Here's that Woodrow Wilson historiography I've been babbling about forever and ever:
Woodrow Wilson:
Progressives, Socialists, & Democrats
in the elections of 1912 and 1916
A Historiography
Jack shoegazer
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
United States History 1865-Present
Madison Area Technical College
With the exception of the odd double-presidency of Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson was the first Democrat to hold the office of the President of the United States since James Buchanan left office in 1861. That is approximately fifty years of Republican hegemony reinforced by a weak post-Civil War South. What brought Woodrow Wilson to office in the election of 1912? What kept him there in the election of 1916? What special circumstances brought the United States its first academic president? What in the political climate was ripe for a Democrat after their long banishment from the White House?
Through the eyes of historian John Milton Cooper’s collection of essays, Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War and Peace; historian Thomas J. Knock’s To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order; and political scientist Charles Noble’s article in Comparative Politics, “Wilson’s Choice: The Political Origins of the Modern American State” we will delve into those questions. In particular, we will look at the political climate of the time and examine Wilson’s relationship with the Progressives and the Socialists and their coalition with Wilson’s Democratic Party during the elections of 1912 and his reelection in 1916.
An important fact to remember about the election of 1912 is that it took place right in the middle of the Progressive Era. Every political party, even the conservative, capitalist-friendly Republican candidate, the incumbent William Howard Taft, had “mildly reformist leanings, and had set out to consolidate rather than remove reforms” and “proclaimed that the best government, the government most certain to provide for and protect the rights and governmental needs of every class, is that one in which every class has a voice.” During his first term, Taft instituted his own reforms as well, such as a corporate income tax and a Populist favorite, direct election of senators.
One of the factors that assisted Wilson to the presidency was a rift in the Republican Party. Theodore Roosevelt, who had previously held the Presidency from 1901 to 1909 as a Republican, chose to run against his protégé, Taft, as a Progressive. Roosevelt was no enemy to capitalism, nor to monopolies, which was a major issue of the day. He was for reform, but considered business consolidation “absolutely necessary and a sign of industrial progress, and supported “corporate liberals…and stability and serenity for big business.” Thus, only slightly to the left of Taft, Roosevelt split the Republican vote.
Even further to the left, add one Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for President in 1912. The Socialist Party of America “had attained respectability and legitimacy” during this period and the Socialist’s platform “combined demands for social democracy with… antimonopoly politics.” Though garnering no electoral votes, Debs & his party nabbed over 900,000 votes, a record 6% of the vote. Granted this paled in comparison to Roosevelt’s four million and Taft’s three million, it is a significant number. The number of Socialists voting and specifically who they voted for will come to play a larger role in the 1916 election.
It was during this Progressive Era, this Age of Socialist Inquiry, as Knock put it, a
“blurring of political lines in 1912. To millions of voters, a ballot cast for either Roosevelt, Wilson, or Debs amounted to a protest against the status quo. That protest, from top to bottom, sanctioned an unfolding communion between liberals and socialists practically unique in American history.”
Noble also reminds us that “three of the four candidates fashioned themselves reformers and between them they received 75.6% of the popular vote.”
Woodrow Wilson stepped into this mix, somewhere on the political spectrum to the right of Debs, but to the left of Roosevelt, but flexible. For instance, in 1889, Wilson “repeated laissez-faire maxims against social reform and state power” but then as Governor of New Jersey “leaned to the left and worked with labor liberals and social reformers.” Wilson’s plan of reform, dubbed New Freedom, was aimed at the middle class, which “was never defined with any clarity. In places, it seemed to include skilled craft workers and small farmers…in other places, small entrepreneurs and capitalists.” However, the platform
“incorporate[ed] almost every plank in the progressive shed…equalizing the tax burdens, reforming educational funding, conserving natural resources, a public utilities commission, …an expanded employer liability act, an eight-hour day for government employees, increased state control over corporations, a corrupt practices act, an expanded civil service, and electoral reform.”
Wilson also adopted the Socialist’s antimonopoly stance, but made the distinction that “big business was a friend.” Trygve Throntveit, in an essay in Cooper’s Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, also reminds us that “Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential win convinced Wilson once and for all that the Democrat’s exile from the White House would never end while [William Jennings] Bryan’s populists and radical theorists…dominated the party.” Walking this middle line between Bryan Democrats, Debsian Socialists, and in the midst of a fractured Republican/Progressive Party brought Woodrow Wilson to office in 1912 with a scant 43% of the vote.
During his first term in office, Woodrow Wilson passed very reform-friendly legislation. We know Wilson was no stranger to reform, and was friendly to the aims of Progressives and Socialists. For instance, in 1887, Wilson wrote an essay, “Socialism and Democracy” in which he stated that, “it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same.” Wilson was concerned about the “aggrandizement of giant corporations that threatened to swallow up, not only individuals and small businesses, but democratic government itself.” More so, Wilson said, in his inaugural address, that government should protect the people from “the consequences of great industrial and social processes they cannot alter, control, or singly-cope with.”
Thus, it is not surprising that Wilson passed the “first and one of the few truly progressive tax schedules of the twentieth century.” The Revenue Act of 1916 raised taxes for incomes over $20,000, added an estate tax, and a corporate income tax. Wilson courted the agrarian vote with the Federal Farm Loan Act, which was hailed as “the Magna Carta of American farm finance.” Wilson also pushed for restrictions of child labor, workmen’s compensation, and the eight-hour work day. Knock points out that “these three measures had for years engaged the energies of progressives and both left-wing and ‘gas and water’ socialists.” He even appeared on Capitol Hill to stump for the legislation, which was uncommon at the time.
Often considered one of the most radical moves in Wilson’s first-term repertoire was appointing Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Knock tells us that “progressives were extremely impressed” because Brandeis, the ‘People’s Lawyer’, was “so closely identified with the social-justice movement and so hated by powerful corporate interests.” Knock also quips that “conservatives could not have been more upset if Eugene Debs had been recommended.” Brandeis was not the only “radical” Wilson put on the Supreme Court; he also nominated John Hessin Clarke, who “was then a federal district judge noted for his decisions on behalf of organized labor.” Of course, conservatives decried these nominations, but the “liberal and socialist press, on the other hand” was quite pleased.
Here, Knock and Noble diverge. Noble repeatedly argues that Wilson was constantly undercutting the left in an effort to find consensus between radicals and capitalists, and “building his power base on the most conservative elements of the Democratic Party.” Noble states that Wilson would “attempt to straddle laissez-faire positions on many issues.” Among these accusations are that Wilson would “use Bryan…to legitimate concessions to business” and that it was “electoral politics that led Wilson to support a number of social and labor reforms in the last two years of his administration.” Noble claims that Wilson’s forte was in his ability to “forge a governing coalition that incorporated reformers without seriously alienating capital.”
And so we enter the election of 1916, in which some combination of Knock’s altruistic Wilson, Noble’s capitalist Wilson, or Throntviet’s “skeptically pragmatic” Wilson “could boast, not only of the Underwood tariff, the Clayton Act, the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Trade Commission…and had secured enactment of an unprecedented program of legislation to improve the lives of all working men, women, and children.”
Eugene Debs did not run again, but the Socialist Party of America still ran a candidate, though the Socialists came out in droves for Wilson. Partly as a “practical consideration…a Socialist vote was too great a luxury when the race between Wilson and [Republican Charles Evans] Hughes promised to be so close” and partly quite enthusiastically because of the Socialist-friendly legislation, the Socialists voted Wilson. According to Knock, “slightly over thirty-three percent of [the Socialist vote] shifted to [Wilson], or some 315,000 of the 901,000 who had supported Debs four years earlier—a figure that represented well over half of his overall margin of victory.”
However, the deciding factor may have been Wilson’s war stance. Theodore Roosevelt had announced his candidacy for the Progressive Party, but he dropped out and threw his support behind Hughes. Even so, Knock states that “Roosevelt’s former followers as well as independents representing every shade of progressivism came out for Wilson.” It was widely viewed that with World War I raging in Europe, a Republican presidency had the greater chance of leading to war, especially with war-hawk Roosevelt campaigning for Hughes. Wilson again walked the middle line, using his tax increase of the wealthy and corporations to pay for military preparedness, while emphasizing popular stance of isolationism. Wilson’s slogan for the election was even, “He kept us out of war.” And thus the American people narrowly reelected Wilson with 9.1 million votes, compared to Hughes’s 8.5 million.
And so it would appear that Wilson rode into the presidency on a wave of progressive reform and kept afloat by appealing to Socialists, Progressives of all stripes, and even the more conservative elements of his own Democratic Party. Trygve Throntveit quotes John Dewey, who summed up Wilson, stating that he had, “appreciated the moving forces of present industrial life and has not permitted the traditional philosophy to stand in the way of doing things that needed to be done.” Knock glosses over Wilson’s compromises and Noble seems to vilify them. Throntveit strikes home the point that Wilson was indeed a pragmatic progressive, which may be why Wilson’s actions seem to sting Knock and Noble so much. Neither seems to be able to pin down Wilson’s motivations.
Perhaps we should turn to Wilson himself for an explanation. Wilson rejected “ideological rigidity” and believed that, “the ideals of liberty cannot be fixed from generation to generation. Liberty fixed in unalterable law would be no liberty at all. Government is a part of life, and, with life, it must change, alike in its objects and its practices.” More so, he added that “synthesis, not antagonism was the whole art of government.” From Wilson’s words, we are left with a man who did what he thought was right and what was possible, with the realization that one must sacrifice what William James called “the pinch between the ideal and the possible.”
Bibliography
Cooper, John Milton. Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2008.
Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ., 1995.
Noble, Charles. "Wilson's Choice: The Political Origins of the Modern American State." Comparative Politics 17.3 (1985): 313-36. JSTOR. Web. 13 Mar. 2010. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/421891>.
I got a 93% on it, which I am okay with. It needed another solid edit and some conclusions I came to white writing it needed to be restated earlier, which would have made my arguments stronger. Oh well.
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jackshoegazer
