"Americans have not been energized"

Taft himself never wanted to be president. He had always hoped to someday be on the Supreme Court, but his wife was an ambitious woman and she very much wanted her husband to become the president of the United States. Twice Taft turned down offers by Roosevelt for nomination to the Supreme Court and finally agreed to run for president. What happened was that Taft was not able to manage things the way Roosevelt was. Roosevelt was able to handle the archconservatives, which Taft was unable to do. Roosevelt found that the policies he urged were not being carried out the way he had hoped for.

So there was a deep split between them that got increasingly bitter. I might also add that Roosevelt liked power. He was only 50 years old when he left the presidency, the youngest man ever to serve, and he missed the power that he had had as the president of the United States. That definitely added to the bitterness he felt at betrayal by Taft.

Woodrow Wilson was a conservative Southern Democrat. He had been president of Princeton University and was picked by the political bosses of New Jersey as the perfect person to run for governor of the state. They thought he was reliable, he was reasonably conservative, but he was honest and moderately reformist. Wilson therefore was elected governor, but then turned on the bosses and put through a highly reformist program in New Jersey. He became increasingly one of the most likely candidates for the nomination by the Democratic Party in 1912 because, as I say, he adopted many of the reforms, some of which had been Roosevelt's reforms, although not as radical as Roosevelt's. And after an incredibly tense convention that went to 46 ballots in Baltimore, where at one point he tried to withdraw his name, thinking he would not get the nomination, he finally secured it through the machinations of Democratic war horse William Jennings Bryan, who had been the Democratic nominee three times before.

Roosevelt now sought the Republican nomination in 1912. It was the first time the primary system became really important, and he won a number of the primaries with enough delegates behind him to secure the nomination. But at the Republican Convention in Chicago the party regulars managed to disqualify something like 80 delegates -- voting delegates for Roosevelt -- and hand the nomination to Taft.

Roosevelt then helped to form a new party, the Progressive Party, known in history as the Bull Moose Party. This was a party made up of middle-class reformers, schoolteachers, well-meaning intellectuals, some populists, a lot of people supporting women's suffrage like Jane Addams, and municipal reformers, particularly those who were fed up with the bossism that reigned in the great cities of the United States. Roosevelt became their standard-bearer. In his opening speech he declaimed, "We stand at Armageddon to do battle for the Lord." Roosevelt was invigorated in this campaign, and it was a very, very lively and strong campaign that he ran.

The fourth man was Eugene Debs, an extraordinary figure in history -- American labor history, certainly. He grew up in Terre Haute, Ind.; he worked on a railroad as a fireman, but was a decently well-educated man, read French and German. Eventually he joined the Socialist Party, but the greatness of Debs lay in the fact that he never lost sight of the goal of what was called industrial unionism. The only powerful organization when Debs came around was the American Federation of Labor, but that was a craft union. You had to be a skilled worker with a skilled craft to be in that union. The ordinary, unskilled worker was excluded from the union. Debs saw that what was needed was a broad-based unionism, a unionism where the skilled craftsman would join with the unskilled laborer in one great strong union. Throughout all of that period he himself was the dominant national figure of the Socialist Party and of organized labor.

It seems clear that 1912 as an election with major issues and colorful candidates would tell us something about the quality of electioneering. Could you just talk about some of the election strategies and the quality of public presentations that the candidates made?

This was the period before television and radio, so what you had in this period were orators. You would speak for an hour -- two hours was not at all unusual. People came out in droves to see the candidates, but they expected to be entertained. It was also really the beginning of whistle-stopping campaigns, where you get on a railroad and just go from town to town with the candidate speaking from the rear platform of the train. The two most gifted orators were Debs and Roosevelt.

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