Roosevelt and Taft"Before the Battle"October 26, 1912

Who remembers the men who lost the presidency?

After the winners are announced, the lawn signs yanked up, and life returns to normal, who cares about the politicians who came in second?

Oh, some ex-candidates may linger in the public memory if they make a good concession speech. And some may hang on as the semi-official critic of the new president. Generally, though, the would-be presidents, whose names were once plastered in giant letters across the country—John W. Davis, Alton B. Parker, and James G. Blaine for example—are quickly forgotten.

However, one candidate—William Howard Taft—deserves to be remembered. Not just for his one-term presidency, but because his unsuccessful run for a second term shaped the course of history for America and the world in the 20th century.

The year was 1912. He was the incumbent. However, former President Theodore Roosevelt also wanted to run as the Republican candidate.

Taft won the nomination— he was the sitting president after all. But Roosevelt, not one to be easily deterred from a goal, formed his own Progressive Party. Between them, they split the Republican vote and underdog Democrat Woodrow Wilson would easily win.

The candidates of 1912: Eugene V. Debs (Socialist Party), E. W. Chafin (Prohibition Party), Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive Party), William H. Taft (Republican), Woodrow Wilson (Democrat). Miss Columbia hands out the presidency.

How did things come to such a pass? The field of candidates in the 1912 election was unusually crowded, as shown in this October 1912 Post cartoon (right).

Roosevelt had come to the end of his second term in 1908 with the desire to continue his progressive reforms. So he named Taft, then Secretary of War, as his successor. Roosevelt believed Taft would work just as hard to raise the living standards of American workers, curb the excesses of big business, and set aside land for conservation, public use, and more.

Taft didn’t want the presidency, but Roosevelt could be very persuasive. He was also Taft’s close friend. So Taft agreed to run. He duly won the Republican nomination, and then the 1908 election.

"Changed New England" October 12, 1912

Once elected, though, it was clear that Taft was no Teddy. Where Roosevelt had been passionate and impulsive, ready to push the limits of the law to achieve reforms, Taft was cautious and methodical. Unlike his predecessor, he would compromise with his opponents, and he always worked well within any legal limits on his authority.

Roosevelt soon grew disenchanted with his heir as Taft withdrew support from progressive Republicans in Congress and from several of Roosevelt’s initiatives. The worst offense came in 1910 after Taft put some land marked for conservation back into the hands of private developers. Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forest Service, publicly criticized Taft’s action. Taft fired Pinchot, who went straight to Roosevelt to complain.

Now Roosevelt was furious. He believed Taft had betrayed him and sold out the Progressive movement. In an interview with the Post (“Why Roosevelt Opposes Taft,” May 4, 1912), Roosevelt explained why he was now opposing his protégé in the race for the Republican nomination.

Mr. Taft was nominated for president … because of his outspoken endorsement of progressive policies. Opposed to these policies … were the Reactionaries. … Without a single exception these men are supporting Mr. Taft today—supporting him openly and with every political trick at their command. They are entirely in accord with his record in the presidency. … Have the Reactionaries become Progressives or has Mr. Taft turned Reactionary? I leave it to the people to judge.

The present Administration has acted for special privilege whenever there was found the slightest authority in law … and has acted for the people in those cases only where it was explicitly commanded by statute. … I gave the people the benefit of the doubt. This Administration has given the benefit of the doubt against the people. ["Why Roosevelt Opposes Taft," May 4, 1912. Read the full story here.]

Can he stick? "The Republican Situation" April 20, 1912

It was a dark time for Taft. The man he once considered his best friend—the man who had talked him into running for president—had denounced him and was planning to kick him out of the White House. To make matters worse, Taft knew he had no talent for campaigning. He hadn’t even a glimmer of Roosevelt’s shining charisma. He was a poor public speaker, and he was ridiculously overweight (in the last two years of his presidency his weight had climbed to 345 pounds).

Yet the Republican party leaders wanted him, even if he had no chance of defeating Roosevelt. In a 1912 assessment of “The Republican Situation,” the Post reported that the Republicans would choose Taft despite all odds because the party would rather “face defeat with him rather than disown and discredit him … and themselves.”  Assured of the party’s support, and determined to pursue his own style of progressivism, Taft decided to run.

Roosevelt launched his Progressive Party and campaigned hard—even giving a speech after being shot in the chest—and on Election Day, he received 15 percent more votes than Taft. But he was still 2 million votes short of Wilson.

Taft couldn’t have known that his decision to run would put Wilson into the White House at the beginning of a world war. Or that the new president would wait three years before bringing the U.S. into the war. Or that Wilson would be so focused on building a League of Nations, he allowed the Allies to take vengeance on Germany—an action that would ensure another, bigger war would be fought 20 years later. Nor could he know that, by splitting the progressive vote, he ended its power in the Republican party.

It’s curious to think that, a century from now, a historian may look back and say, “If only Mitt Romney and Barack Obama had known that by choosing to run in 2012, they would radically alter the path America took in the 21st century.” But would any candidate run for president if he knew all the consequences?

100 Years Ago—A Chaotic Presidential Election The Saturday Evening Post

In this alternative history …

How It Might Have Looked: President Roosevelt reviews tanks from 1st Armored "Rough Riders" battalion heading to France.

• America enters World War I two years earlier.
Teddy Roosevelt could never sit by and watch a fight: he either had to break it up or join in. So when the old Rough Rider hears, in 1914, that Germany has marched over neutral Belgium to attack France, he commits our resources, and then our soldiers, to the Allied cause.

• World War I ends two years sooner.
It takes almost a year to build the ships, arm the troops, train them, and land them in France. By late 1915, though, the American Expeditionary Force of 10 million soldiers is fighting alongside the French and English armies on the Western Front. Even with the wasteful tactics of the European generals, which sometimes wipe out thousands of soldiers in hours, the Allies put enough pressure on the Germans to crack their defenses. The Kaiser’s army falls back, across France, into Germany, with the Allies in pursuit. As winter begins in 1916, the Germans are asking for peace terms.

• Adolf Hitler never comes to power.
The German people see their army in retreat, and the Allied armies occupying their cities. They blame their defeat on the military adventurers who run the Kaiser’s government. When young Adolf Hitler starts proclaiming the invincibility of the German army, and the need to prepare again for war, few Germans are interested. Mostly, they’re relieved when the occupying Allied forces arrest him and keep him in a French prison. Without him, the National Socialist party withers away.

The global peacemaker.

• The Communists never gain power in Russia.
Although the Russian army suffers a paralyzing defeat on the Eastern Front, it is mostly intact when the war ends and the troops march home. The German government is too busy saving itself in 1917 to send the exiled Lenin back into Russia. Without their charismatic leader, the Bolsheviks of Moscow make little progress stirring up revolution. Russian veterans happily round up the loudest revolutionaries and ship them off to Siberia. By November, when the Bolsheviks would have seized the government, they have disappeared underground.

• Europe forms a union.
Since the war ends almost two years earlier, Roosevelt is able to talk the Allies into seeking reasonable reparation costs from the Germans and their allies, the Austrians. Before he dies in office in 1918, he has convinced England, France, and Italy to a continental plan similar to that created for France after Napoleon’s defeat. Having exiled its Kaiser and become a Republic, Germany is invited to rejoin the European nations. For the next 30 years, the Congress of Paris ensures the status quo between nations and suppresses any talk of revolution or nationalism.

All these benefits wouldn’t have accrued without some problems. According to one way of looking at history, if Communism didn’t get a strong foothold in Russia, it would have done so in Germany. Japan would still have emerged as a world power and very likely would still have invaded China. If successful, Japan and the US would have very likely found themselves in conflict over control of the Pacific.

Very probably, the atom bomb would have still been developed. Given human nature, it’s very likely one country or another would have had the curiosity to use it. Which country that might have been is anyone’s guess …

Teddy Roosevelt And World War I: An Alternative History The Saturday Evening Post

Today the names of these cover girls are, for the most part, lost to us. One rare exception is the women seen on the April 8, 1911 cover: Dorothy Gibson.

We know her name because she was a favorite subject of Harrison Fisher. And we know her because of a fateful decision she made one year after this magazine cover appeared, when she chose to sail on the RMS Titanic.

Dorothy Gibson, born in Hoboken in 1889, was living with her mother in New York in 1910 when she began to earn a living singing and dancing. Soon she was offered work as a model.  After Harrison Fisher began painting her, Ms. Gibson became one of the iconic beauties of her time, rivaled only by the women drawn by Charles Dana Gibson (no relation).

It wasn’t long before she was approached by some New York film studios. She proved so successful that she was offered a generous contract by the Éclair Company. She starred in several dramas and comedies, including A Lucky Holdup, which premiered the same week she and her mother, returning from a European trip, boarded the RMS Titanic in Cherbourg.

She was walking on deck after an evening of card playing when she felt the deck lurch slightly. Seeing from the ship’s officers that something was wrong, she didn’t return to her cabin but headed straight for a lifeboat.

She was in the first lifeboat lowered to the water, one of just 19 people in a boat designed to hold 65. Another passenger in her life boat recalled, “the sea was perfectly calm—not even a ripple on the surface… suddenly all the lights dipped simultaneously to a pale glow. A moment or two later [we] saw, silhouetted against the star-lit sky, the stern of the ship rise perpendicularly into the air… Then, with a prolonged rush and a roar like ten thousand tons of coal sliding down a metal chute several hundred feet long, the great ship went down… A great cry arose on the air from the surface of the calm sea where the ship had been.”

Ms. Gibson recalled that sound: “I will never forget the terrible cry that rang out from people who were thrown into the sea and others who were afraid for their loved ones.”

Rescued by the Carpathia, she arrived in New York on April 18. Almost immediately she had agreed to a suggestion from the studio’s producer to make a movie of her experiences. Within a week, she was filming Saved from The Titanic, wearing the same evening gown, long sweater, and gloves she’d worn the night she escaped the sinking ship. The ten-minute ‘feature’ movie proved highly successful, but Ms. Gibson soon lost interest in the movies.

She was considering a career in opera when, in 1915, the producer of Éclair Studios was involved in an automobile accident that killed a man. During the subsequent inquiry, the court—and then the public—learned it was Dorothy Gibson, not the producer, who had been driving the car. Worse, she had been having an adulterous affair with the producer for several years.

In the wake of the scandal, the producer divorced his wife and married Gibson but they, too, were divorced just two years later.

Ms. Gibson, still with her mother in tow, lived on her movie residuals and alimony and eventually decided to move to Europe in 1927 where the cost of living was much less. She and her mother lived in France and Italy, ultimately settling in Paris. She was still there when World War II began.

We are unsure of what happened to her over the next few years; her account is vague and sometimes contradictory. Until America entered the war, she had been allowed to visit her mother in Italy. But in 1941, she was suddenly unable to return to her Paris home. At some point, she was arrested, then sent to San Vittore prison in Milan.

She surfaced again in 1944 when she tried to enter Switzerland. She told the American consul in Zurich she had escaped with the help of an Italian official. He had obtained her release by falsely informing Nazi officials in Italy that Ms. Gibson would enter Switzerland to spy for the fascists.

Apparently the allied authorities never determined whether she was pretending to be a spy or was, in fact, a spy for the German occupiers of Italy. She returned to Paris in 1945 and died there in 1946.

She was outlived by her mother, who survived her by 15 years. As Dorothy’s mother grew even more feeble, she grew vocal in her criticism of the allies. She often made antisemitic, pro-Nazi statements, which led some to infer that her daughter, Dorothy, had been a fascist sympathizer. As in so much of her later life, her political sympathies have never been determined.

The Cover Girl on the Titanic The Saturday Evening Post

Swimming Hole by Norman Rockwell

Swimming Hole
Norman Rockwell
August 11, 1945
© SEPS 1945

This is a charming story-in-a-picture of a salesman making a long drive on a hot August day. No air conditioning in the car, of course. He spots a swimming hole, pulls over and goes for it. He carefully lays his glasses on a newspaper and his lit cigar on his shoe, to be picked up when he emerges (Rockwell was all about details). And then shows us a face of pure bliss. “George Zimmer, my model,” reported Norman Rockwell, “was an awful good sport. He stripped and I poured several buckets of water over his head to get the effect.” And you thought modeling was easy!

Drink of Water by Frank X. Leyendecker

Drink of Water
Frank X. Leyendecker
August 22, 1914
© SEPS 1914

We love this cover from August of 1914 by artist Frank X. Leyendecker (brother of Post cover artist J.C.). Frank did sixteen Post covers, and this one is delightful. Delivering papers in August is hot, tiring work, and the kid deserves a cool drink. The fact that his drinking buddy happens to be a horse doesn’t concern him.

Watering Father by Richard Sargent

Watering Father
Richard Sargent
June 4, 1955
© SEPS 1955

We’d all like to see this scene three seconds later, but this is what we have to work with. While Mom is busy planting and watering flowers, Junior is thinking Dad’s pasty white skin needs a cool-down. Whether Dad agreed it was a good idea is a mystery left up to the viewer. Sargent was great with humorous scenes and a master at the pregnant pause, the “what-happens-next” moment.

Wet Swim Suit by Clarence F. Underwood

Wet Swim Suit
Clarence F. Underwood
August 24, 1912
© SEPS 1912

We know, you’re shocked. A pretty young lady in a swimsuit on the cover of the staid and venerable Saturday Evening Post. And in 1912 yet! Well, even young ladies in 1912 deserved a cool-down. At least we don’t have to wring out the heavy skirts of our swimsuits these days. Artist Clarence F. Underwood did over forty Post covers. Even though most of them were in the 19-teens, many showed active women: fishing, playing tennis, canoeing, even plowing a field. Of course, they looked surprisingly pretty doing all this.

Sitting on the Diving Board by Penrhyn Stanlaws

Sitting On the Diving Board
Penrhyn Stanlaws
August 19, 1933
© 1933 SEPS.

My, how bathing suits changed in a mere twenty-one years! In a swimsuit more suited for immersion, the pretty lady from 1933 is just dipping her toes in the water. Go figure. Curtis Publishing (curtispublishing.com) shows many gorgeous Stanlaws covers, usually of lovely young ladies holding a teacup or bouquet. He did a total of thirty-seven Post covers between 1913 and 1938. (Warning: if you look up his covers on the Curtis website, you’ll want to buy prints of them all.)

Cool Bear by Charles Livingston Bull

Cool Bear
Charles Livingston Bull
August 19, 1922
© SEPS 1922

Then there’s the total immersion therapy. This is from Country Gentleman magazine (a sister publication) in 1922 by great wildlife artist, Charles Livingston Bull. If that water looks good to you, a word of advice: Find another place to cool down.

Classic Covers: August Cool-Down The Saturday Evening Post