Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. This week, we want to talk about the question of third-party candidates and how they influence presidential elections. And obviously, one of the things that’s front and center as we’re talking about this topic is the current discussion and various controversies that exist having to do with the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., seemingly a democratic candidate, perhaps not, and that’s the very sort of question that’s going to be in part at the heart of this episode, which is we assume, and we’ll talk about this more momentarily, that America has a two-party system and that is how things work and that is how they’ve always supposed to have worked and that’s how things go. And like, “Oh, gasp, look, there might be another party and that it’s actually more complicated than that or interesting than that.”

And it has to do with a lot of different kinds of things, some of them having to do with political strategy, some of them actually having to do with principles and ideals. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he is actually running as a Democratic primary competitor to President Biden. Anyone who’s been watching the news in any way is aware that he has a variety of different views about things that don’t necessarily put him at the center of the Democratic Party stance. Now, Kennedy has long been trumpeting a range of conspiracy theories, for example, suggesting that vaccines may cause autism and other medical conditions, that exposure to chemicals in drinking water may cause gender dysphoria.

He somehow or other has linked the rise of antidepressants to school shootings. He suggested that the CIA may have killed his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Most recently, he started talking about ethnically geared biochemicals, somehow or other, linking that with COVID in a way that he has made increasingly unclear as he’s tried to explain what it is that he was trying to talk about. So in one way or another, he’s an interesting candidate potentially and this is some of what we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode, the kind of candidate who’s put forward to complicate or change the way a two-party election is going.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And candidate is, I think, a slightly different case than the ones that you and I are going to talk about in terms of American history and that he’s a deeply problematic candidate as an individual. He has a very problematic past. He does not at all fit the Democratic Party, but it strikes me, one of the things about the Kennedy candidacy in which he insists that he is running to win the election, even though that’s really not anywhere in any card that anybody can see, is that he seems to reflect a new political moment that has been characterized by this new concept of politics that comes out of Russia called political technology, in which a party that is trying to run as a spoiler pick somebody who has a name that will get great name recognition among the voters that they’re trying to split.

That’s one thing that Kennedy has going for him, is a name that a lot of people, if they’re not paying attention, might say, “Oh, Kennedy, he’s a Democrat. He says things I believe in,” and what that will do is it’ll split the Democrats. So he is slightly different, I think, than the other cases we’re talking about because of this new concept of how you can take over a country that is a democratic country and turn it into an authoritarian government through voting. And one of those ways is to run ghost candidates, if you will, or candidates who are misrepresenting who they are. And he seems to fit that really nicely.

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely, candidates of impulse and not of reasoning, right? “Oh, it’s a Kennedy,” just as you’re saying, “Oh, I know what he represents,” and that kind of thoughtless or heedless vote, as you’re suggesting, can have real power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is a political strategy and one of the purveyors of it is a person like Roger Stone, who’s very famously been supporting the Kennedy candidacy and photographed with him. That does point to the fact that a Kennedy-linked Super PAC called American Values 2024 has raised more than $10 million from a mix of Democratic and Republican donors. And the most prolific of his fundraisers is a colleague of Elon Musk’s, the same man, David Sacks, is also a major contributor to Republican Ron DeSantis and a number of other tech CEOs are rallying behind Kennedy. So the idea that he is actually a Democrat actually really running for the presidency on principle is problematic.

Joanne Freeman:

Problematic, to put it in a word. Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and at the same time, we have the rise of this new No Labels third-party force. It’s not officially in the race yet, but it argues that it is a centrist political organization that is going to try and create a new kind of politics in the country. But there too, even as it is doing launch events in places like New Hampshire this very week, it was formed by a former Democratic fundraiser, Nancy Jacobson, who is married to somebody who did work for the Democratic Party, but over the last decade has become a vocal defender of former President Trump. Lots of suggestions here including the fact that it’s bankrolled in part by the same GOP fundraiser, Harlan Crow, who bankrolled Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. This No Labels idea is also one that is designed to split the Democrats and throw the election to former President Trump or whomever the Republican nominee is.

Joanne Freeman:

And the rhetoric of that, number one, No Labels, so, “No, we’re not a party really. We’re a party without labels,” and number two, they are throwing around the word unity, right? They’re going to have a unity ticket. So they’re also pulling at words and ideas that are suggesting something that will get a, I’m sure they’re hoping, visceral response from people at a time when politics is so divided. Talking about Kennedy or talking about unity or talking about No Labels, those all have a kind of emotional appeal to them as well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s worth pointing out that polls suggest that, if in fact there is a head-to-head contest between President Biden and former President Trump, Biden wins pretty handily. But when you add in a theoretical No Labels candidate, for example, Trump wins that election by edging out Biden. A lot of people have looked at the rise of No Labels and said, “Basically, No Labels equals a Trump presidency.” We appear to be in a place where third parties may have a huge effect on the direction of our country.

Joanne Freeman:

And what’s equally interesting is that, according to a Pew poll from last year, that nearly four in 10 Americans say that the statement, “I wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country,” describes their view extremely or very well. So that’s another component of this, is that Americans are in part saying, “These two parties that we have right now are not working well. I wish there were more to choose from,” which adds another dimension to the complications that we’re introducing here just for the election to come.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, and people have come up with ways to address that like multiple choice voting, but you and I were talking about this before this episode and it is worth pointing out something that a lot of people missed and that is that our primary system is designed to include more voices in the major parties. So when in fact you back a primary candidate whose policies you believe in, they can take that support and go to whomever becomes the major party candidate and say, “Hey, I’m going to throw my votes to you, but in exchange, you have to give me either this plank in a platform or my people in certain positions of power and so on.” So that-

Joanne Freeman:

Political wheeling and dealing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, at least, that’s what the Democratic Party does at this point, so that you end up with a party that may not have your person on the top of it but does have your policies included. And you can see that really clearly in the Biden administration, by the power that somebody like Pete Buttigieg has, which is very clearly he traded the power that he amassed during the primaries to a real focus on infrastructure and transportation in the Biden administration. There actually is a system in place that is designed to guarantee that people do get to have a say in the major political parties, although it’s not entirely clear that that’s equally true across the political spectrum.

Joanne Freeman:

No, but imagine small D, democracy. Components of actual democracy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, the whole idea of third parties having a huge effect on the outcomes of elections is nothing new in American history. And we picked out two elections in particular where choices change everything.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed. And I do want to say, just as we move on to talk about these two elections, it’s very much worth noting that it’s not as though the be-all, end-all norm has always been assumed to be two parties, that in the founding era, parties, generally speaking, were seen as a negative thing. The idea that you could only have two of them across the whole nation was a pie in the sky. No one imagined that that would be possible. And when it began to seem as though the country was dividing in that way, it was alarming. There was just too much diversity, too many different views, too little unity for that to be the case.

If you go to the Biographical Guide of the United States Congress, an online database of sorts, you’ll see that there are at least 75 different parties mentioned within that database for people who have served in Congress during the history of the nation. So there’s a lot of variety over time and a two-party system was certainly not assumed to be the norm for quite some time in American history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So when we look at moments when a third party really mattered, the one that comes up is 1844. The election of 1844 is one of the most important elections in American history because of what happened with regard to a third party.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed. And it shows something that increasingly would come to be at the center of national politics, that in a sense is smacked right in the middle of all of the campaigning and the discussions and made things ripe for a party to step forward and say, “We are here to talk about slavery.” What we’re going to be talking about in part is the Liberty Party directly related to that, that there’s a major issue, a fundamental national-shaping issue at play, that there are ideals and principles at play and that that factor ends up having a major impact on a presidential election.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the issue is enslavement, but the larger political theme is purity and voting for a pure candidate. So what happens is, in 1844, the presidential election comes down to a fight between James K. Polk, who’s a Democrat, who’s running against Henry Clay, who’s a Whig. So here’s how it plays out. Polk is a protege of Andrew Jackson. He was from Tennessee. He had been the governor of Tennessee and a Speaker of the House of Representatives. Clay, the Whig, was the big guy. He was the leader of the Whigs. He was thought of as one of the greatest Americans at the time. He had served as Speaker of the House. He had been a longtime senator from Kentucky. He had served Secretary of State.

So in this campaign, 1844, the real issue is the proposed annexation of Texas. So if you remember from our episode, Texas Tall-Tales, Ken Paxton and Us, which we did I think fairly recently, June, I guess, we talked about the significance of enslavement in the creation of Texas as an independent Republican in 1836. Well, one of the things that they wanted to do in Texas was to annex that state to the United States, but there’s an obvious problem.

Joanne Freeman:

And this is an important point, which is we’re talking about a period here when we’re creating states or annexing states when the nation is growing geographically in leaps and bounds and every new state or new territory, everything that gets added raises the central question, “Will this be a free state or will this be a slave state?” So I actually mentioned that in part because it’s important to note that, although we’re talking about this election and the Liberty Party as being a question of principles, that it isn’t simply people are suddenly being idealistic in and of themselves. It’s because this issue is at the forefront of politics and it’s forcing people to step forward and decide how they view this or not.

So it’s not as though suddenly America became idealistic. It’s because expansion is forcing the issue forward and that is leading precisely to what you just said, Heather. People now have to decide what they think about it, how they’re going to act on it, and in the case of the Liberty Party, what kind of a candidate can they trust on it, how pure that candidate is.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I’d push that further and say it’s not just about the issue of enslavement. It’s also about the issue of democracy. Because the truth here is that, regardless of how any voter, and these are all white men at this point, the way any voter felt about the issue of enslavement, in a democracy, they had to win a majority. And what happens is that Polk is perceived to be the pro-slavery dude. He’s going to annex Texas with enslavement and can I say he’s a fan of slavery? I’m going to because he’s not going to be able to come after me, but he is in favor of the annexation of Texas and the understanding is that, if he’s elected, enslavement is going to spread into the Texas lands, which by the way at this time don’t have very clear boundaries.

And Henry Clay himself is an enslavers. Although by the time he dies, he’s going to call for the end of enslavement. And he is perceived to be anti-slavery, but not fully anti-slavery. He held enslaved people himself. He was not an abolitionist. That is that even the Whigs believed that the Constitution protected enslavement where it already existed, but he pretty clearly was not going to let it expand into any territory that was taken or that the United States collected from Mexico.

Joanne Freeman:

He’s also known to be, for good reason, a very savvy … Wow, [inaudible 00:15:21] really does not like Henry Clay.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He’s running for the third party. He’s a third-party candidate.

Joanne Freeman:

The Budgie Party. Clay is a very, very savvy politician. And so some of what we’re also talking about here is that he’s known as being someone who can move with what makes sense to move with in the favor of political results. And so that’s going to be part of what’s happening here too, is an awareness of what kind of a political actor he is.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he wants to get elected and he recognizes that, if he is too strong on that particular issue, he’s going to lose a lot of votes he can’t afford to lose, especially in the American South, where the Whigs will come along behind him because he’s a Whig, unless he comes out and openly says, “No enslavement in the New West.”

Joanne Freeman:

And he tries several times, right? Tries to become president several times. And there’s a joke at the time, Henry Clay was very well known as an orator, and any anytime that he gave any kind of speech and it was known about in advance, there would be mass crowds of people standing outside listening through windows. And one of his contemporaries said that Henry Clay had a way of making, I’m probably not going to do this justice, “He could get more people to listen to him and fewer people to vote for him than any person on the face of the Earth.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, in part, because he was the great compromiser and it’s easy to pick holes at that and that is precisely what the Liberty Party does. It is openly an anti-slavery party. The Liberty Party comes in to fill the void for people who wanted an end to enslavement, particularly a fast end to enslavement. The party had emerged in 1840. It was not actually as radical as some abolitionists, but in both 1840 and 1844, it ran a man named James G. Birney, who had been part of a Kentucky family that had enslaved their Black neighbors. He had become an initially an enslaver himself, but gradually because of religious fervor and exposure to abolitionist thought, he decided that slavery needed to end.

So he moved closer and closer to outright radical abolitionism. And finally in 1844, when the Liberty Party runs Birney, they criticized both Polk and Clay as being enslavers who are wedded to this unholy institution.

Joanne Freeman:

And let me read actually just a plank of their platform to give you a sense of precisely what it is that they stood for. They said, “Resolved that the Liberty Party will demand the absolute and unqualified divorce of the general federal government from slavery and also the restoration of equality of rights among men in every state where the party exists or may exist.” So that’s a pretty direct statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So you can imagine how this is going to play out, the Liberty Party people are constantly going to hit on Clay as an enslaver, as somebody who is just as bad as Polk, and that they alone are the ones who are fully embracing the potential of America to be a place that does not have human enslavement.

Joanne Freeman:

So to give you a sense of the, again direct, plain, straightforward, extreme view of the time, here is the Whig Indiana Journal addressing prospective Liberty Party voters in early August of 1844, essentially arguing that, “If you vote for the Liberty Party, it’s a wasted vote. They’re just coming in here to make a point. They can’t possibly win the election.” So the Indiana State Journal says, “Friends, Christians, honest men, how can you, by throwing away your votes, hazard the election of Texas and slavery men to the legislature from this country? Our opponents are tickled to death with the prospect of thus using you as tools. Shall it be done? Will you minister to their success? Ponder on these things.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet, the Birney people continued to hammer on Clay saying, for example, this is one person talking about him saying, “This is the party whose leader is a gambler, a man stealer and a dualist. This is the party with all their bitter, bloody, burning outrages on abolitionists that has the impudence to call on Liberty men to support this particular man.”

Joanne Freeman:

And I’ll say that those coded words, gambler, man stealer and dualist are all also ways of saying Southerner. They’re also ways of saying, “This is a typical Southern slave holding, gambling, dualist with low morals.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this is the one that really gets me in the modern context, Birney himself said, “In remarking on the danger of annexation that is of Texas, I expressed the opinion that I now repeat, that I had but little fear of it should Mr. Polk be elected, but a good deal should Mr. Clay be elected. I place my fears on the ground that Mr. Clay as well as Mr. Polk has expressed himself favorable to annexation and that Mr. Clay could and would lead his party, whilst Mr. Polk was incompetent to lead his.” So Birney actually comes out and says, “Don’t really worry about Polk getting elected because he’s so incompetent that he won’t get anything done. Clay though, Clay’s going to go ahead and he going to spread slavery.”

Joanne Freeman:

So despite those kinds of defensive Whig actions, the Liberty Party ended up making a big dent in that election. On election day, the Liberty Party ultimately received over 62,000 votes, which is roughly 2.3% of the popular vote, including 15,800 votes in New York and those were votes that probably would’ve gone in a large majority to Henry Clay. Polk won New York by just over 5,000 votes. Clay would have won the election had he carried New York’s 36 electoral votes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So let’s be really clear there, the Liberty Party out of New York threw the New York election to James K. Polk. That gave Polk the electoral college and beat Henry Clay in the electoral college. So the Liberty Party ends up throwing the election to James K. Polk, the one who openly says, “I’m spreading slavery.” The Liberty Party throws the election to the most pro-slavery candidate. I’m sorry, I just can’t keep … Even after all these years, I can’t wrap my head around that.

Joanne Freeman:

In part by suggesting, “Well, he won’t really be able to do anything because he’s not very competent, so he’s not really a danger,” which is another sort of aspect of this that’s worth noting, “Oh yeah, through the Liberty Party, throws the election to the guy who says he’s going to spread slavery, and in part, does it by saying, ‘Yeah, but he’s not a real threat. Clay is the guy we have to be afraid of.'”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because he is a threat and he knows what he’s doing. So this is a historic moment here because this is one of the few moments that I will agree wholeheartedly with Horace Greeley, with whom I have a longstanding feud.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, Heather …

Heather Cox Richardson:

Horace Greeley.

Joanne Freeman:

… wait, I just have to appreciate this moment because this is such an us moment, “Heather, you’re agreeing with Horace Greeley?”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Horace Greeley is an editor of an anti-slavery newspaper and he writes, “You third-party wire workers force this man upon us instead of the only anti-Texas candidate who could possibly be elected. On your guilty heads shall rest the curses of unborn generations rot in your infamy and rejoice in its triumph, but never ask us to unite with you in anything.”

Joanne Freeman:

And I have to say, that’s really Greeley-esque. Greeley is not a shy writer.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is, but the frustration is enormous there because the election of Polk changes US history in one of the most significant ways possible.

Joanne Freeman:

This is a moment where the nation is pushing West and new states, new question, “Will it be free? Will it be slave?” and the outcome of each one of those decisions can be massive. So for Polk, highly significant that election. Within months of taking office, he had acquired the lands in the West that become Oregon, Washington state and Idaho. The following year, 1846, he spearheaded the controversial Mexican-American War, which resulted in the United States getting lands that became California, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, Nevada and much of Colorado and Arizona.

And he, basically, during his presidency, struggled to manage disputes over the status of slavery and all of these new territories. His lack of leadership over this question of slavery was a major contributing factor to the building sectional tensions in this time period that down the road ultimately do lead to the Civil War.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Let’s play that out just a little bit more. If Clay had been elected, I can hear people saying, “Well, the United States got all that land. It can’t be all bad.” If Clay had been elected, counterfactual history and that’s got all kinds of caveats and all that, but it seems probable that the United States would still have gone ahead and acquired that land. But crucially, Congress in 1846, when Polk is president, tries to keep enslavement out of all that lands acquired. They try and pass, you may remember from your high school textbooks, something called the Wilmot Proviso, which says, “Any land acquired from Mexico shall not have human enslavement in it.” And it’s the backing of Polk and the people who got elected with Polk who kill that proviso in the US Senate.

So you think about what might have happened in this country if it had been Clay there instead of Polk. Yes, enslavement would have continued in the American South through that period, but with the acquisition of the West that was entirely free, that system of enslavement would have ended further down the line under a Congress that then was a free state Congress. It is really interesting, because when I teach this election, there’s always a number of people who say, “Well, it is good to vote on principle. That’s the only way to put stuff on the table,” and there’s always a number of people, often from other countries and often people of color, who are like, “Really? They pushed enslavement across the United States for another 20 years and everything that came from that, so those 5,000 people in New York could be pure.” This keeps me up at night, I got to say.

Joanne Freeman:

But again, thinking about the fact that the Liberty Party pushes this and that part of the reason why they push this is underestimating the damage that can be done by a candidate who they disagree with. That’s worth noting too. So principles and purity sometimes end up being a privilege that shouldn’t be deployed in that way. And if they are, you end up with this kind of outcome and this kind of dire legacy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Whenever I think of the election of ’44, I always think about people voting purely on issues of climate change, which is of course the overriding issue of the present. And yet people like me anyway, we’re desperately trying to put in place a political system that can address that issue because trying to address it without that political system in place means you split the vote and you lose. And every time I hear that argument, I just think, “1844, 1844, 1844. Should we talk about 1844?”

Joanne Freeman:

There are issues that are front and foremost should be right in front of our eyes all the time, but without a stable democratic system in place, you’re not doing anything. You’re not accomplishing anything. You’re not saving anything. You won’t be able to do any of these things that are very much worth doing. So what we’re talking about here is politics. Principles are important, they’re there, but you have to also consider the politics that, by definition, have to go along with the principle to achieve outcomes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The politics of getting to a majority in a democratic system, because you may not have liked Henry Clay or the people who surrounded him and all that, but he could have put it together in a way that James Birney could not.

Joanne Freeman:

As we move in to this 1912 election, it stands in sharp contrast with what we just talked about. We just talked about principles and the way in which a party grounded on principle shaped the election. In this case, we’re going to be looking at an election where there’s a lot of strategy involved, which in this case a third party is partly a matter of trying to strategically shift the direction that one party is going. Now the 1912 presidential election pitted Democrat Woodrow Wilson against the incumbent Republican William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and we’re going to be talking about his progressive party coming up here. Roosevelt had served almost a full unelected term in office after he succeeded his slain predecessor William McKinley in 1901 and he won a landslide reelection in 1904 and then said he would not run for third term in 1908 and had handpicked Taft as his successor.

And initially, Roosevelt kept that pledge and headed off to Africa. I had forgotten until thinking about this episode that his son was named Kermit. He headed to Africa to go on safari with his son named Kermit, in which they apparently together killed 512 animals on safari.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the libraries I used to work in had a permanent Roosevelt collection and it had all kinds of cartoons on display, largely from Puck.

Joanne Freeman:

Which is a political magazine that has the very famous cartoons in it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And very funny cartoons, but one of the wealthy New Yorkers who loathed Roosevelt, when he announced he was going to Africa on safari, the guy said, “Let every lion do his duty.”

Joanne Freeman:

I have to say that, a thing I love as a historian is going back a hundred or 200 years and finding things that still make you laugh out loud and that’s a great example. So he’s out there slaughtering animals on safari with his son Kermit, but as he’s out there, within months of Taft taking office in 1909, he starts to take an increasingly pro-business orientation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What happens is that when Roosevelt goes off on his safari, and of course, everybody is madly covering that, one of the ways that he had been able to hold together the Republican Party’s growing split between pro-business people and progressives like Roosevelt and fighting Bob La Follette and that growing progressive wing was by not touching the tariff. That was like the holy grail. Roosevelt did not touch the tariff. And so he did a bunch of stuff like protecting lands and he didn’t actually get much through Congress and he did that by trying not be a bomb thrower in the middle of the old guard, which liked the high tariff and was trying to sit him out.

Taft gets into office and Taft is this plotting guy who’s got a very legalistic mind and not a lot of sense of politics. He’s really been directed by his wife and she has a stroke as soon as he’s in the White House and all of a sudden he’s rudderless. He doesn’t know what to do. So the first thing he does is he dives into the tariff and the pro-business Republicans are like, “Hot dog, we’re going to raise the tariff.” And everybody who’s voted for Democrats and for Roosevelt wants to lower the tariff. They do. They call it tariff reform, but they actually raised the numbers on the tariff and then Taft has the nerve to go around the country saying, “This is the best law we’ve ever had. This is the best tariff we’ve ever had,” and cutting all the progressive Republicans out. So he does this tour of the country, but he won’t even talk to the progressive Republicans.

So Teddy Roosevelt gets rip shit mad, the leader of the progressive Republicans and this is where the next Puck cartoon comes in. When he comes back from Africa, Puck has this picture. You can tell that it was originally Taft busily being Taft behind a desk and all that and Roosevelt’s face has punched through the paper so that he is back from Africa and he’s just totally stealing all the headlines because he comes back and feels personally attacked by Taft who was his handpicked successor. And when he returns in June of 1910, a million New Yorkers show up to greet him, suggesting that the heart of the country really is behind Roosevelt and not the somewhat lethargic Taft.

Joanne Freeman:

I was going to say, and Roosevelt, who’s this energetic, charismatic figure, even just on that front alone and nevermind punching through the headlines, is going to be a study in contrast with Taft.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s just such a great cartoon. His glasses are like … They’re not eyes. They’re just white like [inaudible 00:33:53] glasses and the giant grin and the face, it’s two-dimensional, of course, because it’s a drawing, but it is punched through the newspaper headlines and say something like, I don’t know, “Taft does something,” and there’s Teddy Roosevelt punching-

Joanne Freeman:

“I’m back.” So obviously now, the Republican Party is dividing while people are rallying behind Roosevelt. Roosevelt clubs begin to spring up around the country. And although Roosevelt initially distanced himself a bit from that enthusiastic support saying, “Oh, no, no, this isn’t about me. I’m not raising this to happen. It’s happening despite me. They love me. What can I do about it?” To quote him actually, he says, “I might be able to guide this movement, but I should be wholly unable to stop it even if I were to try. This isn’t something I’m doing. It’s the people. The people making their demand.”

Even though, as he’s making that distancing comment and claiming that he’s a little uncomfortable with the massive swell of support for him, he actually also went on very high-profile tour of the Midwest in August of 1910, and on August 31st, delivered a famed new nationalism speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in which he reaffirmed his belief in the government’s responsibility to regulate corporate power and to secure rights for workers. Roosevelt said, “The constitution guarantees protections to property and we must make that promise good, but it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth, who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces, which they have themselves called into being.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

You said that like a historian, but he is standing there shaking his fist in Osawatomie saying, “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.” This is like he is calling Americans behind him to take back the US government and to use it in such a way that it does not become beholden to the extremely wealthy.

Joanne Freeman:

So basically, by February of 1912, at this point, Roosevelt, who is being really urged on by progressives in the Republican Party as well as this swell of popular support, he agrees to enter the Republican presidential primary against Taft. And this is the way he announced that he was in the election. Roosevelt said, “My hat is in the ring. The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” That is my gift to you, listeners.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which is a reference to boxing in this era.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes, but still, still.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it didn’t mean he was completely naked, but the idea was there’s all kinds of layers of masculinity and all kinds of stuff and always with Roosevelt-

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it’s Roosevelt we’re talking about. Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, yes. All right, so what happens is that Roosevelt actually wins more primary delegates in the state primaries than Taft does, but party bosses who are beholden to the old guard and the Republican Party that wants to defend business manage to throw the Republican nomination to Taft. This is going to be really important because Taft is going to get the Republican nomination. Roosevelt bolts the Republican Party and forms the progressive party. So he has split the Republican Party.

Joanne Freeman:

He split the Republican Party. You also get a socialist, Eugene Debs, who now tangles the field further by jumping into the contest. There’s a moment talking about Roosevelt and masculinity. He hits the campaign trail in the fall, and on October 14th, he is shot in the chest while campaigning by a man named John Schrank. He’s preparing to deliver a speech in Milwaukee. He is shot and he refuses medical attention and speaks for 90 minutes with the bullet lodged in his chest cavity and opened his remarks by saying, and I just love this quote, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I’ve just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” and that becomes an animal and a saying that becomes associated with Roosevelt throughout this campaign.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and think of a bull moose. Bull moose are huge, unstoppable and dangerous as hell. It takes more than that to stop a bull moose. It does in fact take more than a bullet to stop a bull moose.

Joanne Freeman:

He was telling the truth.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. So on election day in November 1912, Taft and Roosevelt split the Republican vote. Roosevelt got 4 million votes in the election. Taft only got 3.5. So in fact, Roosevelt was correct to judge that he was the wave of the future. But by splitting those 7.5 million votes, they threw the election to Woodrow Wilson, who got 6.2 million votes. The electoral college showed an even greater win for Wilson. He won the largest electoral majority up to that point. He got 435 electoral votes compared to Roosevelt’s 88 and Taft’s eight. Eugene Debs got fewer than a million votes. He got about 900,000 votes, which is 6% of the popular vote, the highest that any presidential socialist candidate has ever gotten in US history.

The old guard under Taft really went on to attack Roosevelt saying that it was his fault the Republicans were no longer in power and he was furious about this. In 1917, he actually came out and attacked the old guard after it had very pointedly attacked him and said, “Today, many well-meaning men who have permitted themselves to fossilize, to become mere ultra-conservative reactionaries, to reject and oppose all progress, but who still pay a conventional and perfunctory homage to Lincoln’s memory will do well to remember exactly what it was for which this great conservative leader of radicalism actually stood.” His argument being that Lincoln was actually incredibly conservative in his attempt to take back the United States government for the American people.

This story has a really close tie to the present. Remember the name Taft because this is a really interesting swing on this. William Howard Taft’s son, Robert Taft, was a senator from Ohio and he ran the Republican Party at the end of World War II. He was really the leader. He had the war chest. He was the one who called all the shots. And it was absolutely expected that he would become the next Republican candidate for president when they finally could get some of the Democrats out of there after FDR and Truman. So in 1952, Eisenhower, who was not looking to run for president, was really concerned about protecting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, to hold back the Soviet Union, and he goes to Robert Taft, who is against NATO in leading the Republicans.

And Eisenhower says to Taft, “If you’ll back NATO, I won’t run against you,” and Taft says, “No, I’m against NATO.” So Eisenhower throws his hat into the ring in 1952. There’s a fist fight at the convention between Taft people and Eisenhower people, and when the Eisenhower delegates managed to swing the convention behind Eisenhower, that’s when the Taft people, who wanted to get rid of the new deal, wanted to get rid of NATO, wanted to become isolationist and basically go back to the 1920s, that’s when we get the rise of the idea of the Eastern Establishment that is undermining true Republicanism.

And Robert Taft comes out and talks about how thoroughly he hates third-party insurgencies because of what had happened to his father. Lots of it was personal, but that’s where we get the idea of the Eastern Establishment, not that they recognize that the New Deal was popular and Eisenhower said, “Listen, I’m going to keep on going with the New Deal. I’m going to call it the Middle Way, but we’re going to keep on having a government that regulates business and protects the basic social safety net and all that. We’re also going to protect NATO.” Eisenhower was enormously popular, but the reactionary right under Robert Taft, who was like, “I had deserved this. I’m just like my dad. I’ve sewn this whole system up,” is so mad. They talked about the system being taken over by an Eastern Establishment that backs Eisenhower.

And most people forget where we got that term, but still you’re hearing people talking about a deep state, all that kind of stuff. It came from this old fight in 1912 between Taft and Roosevelt.

Joanne Freeman:

And what’s interesting about that, and it goes back to some of what we were saying at the very beginning of this episode, we talked in part about how these third party efforts have to do with principle and in part how they have to do with party politics and strategy. And certainly, politics always has to do, in one way or another, with emotion and visceral reactions to things, but I think particularly with third parties and with the complications introduced by third parties. One of the major strengths that they have is that very factor, that they are seen as not the norm and that that can be played as a strength, that that can appeal to a desire to take things back or disrupt things or work for whatever, the people, whatever it is that you want to use as far as the rhetoric goes for these movements.

There’s a visceral power in stepping forward as a third-party candidate. And as we’ve said throughout this episode, it’s often you can’t tell necessarily where that’s going to go, but there’s a power to it. There’s an instinctive, visceral emotional grab that really can lend strength and power to a third-party candidate and can really skew how elections go. And it’s worth bearing in mind right now that we are at a moment where emotion and hate and rhetoric is so central in so many more ways than actual policy appears to be in much of our campaigning environment. It’s worth bearing in mind that these third-party efforts that we started out discussing at the beginning of this episode, they may have nothing to do with actually getting someone in office. They may have nothing to do with an actual specific candidate.

The goal there is to skew the logic and power and direction and emotion of an election. And that would be worth bearing in mind in months to come, because potentially, this is going to have a major, major influence on the outcome and Americans would be well advised to be thinking carefully and reasoning carefully and not necessarily succumbing to the emotion bound up in that kind of effort. We’re talking politics, we’re talking strategy and we’re talking passions, political passions, and all of those things need to be taken into account as we move ahead towards, gasp, a presidential election.