The War of 1912

(3 of 4)

Whatever Johnson's sentiments, just about everyone else at the convention found it an exhilarating combination of barn raising and revival meeting. They hammered together their platform, belted out hymns and interrupted Roosevelt's acceptance speech 145 times to holler and applaud. When he closed with the best line from his first speech after the bolt--"We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord"--they burst into what may still be history's loudest rendition of Onward, Christian Soldiers.

The battle would be short. Election Day, Nov. 5, was only two months off when the Progressives went forth to proselytize. Taft had already dropped from sight, telling the newspapers that he planned to take a long vacation and would stand on his record. It was said that the ideological difference between Roosevelt and Wilson was the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but on one fundamental they sharply disagreed. Wilson was a states'-rights man who contended that the history of liberty was a history of limiting the power of the national government. Roosevelt was a confirmed nationalist, convinced that the history of social progress proved that only a strong central government could level the playing field.

The urgent questions of the day were economic: how best to regulate the economy and what to do about a tariff policy that kept consumer prices artificially high by protecting American companies from foreign competition. The tariff had been created decades earlier to raise revenue (income tax being a thing of the future) and to nurture a stripling American manufacturing establishment. As the manufacturers prospered, they convinced their captives in Congress that ever thicker blankets of protection were needed to preserve American jobs. Wilson, calling the tariff "stiff and stupid," promised an immediate revision. Roosevelt, arguing that a speedy change would disrupt the economy, proposed a permanent nonpartisan commission of experts able to make impartial recommendations for more gradual reform.

T.R. also campaigned forcefully for a commission to regulate corporations. Its members--accomplished, public-spirited business leaders--would study a company's affairs, require change when there were signs of monopoly and stamp a company "approved" when all was in order. Once approved, the company could operate without fear of prosecution under the country's confusing antitrust law. To Wilson, the corporations commission was a dangerous merger of business and government, sure to enable Big Business to regulate the regulators. Even Taft roused himself to condemn it as "the most monstrous monopoly of power in the history of the world."

While Taft vacationed and Wilson gave as few speeches as possible, Roosevelt raced up the East Coast and down, across the South and into the Midwest. In Milwaukee, Wis., on Oct. 14, as he stood in an open car to salute a cheering crowd, a man a few feet away drew a revolver and fired, hitting Roosevelt in the chest and knocking him back into the car seat.