Transcript THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME CHANGE

THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 All the crosscurrents of Progressive era
thinking about what McClure’s Magazine
called “the problem of the relation of the
State and the corporation” came together
in the presidential campaign of 1912.
 The four way race became a national
debate on the relationship between political
and economic freedom in the age of big
business.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 At the one end of the
political spectrum
stood President Taft.
 Taft stressed that
economic individualism
could remain the
foundation of the
social order as long as
govt and private
entrepreneurs
cooperated in
addressing social ills.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 At the other end of
the spectrum was
Eugene V. Debs,
candidate of the
Socialist Party.
 Relatively few
Americans
supported the
Socialist Party’s
goal of abolishing
the “capitalist
system.”
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 But the Socialist
Party’s immediate
demands summarized
forward-looking
Progressive thought.
 Their demands were:
 Public ownership or
railroads and
banking system
 Govt. aid to the
unemployed
 Laws establishing
shorter hours and a
minimum wage.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 But the battle was
between Woodrow Wilson
and Theodore Roosevelt
over the role of the
federal govt in securing
economic freedom that
galvanized public
attention.
 The two represented
competing strands of
Progressivism.
 Both believed govt action
necessary to preserve
individual freedom.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 But they differed about the dangers of increasing the
govt’s power and the inevitability of economic
concentration.
 Though representing a party thoroughly steeped in
states’ rights and laissez-faire ideology, Wilson was
deeply imbued with Progressive ideas.
 “Freedom,” he declared, “is something more than being
let alone. The program of a government of freedom must
in these days be positive, not negative merely.”
 As governor of NJ, he presided over the implementation
of a system of workmen’s compensation and state
regulation of utlities and railroads.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 While the election was a battle between the
ideas of Wilson and TR, the story of the
election revolves around the relationship
between Taft and TR and the schism of the
Republican Party.
 Taft was TR’s hand-picked successor.
 TR had expected Taft to continue TR’s
policies but Taft had his own mind.
 He won an easy election in 1908 beating
William Jennings Bryant.
 He entered the White House on a wave of
good feeling.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHAN GE
 Four years later, Taft
would leave office the
most decisively
defeated president of
the 20th century, with
his party deeply
divided and govt in the
hands of a Democratic
administration for the
first time in twenty
years.
 TR and Taft were not
alike at all.
 But it was not until
Taft became president
did the real extent of
the differences
became clear.
 TR had been the most
dynamic public figure
of his time.
 Taft was a stolid and
respectable and little
more.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 TR was an ardent
sportsman and
athlete.
 Taft was sedentary
and obese – he
weighed close to
300 pounds and
required a special,
oversized bathtub
to be installed in
the WH.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 Most of all, TR had
taken an expansive
view of the powers
of the presidency.
 Taft was slow,
cautious and even
lethargic, insistent
that the president
take pains to
observe the strict
letter of the law.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE



Yet even had Taft been the
most dynamic of presidents,
he would still have had
difficulties.


Having come into office as
the darling of progressives
and conservatives alike, he
soon found that he could
not please them both.
He found himself, without
really intending, pleasing
the conservatives and
alienating the progressives.


TR saw Taft’s actions as
president as a betrayal of
his progressives policies.
Compounding Taft’s
problems with progressive
Republicans was the
overwhelming party loss in
the congressional elections
of 1910.
For the first time in the 20th
century Democrats
controlled the HoR.
TR was out of the country in
1910. But he would return
intent on securing the
Republican nomination.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 1910: TR was greatly
influenced by a book
written by Herbert Croly.
 In The Promise of
American Life, Croly
called for:






Women’s suffrage
Graduated income tax
Lower tariffs
A broad social welfare
program
Abolition of child labor
Worker’s compensation.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 The battle for the Republican Party involved
Taft, TR and Robert LaFollette of Wiscosin.
 LaFollette had been working for the
nomination for sometime. Because of this
TR was reluctant to enter the race.
 But in Feb. 1912, exhausted and distraught
over his daughter’s illness, LaFollette
appeared to have a breakdown during a
speech in Phil.
 Many of his followers abandoned him and
turned to TR who announced his candidacy
on 2/22.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 TR won all 13
presidential primaries.
 He arrived at the
Republican Convention
convinced he was the
choice of the party
rank and file.
 But Taft and the
Republican Old Guard
controlled the
convention.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 The battle at the
convention
revolved around
254 contested
delegates.
 TR needed fewer
than half to secure
the nomination.
 But the Old Guard
awarded all but 19
of them to Taft.
 At a rally at night, TR
told an audience of 5,000
supporters that if the
convention refused to
seat his delegates, he
would continue his fight
outside the party.
 The next day, he led his
supporters out of the
convention and out of
the party.
 The remaining delegates
then nominated Taft.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 TR summoned his
supporters to Chicago for
another convention to
launch the Progressive
Party and nominate him
as its candidate for
president.
 TR approached the battle
feeling , as he put it, “fit
as a bull moose” – thus
giving his new party the
nickname The “Bull
Moose’ Party.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 But by then, he was aware that his
cause was virtually impossible.
 That was because many of the
insurgents who had supported him
during the primaries refused to follow
him out of the Republican Party.
 It was also because of the man the
Democrats nominated Woodrow
Wilson.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE.
 The 1912 presidential contest was not
simply one between conservatives
and reformers.
 It was also one between two brands
of progressivism, expressing two
different views of America’s future.
 And it matched the two most
important national leaders of the
early 20th century.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 Wilson’s program was
called the NEW
FREEDOM.
 He insisted that
democracy must be
reinvigorated by
restoring market
competition and
freeing govt from
domination by big
business.
 He feared big govt as
mush as he feared the
power of corporations.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 The New Freedom
envisioned the fed govt:



Strengthening antitrust
laws
Protecting the right of
workers to unionize
Actively encouraging
small businesses –
creating, in other
words, the conditions
for the renewal of
economic competition
without increasing
regulation of the
economy.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 TR’s program the
NEW
NATIONALISM.
 TR’s program
insisted that only
controlling and
directing the power
of the govt could
restore the liberty
of the oppressed.
 He called for:
 Heavy taxes on
personal and
corporate fortunes
 Federal regulation
of industries,
including railroads,
mining, and oil.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 The Progressive Party
platform was drafted
by labor reformers,
settlement-house
activists, and social
scientists.
 It was a blueprint for a
modern, democratic
welfare state.
 It called for:
 Women’s suffrage
 Federal supervision of
corporate enterprise
 National labor and
health legislation for
women and children
 A system of social
insurance covering
unemployment,
medical care, and old
age.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A
GAME CHANGE
 TR called the platform
the most important
document since the
Civil War.
 His campaign helped
to give freedom a
modern social and
economic content and
established an agenda
that would define
political liberalism for
much of the 20th
century.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 SIGNIFICANCE:
 Voters voted for progressive
change/activist govt.
 A growing number of Americans believed
Socialists Party was an alternative to the
corrupt 2 party system. Part of
Progressive Movement.
 Democrats won a majority in Congress
for the next 6 years.
 Huge party re-alignment.
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
 DEMOCRATS:








Wilson
FDR (4 times)
Truman
JFK
LBJ
Carter
Clinton
Obama
 REPUBLICANS:









Harding
Coolidge
Hoover
Eisenhower
Nixon
Ford
Reagan
Bush I
Bush II
THE ELECTION OF 1912: A GAME
CHANGE
RACE AND THE PROGRESSIVE
MOVEMENT
RACE AND THE PROGRESSIVE
MOVEMENT
 By far the largest non-white group,
African-Americans were excluded from
the Progressive Movement.
 After their disenfranchisement in the
south, few could participate in American
democracy.
 Barred from joining unions and from
skilled employment, black workers had
little access to “industrial freedom.”
RACE AND THE PROGRESSIVE
MOVEMENT
 A majority of black
women worked outside
the home, but for
wages that offered no
hope of independence.
 Predominately
domestic and
agricultural workers,
they remained
unaffected by the era’s
laws regulating the
hours and conditions
of female labor.
 Nor could blacks, the
majority desperately
poor, participate fully
in the emerging
consumer economy,
either as employees in
the new department
stores (except as
janitors and cleaning
women) or as
purchasers of the
consumer goods now
flooding the
marketplace.
RACE AND THE PROGRESSIVE
MOVEMENT
 Progressive
intellectuals, social
scientists, labor
reformers, and
suffrage advocates
displayed a
remarkable
indifference to the
black condition.
 Israel Zangwill did not
include blacks in the
melting-pot idea
popularized by his
Broadway play.
RACE AND THE PROGRESSIVE
MOVEMENT
 Walter Weyl waited until
the last fifteen ages of
The New Democracy to
introduce the “race
problem.”
 His belief that the chief
obstacles to freedom
were economic not
political, revealed little
apprehension of how
denial of voting rights
underpinned the
comprehensive system of
inequality to which
southern blacks were
subjected.
RACE AND THE PROGRESSIVE
MOVEMENT
 Most settlement house reformers accepted
segregation as natural and equitable, assuming there
would be white settlements for white neighborhoods
and black settlements for black.
 White leaders of the women’s suffrage movement said
little about black disenfranchisement.
 In the South, upper-class white club women
sometimes raised funds for black schools. But
suffrage leaders insisted that the vote was a racial
entitlement, a “badge and synonym of freedom,” that
should not be denied to “free-born white women.”
RACE AND THE PROGRESSIVE
MOVEMENT
 During Reconstruction, women had been
denied constitutional recognition because it
was “the Negro’s hour.”
 Now WWI’s “women’s hour” excluded
blacks.
 The amendment that achieved women’s
suffrage left the states free to limit voting
by poll taxes and literacy tests.
 Living in the South, the vast majority of the
nation’s black women did not enjoy its
benefits.
TR, WILSON AND RACE
TR, WILSON AND RACE
 The Progressive
presidents shared
prevailing attitudes
concerning blacks.
 TR shocked white
opinion by inviting
Booker T. Washington
to dine in the WH and
by appointing a
number of blacks to
federal offices.
TR, WILSON AND RACE
 But in 1906, when a
small group of black
soldiers shot off their
guns in Brownsville, TX,
killing one resident, and
none of their fellows
would name them.
 TR ordered the
dishonorable discharge
of three black companies
– 156 men in all,
including 6 winners of
the Congressional Medal
of Honor.
 TR’s ingrained belief in
Anglo-Saxon racial
destiny (he called
Indians “savages” and
blacks “wholly unfit for
the suffrage”) did
nothing to lessen
Progressive intellectuals’
enthusiasm for the New
Nationalism.
TR, WILSON AND RACE
 Even Jane Addams,
one of the few
Progressives to take a
strong interest in black
rights and a founder of
the NAACP went along
when the Progressive
Party convention of
1912 rejected a civil
rights plank in its
platform and barred
black delegates from
the South.
TR, WILSON AND RCE
 Wilson, a native of
VA., could speak
without irony of the
South’s “genuine
representative
government” and its
exalted “standards of
liberty.”
 His administration
imposed racial
segregation in federal
departments and
dismissed numerous
black federal
employers.
TR, WILSON AND RACE
 Wilson allowed
D.W. Griffith’s film
Birth of a Nation,
which glorified the
KKK as the
defender of white
civilization during
Reconstruction, to
have its premiere
at the WH in 1915.
TR. WILSON AND RACE
 “Have you a ‘new
freedom’ for white
Americans and a new
slavery for your
African-American
fellow citizens?”
William Monroe Trotter,
the militant black
editor of the Boston
Guardian and founder
of the all-black
National Equal Rights
League, asked the
President.
TR, WILSON AND RACE
 Blacks subject to disenfranchisement and segregation
were understandably skeptical of the nation’s claim to
embody freedom and fully appreciated the ways the
symbols of liberty could coexist brutal racial violence.
 In one of hundreds of lynchings during the
Progressive era, a white mob in Springfield, Missouri,
in 1906 falsely accused three black men of rape,
hanged them from an electric light pole, and burned
their bodies in a public orgy of violence. Atop the pole
stood a replica of the Statue of Liberty.
W.E.B DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 Black leaders struggled to find a strategy to
rekindle the national commitment to
equality that had flickered brightly, if
briefly, during Reconstruction.
 No one thought more deeply, or over so
long a period, about the black condition and
the challenge it posed to American
democracy than the scholar and activist
W.E.B. Du Bois.
W.E.B. DUBOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 Born in Great
Barrington, MA, in
1868, and educated at
Fisk and Harvard
universities, DuBis
lived until 95.
 The unifying theme of
his career was his
effort to reconcile the
contradiction between
what he called
“American freedom for
whites and the
continuing subjection
of Negroes.”
W.E.B. DUBOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 His book The Souls
of Black Folks
(1903) issued a
clarion call for
blacks dissatisfied
with the
accommodationist
policies of Booker
T. Washington to
press for equal
rights.
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 Du Bois believed that educated African-Americans like
himself – the “talented tenth” of the black community
– must use their education and training to challenge
inequality.
 In some ways, he was a typical Progressive who
believed that investigation, exposure and education
would lead to solutions for social problems.
 As a professor at Atlanta University, he projected a
grandiose plan for decades of scholarly study of black
life in order to make the country aware of racism and
point the way toward its elimination.
 But he also understood the necessity of political
action.
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST


1905: Du Bois gathered a
group of black leaders at
Niagara Falls (meeting on the
Canadian side since no
American hotel would provide
accommodations) and
organized the Niagara
Movement, which sought to
reinvigorate the abolitionist
tradition.
“We claim for ourselves every
single right that belongs to a
free-born American, political,
civil, and social; and until we
get these rights we will never
cease to protest and assail
the ears of America,” Du Bois
wrote in the group’s
manifesto.
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 The Declaration of Principles adopted
at Niagara Falls called for:
 Restoring to blacks the right to vote
 An end to segregation
 Complete equality in economic and
educational opportunity.
 These principles would remain the
cornerstone of the black struggle for
racial justice for decades to come.
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 1909: Du Bois joined a
group of white reformers
shocked by a lynching in
Springfield, Ill (Lincoln’s
adult home), to create
the National Association
for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP).
 The NAACP launched a
long struggle for the
enforcement of the XIV
and XV Amendments.
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 The NAACP’s legal strategy won a few
victories.
 In Bailey v. Alabama (1911), the S.C.,
overturned southern “peonage” laws that
made it a crime for sharecroppers to break
their labor contracts.
 1917: The S.C., ruled unconstitutional a
Louisville zoning regulation excluding
blacks from living in certain parts of the city
(primarily because it interfered with whites’
right to sell their property as they saw fit).
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE REVIVAL
OF BLACK PROTEST
 Overall, however, the Progressive era
witnessed virtually no progress toward
racial justice.
 At a time when Americans’ rights were
being reformualted, blacks, said Moorfield
Story, the NAACP’s president, enjoyed a
“curious citizenship.”
 They shared obligations like military
service, but not the “fundamental rights to
which all men are entitled unless we
rupdiate…the Declaration of Independence.”
RACE AND WORLD WAR ONE
RACE AND WORLD WAR ONE
 Among black Americans, the wartime
language of freedom inspired hopes
for a radical change in the country’s
racial system.
 With the notable exception of William
Monroe Trotter, most black leaders
saw American participation in the war
as an opportunity to make real the
promise of freedom.
RACE AND WORLD WAR ONE
 To Trotter, muchpublicized German
atrocities were no
worse than American
lynchings; rather than
making the world safe
for democracy, he
argued, the
government should
worry about “making
the South safe for
Negroes.”
 Yet the black press
rallied to the war.
 Du Bois, himself, in a
widely reprinted
editorial in the
NAACP’s monthly
magazine The Crisis,
called on AfricanAmericans to “close
ranks” and enlist in the
army, to help “make
our own America a real
land of the free.”
RACE AND WORLD WAR ONE
 Black participation in the Civil War had
helped to secure the destruction of slavery.
 But during World War I, closing ranks did
not bring significant gains.
 The navy barred blacks entirely and he
segregated army confined most of the
400,000 blacks who served in the war to
supply units rather than combat.
RACE AND WORLD WAR ONE
 Contact with African
colonial soldiers
fighting alongside the
British and French
widened the horizons
of black soldiers.
 But while colonial
troops marched in the
victory parade in Paris,
the Wilson Admin., did
not allow black
Americans to
participate.
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE
“PROMISED LAND”
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE
“PROMISED LAND”
 World War I unleashed social changes that
altered the contours of American race
relations.
 The combination of increased wartime
production opened thousands of industrial
jobs to black laborers for the first time,
inspiring a large-scale migration from South
to North.
 On the eve of WWI, 90% of the AfricanAmerican population still lived in the South.
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE
“PRMISED LAND”
 Most northern cities
had tiny black
populations.
 Domestic and service
work still
predominated among
black men and women
in the North.
 1910-1920: Half a
million blacks left the
South.
 Northern cities:
 Chicago: Black
population more than
doubled.
 NYC: Black
population rose 66%
 Smaller industrial
cities like Akron,
Buffalo, and Trenton
showed similar gains.
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE
“PROMISED LAND”
 Motives for the
Great Migration:
 Higher wages in
northern factories
 Opportunities for
education their
children
 Escape the threat
of lynching
 Prospect of
exercising their
right to vote.
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE
“PROMISED LAND”
 Migrants spoke of a Second
Emancipation, of “crossing over
Jordan,” and of leaving the realm of
pharaoh for the Promised Land.
 One group from Mississippi stopped
to sing, “I am bound for the land of
Canaan,” after their train crossed the
Ohio River into the North.
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE
“PROMISED LAND”
 Yet the migrants
encountered vast
disappointments:
 Severely restricted
employment
opportunities
 Exclusion from
unions
 Rigid housing
segregation
 Outbreaks of
violence
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE
“PROMISED LAND”
 More white southerners than blacks
moved north during the war, often
with similar economic aspirations.
 But the new black presence, coupled
with demands for change inspired by
the war, created a racial tinderbox
that needed only an incident to
trigger an explosion.
THE RED SUMMER OF 1919
THE RED SUMMER OF 1919
 The summer of 1919 witnessed a
number of race riots in the south and
north.
 The nation’s capital also witnessed a
race riot where several black and
white residents were killed.
 The violence was so strong that the
summer of 1919 was dubbed the Red
Summer of 1919.
THE RED SUMMER OF 1919
 1917: Dozens of
blacks were killed
during a race riot at
east St. Louis, Illinois,
where employers had
recruited black
workers in an attempt
to weaken unions
(most of which
excluded blacks from
membership)
THE RED SUMMER OF 1919
 1919: More than 250
persons died in riots in
the urban North.
 Most notable was the
violence in Chicago
touched off by the
drowning by white
bathers if a black
teenager who
accidentally crossed
the unofficial line
dividing black and
white beaches on Lake
Michigan.
THE RED SUMMER OF 1919
 The riot that followed lasted 5 days
and involved pitched battles between
the races throughout the city.
 By the time the National Guard
restored order, 38 persons (23 black,
15 white) had been killed; 520
seriously wounded; over 1,000 left
homeless.
THE RED SUMMER OF 1919
 1920: 76 persons were
lynched in the South,
including several
returning black
veterans wearing their
uniforms.
 In Phillips County, AK,
attacks on striking
black sharecroppers by
armed vigilantes left
as many as 200
persons dead and
required the
intervention of the
army to restore order.
THE TULSA RACE RIOT 1921
THE TULSA RACE RIOT 1921
 The worst race riot in American
history occurred in Tulsa, OK, in
1921.
 More than 300 blacks were killed and
over 10,000 left homeless after a
white mob, including police and
National Guardsmen, burned an allblack section of the city to the
ground.
THE TULSA RACE RIOT 1921
 The violence erupted
after a group of black
veterans tried to
prevent the lynching of
a youth who had
accidentally tripped
and fallen on a white
female elevator
operator, causing
rumors to sweep the
city.
THE TULSA RACE RIOT
THE TULSA RACE RIOT
LYNCHING DURING THE
PROGRESSIVE ERA
LYNCHING DURING THE
PROGRESSIVE ERA
 Lynchings
continued to occur
in America
throughout the
Progressive Era.
 There was no
national law
outlawing lynching.
LYNCHING DURING THE
PROGRESSIVE ERA
LYNCHING DURING THE
PROGRESSIVE ERA
THE RISE OF GARVEYISM
THE RISE OF GARVEYISM
 In the densely
populated black
ghettoes of the
North, widespread
support emerged
for the Universal
Negro
Improvement
Association.
 This was a
movement for
African
independence and
black self-reliance
launched Marcus
Garvey, a recent
immigrant from
Jamaica
THE RISE OF GARVEYISM
 Freedom for Garveyites meant
national self-determination.
 Blacks, they insisted, should enjoy
the same internationally recognized
identity enjoyed by other peoples in
the aftermath of World War I.
THE RISE OF GARVEYISM
 “Everywhere we hear the
cry for freedom,” Garvey
proclaimed in 1921.
 “We desire a freedom
that will lift us to the
common standard of all
men, …freedom that will
give us a chance and
opportunity to rise to the
fullest of our ambition
and that we cannot get
in countries where other
men rule and dominate.”
THE RISE OF GARVEYISM
 Du Bois and other established black leaders
viewed Garvey as little more than a
demagogue.
 They applauded when the govt., deported
him after a conviction for mail fraud.
 But the massive following his movement
achieved testified to the sense of betrayal
that had been kindled in black communities
during and after the Progressive Era.
THE DARKER SIDE OF
PROGRESSIVISM
 Progressives were
criticized for attempting
to impose their middleclass WASP values on all
of society.
 They often supported
segregation of blacks to
prevent social tensions.
 They became
increasingly nativist, and
supported harsh antiimmigration laws of the
1920s.
 Progressive attempt to
legislate morality led to
the disastrous
“prohibition experiment”
in the 1920s.
 Progressive trust in
science led to the
extreme practice of
eugenics: attempt to
eliminate crime, insanity
and other defects
through selective
breeding. This also gave
white supremacy the
endorsement of science.