1912: The Third Party That Almost Won

For four months in the autumn of 1912, it was genuinely unclear whether the President of the United States would be a Democrat, a Republican, or a bull moose. Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party (The Bull Moose Party, everyone called it within days of its founding) remains, more than a century later, the closest any third party has come to winning the American presidency. Though it lost, the story of how it came within one badly run convention of doing so, and how it then collapsed almost as fast as it had risen, is one of the most intriguing four-year stretches in American political history.

Roosevelt left the presidency in March 1909, at 48-years old and still enormously popular, having pledged not to seek what would have been a third term. He handed the office to his own chosen successor, William Howard Taft, and set off for a year-long African safari and a tour of European capitals, where he was received by kings and emperors. He returned to the United States in June 1910 to find himself increasingly unhappy with what Taft had done with the inheritance. Taft had moved more cautiously on conservation, enforced antitrust law less aggressively than Roosevelt wanted, and, in the eyes of the party's reform wing, drifted toward the conservative "Old Guard" that Roosevelt had spent two terms trying to outmaneuver. That unhappiness found its first full expression on August 31, 1910, when Roosevelt traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, to dedicate a memorial before a crowd of roughly thirty thousand people. He used the occasion to lay out a political philosophy he called the "New Nationalism": the destruction of special privilege, federal regulation of corporations and a ban on corporate political spending, an 8-hour workday, a social insurance system for the old and the sick, women's suffrage, direct election of senators, primary elections, and a constitutional amendment for a federal income tax. It was, by the standards of 1910 Republican orthodoxy, startling stuff. Roosevelt's critics called it socialistic, communistic, even anarchistic. It was also, almost word for word, the platform Roosevelt would run on two years later.

The label “New Nationalism” itself, and much of the thinking underneath it, belonged to a political theorist named Herbert Croly. It sold barely 7,500 copies in Croly's lifetime. Croly professed a Hamiltonian belief in strong national government paired with a Jeffersonian belief in individual liberty and local control. Croly's proposal was to use Hamiltonian means to secure Jeffersonian ends: a powerful federal government, deliberately built and centrally administered, harnessed not to protect privilege but to guarantee the equality of opportunity Jefferson had promised and the 19th century's trusts and machines had quietly taken away. Roosevelt read it, adopted its central term for his own platform, and effectively made Croly’s private theory into a national one. Felix Frankfurter, then a young lawyer and later a Supreme Court justice, would call Croly’s book, The Promise of American Life, "a reservoir for all political writings" that followed it, including Woodrow Wilson's rival New Freedom platform, which Croly's admirers claimed as descending from the same well even as Wilson positioned it against Roosevelt's vision.

Roosevelt announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in February 1912 with a line that became instantly famous: “My hat is in the ring.” What followed was one of the ugliest fights in American electoral history between two men who had, a few years earlier, been genuinely close friends. Roosevelt called Taft an agent of “the forces of reaction and of political crookedness” and a “puzzlewit.” Taft, pushed further than he wanted to go, called Roosevelt “the greatest menace to our institutions that we have had in a long time” and, when finally goaded into fighting back, complained that he had been “a man of straw” long enough. Roosevelt won nearly every state that held a primary, every one but Massachusetts. That victory mattered less than it should have, because most delegates in 1912 were still chosen by state party conventions and machinery that Taft, as the sitting president, controlled. When the Republican National Convention opened at the Chicago Coliseum on June 18, neither man had the 540 delegates needed to win outright, and roughly 250 delegate seats were under formal dispute. The Republican National Committee's credentials committee, which Taft's people controlled, awarded the overwhelming majority of the contested seats to Taft. Missouri Governor Herbert Hadley led a floor fight to unseat 92 of them; it failed, 564 to 510. The first real test of strength, the vote for temporary chairman, went to Taft's candidate, Elihu Root, over Theodore Roosevelt's, Wisconsin Governor Francis McGovern, 558 to 502. Roosevelt had spent years courting white Southern Democrats as potential Republican converts, and going into 1912 he hoped to translate that courtship into delegate strength across the South. It did not work. The region's Republican organizations were built, and had been for decades, on Black membership, and those delegates stayed with Taft. Roosevelt lost the South within his own party in part because the party's Black Southern base did not trust him to represent it. Taft was renominated. Roosevelt released his delegates from their pledges and told them to sit out the final vote rather than ratify a stolen nomination. He walked out of the Coliseum for the last time as a Republican.

Roosevelt's supporters reconvened that same evening a few blocks away at Orchestra Hall and announced they would form a new party. Asked by reporters whether, at 53, he was healthy enough for another grueling campaign, Roosevelt said he felt "as fit as a bull moose." The nickname attached itself within days and never let go. The moose became the party's emblem before its formal platform had even been written. The Progressive Party held its own convention in Chicago that August, and it was, by the standards of any third-party gathering before or since, enormous: more than 2,000 delegates packed the Coliseum, a great many of them women, at a moment when no state outside a handful in the West let a woman cast a ballot for president. Delegates opened proceedings by singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" as the convention's unofficial anthem, and the religious cadence was not incidental. Jane Addams, the Hull House reformer and one of the best-known social workers in the country, seconded Roosevelt's nomination, eight years before the Nineteenth Amendment. California's reform governor, Hiram Johnson, joined the ticket as his running mate. Roosevelt closed his acceptance speech, later published as "A Confession of Faith," with the line that would define the whole campaign:

“We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

The Bull Moose platform held the most comprehensive reform program any major American party had yet proposed: direct primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall, women's suffrage, an 8-hour day, a minimum wage for women, workers' compensation, a ban on child labor, a federal commission to regulate large corporations, and social insurance for old age, sickness, and unemployment. Its two most important financial backers were the publisher Frank Munsey and the financier George Perkins, a sitting partner at JP Morgan & Co. Most sitting Republican officials, including Roosevelt's own son-in-law, declined to follow him into the new party, judging the risk too great. Having already lost the South's Black Republican delegates to Taft in June, Roosevelt's organizers responded in August by building the new party's Southern wing on a white-only basis. Roosevelt defended the decision in print that August, arguing the party had made “the Progressive issue a moral, not a racial issue” and that courting reform-minded white Southerners would serve Black Southerners better in the long run than the Republican Party's older strategy had.

Beyond the convention floor, the party organized with a speed that startled even its own founders. It appeared on the ballot in 47 states that November. Women, unable to vote in most of the country, ran the party's precinct-level machinery anyway: Massachusetts alone reported women's committees forming in town after town that September, from Natick to Springfield to Boston, months ahead of the general election, and the California suffragist Isabella Blaney was one of four women elected directly to the party's National Committee at the founding convention. The party's own national committee later reported roughly 1,750,000 votes across 37 states in down-ballot races that fall, on top of Roosevelt's presidential total, electing nine members of Congress and roughly 250 candidates to local office nationwide. The organization outlived the 1912 election by at least two full cycles: 138 candidates, women among them, ran for the US House as Progressives in 1914, and the party kept a functioning national committee through 1916.

On the evening of October 14, 1912, Roosevelt was leaving the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee for a campaign speech when a New York saloonkeeper named John Flammang Schrank, who had trailed him through eight states, stepped out of the crowd and shot him in the chest from roughly five feet away. Schrank's stated reasoning was that no man should serve a third presidential term. The bullet tore through Roosevelt's heavy overcoat, a folded 50-page copy of his prepared speech, and a steel eyeglass case before lodging in his chest muscle, just short of his lung. Roosevelt's secretary, a former football player named Elbert Martin, tackled Schrank to the ground. Roosevelt himself, still standing, shouted for the crowd not to hurt his attacker. Against the pleading of his aides and doctors, Roosevelt refused to go to the hospital. “This may be my last talk in this cause to our people,” he told them, and had himself driven to the Milwaukee Auditorium. He opened his coat to show the crowd his bloodied shirt and began: “I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” He spoke for roughly ninety minutes before finally agreeing to go to the hospital. Doctors judged the bullet too dangerous to remove, and Roosevelt carried it in his chest for the rest of his life.

The election was held on November 5. Woodrow Wilson won with 41.8% of the popular vote and 435 electoral votes across 40 states, the lowest winning share of any candidate since Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and a direct consequence of the Republican-Progressive split. Roosevelt finished second: 27.4%, 4,122,721 votes, 88 electoral votes from 6 states. Taft finished third with 23.2% and just 8 electoral votes from two states, Vermont and Utah, still the worst electoral showing of any incumbent president in American history. The Socialist Eugene Debs took 6% and no electoral votes. Roosevelt's second-place finish remains, well over a century later, the strongest performance by any candidate outside the two major parties in American presidential history, in both popular and electoral votes, the only time a third-party or independent candidate has finished second in the race for president.

The Progressive Party did not survive to contest a second time. Its financial backer, George Perkins, broke publicly with the platform's antitrust language in 1913, arguing for regulated bigness over breakup and alienating the trust-busting wing of the party almost immediately. Without local machinery of its own in most of the country, and with the economic argument of 1914 running against reform generally, the Progressives' 9 House seats fell to 6 that November, and most rank-and-file Progressives drifted back to the Republican Party they had left. By 1916 Roosevelt himself concluded the experiment was over. The Republican and Progressive conventions met simultaneously in Chicago that June, each waiting on the other. The Progressives nominated Roosevelt again, with Louisiana's John M. Parker as his running mate. Roosevelt declined the nomination and endorsed the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, instead. Parker, left holding a ticket with no one at the top of it, campaigned for Wilson. The party that four years earlier had beaten a sitting president into third place had lasted, as an organized national force, almost exactly four years.

More of the 1912 platform became law within a generation than perhaps any other losing platform in American history. The federal income tax and the direct election of senators, both already moving through the states as constitutional amendments that year, were ratified in 1913. Wilson's own administration created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, adopting the Progressive platform's regulatory-commission idea over Roosevelt's public objection that Wilson's version had no teeth. National women's suffrage followed in 1920. And the social-insurance system Roosevelt had first proposed at Osawatomie in 1910 arrived two decades later, under Franklin Roosevelt, as Social Security.

The party that ran on all of it did not live to see any of it happen, though its spirit lives on today in the New Nationalists of America.