Turning Point; Did America's great political divide begin 92 years ago?
Kevin Phillips once wrote that Americans achieve through presidential elections what in other countries it takes a revolution to accomplish. The noted intellectual provocateur was exaggerating, of course. But, on occasion, our quadrennial circuses do produce or certify durable shifts in power.</br></br>Andrew Jackson's triumph in 1828 ushered in an age of mass parties based on the needs and prejudices of ordinary white voters. Lincoln's victory in 1860 led directly to the Civil War (so much for elections substituting for armed conflict). Lashed to the Depression, Herbert Hoover lost the election of 1932 more than Franklin Roosevelt won it. But FDR, backed by a new multi-ethnic coalition, went on to build the modern welfare-warfare state that governs us still.</br></br>James Chace would include the contest of 1912 in that select group. The election, he writes, "introduced a conflict between progressive idealism . . . and conservative values" that raged through the rest of the 20th century and continues today. Obviously, President George W. Bush now waves the banner of the right; only a publisher's deadline kept the author from naming John Kerry the latest defender of the liberal alternative.</br></br>To flesh out his claim, Chace offers a brisk, consistently entertaining narrative that is alive both to politics and personality. The four serious candidates in 1912 were all men of intellectual substance, able to debate the major question of the day: how to sustain economic growth without widening the gulf between the corporate rich and everyone else. Republican President William Howard Taft and Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs occupied the right and left poles. The incumbent feared that a true crackdown on the mighty trusts that ruled the marketplace would endanger prosperity; the radical wanted to abolish private capital altogether. Running on the Progressive ticket, Theodore Roosevelt favored strict regulation of big business; Democrat Woodrow Wilson argued that the state should break up monopolies, not just force them to behave responsibly.</br></br>Taft was never comfortable on the stump and spent more time that fall playing golf than giving speeches. But the other three contenders were gifted orators who drew huge, adoring crowds. Chace describes Debs reaching out his long, bony arms to working-class audiences, urging them to "tear up privilege by the roots, and consecrate the earth and all its fullness to the joy and service of all humanity." He recounts how Roosevelt delivered a spirited hour- long address minutes after a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. He captures Wilson's success at shedding his Ivy League hauteur to emerge as a strong advocate of the rights of labor and small business.