"Americans have not been energized"

One of the most noteworthy things that happened in that campaign occurred in the late stages in October, when Roosevelt was campaigning in the Middle West. He came out of his hotel and went to get in his car and a man tried to assassinate him. A man picked up a pistol and shot at him, and Roosevelt's life was saved only because he had a 50-page speech in the pocket of his coat. He was bleeding and the bullet went through the speech into his chest. Nonetheless, he insisted on going on to make his speech, against the advice of the doctors. No one could stop Roosevelt: He got up and walked onto the platform in front of about 5,000 to 10,000 people, opened his coat where he was still bleeding and said, "It takes more then a bullet to kill a Bull Moose." And he spoke for another 45 minutes with a bullet in his chest. It was one of the most extraordinary performances in American electoral history. He then went to a hospital, where he spent the next couple of weeks. All the other candidates stopped campaigning until he was able to recover.

One reason that 1912 was so important was that it was the beginning of the idea of the direct primary system. States -- not all of them, but many states -- were beginning to have primaries, so the parties couldn't simply be left solely in the hands of the political bosses, although they nonetheless remained powerful. So you had to really get to the people in a way you might not have had to in an earlier period. You had to get out, get to the people and get them to vote for you.

I'm a little bit surprised. Maybe it was just an oversight, but you mentioned Debs and Roosevelt as orators. I would have thought that Wilson was a better speechmaker. Maybe Roosevelt was a better stump speaker?

The point about Wilson is that he was extremely eloquent in his speeches. He wasn't, however, a stemwinder kind of speaker. In other words, if you read the speeches, or if you listened carefully to them, there was no question he was extremely eloquent. Wilson's father was a preacher. As a boy Wilson would sometimes spend time in front of a mirror practicing speaking well. But Debs and Roosevelt would whip up the crowd. Taft, by the way, made almost no speeches whatsoever during the campaign. He used the organization of the Republican Party to get the nomination. But that he ran at all was because he was so angry at Roosevelt for the things that Roosevelt had said about him and their then broken friendship.

Perhaps you could say a little something about the legacies of the election. What happened because of the election? What would you highlight as significant changes either in public policy, or in the parties, or in the strategies of campaigning?

Between them Roosevelt and Wilson really invented the modern presidency. By this I mean the strong use of executive power to get their programs through. From roughly right after the Civil War to the McKinley presidency, the presidency as a whole was really a weak presidency. The presidents themselves believed that Congress should play a dominant role, and it certainly did so. But when Roosevelt came in, he had to find ways in which he could assert executive power legally. And he found various loopholes, and executive orders, where he could do certain things. Most of the lands that he saved from destruction by loggers or others were done by executive orders, rather then votes by Congress. So this was a strong assertion of executive power -- and that has been the dominant role of presidencies in the United States in the 20th and 21st century. Wilson himself also used executive power strongly when he became president.

The other thing is that because the spirit of reform was so strong in the Progressive period, Wilson adopted many of Roosevelt's radical ideas. The result was that the first two years of Wilson's first term resulted in a great deal of very important legislation: the income tax, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, better hours for workers. He pursued a number of policies that probably never would have passed had they not been prepared for by the strength of progressivism that Roosevelt and Debs espoused.

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