A Clash of Titans
GRAFF, HENRY F.
A Clash of Titans 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—the Election That Changed the Country By James Chace Simon & Schuster. 323 pp. $25.95. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of...
...Like the wife of the wine merchant in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities who, while knitting furiously the names of the people she detests, watches them pass on their way to the guillotine, we constantly delight in the discovery of weaknesses in our leaders...
...Wilson, despite his attractiveness, was far from a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination...
...As Chace writes, he "was quite simply not the commander that Roosevelt had been...
...Chace's equally passionate examination of Woodrow Wilson shows the dominant role his father had played in shaping his outlook...
...The contest is between him and me, not between Taft and me...
...The campaign, as every attentive high school student knows, would be a contest between Wilson's New Freedom and Roosevelt's New Nationalism...
...It involves all who are at the top of any kind of hierarchy, including corporate CEOs, college presidents, school principals, and athletic head coaches...
...Meanwhile Roosevelt, refused the Republican nomination, became the leader of the Progressive Party and faced the country as the Bull Moose...
...His championing of honesty and integrity in government brought him to the governorship of New Jersey and wide prominence...
...is all guesswork...
...In focusing on the striking development of Wilson's political career after he left the presidency of Princeton University, Chace does not deal with one essential issue—the series of strokes Wilson suffered starting in the 1890s, laid out revealingly in a 1981 monograph of his medical history by Dr...
...Few Americans are aware that House's 1912 book, Philip Dru: Administrator, contained much of the substance of Wilson's domestic program...
...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" Don't be put off by the banal subtitle of James Chace's emotive new book...
...William Jennings Bryan was making a bid to be the party's candidate for the fourth time, and Champ Clark of Missouri, recently elected Speaker of the House, had also thrown his hat into the ring...
...The New York Times called the Pullman Strike he spearheaded "a struggle between the greatest and most powerful railroad labor organization and the entire railroad capital...
...The most intriguing individual introduced in 1912 is Edward Mandell House, a figure now obscure yet indispensable to any understanding of Wilson's campaign...
...Presidents are under assault from the media 24/7...
...An honorary Texas "Colonel," he met Wilson in 1911 at the Hotel Gotham in New York City...
...On the first ballot he received 440.5 votes against 324 for Wilson, his nearest competitor...
...They are aware, too, that they are competing with other leaders in society—sport champions, Nobel laureates, Hollywood heroes and heroines...
...As Taft admitted to Captain Archie Butt, the military aide, "It is hard, very hard Archie, to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand...
...In addition, the President's incessant raising of money for his second term run creates a picture of aman unattentive to his job...
...Taft, however, was no match for TR in attracting public enthusiasm...
...Wilson's opponents skillfully used his racism against him, as well as his opposition to the "new immigration" from Eastern Europe expressed in his historical writings...
...He enjoyed strong support when the Democratic Convention opened in Baltimore...
...Taft, who sometimes seemed content to let the government operate on its own while he played golf, did not intend to irritate TR...
...The story does not go on, though: Roosevelt's death in January 1919 and the devastating stroke Wilson suffered that October opened yet another era that "changed the country.' The election of 1912 seems so remarkable now because it was very different in many important respects from recent Presidential canvasses...
...We were at the beginning of the need for candidates to "have a program," as President Harry S. Truman put it decades later...
...Americans have become what Walter Lippmann long ago called us—a nation of Madame Defarges...
...His son Charles explained, "Ma wants him to be President...
...These admired personalities are invited to the White House to enlarge the image of its temporary resident...
...Wilson, the author also reminds us, was "in essence a white supremacist, holding a romantic view of the courtesy and graciousness of the antebellum Southern plantation system...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of history emeritus, Columbia...
...One may assume that TR, who never yielded in his belief that the country needed him in power, was mulling over a return to the Presidency almost as soon as he left it...
...But just what will happen...
...It seemed clear that the Republican vote would be split between Taft, who controlled the GOP convention, and an obsessed TR, who fancied himself a crusader...
...It was the Presidential contest he explores that fully installed the "modern activist Presidency," which began to show its teeth after Theodore Roosevelt came to the White House in 1901...
...Yet Wilson was destined to triumph over the old Rough Riderboth at the polls and as President...
...It depends upon what people are thinking...
...He believed that if he remained an academic he could not fulfill his keen "longing to do immortal work...
...Nevertheless, the purist Wilson, writing to his ladyfriend Mary Peck, expressed doubt about the outcome: "I feel that Roosevelt's strength is altogether incalculable...
...It is not too early to wonder about the future of the Presidency when every President enters office scarred by a brutal campaign, and is almost sure to leave office without hearing the cheers of the electorate...
...But Debs could not muster a third party that would prove a political force...
...On the other hand, few accounts of the 1912 election offer a full discussion of Eugene V Debs' impact on the country's political culture during the years immediately preceding World War I. Chace's treatment of the determined Socialist is expert...
...But Bryan regarded Clark—wrongly, it turned out—as an opponent of progressive reform and swung his support to Wilson, who was chosen on the 46th ballot...
...Nor was anyone on the Democratic side as charismatic as TR...
...Our society has been experiencing a crisis of the executive...
...He defines Wilson's place as a world leader, and tracks TR's growing hatred of him...
...Chace, a professor of Government and Public Law at Bard College, also treats the years after 1912 in detail...
...and I am by no means confident...
...1912 traces the decline in the relationship of Taft and Roosevelt in vivid detail...
...Edwin A. Weinstein...
...When TR left the Oval Office in 1909 he bequeathed it to a dear friend, William Howard Taft—whose wife, Nellie, gloried in her husband's position...
...Woodrow Wilson, who would eventually emerge as the Democrats' standard bearer, compared himself to Roosevelt in words that Taft could have used, too: "He is a real, vivid person___I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits andred corpuscles...
...Debs' goal was, in Chace's words, "the overthrow of the competitive capitalist system by the ballot box, in what he saw as the American democratic tradition...
...Almost instantly Wilson knew he had "finally found the man who he believed would become his other self...
...It would be several years before Taft and TR spoke to each other again...
...Neither was enough to defeat him...
...Taft himself wished he was on the Supreme Court, and Roosevelt had offered him an appointment as Associate Justice, but he had turned it down...
...Although Chace's account of how this transpired is not new, and he makes no claims to originality, it has never been researched more exhaustively or told better...
...he simply was not skilled at the chess game of politics...
...By 1918Roosevelthadmade up with Taft (who would be appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921), and appeared set to win the Republican Presidential nomination...
...But the urge must have mounted during his trip to Africa when he heard that his successor had fired Gifford Pinchot, one of Roosevelt's conservation heroes...
...The novel itself wasn't much good," Chace writes, "but Woodrow Wilson would find the ideas behind it compelling...
Vol. 87 • May 2004 • No. 3
