Roosevelt for the Republican nomination, and TR bolted to run as a third-party candidate, the battle for the GOP’s soul began. In this August 1912 cartoon, Puck’s Joseph Keppler satirizes the evangelical fervor of Roosevelt and the conservative recalcitrance of Taft and his allies. In reality, the two men were not all that far apart in matters of policy. Library of Congress.

      The stickiness of the math became apparent as the Republican Convention opened in Chicago in early June. Roosevelt and Taft were the leading candidates, but La Follette was still in the race, as were others. There were so many contested delegates that no candidate had the number needed to win the nomination. Letters flew between Roosevelt and his allies darkly predicting that the Taft forces would stop at nothing to obtain the nomination, and framing the contest in stark good-and-evil terms. “My concern for this country has been the attitude of so many educated persons,” wrote Roosevelt on 4 June, while Taft championed “the cause of the political bosses and of special privilege in the business world.”¹⁸

      Roosevelt’s greatest fears started to come to fruition as the Republican National Committee came together in Chicago a week before the convention’s start, and started to rule on the 254 delegates not yet committed to a candidate. By the time they were finished, 235 of these votes had been awarded to Taft. By the time the convention formally opened, the president’s forces were in control.

      Roosevelt decided it was time for some bold moves. Two days before the opening night of the full convention, in a headline-making break with tradition, he came to Chicago in person. Predictably, he got an overwhelming reception. Amid a summer heat wave, the streets of the city were packed with crowds shouting “we want Teddy!” and brass bands playing rousing marches. Speaking to a packed house of supporters in the same building where the convention would take place, he proclaimed that his fears of vote-stealing had come to pass: “we are fighting for honesty against naked robbery.” In a subsequent letter to the Republican party leaders, he called on them to reverse the actions of the National Committee members, which, Roosevelt asserted, had stolen “eighty or ninety delegates” and “substitute[d] a dishonest for an honest majority.”¹⁹

      Things went from bad to worse once the Convention got underway on 17 June. Inside a sweltering convention hall, fistfights broke out. When Taft’s supporters tried to take the floor, Roosevelt’s people whistled and tooted, shouting “steamroller!” When the vote finally was taken, Roosevelt delegates sat on their hands in protest. Roosevelt’s evangelistic outcry had little effect, however, and in fact may have further slimmed his chances of overcoming the old guard. Taft’s supporters dug in their heels. La Follette, who might have been a potent ally in the fight against the stand-patters, refused to join forces with his old rival or displace the Taft men who were running the convention machinery.²⁰

      When the vote was taken, 558 went for Taft and 501 for his rivals. While new politics may have dominated the primaries, the GOP convention was old politics at its finest. Taft, the reluctant politician, won.

       The Democratic Battle

      The smoke was still clearing from the Republican showdown in Chicago when the Democrats gathered in Baltimore at the end of June 1912. When it opened, Woodrow Wilson did not even have close to the majority of delegates, much less the two-thirds majority needed under Democratic Party rules. There were a number of rivals to Wilson, and the leader in the delegate count was Champ Clark, speaker of the House, a plain-talking Missourian and an old-style party politician. Clark was fond of saying things like “I sprang from the loins of the common people, God bless them! And I am one of them.” His campaign theme song had a chorus that went “you gotta quit kickin’ my dawg aroun’.”²¹

      Even though he had the delegate lead, the conventional wisdom was that Clark was not up to the job of being president. The other leading contenders—including powerful Alabama Representative Oscar Underwood—seemed old-fashioned, regional candidates. At the same time, an alarming number of delegates were “pledged to favorite sons” or “uncertain,” which in this era meant their votes were controlled by powerful Democratic machines like New York’s Tammany Hall. In the days leading up to the convention, Wilson was not particularly bullish that he could overcome the forces of tradition and inertia. “Just between you and me,” he wrote his close friend Mary Hulbert, “I have not the least idea of being nominated, because the make of the convention is such … that the outcome is in the hands of professional, case-hardened politicians who serve only their own interests.”²²

      Yet Wilson had some important advantages. He had a national network of wealthy supporters and endorsement from important newspapers across the continent, including the most powerful Democratic newspaper in the country, the New York World. Wilson stuck with tradition and didn’t set foot in Baltimore, but he had state-of-the-art communications hooked to his seaside home in Sea Girt, New Jersey, that would keep him apprised of news soon after it happened.

      The outcome of the Republican Convention altered the political calculus of the Democratic one. With Taft the winner, and Roosevelt likely to bolt and run as a third-party candidate, the drumbeat became stronger for the Democrats to nominate Wilson over conservatives like Clark and Underwood. Only a progressive could defeat TR. Funnily enough, the man who made sure this would come to pass was none other than the man whose defeats had hobbled the Democratic Party’s national power: William Jennings Bryan. Despite the past electoral debacles, Bryan remained a powerful force in the party, and his passionate “Wall Street versus Main Street” populism retained a broad base of support in the Democratic base. Seeing how perilously close the Democrats were coming to nominating a conservative, Bryan launched a media campaign to turn things around. In a 21 June dispatch distributed to papers nationwide, he wrote: “with two reactionaries running for president, [Roosevelt] might win and thus entrench himself in power.”²³

      Bryan then proceeded to drive the cause of reform on the floor of the Baltimore convention—seeding the same evangelistic fervor Roosevelt had done with his appearance in Chicago. Still a legendary orator, Bryan egged on progressive supporters in the convention hall and encouraged voters all over the country to telegram their support to the delegates. “The fight is on,” shouted one delegate, “and Bryan is on one side and Wall Street is on the other.”²⁴ The progressive forces took control of the proceedings. Nominating speeches began at midnight on Thursday evening and continued until the next morning. At 7 a.m. the first ballot was taken. Clark won—but not a two-thirds majority. Another vote. Still no clear winner. The behind-the-scenes deal-making was furious. Through Friday and Saturday, vote after vote, Wilson started to chip away at Clark’s lead. The delegates took Sunday off for church and rest—and more negotiations in hotel rooms and barrooms. Over the course of multiple rounds of balloting, day after day of the convention, Wilson steadily increased his support. On Tuesday 2 July—on the 46th round of voting—Wilson secured 990 votes, enough to win the nomination.²⁵

      Wilson’s nomination victory had to do with smart politics, good press, the weaknesses of his opponents, the power of his allies, and incredible luck. One Washington pundit later said of Wilson: if he “was to fall out of a sixteen story building … he would hit on a feather bed.” Wilson saw a higher power at work. Later, after his election, he would say quite simply: “God ordained me to be the next president of the United States.”²⁶

       Bolting from the Parties

      Once William Howard Taft beat Theodore Roosevelt to win the Republican nomination, the ex-president did what most people had suspected for a while: he bolted. He broke with the party that had been his home since the beginning, taking a large cohort of earnest reformers with him. Driven by personal animus and a healthy dose of messianic zeal, Roosevelt became the presidential candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party. His

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