Taft, Roosevelt and the Convention Fight That Split the Party in 1912

Let me start with arithmetic, because arithmetic does not lie to you the way a politician does. In the presidential election of 1912, Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, got about 41.8 percent of the popular vote. William Howard Taft, the Republican President, got about 23.2 percent. Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive, got about 27.4 percent. Now add the last two together. Twenty-three point two plus twenty-seven point four is fifty point six. The two men who had been the best of friends, and who both came out of the same party, collectively beat the winner by almost nine points. And they lost anyway. Wilson carried 435 electoral votes.

That is the whole lesson of 1912 in one sentence: a party that fights itself hands the election to the other side. But the sentence is too tidy. How the party got to that point, who was right and who was wrong, and what it cost, is a story with real villains and heroes on both sides. And since the Republican Party has had a few family quarrels since, some of them in our lifetimes, I think it is worth knowing how the first great one went.

Two friends and a promise

Start with the friendship. Theodore Roosevelt became President in September 1901 when William McKinley was assassinated. He won in his own right in 1904, and on election night he announced that he would not seek another term. He kept that pledge in 1908 and handpicked his successor: his Secretary of War, a big, genial Ohio lawyer and former judge named William Howard Taft. Roosevelt campaigned for him. Taft won easily. Then Roosevelt sailed for a long hunting trip in Africa and a tour of Europe, certain that his man would carry on the program.

The program was what historians call Progressivism: more federal regulation of the railroads and big corporations, the conservation of public lands, a tougher hand with the trusts. Taft did not think of himself as a break from it. By some measures he was more aggressive on antitrust enforcement than Roosevelt had been, filing more suits against the big combinations. His Congress sent the proposed 16th Amendment, which would authorize the income tax, to the states in 1909. But temperament matters. Taft was a judge at heart. He liked rules, procedures and the letter of the law, and he disliked the fiery moral campaign.

Where they actually broke

The split came in pieces, and each piece was a real disagreement.

The tariff. In 1909 Congress passed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff. Progressive Republicans in the Midwest had expected substantial cuts. They got a bill that left many duties high, and Taft defended it as the best that could be done, calling it the best tariff bill the party had ever passed. Midwestern Republicans never forgave the speech. (For the long history of the party's relationship with duties, see Why the Protective Tariff Was Republican Gospel From Morrill to McKinley.)

Conservation. The Ballinger-Pinchot dispute pitted Taft's Interior Secretary, Richard Ballinger, against Gifford Pinchot, the head of the Forest Service whom Roosevelt had made a national figure. Pinchot accused Ballinger of being too friendly to private interests in the use of public lands. Taft sided with Ballinger and fired Pinchot in January 1910. To Roosevelt's friends, that meant Taft had abandoned the cause.

The antitrust suit against U.S. Steel. In 1911 Taft's Justice Department sued U.S. Steel over its acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, a deal Roosevelt's administration had approved during the Panic of 1907. Roosevelt took the suit as a personal insult, an attack on his own record.

The courts. This one was real and deserves to be understood by any conservative. In 1912 Roosevelt began calling for the "recall of judicial decisions," a procedure by which voters could overturn a state court's ruling on a constitutional question. Taft, a former federal judge who later became Chief Justice, saw that as an attack on the independence of the judiciary and the idea that constitutional rights do not depend on a popular vote. Whatever else you think about 1912, remember that Taft was making an argument about the rule of law that conservatives still make.

In August 1910 Roosevelt gave a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, calling for what he named the "New Nationalism," a federal government with the power to regulate the economy in the public interest. Taft saw it as an insult to the Constitution and to his own record. By early 1911 Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had formed the Progressive Republican League to challenge Taft for the nomination. In February 1912, Roosevelt threw his hat in the ring.

The primaries: Roosevelt wins the voters, Taft wins the machinery

Here is a fact that matters for anyone who cares how we choose our nominees. In 1912, for the first time on a significant scale, some states held presidential primaries to choose convention delegates. About a dozen states did. Roosevelt won most of them, including Taft's home state of Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. In those states, the voters wanted Roosevelt.

But most delegates were not chosen by primaries. They were picked in state conventions and by party committees, the old way, and the old way belonged to the party organization. The organization belonged to the sitting President, who controlled federal patronage. A particularly large block came from the Southern states, where the Republican Party was small and depended on federal appointments, and those delegations went to Taft. So Roosevelt could win the voters and still not have the convention. The story of that old system, and how the rules changed, is told in How Republicans Pick Nominees from Party Bosses to Primaries and Caucuses, and the picture of the old conventions is in From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prime Time Republican Conventions in Dated Steps.

Chicago, June 1912: the credentials fight

The Republican National Convention met in the Chicago Coliseum in the third week of June 1912. Before a single ballot could be cast, the convention had to decide who the delegates were, because in many states there were two rival delegations, one for Taft and one for Roosevelt, each claiming to be the real one. The first body to decide was the Republican National Committee, which ruled overwhelmingly for the Taft delegations in the contested cases. The Roosevelt forces said the decisions were rigged by a "steam roller." Taft's supporters said the committee was following the party's rules, and that the rules had not changed.

The fight moved to the floor. Roosevelt's candidate for temporary chairman, Governor Francis McGovern of Wisconsin, lost to Taft's choice, Senator Elihu Root of New York, who had once been Roosevelt's own Secretary of State. Roosevelt's forces then asked that the contested delegates be barred from voting on their own seats. That motion lost too. At that point Roosevelt told his delegates to stop taking part. They sat in silence and refused to vote. Taft was nominated on the first ballot, but with a large number of delegates abstaining. Roosevelt had told a crowd the night before the convention opened, "We stand at Armageddon," and he meant it. The Roosevelt delegates left the Coliseum and met elsewhere in Chicago, and they agreed to hold a new convention in August.

So who was right? Here is the steelman for each, and then my view.

The case for Roosevelt: In the states that let the voters decide, Roosevelt had won. The party's machinery then overrode that verdict by seating Taft delegates in disputed cases. A party that disregards its own voters invites a rebellion.

The case for Taft: The party had rules for deciding contested delegates, and the National Committee had applied them the way party committees always had. A candidate who loses a credentials fight and then leaves to form his own party is putting his own ambition ahead of the organization that made him. And Taft's argument about the judiciary was sound.

My view: Both were partly right, and that is what made it a tragedy. The system needed reform and got it later, through more primaries. But Roosevelt's decision to bolt, rather than win or lose within the party, was the choice that elected Wilson. A man who has already been President for nearly two terms has more responsibility than anyone to keep the family together.

August: the Bull Moose Party

The Progressive Party held its convention in the same Coliseum on August 5 through 7, 1912. Delegates sang hymns, including "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Roosevelt gave a speech called "A Confession of Faith." The platform was a long document, which the party called a "Contract with the People," and it included woman suffrage, direct primaries, an income tax, and a wide array of labor and social protections that were far ahead of their time. The convention nominated Roosevelt for President and Governor Hiram Johnson of California for Vice President. The nickname came from Roosevelt himself, who told a reporter before the Chicago convention that he felt as fit as a bull moose. The name stuck.

The campaign had a moment of drama that no one forgot. On October 14, 1912, while on his way to give a speech in Milwaukee, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a would-be assassin. The bullet was slowed by a folded copy of his speech and his steel eyeglass case. He insisted on delivering the speech before going to a hospital. It was a moment of great personal courage, and it did nothing to change the outcome.

The result

Wilson won the election with 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt took 88, the strongest third-party showing of any presidential campaign in the twentieth century. Taft carried only two states, Utah and Vermont, for 8 electoral votes. Check the sum: 435 plus 88 plus 8 equals 531, the whole of the electoral vote. The Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, received about 6 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes.

Now, a note of caution, because the arithmetic I started with is too neat. We cannot simply add Taft's votes to Roosevelt's and say that a united party would have won. Some Roosevelt voters were former Democrats and independents who would never have voted for Taft. Some would have stayed home. Some Taft voters would have gone to Wilson if they were stuck with the man who had left them. The honest statement is: the split was a necessary condition of Wilson's victory, and probably, but not certainly, a sufficient one. The party also lost more than the presidency. Democrats took the Senate and strengthened their majority in the House.

What happened next

Roosevelt's Progressives did not last. In 1914 their candidates did poorly in the midterms, and by 1916 most of the party was drifting back. Roosevelt declined the Progressive nomination that year and backed the Republican, Charles Evans Hughes, who lost narrowly to Wilson. Roosevelt died in January 1919. Taft, who had been the loser and the object of such scorn, lived to see a fitting reward. In 1921 President Harding appointed him Chief Justice of the United States, a job he had long said he wanted more than the presidency. He is the only man in American history to have served as both. The Republican Congress of 1919, which you can read about in The Republican Congress That Sent the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the States, delivered on one of the Progressive platform's central planks, woman suffrage.

The party had a chance to renew its coalition under Harding and Coolidge. It would be 1932 before anything like the same level of disunity returned. The story of what happened to Republicans in the long decades afterward is told in The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness.

What a Republican should take from 1912

I'd give you five.

1. Fight over the rules before the fight, not during it. The credentials dispute turned on rules written years earlier. If the rules for choosing delegates are going to be changed, change them when nobody knows who they will help. The modern version of that lesson is in Caucus, primary or convention, how Republicans actually pick a nominee.
2. A primary is a promise to the voters. When voters take the trouble to vote, a party that disregards them pays for it. This is the case for taking part in your own party's primaries, which our piece Why every Republican owes the primary election a vote, every time makes at greater length.
3. A loser who bolts should count the cost first. Roosevelt's followers were sincere. But the effect of their departure was to deliver the country to the party they most opposed. A candidate who leaves should be sure the cause is worth the price.
4. Principled disagreement is not treason. Taft's concern for the courts and Roosevelt's concern for the voters were both legitimate. A party that can hold both is stronger than one that expels either. Our page on Republican party unity tracks how often Republicans in Congress vote together, if you want to see how unity looks in practice.
5. A platform matters. The Progressive platform of 1912 reads like a preview of many things that later became law. A party that ignores its own reform wing risks losing it. See What a Party Platform Is, Who Writes It and What It Actually Binds for what a platform does and does not bind.

The bottom line

• In 1912 Taft and Roosevelt together won about 50.6 percent of the vote to Wilson's 41.8 percent, and Wilson took 435 electoral votes. A divided party loses even when it has a majority.
• The split grew out of real disagreements: the tariff, conservation, antitrust and the independence of the courts. Neither man was a fool and neither was a villain.
• The convention rules, not just the personalities, fed the fight. When you are asked to vote on party rules, whether in your county or at a state convention, read them as if your side were losing.
• Be a Republican who argues hard inside the family and shows up for the nominee. The other side does not need a third party to beat us. It only needs us to stay home.
• If you want to see how your own party's members line up today, the votes and unity pages on this site show it plainly.