Cleveland ruled well and made some progress in civil service reform. Toward the end of his term he addressed the tariff issue by calling for some reductions, due to the Treasury surplus that had built up through the high tariffs then in effect. In 1888 the Republicans nominated Senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, after several ballots and much negotiation (Sherman had received more than twice as many votes as anyone else on the first ballot). The Republicans successfully (and falsely) accused the Democrats of being for free trade, and they warned of wage cuts and unemployment that would result if the Democrats prevailed.
The Republican Harrison narrowly won the election. Cleveland outpolled him by 100,000 votes, but he lost the electoral vote 233-168, due to losing New York's 36 electoral votes by 13,000 votes. Republican corruption in this election had been "well authenticated", according to Roseboom, as the Republicans locked up "floaters", and then sent them to the polls with "Republican ballots in their hands and as much as $15.00 in their pockets". Roseboom states that corruption may have decided the result in New York, and definitely did in Indiana.
Roseboom states that "no resident of the White House has aroused so little enthusiasm" as did Benjamin Harrison. He was ungracious and frigid in his dealings with people. He had been elected with the help of many party workers, but now failed to reciprocate properly.
The 1892 election was a repeat of the 1888 one, between Harrison and Cleveland, but this time the professional politicians were lethargic and it was a dull campaign. The tariff issue was again paramount, but labor troubles had put the lie to the Republican argument that labor benefited from high tariffs. Cleveland was elected by 400,00 votes, making him the only president to date to serve two non-consecutive terms. The electoral vote was 277-145.
Thanks to the masterful actions of his campaign manager, Mark Hanna, William McKinkley was easily nominated on the first ballot of the 1896 Republican convention. The Democrats debated the silver issue, leading to William Jennings Bryan's famous "cross of gold" speech, which was so effective that Bryan was later nominated by the convention. Bryan proceeded to receive the endorsements of various third parties that had sprung up during the previous twenty years to advance the interests of farmers and workers. Bryan campaigned hard, but Hanna raised vast sums of money for McKinley and ran a masterful campaign, winning 271-176 in the electoral college and by 700,000 popular votes.
Roseboom reports that McKinley was an adept politician:
"No president has been more successful in mirroring the composite views of the majority of voters. McKinley's success was due chiefly to his adeptness at the complex game of politics. Nursing no grudges, disarming irate Congressmen by his friendliness, handling patronage with skill, he gained steadily in popular favor, and his party became united and harmonious, despite the anti-imperialism of a few old-fashioned eastern wheelhorses."
The economy was improved, and for the first time in a long time, foreign affairs became more significant than domestic politics. America emerged as a world power with the Spanish-American War, the acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and the annexation of Hawaii. The silver and tariff issues were thrust into the background.
McKinley was nominated for another term by the Republicans in 1900, and the newly-elected governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt, was nominated for VP, after McKinley left it up to the delegates to decide. Bryan was again nominated by the Democrats, after insisting on another plan endorsing free coinage of silver, which passed in the committee by only one vote. However, the economy was much-improved from 1896, and Bryan's message was not as effective this time around. His electoral vote loss was 292-155, and the popular vote deficit was 850,000.
McKinley was shot on September sixth, and Teddy Roosevelt took over. Roosevelt had handled the speaking chores during the campaign and had become very popular in his own right by the time of the election. Teddy was unanimously nominated for a full term in 1904, while the Democrats were so lacking in sitting governors and senators that they turned to a judge--Alton B. Parker--for the nomination, and they nominated an 80-year-old man for VP. Cleveland could have had the nomination easily, but he declined to run. As a result, the Democrats were in a state of disarray. Roosevelt won 336-140, with a tremendous 2.5 million popular vote margin. All of Parker's electoral votes came from the South.
On election night Roosevelt made a pledge not to seek another term, although he certainly could have had the 1908 nomination for the asking. Instead, he supported his Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, who was nominated. The Democrats turned back to Bryan, who lost to Taft 321-162, and by more than a million popular votes, while the socialist Eugene Debs raised his total to 420,000.
Taft was not a good president, and when Roosevelt returned from a fifteen-month overseas trip, he was drawn into the political controversies that were raging. At first he supported Taft, but early in 1912 events led to his running himself for the GOP nomination. Taft was fundamentally a conservative, and Roosevelt a progressive; there were also personality differences.
Roseboom calls the ensuing fight for the GOP nomination "the greatest pre-convention struggle in American history". Both candidates took an active part in the pre-convention battle, a sharp contrast from the 1800s when even the general election campaign did not see active campaigning. (McKinley's "front porch campaign" in 1896 was actually a more active role than had been seen previously, while Bryan went all the way and actually made stump speeches.)
Roosevelt personally went to the convention in Chicago, an unusual move. He had defeated Taft 278-48 in states that had direct primaries. However, Taft controlled the convention machinery. With 254 of 1,078 convention seats in dispute, the national committee had to decide who to seat. The committee was controlled two-thirds by Taft, and consequently it gave Taft 235 of the 254 disputed seats.
The control of the convention was evident early on when the battle over the chairman of the convention was won by the Taft forces, 558-501. The Roosevelt forces continued to battle by forcing the fight over disputed seats to the floor of the convention. However, a "steam roller" was in effect; a motion that delegates whose seats were in dispute not be permitted to vote on any disputed cases was voted down, 567-507. Since 74 of the disputed seats were being challenged on the floor, it is apparent that the Taft supporters prevailed only by allowing the disputed delegates to vote on their own cases. This was a blatant conflict of interest, and this heavy-handed approach by Taft showed a serious lack of judgment. How did he expect to win the general election with such a divided party?
On the Democratic side, Bryan was still on the scene and the Democrats had their own party schism to contend with. Unlike the prior recent elections, this time the Democrats were blessed with some good candidates. Democratic victories in 1910 had produced a good crop of governors and had given Democrats control of the House.
At the 1912 Democratic Convention, House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri was the early favorite, and he had the most votes on the first ballot. When the 90 New York votes then shifted to Clark, he had a majority. However, the two-thirds rule was still in effect, and no such super-majority could be obtained.
On the 14th ballot Bryan stepped into the deadlock and announced that he was changing his vote from Clark to Wilson. Wilson was eventually nominated on the 46th ballot.
After losing the Republican nomination to Taft, Roosevelt decided to mount a run as a third-party candidate. His Progressive Party met in convention and adopted a platform that was "the most comprehensive and detailed ever offered by an American party". It proposed a host of reforms designed "to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics".
However, Wilson proved to be a good campaigner. He "steered clear of extremes and conducted a campaign that kept him safely between the conservatism of Taft and the radicalism of Roosevelt". Wilson won with 435 electoral votes to 88 for Roosevelt and and only 8 (Utah and Vermont) for Taft. Roosevelt polled about 2/3 of Wilson's popular vote total, and Taft about half. The socialist Eugene Debs more than doubled his vote from 1908, to 897,000, which no doubt would have been higher but for the liberalism of Roosevelt and Wilson.
Wilson was an effective leader, and pressured Congress into passing many pieces of reform legislation in areas such as tariff rates, income tax, anti-trust, banking, labor, et al. Roseboom states that:
"Wilson's ascendency over his party evoked comparison with Jackson and Jefferson. Nor was it merely a matter of bills passed. He freed the Democratic Party from its worship of the states-rights fetish, held its discordant elements together in a program of reform, gained the confidence of farmers and organized labor, and refused to let the opposition of business deter him from his chosen course.
In 1916 Wilsopn ran for re-election based on his domestic achievements and the fact that he had kept the U.S. out of the European War. And yet, he almost lost the election to Justice Hughes. The electoral vote was 277-254, and the election wasn't decided until Thursday afternoon when California's votes were given to Wilson. The Progressives had a convention, but then didn't nominate anybody when Roosevelt turned down the chance to run.
Many Republican candidates vied for the nomination at the 1920 convention. After four ballots there was no favorite, and the chairman adjourned overnight. That night the infamous "smoke-filled room" saw a committee of men confer and settle on Harding, and he became the nominee. The Democratic convention was leaderless, with Wilson now an invalid, and Ohio Governor Cox was finally nominated on the 44th ballot.
The Republican campaign was "a model of vote-catching banality". Harding won in a real landslide, 404-127 in the electoral vote, and 16-9 million in the popular vote. Harding's shortcomings are well-known, and the Democrats made significant gains in the 1922 mid-term elections. Harding then died on August 2, 1923.
Coolidge took over after Harding's death, and he was nominated for a full term almost unanimously in 1924. The Democrats, by contrast, were hopelessly divided, and finally nominated John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot. Davis was a conservative, and dissatisfied liberals met and nominated Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The Progressives hoped to win enough states to throw the election into the House, but with the economy strong the Republicans won easily. The Progressives did win Wisconsin's electoral votes, but otherwise Coolidge won 382-136 in the electoral vote and 54-29-16 million in the popular vote.
Coolidge declined to run for a second term in 1928, and his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover got the Republican nomination. Four-time governor of New York Al Smith got the Democratic nomination, but lost 444-87 in the electoral vote and 21-15 million in the popular vote.
Despite the depression, Hoover was nominated for a second term in 1932 as his friends controlled the party machinery. FDR had sprung to national prominence by winning the governorship of New York in 1928 in the face of the GOP landslide, and he won the Democratic nomination easily. The general election was a Democratic landslide, with the electoral vote 472-59 and the popular vote at 23-16 million.
The most significant thing about the 1936 election was that the Democratic convention finally threw out the infamous century-old "two-thirds rule", which had on occasion denied the nomination to someone who had a majority of the votes. The Roosevelt landslide over Alf Landon in the 1936 election was 523-8 in the electoral vote, and 27.5-16.7 million in the popular vote. The other interesting thing about 1936 is the literary Digest poll which predicted a Landon victory; this drastic error paved the way for the development of more scientific polling techniques in the future.
At the 1940 GOP convention,. Wendell Willkie trailed both Dewey and Taft on the first ballot, but by the fifth ballot his strength had grown and a few states then shifted their votes to put him over the top. Willkie ran a strenuous and more liberal campaign than his predecessors, beginning with a speech in Coffeyville, Kansas, where he had once taught school. The election was thought to be too close to call, but when the votes were counted FDR had won 449-82, with 54.7% of the popular vote.
The 1944 Republican convention was a lackluster affair which nominated New York governor Thomas Dewey. At the Democratic convention, the excitement was in the VP nomination. Henry Wallace outpolled Truman on the first ballot, but Truman eventually prevailed. FDR won the general election 432-99, with 53.4% of the popular vote.
Truman's come-from-behind victory over Dewey in 1948 is well-known. He campaigned hard and won 303-189, with 39 Southern electoral votes going to Strom Thurmond.
At the 1952 GOP convention, there were contested seats between the Dwight Eisenhower forces and the Robert Taft forces, just like the battle in 1912 between Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Taft's father, William Howard Taft. However, unlike in 1912, when the Roosevelt forces were unable to exclude contested delegates from voting on who to seat, here the Eisenhower forces were successful in getting through a motion that delegations opposed by more than one-third of the national committee should not be permitted to vote on the credentials of any disputed delegation. Even though the Taft forces controlled the convention machinery, the motion passed by 110 votes. The credentials committee still voted in favor of seating the Taft delegates, but the full convention overruled the committee by rejecting the Georgia delegation 607-531, and the Eisenhower delegates were then seated in all cases.
The Democratic convention was also interesting, with eleven candidates being nominated. Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson had disavowed the movement to draft him, but his vote total steadily rose and he was nominated on the third ballot, the last time it took more than one ballot to nominate a presidential candidate. With TV now in the picture, the campaign was interesting. Ike won big, 442-89, with 55% of the popular vote.
It was Ike vs. Adlai again facing off in 1956, and Ike again won, with a 457-73 electoral edge, and 57% of the popular vote. However, in an unprecedented result, the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. Roseboom says the explanation for this is hard to understand, but he concludes that the voters must have wanted divided government:
"Viewed in its immediate aftermath, the election was actually a vote for a bi-partisan administration--a president of one party, a Congress of the other--a perplexing verdict for believers in party or parliamentary government. But the voters wanted peace and prosperity continued and this was their solution. They trusted Eisenhower to preserve the one, and the Democratic party to safeguard the other. In 1956, this seemed to make sense.
The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest is chronicled in some detail; in the end the electoral vote was 303-219 for Kennedy, and the popular vote difference was less than 1/10 of 1%. The Roseboom book then concludes as the 1964 primary season was heating up.
[Note: With the Roseboom account now ended, in Part Four I will update the account from 1964 to the present, using my own recollections and research.]
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