Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Campaign | Why Wilson Wasn't Really a Progressive!
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- čas přidán 24. 08. 2020
- In this episode, we talk about Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 “Bull Moose” Progressive Party campaign and the three-way presidential contest over progressivism.
The 1912 election involved three candidates, Republican William Howard Taft, Progressive Party candidate Teddy Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Taft was a former close adviser of Roosevelt who Roosevelt had handpicked as his successor in 1908 because he believed Taft a solid progressive who would continue his progressive legacy. Roosevelt was a progressive champion as president who was now running on an even stronger progressive agenda as the head of a new Progressive Party. Wilson, a Democrat with a Southern small-government Jeffersonian background who had only entered politics two year before, now also claimed to be a progressive too.
America had a three-way presidential race. All three candidates had a solid claim on progressivism.
This epic race brought the great debate William Jennings Bryan launched in 1896 to its conclusion. America had struggled over how to reform its institutions to adapt to a new industrial economy. The Republican Party’s progressive agenda to address that problem was now so popular every candidate in a three-way race wanted to identify as a progressive. The great debate of America’s Fourth Party System was essentially resolved.
We talk in this episode about how Roosevelt, facing forced retirement after finishing two presidential terms, picked his good friend Taft to carry on his legacy. How he became disappointed with Taft while sitting on the sidelines, as he desperately wanted to get back into the ring and win his old job back. And how we decided to launch a comeback seeking a third term-at the time only prohibited by tradition and not yet law-splitting the Republican Party and leading to him launching a new Progressive Party as a vehicle for his agenda.
We also talk about how Woodrow Wilson, despite embracing the progressive movement and enacting progressive reforms, wasn’t really philosophically progressive.
Roosevelt run in 1912 on his philosophically progressive New Nationalism program, which demanded a stronger government to supervise a more complex industrial economy with big national businesses. Wilson countered with a program he called the New Freedom, rejecting bigness in both government and industry. Wilson invented a new small-government version of progressivism. Instead of federal regulation and supervision, Wilson would have a small government selectively intervene to break up private power, allowing the market to do the rest. Roosevelt’s program involved a powerful active government supervising large businesses. Wilson’s involved a small government intervening to maintain small businesses-a program that philosophically sounds a lot more like Jeffersonian Bourbon Democrats than progressivism.
Through Wilson’s presidency, America tumbled into the First World War. Then came the Roaring Twenties. America was prosperous, people were happy, and the Populist and Progressive Era of national reform came to its end. Setting America up for another realignment and the start of its next political party system, our Fifth Party System of New Deal liberals and modern conservatives that still rules today.
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I’ve been a history lover for about 20 years now. Since I was 12. I’m always scouring CZcams and the internet for fascinating content to read and watch. As far as American politics and American history goes, few people have been able to lay out the overall fundamentals and basics better than you in a substantive way, bravo there’s really a lot to be learned and remembered from your work on these subjects!
Great breakdown. So many parallels between politics and branding of companies.
Excellent analysis, thank you!
Great stuff…!
1912 was a 4 way race.
This video I can really see how a moralist middle class anglo/protestant progressive movement could evolve into the modern Republican party.
So is the 1920s going to be their own video or will they be grouped with the onset of the great depression?
It's going to be grouped together, starting in the 1920s and going into the launch of the Depression.
Was waiting to hear about our entrance into the League of Nations. I guess that is a foreign policy issue and wasn't much of a campaign issue. I feel though the isolationist and internationalist debate ended rather quickly once the 20s got started.
I mainly focus on domestic politics because that's what traditionally determines political coalitions. Foreign policy is critical to the nation, does have some relevance in elections, and matters a lot at the level of elite politics. But at the end of the day, most people identify as Democrats or Republicans (or Federalists or Populists or Whigs) because of their values and what's going on at home.
You're correct however that the debate over internationalism and isolation was a big deal and remained so for quite some time, particularly for Republicans in the era of Taft and Dewey. (Which will be the next episode, although we'll not be talking much about foreign policy again!)
Frank, you look like Michael Scott
7:30 running in a third-party after losing in one party no longer possible due to sore-loser laws
No one cna maintain credibility with me in talking about politics when they start repeating the myth that Wilson believed in Limited Government. On Domestic policy Wilson was the heir of Bryan, Bryan was in his administration and approved of everything he did until the Lusitania was sunk, the War alone was the break between Wilson and Bryan.
Segregating the Federal Government is a pretty big government thing to do.
Bryan and Wilson were absolutely on the same team--that's part of the point of the video! Bryan handpicked Wilson as his candidate for the presidency and helped engineer him the nomination. But both Wilson and Bryan were also Jeffersonians, and proudly so. Don't take my word for it. Go read up on the debate between TRs New Nationalism and Wilson's New Freedom and form your own opinion. The entire conflict between them was on whether to pursue "progressive" policy goals through top down expertise and management (TR) or bottom up with the federal government intervening as policeman when things went off track. I think your problem is twofold. First, you're conflating "small government" or Jeffersonian bottom up politics with the agenda of the mid-twentieth century Republican Party--not always the same thing. Wilson's agenda surely would be (and was) disliked by a mid-twentieth century conservative libertarian. Second, you've fallen into the political trap set by our twentieth century parties. Democrats have since FDR have distorted Wilson and what he represented to claim him and their agenda as a continuation of his polices, while Republicans did the same to distance their party from their progressive legacy under TR (they want to claim progressivism was all Wilson). But again, I recommend you read more about the conflict between New Nationalism and New Freedom and I suspect you'll come around to my point of view.
@@FrankDiStefano To me Teddy's Progressive credentials are questionable themselves, he only after the Trust who pay him off, he was also a Nationalist and a War Monger.
@@Kuudere-Kun I think it's also important to distinguish progressivism as meant by the historical progressive movement, and progressivism as the modern movement uses the term today. Progressivism has traditionally meant using expertise and social science to plan social progress. Which is exactly what TR was trying to do (he was a champion of that movement at the time). A lot of what we call modern progressivism is in reality rebranded New Deal liberalism (in response to a growing unpopularity of the word "liberal" in the 1980s and 1990) or used to describe the new movement emerging on the left that is still without a widely accepted name.
It was good enough for George Washington, but not for FDR! 😅😉
Progressive form back then would sadly be seen as far right in today’s mesed up wolrd
you are 100 percent correct teddy would be disgusted with the progressives of today
And now the Lincoln types of back then would be liberal leaning. By today's standards. And the radical republicans would be like today's squad. labels change over time.
@@onomatopoeia162003 Lincoln would also be a war criminal that mass executed native American during the civil war.
Democrats small government?
Bourbon? What is a "progressive " definition?
They promoted small government ideals when Classical Liberalism was their guiding philosophy as was represented in the form of the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian Democratic tradition. Their rationale for constraining it being that they saw big government as the greatest danger to a free people because it was assumed to naturally tend toward the benefit of an elite. The powers that be which Andrew Jackson referred to as associated wealth. That’s why I find it to be a misnomer when orthodox Democrats from around the turn of the 20th Century including Grover Cleveland, Samuel Tilden and Charles O’Conor are labeled conservatives. They were essentially the American counterparts to the Gladstonian Liberals in the UK given their commitment to laissez-faire, civil service reform, open immigration and anti-imperialism.
And yet you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who calls someone like William Gladstone a conservative. It seems to come down to the fact that they fought with the Populist Movement which rallied to William Jennings Bryan over the future of the Democratic Party. But the Liberal Party went through what was the same underlying process when the Liberal-Labour Movement embodied by the likes of George Odger made an effort to push it in a more economically interventionist direction. But while that debate was settled for the Democrats by the success of the New Deal Coalition, the Liberals tore themselves apart over it and were ultimately supplanted by the Labour Party as the chief opposition to the Conservatives. As the Second Industrial Revolution set-in, big business became seen as more oppressive than the state.
It needs to be stressed that the name Bourbon Democrat was not chosen by those it was applied to but was a smear by their rivals within the party so as to brand them as reactionaries. Although in fairness, there was another faction that they hurled the epithet at and they were the aristocratic Southern landowner types who also stood against the Populists. But otherwise, they weren’t exactly devoted to the same liberal agenda that their national colleagues were. An eerily similar situation transpired when, with regard to Republican Progressives, the Standpatter establishment used the term Insurgent to lump together both conservative crusaders like Theodore Roosevelt who were basically the American equivalents to the Disraelian Conservatives, from the UK as well, and the true radicals such as Robert La Follette.
The word in question had encompassed a broader group of people back in the heyday of the Progressive Era. Now the conventional wisdom is to define it as synonymous with modern Liberalism and Leftism. The best way to understand it might be as an intellectual phenomenon that embraced solutions to social issues based upon recent developments instead of holding on to dogma which wasn’t getting the job done for its own sake. As already mentioned, the unrest created by the growing pains of industrialization caused a huge outcry for drastic action to be taken. Not only in the US, but across the rest of the Western world. But it wasn’t solely Liberals or Socialists who offered alternatives to the status quo. Just as Classical Liberalism largely gets overlooked in this discussion, so too does Progressive Conservatism.
That approach may appear confusing to Americans today, but it’s not uncommon historically or globally. TR, William Howard Taft, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were all US presidents who identified with the concept. They recognized factors which gave rise to the nation’s ills and thus pursued measures to remedy them while not taking things as far as their political adversaries whom they perceived as threats to social stability. Those instincts were rather famously shared in Europe by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the previously alluded to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Fearing violent upheaval and hoping to restore a sense of solidarity, they supported innovations in a wide range of areas covering health, safety, election as well as pro-labor laws coupled with a dose of patriotic fervor.
Returning to the Bourbon Democrats for a moment to wrap this up, the most apt comparison from the present day has to be the oft-derided Corporate Democrats as they’ve come to be known. Both titles have connotations which paint them as old-fashioned, out-of-touch sellouts by their increasingly impatient base. They were emboldened by firebrands who demanded fundamental change to the system on behalf of those it exploited. When it came to the battle with the Bourbons spearheaded by Bryan, that did result in a major shift in the long run. As for the current revolt launched by Bernie Sanders, that remains to be seen. But the point is that the Democratic leadership is still thought of as liberal and I’d say the same for the Classic Liberals of the past. Having enemies further to the Left doesn’t prove the contrary.