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

For his part, Roosevelt came to despise the great American humorist, once saying to a small group of friends he’d like to skin Mark Twain alive.

Back when the two men first met in the 1880s, they had admired each other. Roosevelt loved Twain’s writings and Twain said he’d never shaken Roosevelt’s hand without feeling an electric charge move up his arm. But their background and their principles were already leading them in vastly different directions.

Where those differences came from, and how they shaped the lives of these men, is the focus of Philip McFarland’s Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century, (Rowman, & Littlefield, 2012).

These men—who were probably the two most famous Americans of their times—took vastly different routes to success. For Twain, it was a wandering path for a small-town boy who became a steamboat pilot, prospector, journalist, and finally world-renowned humorist. For Theodore Roosevelt the journey was much quicker: in just 43 years, this frail child of money and privilege became a reform-minded politician and, to everyone’s surprise, president.

To a great degree, Twain retained the outlook of a man of the 19th century, while Roosevelt saw a future in which America would become a global power, and that’s where the trouble lay.

But the bitterness between the two wasn’t caused only by their differences. As McFarland points out, “There were enough similarities between Roosevelt and Clemens to cause friction anyway. Both were writers and public performers possessed of restless, perpetually youthful temperaments. Each grew a bit nettled when the spotlight wandered off him. And both had a wide circle of friends, the circles often overlapping… keeping the one, if only inadvertently, aware of the other’s views and doings.”

In this dual biography, McFarland weaves the threads of their lives around the key events and important people of their day. While Clemens lambasts the moneyed classes in his novel The Gilded Age, Roosevelt becomes a progressive who challenges “the malefactors of great wealth.” But McFarland also notes the difference between what these men said and what they did. How both men talked a better attitude toward black Americans than they practiced. How they could withhold their criticism of robber barons when it suited themselves.

Their lives, and their outlook couldn’t be too divergent because they were, ultimately, shaped by the same great forces in American society: the excesses of the Gilded Age, the financial panic of 1893, the rise of Progressivism, the growing desire to reform America, the pride in America’s new technologies, the growing realism in art—McFarland seems to weave it all together.

I should note one peculiarity of this book. Because McFarland writes about themes more than sequential events, the continuity of “Mark Twain and the Colonel” is more disrupted than a typical biography. But then, a book concerning two men born a generation and a world apart should be expected to be a little disjointed.

Overall, it’s a highly enlightening book that offers you two biographies and a vast panorama of American society at the beginning of its modern age.

Mark Twain and The Colonel is available from Amazon for a list price of $28.

Book Review: Mark Twain and The Colonel The Saturday Evening Post