Union Stock Yards: beef processingBeef processing as conducted at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, c. 1900.Geo. R. Lawrence Co./Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-52728-9)
Meanwhile, almost from his accession to the presidency, Roosevelt had been carrying on a crusade, often independent of Congress, to conserve the nation’s fast-dwindling natural resources and to make them available for exploitation under rigorous national supervision. He withdrew from the public domain some 148,000,000 acres of forest lands, 80,000,000 acres of mineral lands, and 1,500,000 acres of water-power sites. Moreover, adoption of the National Reclamation Act of 1902 made possible the beginning of an ambitious federal program of irrigation and hydroelectric development in the West.
Muir, John; Glacier Point, Yosemite ValleyU.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley, California, U.S.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Republican troubles under William Howard Taft
Roosevelt was so much the idol of the masses of 1908 that he could have easily gained the Republican nomination in that year. After his election in 1904 (see U.S. presidential election of 1904), however, he had announced that he would not be a candidate four years later (see U.S. presidential election of 1908); adhering stubbornly to his pledge, he arranged the nomination of his secretary of war, William Howard Taft of Ohio, who easily defeated Bryan.
Taft might have made an ideal president during a time of domestic tranquility, but his tenure in the White House was far from peaceful. National progressivism was nearly at high tide, and a large group of Republican progressives, called “insurgents,” sat in both houses of Congress.
The Republican insurgents
These Republicans, like a majority of Americans, demanded such reforms as tariff reductions, an income tax, the direct election of senators, and even stricter railroad and corporation regulations. Taft, who had strongly supported Roosevelt’s policies, thought of himself as a progressive. Actually he was temperamentally and philosophically a conservative; moreover, he lacked the qualities of a dynamic popular leader. In the circumstances, his ineptness, indecision, and failure to lead could only spell disaster for his party.
Taft’s troubles began when he called Congress into special session in 1909 to take up the first item on his agenda—tariff reform. The measure that emerged from Congress actually increased rates. Republican insurgents and a majority of Americans were outraged, but Taft signed the bill and called it the best tariff law the Republicans had ever enacted. Conflicts and misunderstandings over conservation and legislative procedure caused the rift between Taft Republicans and the insurgents to grow. By 1910 the Republican insurgents were clearly in the ascendancy in the Congress. Taking control of the president’s railroad-regulation measure, they added new provisions that greatly enlarged the ICC’s authority. The following year they bitterly opposed Taft’s measure for tariff reciprocity with Canada; it passed with Democratic support in Congress, only to go down to defeat at the hands of the Canadian electorate.
The 1912 election
Republican insurgents were determined to prevent Taft’s renomination in 1912. They found their leader in Roosevelt, who had become increasingly alienated from Taft and who made a whirlwind campaign for the presidential nomination in the winter and spring of 1912. Roosevelt swept the presidential primaries, even in Taft’s own state of Ohio, but Taft and conservative Republicans controlled the powerful state organizations and the Republican National Committee and were able to nominate Taft by a narrow margin. Convinced that the bosses had stolen the nomination from him, Roosevelt led his followers out of the Republican convention. In August they organized the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party and named Roosevelt to lead the third-party cause. Hiram Johnson, the reform Republican governor of California, became Roosevelt’s running mate.
Democrats had swept the 1910 congressional and gubernatorial elections, and, after the disruption of the Republican Party in the spring of 1912, it was obvious that almost any passable Democrat could win the presidency in that year. Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University, who had made a brilliant progressive record as governor of New Jersey, was nominated by the Democrats on the 46th ballot.
Taft’s single objective in the 1912 campaign was to defeat Roosevelt. The real contest was between Roosevelt and Wilson for control of the Progressive majority. Campaigning strenuously on a platform that he called the New Nationalism, Roosevelt demanded effective control of big business through a strong federal commission, radical tax reform, and a whole series of measures to put the federal government squarely into the business of social and economic reform. By contrast Wilson seemed conservative with a program he called the New Freedom; it envisaged a concerted effort to destroy monopoly and to open the doors of economic opportunity to small businessmen through drastic tariff reduction, banking reform, and severe tightening of the antitrust laws. Roosevelt outpolled Taft in the election, but he failed to win many Democratic Progressives away from Wilson, who won by a huge majority of electoral votes, though receiving only about 42 percent of the popular vote.
The New Freedom and its transformation
A trained political scientist and historian, Wilson believed that the president should be the leader of public opinion, the chief formulator of legislative policy, and virtually sovereign in the conduct of foreign relations. With the support of an aroused public opinion and a compliant Democratic majority, he was able to put his theories of leadership into effect with spectacular success.
Wilson, Woodrow and EdithU.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson and first lady Edith Wilson, 1919.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital photo no. 3b12597u)
The first item in Wilson’s program was tariff reform, a perennial Democratic objective since the Civil War; the president’s measure, the Underwood Tariff Act of 1913, reduced average rates from 40 percent to 25 percent, greatly enlarged the free list, and included a modest income tax. Next came adoption of the president’s measure for banking and monetary reform, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created a federal reserve system to mobilize banking reserves and issue a flexible new currency—federal reserve notes—based on gold and commercial paper; uniting and supervising the entire system was a federal reserve board of presidential appointees.
The third, and Wilson thought the last, part of the New Freedom program was antitrust reform. In his first significant movement toward Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, Wilson reversed his position that merely strengthening the Sherman Antitrust Act would suffice to prevent monopoly. Instead, he took up and pushed through Congress the Progressive-sponsored Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. It established an agency—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—with sweeping authority to prevent business practices that would lead to monopoly. Meanwhile, Wilson had abandoned his original measure, the Clayton Antitrust Act passed by Congress in 1914; its severe provisions against interlocking directorates and practices tending toward monopoly had been gravely weakened by the time the president signed it. The Clayton Act included a declaration that labour unions, as such, were not to be construed as conspiracies in restraint of trade in violation of the antitrust laws, but what organized labour wanted, and did not get, was immunity from prosecution for such measures as the sympathetic strike and the secondary boycott, which the courts had proscribed as violations of the Sherman Act.