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WOODROW WILSON: A BIOGRAPHY - GLOSSARY (SPOILER THREAD)
Robert Todd Lincoln:
Robert Todd Lincoln was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1843. He received his education from Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, but four months after entering Harvard, he left to join the Union Army, ultimately serving on General Ulysses S. Grant's staff.
Son of slain President Abraham Lincoln, Robert Lincoln returned to Illinois after his father's assassination, where he studied law and was admitted to the Illinois state bar in 1867. He also became involved in corporate and railroad business ventures, accruing substantial wealth. In 1880, he served as a delegate to the 1880 Republican National Convention that nominated James A. Garfield for President.
Upon Garfield's election, the new President appointed Lincoln as his secretary of war; Lincoln held onto this post even after Garfield's assassination at the request of President Chester Arthur. Robert Lincoln declined any consideration of running for President himself in 1884 and left office in 1885 to resume his law practice in Illinois.
In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison nominated Lincoln, without his knowledge, as U.S. minister to Great Britain, an appointment the Senate approved. Lincoln ultimately accepted the post and served as ambassador from 1889 to 1893. Lincoln also worked as leading counsel for the Pullman Railroad company, becoming its president in 1897 and serving in the position until 1911. Robert Todd Lincoln died in 1926.
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Booker T. Washington:
Booker Taliaferro was born a mulatto slave in Franklin Country on 5th April, 1856. His father was an unknown white man and his mother, the slave of James Burroughs, a small farmer in Virginia. Later, his mother married the slave, Washington Ferguson. When Booker entered school he took the name of his stepfather and became known as Booker T. Washington.
After the Civil War the family moved to Malden, West Virginia. Ferguson worked in the salt mines and at the age of nine Booker found employment as a salt-packer. A year later he became a coal miner (1866-68) before going to work as a houseboy for the wife of Lewis Ruffner, the owner of the mines. She encouraged Booker to continue his education and in 1872 he entered the Hampton Agricultural Institute.
The principal of the institute was Samuel Armstrong, an opponent of slavery who had been commander of African American troops during the Civil War. Armstrong believed that it was important that the freed slaves received a practical education. Armstrong was impressed with Washington and arranged for his tuition to be paid for by a wealthy white man.
Armstrong became Washington's mentor. Washington described Armstrong in his autobiography as "a great man - the noblest rarest human being it has ever been my privilege to meet". Armstrong's views of the development of character and morality and the importance of providing African Americans with a practical education had a lasting impact on Washington's own philosophy.
After graduating from the Hampton Agricultural Institute in 1875 Washington returned to Malden and found work with a local school. After a spell as a student at Wayland Seminary in 1878 he was employed by Samuel Armstrong to teach in a program for Native Americans.
In 1880, Lewis Adams, a black political leader in Macon County, agreed to help two white Democratic Party candidates, William Foster and Arthur Brooks, to win a local election in return for the building of a Negro school in the area. Both men were elected and they then used their influence to secure approval for the building of the Tuskegee Institute.
Samuel Armstrong, principal of the successful Hampton Agricultural Institute, was asked to recommend a white teacher to take charge of this school. However, he suggested that it would be a good idea to employ Washington instead.
The Tuskegee Negro Normal Institute was opened on the 4th July, 1888. The school was originally a shanty building owned by the local church. The school only received funding of $2,000 a year and this was only enough to pay the staff. Eventually Washington was able to borrow money from the treasurer of the Hampton Agricultural Institute to purchase an abandoned plantation on the outskirts of Tuskegee and built his own school.
The school taught academic subjects but emphasized a practical education. This included farming, carpentry, brickmaking, shoemaking, printing and cabinetmaking. This enabled students to become involved in the building of a new school. Students worked long-hours, arising at five in the morning and finishing at nine-thirty at night.
By 1888 the school owned 540 acres of land and had over 400 students. Washington was able to attract good teachers to his school such as Olivia Davidson, who was appointed assistant principal, and Adella Logan. Washington's conservative leadership of the school made it acceptable to the white-controlled Macon County. He did not believe that blacks should campaign for the vote, and claimed that blacks needed to prove their loyalty to the United States by working hard without complaint before being granted their political rights.
Southern whites, who had previously been against the education of African Americans, supported Washington's ideas as they saw them as means of encouraging them to accept their inferior economic and social status. This resulted in white businessmen such as Andrew Carnegie and Collis Huntington donating large sums of money to his school.
In September, 1895, Washington became a national figure when his speech at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta was widely reported by the country's newspapers. Washington's conservative views made him popular with white politicians who were keen that he should become the new leader of the African American population. To help him in this President William McKinley visited the Tuskegee Institute and praised Washington's achievements.
In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to visit him in the White House. To southern whites this was going too far. One editor wrote: "With our long-matured views on the subject of social intercourse between blacks and whites, the least we can say now is that we deplore the President's taste, and we distrust his wisdom."
Washington now spent most of his time on the lecture circuit. His African American critics who objected to the way Washington argued that it was the role of blacks to serve whites, and that those black leaders who demanded social equality were political extremists.
In 1900 Washington helped establish the National Negro Business League. Washington, who served as president, ensured that the organization concentrated on commercial issues and paid no attention to questions of African American civil rights. To Washington, the opportunity to earn a living and acquire property was more important than the right to vote. Like those who helped fund the Tuskegee Institute, Washington was highly critical of the emerging trade union movement in the United States.
Washington worked closely with Thomas Fortune, the owner of The New York Age. He regularly supplied Fortune with news stories and editorials favourable to himself. When the newspaper got into financial difficulties, Washington became secretly one of its principal stockholders.
Washington's autobiography was published in The Outlook magazine and was eventually published as Up From Slavery in 1901. His critics argued that the views expressed in his books, articles and lectures were essentially the prevailing views of white Americans.
In 1903 William Du Bois joined the attack on Washington with his essay on his work in The Soul of Black Folks. Washington retaliated with criticisms of Du Bois and his Niagara Movement. The two men also clashed over the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in 1909.
The following year, William Du Bois and twenty-two other prominent African Americans signed a statement claiming: "We are compelled to point out that Mr. Washington's large financial responsibilities have made him dependent on the rich charitable public and that, for this reason, he has for years been compelled to tell, not the whole truth, but that part of it which certain powerful interests in America wish to appear as the whole truth."
Although he now had a large number of critics, Washington continued to be consulted by powerful white politicians and had a say in the African American appointments made by Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) and William H. Taft (1909-13).
Booker Taliaferro Washington was taken ill and entered St. Luke's Hospital, New York City, on 5th November, 1915. Suffering from arteriosclerosis he was warned that he did not have long to live. He decided to travel to Tuskegee where he died on 14th November. Over 8,000 people attended his funeral held in the Tuskegee Institute Chapel.
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Andrew Carnegie:
One of the captains of industry of 19th century America, Andrew Carnegie helped build the formidable American steel industry, a process that turned a poor young man into one of the richest entrepreneurs of his age. Later in his life, Carnegie sold his steel business and systematically gave his collected fortune away to cultural, educational and scientific institutions for "the improvement of mankind."
Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, the medieval capital of Scotland, in 1835. The town was a center of the linen industry, and Andrew's father was a weaver, a profession the young Carnegie was expected to follow. But the industrial revolution that would later make Carnegie the richest man in the world, destroyed the weavers' craft. When the steam-powered looms came to Dunfermline in 1847 hundreds of hand loom weavers became expendable. Andrew's mother went to work to support the family, opening a small grocery shop and mending shoes.
"I began to learn what poverty meant," Andrew would later write. "It was burnt into my heart then that my father had to beg for work. And then and there came the resolve that I would cure that when I got to be a man."
An ambition for riches would mark Carnegie's path in life. However, a belief in political egalitarianism was another ambition he inherited from his family. Andrew's father, his grandfather Tom Morrison and his uncle Tom Jr. were all Scottish radicals who fought to do away with inherited privilege and to bring about the rights of common workers.
But Andrew's mother, fearing for the survival of her family, pushed the family to leave the poverty of Scotland for the possibilities in America. She borrowed 20 pounds she needed to pay the fare for the Atlantic passage and in 1848 the Carnegies joined two of Margaret's sisters in Pittsburgh, then a sooty city that was the iron-manufacturing center of the country.
William Carnegie secured work in a cotton factory and his son Andrew took work in the same building as a bobbin boy for $1.20 a week. Later, Carnegie worked as a messenger boy in the city's telegraph office. He did each job to the best of his ability and seized every opportunity to take on new responsibilities. For example, he memorized Pittsburgh's street lay-out as well as the important names and addresses of those he delivered to.
Carnegie often was asked to deliver messages to the theater. He arranged to make these deliveries at night--and stayed on to watch plays by Shakespeare and other great playwrights. In what would be a life-long pursuit of knowledge, Carnegie also took advantage of a small library that a local benefactor made available to working boys.
One of the men Carnegie met at the telegraph office was Thomas A. Scott, then beginning his impressive career at Pennsylvania Railroad. Scott was taken by the young worker and referred to him as "my boy Andy," hiring him as his private secretary and personal telegrapher at $35 a month.
"I couldn't imagine," Carnegie said many years later. "what I could ever do with so much money." Ever eager to take on new responsibilities, Carnegie worked his way up the ladder in Pennsylvania Railroad and succeeded Scott as superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Scott was hired to supervise military transportation for the North and Carnegie worked as his right hand man.
The Civil War fueled the iron industry, and by the time the war was over, Carnegie saw the potential in the field and resigned from Pennsylvania Railroad. It was one of many bold moves that would typify Carnegie's life in industry and earn him his fortune. He then turned his attention to the Keystone Bridge Company, which worked to replace wooden bridges with stronger iron ones. In three years he had an annual income of $50,000.
However, Andrew expressed his uneasiness with the businessman's life. In a letter to himself at age 33, he wrote: "To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery. I will resign business at thirty-five, but during the ensuing two years I wish to spend the afternoons in receiving instruction and in reading systematically."
Carnegie would continue making unparalleled amounts of money for the next 30 years. Two years after he wrote that letter Carnegie would embrace a new steel refining process being used by Englishman Henry Bessemer to convert huge batches of iron into steel, which was much more flexible than brittle iron. Carnegie threw his own money into the process and even borrowed heavily to build a new steel plant near Pittsburgh. Carnegie was ruthless in keeping down costs and managed by the motto "watch costs and the profits take care of themselves."
"I think Carnegie's genius was first of all, an ability to foresee how things were going to change," says historian John Ingram. "Once he saw that something was of potential benefit to him, he was willing to invest enormously in it."
Carnegie was unusual among the industrial captains of his day because he preached for the rights of laborers to unionize and to protect their jobs. However, Carnegie's actions did not always match his rhetoric. Carnegie's steel workers were often pushed to long hours and low wages. In the Homestead Strike of 1892, Carnegie threw his support behind plant manager Henry Frick, who locked out workers and hired Pinkerton thugs to intimidate strikers. Many were killed in the conflict, and it was an episode that would forever hurt Carnegie's reputation and haunt the man.
Still, Carnegie's steel juggernaut was unstoppable, and by 1900 Carnegie Steel produced more of the metal than all of Great Britain. That was also the year that financier J. P. Morgan mounted a major challenge to Carnegie's steel empire. While Carnegie believed he could beat Morgan in a battle lasting five, 10 or 15 years, the fight did not appeal to the 64-year old man eager to spend more time with his wife Louise, whom he had married in 1886, and their daughter, Margaret.
Carnegie wrote the asking price for his steel business on a piece of paper and had one of his managers deliver the offer to Morgan. Morgan accepted without hesitation, buying the company for $480 million. "Congratulations, Mr. Carnegie," Morgan said to Carnegie when they finalized the deal. "you are now the richest man in the world."
Fond of saying that "the man who dies rich dies disgraced," Carnegie then turned his attention to giving away his fortune. He abhorred charity, and instead put his money to use helping others help themselves. That was the reason he spent much of his collected fortune on establishing over 2,500 public libraries as well as supporting institutions of higher learning. By the time Carnegie's life was over, he gave away 350 million dollars.
Carnegie also was one of the first to call for a "league of nations" and he built a "a palace of peace" that would later evolve into the World Court. His hopes for a civilized world of peace were destroyed, though, with the onset of World War I in 1914. Louise said that with these hostilities her husband's "heart was broken." Carnegie lived for another five years, but the last entry in his autobiography was the day World War I began.
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Andrew Carnegie
David Nasaw
Arteriosclerosis:Arteries are blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients from your heart to the rest of your body. Healthy arteries are flexible and elastic. Over time, however, too much pressure in your arteries can make the walls thick and stiff — sometimes restricting blood flow to your organs and tissues. This process is called arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.
Atherosclerosis is a specific type of arteriosclerosis, but the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Atherosclerosis refers to the buildup of fats and cholesterol in and on your artery walls (plaques), which can restrict blood flow.
These plaques can also burst, triggering a blood clot. Although atherosclerosis is often considered a heart problem, it can affect arteries anywhere in your body.
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Quad Plan:Two years after introducing the preceptorial system, President Wilson tried to translate its principles into a plan for the social reorganization of the University, which he also hoped would check the domination of the eating clubs and thus rectify what he feared was ``the almost imperceptible and yet increasingly certain decline of the old democratic spirit of the place.'' The Quad Plan called for the establishment of residential quadrangles or colleges, each with its own dining hall, common room, resident master, and resident preceptors. Every undergraduate would be required to live in a college, the particular one to be determined by lot or assignment. Although the trustees approved the Quad Plan in principle, they later withdrew their support in response to the opposition of club alumni and undergraduates, and their own concern about the cost.
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Sherman Anti-Trust Act:was the first United States Federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies. It falls under antitrust law.
The Act provides: "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal". The Act also provides: "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony. The Act put responsibility upon government attorneys and district courts to pursue and investigate trusts, companies and organizations suspected of violating the Act. The Clayton Act (1914) extended the right to sue under the antitrust laws to "any person who shall be injured in his business or property by reason of anything forbidden in the antitrust laws.". Under the Clayton Act, private parties may sue in U.S. district court and should they prevail, they may be awarded treble damages and the cost of suit, including reasonable attorney's fees.
John Sherman (1823-1900) was the younger brother of the American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. He became a U.S. senator from Ohio and served as a chairman of the Senate finance committee. He also served as a member of the U.S. Cabinet, including Secretary of State under President William McKinley and Secretary of the Treasury under President Hayes. Sherman was an expert on the regulation of commerce and was the chief author of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
This ground breaking piece of legislation was the result of intense public opposition to the concentration of economic power in large corporations and in combinations of business concerns (i,e., trusts) that had been taking place in the U.S. in the decades following the Civil War. Opposition to the trusts was particularly strong among farmers, who protested the high charges for transporting their products to the cities by railroad.
The Sherman Antitrust Act was the first measure enacted by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts (or monopolies of any type). Although several states had previously enacted similar laws, they were limited to intrastate commerce. The Sherman Antitrust Act, in contrast, was based on the constitutional power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. It was passed by an overwhelming vote of 51 to 1 in the Senate and a unanimous vote of 242 to 0 in the House, and it was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison.
The first part of Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution (with the interstate commerce clause underlined) states:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
· To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
· To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
· To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
· To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; . . .
The Sherman Antitrust Act (the full text of which can be found here) authorized the Federal Government to dissolve the trusts. It began with the statement: "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal." And it established penalties for persons convicted of establishing such combinations: ". . . shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court."
Enforcement
For more than a decade after its passage, the Sherman Antitrust Act was invoked only rarely against industrial monopolies, and then not successfully. Ironically, its only effective use for a number of years was against labor unions, which were held by the courts to be illegal combinations.
This was the result of intense political pressure from the trusts together with the loose wording of the Act. Its critics pointed out that it failed to define such key terms as combination, conspiracy, monopoly and trust. Also working against it were narrow judicial interpretations as to what constituted trade or commerce among states.
Five years after its passage, the Supreme Court in effect dismantled the Sherman Antitrust Act in United States v. E. C. Knight Company (1895). The Court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company, one of the other defendants in the case, had not violated the Act despite the fact that it controlled approximately 98 percent of all sugar refining in the U.S. The Court's explanation was that the company's control of manufacturing did not constitute control of trade.
President William McKinley launched the trust-busting era in 1898 when he appointed several senators to the U.S. Industrial Commission. The Commission's subsequent report to President Theodore Roosevelt then laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's attacks on trusts and finally resulted in the successful employment of the Act.
In a seminal 1904 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Government's suit under the Sherman Antitrust Act to dissolve the Northern Securities Company (a railroad holding company) in State of Minnesota v. Northern Securities Company. Then, in 1911, after years of litigation, the Court found Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act because of its excessive restrictions on trade, particularly its practices of eliminating competitors by buying them out directly and by driving them out of business by temporarily slashing prices in a given region.
In this historic decision, the Supreme Court established an important legal standard termed the rule of reason. It stated that large size and monopoly in themselves are not necessarily bad and do not violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Rather, it is the use of certain tactics to attain or preserve such position that is illegal.
The Court ordered Standard Oil to dismantle 33 of its most important affiliates and to distribute the stock to its own shareholders and not to a new trust. The result was the creation of a number of completely independent and vertically integrated oil companies, each of which ranked among the most powerful in the world. The consequent vigorous competition gave a big impetus to innovation and expansion of the oil industry as a whole.
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Constitutional Government of the United States by Woodrow Wilson:Wilson's classic study and re-thinking of government in states and federal organizations such as Congress, the courts, executive agencies, and the presidency -- just a few years before he gained that office. While President of Princeton and a professor in political science, Wilson revisited some of his theories from prior books and delivered this life's work on the subject. It is still read and considered thoughtfully by history buffs, political science students, and constitutional lawyers. American history is punctuated with treatises that mark a shift in political thought and influence the role of government. These treatises, influential both in their day as well as to modern scholarship, are central to an understanding of the development of modern political behavior. 'Constitutional Government in the United States' is certainly one such treatise. Written as a series of lectures just over a century ago, this book proposed a dramatic shift in the American perception of the role of the Constitution, as well as presenting a thoughtful exposition on the three branches of United States government. Wilson endorsed the theory that the Constitution is evolutional, Darwinian even -- and his organic theory is still fervently debated among jurists, economists, and political theorists.
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William Procter:
William Procter left England for America in 1830, after his London woolens shop was destroyed by fire and burglary. He worked as a candlemaker in New York City, then headed west with his wife, Martha, to settle in the new frontier. When she became ill they stopped in Cincinnati to seek emergency medical help, and there she died of cholera. Procter remained in Ohio, where he continued as a candlemaker. He soon met the woman who would be his second wife, Olivia Procter, whose sister Elizabeth was married to James Gamble, a soapmaker. Eventually the sisters' father suggested that Procter and Gamble should merge their businesses, saving on larger quantity purchase of lye and sharing the ash and meat scraps they both used in preparing their products. The two men established their first storefront at Cincinnati's Main and Sixth streets on 12 April 1837, and their location -- near the Ohio River in a city that was a major rail hub -- allowed the business to expand quickly.
In 1851 an early version on Procter & Gamble's familiar moon-and-stars trademark -- needed to identify their products in a time when many customers were illiterate -- debuted on boxes of their Star brand candles, and the company's annual sales first surpassed $1M in 1859. As the US Civil War approached, Procter and Gamble worried that war could interrupt their supply of a certain kind of Southern pine sap used to make rosin, a key ingredient in several of their products, so the partners sent their sons, William Alexander Procter and James Norris Gamble, to purchase huge quantities of pine sap in Louisiana. This shrewd move allowed P&G to dominate the market during the Civil War, with a lucrative contract to provide numerous products for the Union Army.
Several years after Procter's death, his son William became President of P&G, and after his 1907 suicide Procter's grandson William Cooper Procter took charge of the business. According to company folklore, another of Procter's sons, Harley Procter, came up with the name "Ivory" for the company's new floating soap in 1858, inspired by the Biblical mention of "ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad" (Psalm 45:8).
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Edward House:
Edward Mandell House, the son of a banker, was born in Houston, Texas on July 26, 1858. He studied at Cornell University and afterwards returned to the family plantation on the death of his father in 1880.
A wealthy man, House was now able to concentrate on politics. A member of the Democratic Party he advised Texas governors including Charles A. Culberson (1895-1899), Joseph D. Sayers (1899-1903) and S.W. Lanham (1903-1907). A close associate of Woodrow Wilson, he helped him win the presidential campaign in 1912.
On the outbreak of the First World War, House became Wilson's personal representative in Europe. He visited most European capitals in 1915 and 1916 but his attempts at achieving a negotiated peace ended in failure. After the United States entered the war in 1917, House was responsible for working with Allied nations in order to organize manpower and supplies.
House worked closely with Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann in drafting the Fourteen Points Peace Programme. House was a member of the USA's delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and helped draw up the covenant of the League of Nations. Edward Mandell House died on March 28, 1938.
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Godfrey Hodgson(No image)The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: Arranged as a narrative by Charles Seymour ( 4 Volumes) by Edward Mandell House
Democratic Party: 1865-1908Johnson replaced Lincoln in 1865 but stayed independent of both parties. The Democrats benefited from white Southerners' resentment of Reconstruction after the war and consequent hostility to the Republican Party. After Redeemers ended Reconstruction in the 1870s, and following the often extremely violent disenfranchisement of African Americans led by such white supremacist Democratic politicians as Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina in the 1880s and 1890s, the South, voting Democratic, became known as the "Solid South." Though Republicans won all but two presidential elections, the Democrats remained competitive. The party was dominated by pro-business Bourbon Democrats led by Samuel J. Tilden and Grover Cleveland, who represented mercantile, banking, and railroad interests; opposed imperialism and overseas expansion; fought for the gold standard; opposed bimetallism; and crusaded against corruption, high taxes, and tariffs. Cleveland was elected to non-consecutive presidential terms in 1884 and 1892.
1900
Agrarian Democrats demanding Free Silver overthrew the Bourbon Democrats in 1896 and nominated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency (a nomination repeated by Democrats in 1900 and 1908). Bryan waged a vigorous campaign attacking Eastern moneyed interests, but he lost to Republican William McKinley.
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George Brinton McClellan Harvey
was an American diplomat, journalist, author, administrator for electric rail construction and owner and editor of several newspapers,
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James Smith:
a Senator from New Jersey; born in Newark, N.J., June 12, 1851; attended private schools and St. Mary’s College, Wilmington, Del.; engaged in the dry-goods and importing business, later becoming a manufacturer of leather in Newark, N.J.; member of the board of aldermen of Newark 1883-1887; declined the nomination for mayor of Newark in 1884; president of the first board of works of Newark; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1893, to March 3, 1899; was not a candidate for reelection; chairman, Committee on the Organization, Conduct and Expenditures of Executive Departments (Fifty-third Congress); resumed the manufacture of leather, and also engaged in banking and newspaper publishing; unsuccessful candidate for election to the United States Senate in 1911; died in Newark, N.J., April 1, 1927; interment in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery.
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Robert La Follette:
a Representative and a Senator from Wisconsin; born in Primrose, Dane County, Wis., June 14, 1855; graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1879; studied law; admitted to the bar in 1880 and commenced practice in Madison, Wis.; district attorney of Dane County 1880-1884; elected as a Republican to the Forty-ninth, Fiftieth, and Fifty-first Congresses (March 4, 1885-March 3, 1891); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1890 to the Fifty-second Congress; chairman, Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Agriculture (Fifty-first Congress); resumed the practice of law in Madison, Wis.; Governor of Wisconsin 1901-1906, when he resigned, having previously been elected Senator; elected as a Republican to the United States Senate on January 25, 1905, for the term beginning March 4, 1905, but did not assume these duties until later, preferring to continue as Governor; reelected in 1911, 1916, and 1922, and served from January 4, 1906, until his death; chairman, Committee on the Census (Sixty-first and Sixty-second Congress), Committee on Corporations Organized in the District of Columbia (Sixty-third through Sixty-fifth Congresses), Committee on Manufactures (Sixty-sixth through Sixty-eighth Congresses); one of the founders of the National Progressive Republican League; unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for president in 1912 and 1916; nominated as the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1924, winning 13 electoral college votes; died in Washington, D.C., June 18, 1925; interment in Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wis.
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Nancy C Unger
David P. Thelen
Robert M. La Follette
Vivian Lewis:
was an American jurist and politician who was the Republican nominee for Governor of New Jersey in 1910 against Woodrow Wilson.
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James Martine:
a Senator from New Jersey; born in New York City, August 25, 1850; moved with his parents to Plainfield, N.J., in 1857; attended the public schools; engaged in agricultural pursuits, the real estate business, and in building; member of the Plainfield common council; unsuccessful candidate for election as mayor of Plainfield; unsuccessful candidate in 1906 for election to the Sixtieth Congress; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1911, to March 3, 1917; chairman, Committee on Coast Defenses (Sixty-third Congress), Committee on Industrial Expositions (Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth Congresses); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1916; resumed agricultural pursuits; died in Miami, Fla., February 26, 1925; interment in Hillside Cemetery, Plainfield, N.J.
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1912 Democratic Platform:Labor
The courts of justice are the bulwarks of our liberties, and we yield to none in our purpose to maintain their dignity. Our party has given to the bench a long line of distinguished justices who have added to the respect and confidence in which this department must be jealously maintained. We resent the attempt of the Republican party to raise a false issue respecting the judiciary. It is an unjust reflection upon a great body of our citizens to assume that they lack respect for the courts.
It is the function of the courts to interpret the laws which the people enact, and if the laws appear to work economic, social or political injustice, it is our duty to change them. The only basis upon which the integrity of our courts can stand is that of unswerving justice and protection of life, personal liberty, and property. As judicial processes may be abused, we should guard them against abuse.
Experience has proved the necessity of a modification of the present law relating to injunction, and we reiterate the pledges of our platforms of 1896 and 1904 in favor of a measure which passed the United States Senate in 1898, relating to contempt in Federal Courts, and providing for trial by jury in cases of indirect contempt.
Questions of judicial practice have arisen especially in connection with industrial disputes. We believe that the parties to all judicial proceedings should be treated with rigid impartiality, and that injunctions should not be issued in any case in which an injunction would not issue if no industrial dispute were involved.
The expanding organization of industry makes it essential that there should be no abridgment of the right of the wage earners and producers to organize for the protection of wages and the improvement of labor conditions, to the end that such labor organizations and their members should not be regarded as illegal combinations in restraint of trade.
We pledge the Democratic party to the enactment of a law creating a department of labor, represented separately in the President's cabinet in which department shall be included the subject of mines and mining."
We pledge the Democratic party, so far as the Federal jurisdiction extends, to an employees' compensation law providing adequate indemnity for injury to body or loss of life.
Income Taxes and the Popular Election of Senators
We congratulate the country upon the triumph of two important reforms demanded in the last national platform, namely, the amendment of the Federal Constitution authorizing an income tax, and the amendment providing for the popular election of senators, and we call upon the people of all the States to rally to the support of the pending propositions and secure their ratification.
Presidential Primaries
The movement toward more popular government should be promoted through legislation in each State which will permit the expression of the preference of the electors for national candidates at presidential primaries.
We direct that the National Committee incorporate in the call for the next nominating convention a requirement that all expressions of preference for Presidential candidates shall be given and the selection of delegates and alternates made through a primary election conducted by the party organization in each State where such expression and election are not provided for by State law. Committeemen who are hereafter to constitute the membership of the Democratic National Committee, and whose election is not provided for by law, shall be chosen in each State at such primary elections, and the service and authority of committeemen, however chosen, shall begin immediately upon the receipt of their credentials, respectively.
Tariff Reform
We declare it to be a fundamental principle of the Democratic party that the Federal government, under the Constitution, has no right or power to impose or collect tariff duties, except for the purpose of revenue, and we demand that the collection of such taxes shall be limited to the necessities of government honestly and economically administered.
The high Republican tariff is the principal cause of the unequal distribution of wealth; it is a system of taxation which makes the rich richer and the poor poorer; under its operations the American farmer and laboring man are the chief sufferers; it raises the cost of the necessaries of life to them, but does not protect their product or wages. The farmer sells largely in free markets and buys almost entirely in the protected markets. In the most highly protected industries, such as cotton and wool, steel and iron, the wages of the laborers are the lowest paid in any of our industries. We denounce the Republican pretense on that subject and assert that American wages are established by competitive conditions, and not by the tariff.
We favor the immediate downward revision of the existing high and in many cases prohibitive tariff duties, insisting that material reductions be speedily made upon the necessaries of life. Articles entering into competition with trust-controlled products and articles of American manufacture which are sold abroad more cheaply than at home should be put upon the free list.
We recognize that our system of tariff taxation is intimately connected with the business of the country, and we favor the ultimate attainment of the principles we advocate by legislation that will not injure or destroy the legitimate industry.
We denounce the action of President Taft in vetoing the bills to reduce the tariff in the cotton, woolen, metals, and chemical schedules and the Farmers' free bill, all of which were designed to give immediate relief to the masses from the exactions of the trusts.
The Republican party, while promising tariff revision, has shown by its tariff legislation that such revision is not to be in the people's interest, and having been faithless to its pledges of 1908, it should not longer enjoy the confidence of the nation. We appeal to the American people to support us in our demand for a tariff for revenue only. We appeal to the American people to support us in our demand for a tariff for revenue only.
Anti-Trust Legislation
A private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable. We therefore favor the vigorous enforcement of the criminal as well as the civil law against trusts and trust officials, and demand the enactment of such additional legislation as may be necessary to make it impossible for a private monopoly to exist in the United States.
We favor the declamation by law of the conditions upon which corporations shall be permitted to engage in interstate trade, including, among others, the prevention of holding companies, of interlocking directors, of stock watering, of discrimination in price, and the control by any one corporation of so large a proportion of any industry as to make it a menace to competitive conditions.
We condemn the action of the Republican administration in compromising with the Standard Oil Company and the tobacco trust and its failure to invoke the criminal provisions of the anti-trust law against the officers of those corporations after the court had declared that from the undisputed provisions of the law.
We regret that the Sherman anti-trust law has received a judicial construction depriving it of much of its efficiency and we favor the enactment of legislation which will restore to the statute the strength of which it has been deprived by such interpretation.
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I've been catching up on some of the glossary entries. I particularly enjoyed the entries on Booker T Washington and Carnegie. How difficult it must have been to be one of the first national African American leaders, especially when you were totally dependent on white support for your school!Carnegie is fascinating, not only because of his rise from the bottom, but more especially because of the way he gave his wealth away. I will always remember the Carnegie library in the town where I grew up.
Thanks for all the information, Bryan.
You are welcome, Ann. These men are fascinating. It is interesting to see the legacies of the super-rich like Carnegie. He had some great causes, even though he only built a lake for Princeton. Not what Wilson had in mind, lol.
Hiram Johnson
a Senator from California; born in Sacramento, Calif., September 2, 1866; attended the public schools and the University of California at Berkeley; studied law; admitted to the bar in 1888 and commenced practice in Sacramento; moved to San Francisco in 1902; active in reform politics and assistant district attorney of San Francisco; one of the founders of the Progressive Party in 1912 and nominee for Vice President of the United States on the Progressive ticket in 1912 with Theodore Roosevelt; Governor of California 1911-1917, when he resigned, having previously been elected Senator; elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1916 for the term beginning March 4, 1917, but, preferring to continue as Governor, did not assume his senatorial duties until March 16, 1917; reelected in 1922, 1928, 1934 and again in 1940 and served from March 16, 1917, until his death in the naval hospital at Bethesda, Md., August 6, 1945; chairman, Committee on Cuban Relations (Sixty-sixth Congress), Committee on Patents (Sixty-seventh Congress), Committee on Immigration (Sixty-eighth through Seventy-first Congresses), Committee on Territories and Insular Possessions (Sixty-eighth Congress), and Committee on Commerce (Seventy-first and Seventy-second Congresses); interment in Cyprus Lawn Cemetery, San Francisco, Calif.
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Michael Weatherson
Mahlon Pitney:
a Representative from New Jersey; born in Morristown, Morris County, N.J., February 5, 1858; attended the public schools; was graduated from Princeton College in 1879; studied law; was admitted to the bar in June 1882 and practiced in Dover and Morristown, N.J., 1882-1889; elected as a Republican to the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Congresses and served from March 4, 1895, to January 10, 1899, when he resigned; member of the State senate 1899-1901 and its president in 1901; associate justice of the supreme court of New Jersey 1901-1908; chancellor of New Jersey from 1908 to 1912, when he resigned; appointed by President Taft as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States February 19, 1912, and took the oath of office March 18, 1912; served until December 31, 1922, when he resigned; died in Washington, D.C., December 9, 1924; interment in Evergreen Cemetery, Morristown, N.J.
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William Jennings Bryan:
a Representative from Nebraska; born in Salem, Marion County, Ill., March 19, 1860; attended the public schools and Whipple Academy, Jacksonville, Ill.; was graduated from Illinois College, Jacksonville, Ill., in 1881; studied law at Union College in Chicago; was graduated in 1883 and commenced practice at Jacksonville, Ill., in 1883; moved to Lincoln, Nebr., in 1887 and continued the practice of law; elected as a Democrat to the Fifty-second and Fifty-third Congresses (March 4, 1891-March 3, 1895); declined to be a candidate for reelection in 1894; unsuccessful candidate for election to the United States Senate in 1894; delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1896, 1904, 1912, 1920, and 1924; unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908; was endorsed by the Populist and Silver Republican Parties in the first and second campaigns; during the Spanish-American War raised the Third Regiment, Nebraska Volunteer Infantry, in May 1898 and was commissioned colonel; established a newspaper, “The Commoner,” at Lincoln, Nebr., in 1901; engaged in editorial writing and delivering Chautauqua lectures; Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President Wilson and served from March 4, 1913, until June 9, 1915, when he resigned; resumed his former pursuits of lecturing and writing; established his home in Miami, Fla., in 1921; died while attending court in Dayton, Tenn., July 26, 1925; interment in Arlington National Cemetery.
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William Jennings Bryan
Michael Kazin(no image)Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan by Louis W. Koenig
William Taft:
William Howard Taft faced the difficult task as President of living up to the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Taft so disappointed his predecessor, former mentor, and friend, that Roosevelt opposed his renomination in 1912 and bolted from the Republican Party to form his own "Bull-Moose" party, creating an opening for Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election. Taft's lifelong ambition was to serve as Chief Justice of the United States, to which he was appointed after leaving the presidency. He remains the only man in American history to have gained the highest executive and judicial positions.
Meeting Expectations
Taft, born in 1857, spent his boyhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, trying to live up to the high expectations of his demanding parents, especially his father, Alphonso Taft. Alphonso Taft was a distinguished Cincinnati attorney and a prominent Republican who served as secretary of war and then attorney general under President Ulysses Grant, and was U.S. minister (ambassador) to Austria-Hungary and Russia under President Chester Arthur. The elder Taft had also sought but lost the 1879 Republican gubernatorial nomination in Ohio.
From childhood, William Howard Taft had a weight problem, a reaction perhaps to his parents' very high expectations for him. At times during his presidency, he reached 300 pounds. He followed his father's and half-brother's path to Yale University, graduating second in his class. He studied law at the University of Cincinnati and entered private practice while also holding several local appointive positions. At age 29, Taft married an ambitious, intellectual, and independent woman, Helen "Nellie" Herron, who pushed him to strive for more than a judicial career. He held several key legal and judicial posts from 1887 to 1900, including judge of the Cincinnati Superior Court, U.S. solicitor general, and then as a member of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. President William McKinley then asked Taft to serve as president of the commission to oversee the newly won Philippine Islands. Taft was disappointed, but pushed by his associates, including his wife, he took the job, with McKinley's promise of a future position on the Supreme Court upon his return.
Governor General of the Philippines
Despite his initial hesitancy about it, Taft's service in the Philippines from 1900 to 1903 was fulfilling and largely successful. While there, he twice turned down President Roosevelt's offer of a Supreme Court appointment in order to finish his work. Becoming governor of the islands in 1901, Taft abandoned the brutal and bloody tactics the U.S. military government had used to squash the nationalist rebellion. By the time he left the islands to become Roosevelt's secretary of war in 1903, Taft had constructed a functioning civil regime and pacified the islands. At the same time, Taft fully subscribed to the view that Filipinos were not capable of self-rule. He believed that independence could only come to the undeveloped nation after a long period of U.S. tutelage and protection.
As secretary of war, Taft became Roosevelt's chief emissary and confidant, assisting him in the Portsmouth Peace negotiations, and in establishing a protectorate in Cuba. Roosevelt, having sworn upon his victory in 1904 that he would not seek another term, handpicked Taft to succeed him in 1908. The public joked that T.A.F.T. stood for "take advice from Theodore." Thanks in part to Roosevelt's popularity, Taft's victory over Democrat William Jennings Bryan was decisive. Taft promised to continue Roosevelt's reform program. But Roosevelt, and many of his allies, saw Taft's administration as abandoning progressivism. The consequent animosity split the Republican Party in 1912, sweeping Woodrow Wilson into office.
A Judicial President
Taft's disposition was more prone to judicious administration than presidential activism. Though he came to the White House promising to continue Roosevelt's agenda, he was more comfortable executing the existing law than demanding new legislation from Congress. His first effort as President was to lead Congress to lower tariffs, but traditional high tariff interests dominated Congress, and Taft largely failed in his effort at legislative leadership. He also alienated Roosevelt when he attempted to break up U.S. Steel, a trust that Roosevelt had approved while President. Taft also forced Roosevelt's forestry chief to resign, jeopardizing Roosevelt's gains in the conservation of natural resources. By 1911, Taft was less active in "trust-busting," and generally seemed more conservative. In foreign affairs, Taft continued Roosevelt's goal of expanding U.S. foreign trade in South and Central America, as well as in Asia, and he termed his policy "dollar diplomacy."
President Taft's life-long dream of reaching the U.S. Supreme Court was satisfied in 1921 with his appointment as chief justice by President Warren Harding. Taft had been uncomfortable with politics. His tendency to contemplate every side of an issue served him well as chief justice but rendered him indecisive and ineffectual as President. His presidency is generally viewed as a failure, swinging as he did from a progressive program of "trust busting" to reactionary conservatism in the face of withering criticism from Roosevelt and his allies. While Taft's presidency left a mark on the organization and conduct of the executive branch, and developed the administration of anti-trust policy, his public leadership has been widely seen as below average for 20th century Presidents.
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John A. Dix:
the forty-first governor of New York, was born in Glens Falls, New York on December 25, 1860. His education was attained at Cornell University, where he graduated in 1883, and then at Hamilton College, where he earned an LL.B. degree in 1912. Before establishing his political career, he worked in the lumber, paper, and banking industries. Dix first entered politics in 1904, serving as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. He also served as chairman of the State Democratic Committee in 1908 and 1910. Dix next secured the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and was elected governor by a popular vote on November 8, 1910. During his tenure, a direct primary election law was sanctioned; and a fire destroyed the state capitol in Albany. After leaving the governorship, Dix retired from political life. He continued to stay active in his various business interests. Governor John A. Dix passed away on April 9, 1928, and was buried in the Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York.
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Hudson Harmon:
Ohio governor and United States Attorney General Judson Harmon was born in Newton, Ohio, on February 3, 1846. His father was a Baptist minister. Harmon attended Denison University and the Cincinnati Law School before setting up a practice in Cincinnati in 1869. The following year, Harmon married Olivia Scobey. Harmon's reputation as a lawyer led the people of Cincinnati to choose him as a judge for the common pleas and superior courts.
Harmon had first associated himself with the Republican Party, but the Republicans' stance on Reconstruction led him to switch to the Democratic Party. President Grover Cleveland asked Harmon to serve as the United States Attorney General in 1895, a post that he held until 1897. As attorney general, Harmon was instrumental in pursuing important anti-trust suits against railroads. After 1897, Harmon temporarily retired from politics, but he was never far from the public eye.
Harmon reemerged on the political scene when he successfully ran for Ohio governor in 1908. Two years later, Harmon was reelected over Republican candidate Warren G. Harding. Harmon had campaigned on the promise that he would clean up the state government and make it more efficient. While Harmon was governor, the state passed several reforms, including a workman's compensation act, and instituted many changes that improved efficiency and reduced corruption in state government offices. The state also ratified the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which created the federal income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, which established direct election of senators. Although some of these issues were favored by Progressives, Harmon did not support all Progressive programs. He was not comfortable with some of the social reforms that many Progressives advocated.
In 1912, Harmon had ambitions to gain the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. His opposition to Progressive reforms such as initiative and referendum made him an unviable candidate. Instead, the Democrats chose Woodrow Wilson as their candidate. After completing his second term as governor, Harmon returned to Cincinnati to practice law. In addition, he taught courses at the Cincinnati Law School. Harmon died in Cincinnati on February 22, 1927.
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William McCombs:William Frank McCombs, born in Hamburg (Ashley County), became known nationally and internationally for promoting Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States and for serving as manager of Wilson’s successful campaign for election.
William McCombs was born on December 26, 1875, to William Faulkner McCombs and Mary Frances Pugh McCombs, whose family was among the most prominent in the area. He was one of six children—three boys and three girls. Permanently crippled in a fall during infancy, McCombs depended on the support of a cane for the rest of his life. He became an excellent student, taught by his mother and private tutors before enrolling in an exclusive preparatory school in Tennessee. Later, as a student at Princeton University, he took most of the classes taught by Woodrow Wilson, another Southerner whose intellect he greatly admired. McCombs served as editor of the Daily Princetonian student newspaper, was active in—and became president of—the Southern Club, was the leading orator in the American Whig Society, and graduated cum laude in 1898.
He then entered Harvard Law School and graduated in 1901 before opening law offices in New York City. His interest in politics led him to become a leader in the Democratic Party. When Wilson was persuaded to run for the governorship of New Jersey, McCombs contributed financially to the campaign and was convinced that Wilson would someday become president of the United States.
Before the Democratic National Convention in 1912, McCombs began to promote the nomination of Woodrow Wilson for president. He encouraged prominent journalists and editors to write articles supportive of Wilson’s nomination and distributed copies widely. He also encouraged Wilson to make an extensive speaking trip into the western states to acquaint himself with other areas of the country and to increase personal recognition. Wilson first feigned a lack of interest in running for the office and resisted recognizing McCombs as his campaign manager, partly because McCombs’s connection with Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine that controlled politics in New York for almost eighty years and was in conflict with Wilson’s policy of “open politics” and reform.
In early 1912, after Wilson agreed to stand for the position, McCombs’s leadership grew. He was influential in the politically advantageous selection of Baltimore, Maryland, as the convention site. At one point during the convention when support seemed at low ebb, Wilson sent McCombs a note instructing him to withdraw Wilson’s name from consideration, but McCombs pocketed the note without taking action. He worked tirelessly behind the scenes raising money, placating people whom Wilson had offended, making beneficial contacts, negotiating, garnering support from undecided candidates, and turning the tide from Champ Clark of Missouri, the leading contender, to a point at which Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot. After the convention, McCombs received high praise, being lauded for his management style and his efficient use of funds and effort. The Ashley County Eagle, his hometown newspaper, said, “Every newspaper in the United States…is heralding his praise.”
McCombs had overworked to the detriment of his health and morale, and several times suffered illnesses that incapacitated him. He had spent most of his own money to promote the campaign. After the election, Wilson, who was a devout Presbyterian, proclaimed that it was Providence that led to his election and told McCombs bluntly that he owed him nothing. He declined to offer McCombs a Cabinet position and ignored McCombs’s suggestions for people to fill the positions. Instead, he offered McCombs an appointment as ambassador to France, which McCombs could not afford financially.
Although McCombs considered Wilson brilliant, he found him a cold, distant, insincere opportunist who used Congress to promote his own whims and who crushed those who disagreed with him. McCombs wanted what he felt was best for the Democratic Party, and when Wilson encouraged him to take on the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, he agreed. This position, which he held from 1912 to 1916, proved to be troublesome and unrewarding, partly because of conflict with other Wilson followers who had undermined McCombs during the campaign.
During a trip to Europe to recover his health and his spirits, he was treated like a celebrity. His traveling companion described his visit as a “social joy ride,” and a well-known London clubman described him as “a wonderful social sensation, who conquers everything with silence and smiles, exhibiting the suavity and restraint the English admire as mannerism.” McCombs surprised Americans by his marriage in London in November 1913 to Dorothy Williams, an American whom he had met at Wilson’s inauguration. Their wedding was attended by many notables. The couple quietly divorced in March 1919.
Back in America, he returned to his law practice but continued work for the Democratic Party. Drafted to run as senator from New York in 1916, he was defeated. When Wilson began a push for reelection in 1919, McCombs predicted his defeat and made several cross-country trips to solidify anti-Wilson forces.
His health weakened by overwork and physical ailments, McCombs spent much of the last months of his life under medical care. He died on February 22, 1921. His body was returned to Little Rock after services in New York. In Little Rock, services were held at Second Presbyterian Church with interment at Roselawn Memorial Cemetery.
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William McAdoo:
Not many people can claim to have married the boss' daughter, but William McAdoo did exactly that when he married Eleanor Randolph Wilson, the daughter of President Wilson, at the White House in 1914. William Gibbs McAdoo was born near Marietta, Georgia, on October 31, 1863. He attended the University of Tennessee briefly being appointed, in 1882, deputy clerk of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Tennessee. McAdoo studied law and passed the Tennessee bar in 1885, taking up a practice in Chattanooga.
He moved to New York City in 1892, forming a law practice with William McAdoo (no relation), the former assistant secretary of the Navy. William G. McAdoo also tried his hand at business, and his company -- the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company -- built the first tunnel under the Hudson River. McAdoo stumped for Woodrow Wilson during the latter's run at the presidency, serving as campaign chair for much of the electoral season.
He was appointed secretary of the treasury on March 6, 1913. While in the cabinet, he was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the War Finance Corporation, and the Federal Farm Loan Board. He was also director general of U.S. railroads when the railroads came under governmental control. McAdoo resigned on January 10, 1919, resuming his law practice in New York and Los Angeles.
He later tried and failed to gain the Democratic nomination for President in both 1920 and 1924. McAdoo would be elected to the U.S. Senate from California in 1932 and served until resigning in 1938. He died in Washington, D.C., on February 1, 1941.
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Tammany Hall:The Tammany Society was founded in New York City in 1789 by William Mooney, a Revolutionary War veteran. It drew its name from a respected Delaware chief, Tammend or Tamanend, who had reportedly befriended William Penn. The Society, sometimes called the Columbian Order, was originally a patriotic and charitable organization.
In 1798, Aaron Burr helped to mold the organization into a political force dedicated to anti-Federalist principles. This partisan group was used effectively to support Burr and Thomas Jefferson in the Election of 1800.
A watershed event occurred in 1817 when the Irish managed to force their way into membership in Tammany. The practice of exchanging votes for benefits quickly became the organization's backbone. In 1830, the group's headquarters were established in Tammany Hall and thereafter the name of the association and the location were synonymous.
Tammany Hall elected its first mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1855. New York City would be governed by Tammany forces for the next 70 years with only a few short interruptions. In 1868, William Marcy Tweed headed Tammany and ushered in an era of extreme corruption. Tweed was successful with making the organization a statewide force, but was eventually brought down by a reform attorney, Samuel J. Tilden.
Tammany Hall regained its strength in the 1880s and was prominent in the life of the city. Such figures as Richard Croker, Alfred E. Smith and Jimmy Walker were deeply involved in the dealings of the machine. In the 1930s, reform mayor Fiorello la Guardia, backed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, sharply reduced the power and influence of Tammany Hall. It lingered for several decades as a county organization, but was finally ended by another reform mayor, John V. Lindsay, in the 1960s.
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Thanks especially for the information on Taft. It must have been very difficult to have had so much pressure from parents and his wife to be the best at everything. Too bad he didn't stick to the judicial side.
Taft really belonged as a judge. His heart wasn't' much into politics.
"He (McCombs) had spent most of his own money to promote the campaign. After the election, Wilson, who was a devout Presbyterian, proclaimed that it was Providence that led to his election and told McCombs bluntly that he owed him nothing."Very interesting. It sounds like Wilson used him and then moved on. I'm curious to read more in Cooper's book.
Yeah, interesting. This jives differently than Cooper in that you see a coldness to Wilson. This is from the Arkansas Encyclopedia...
James "Champ" Clark:
a Representative from Missouri; born near Lawrenceburg, Anderson County, Ky., March 7, 1850; attended the common schools and Kentucky University at Lexington; was graduated from Bethany (W.Va.) College in 1873 and from Cincinnati Law School in 1875; president of Marshall College, Huntington, W.Va., in 1873 and 1874; admitted to the bar in 1875; edited a country newspaper and practiced law; moved to Bowling Green, Pike County, Mo., in 1876; city attorney of Louisiana, Mo., and Bowling Green, Mo., 1878-1881; deputy prosecuting attorney and prosecuting attorney of Pike County 1885-1889; member of the State house of representatives in 1889 and 1891; delegate to the Trans-Mississippi Congress at Denver in May 1891; elected as a Democrat to the Fifty-third Congress (March 4, 1893-March 3, 1895); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1894 to the Fifty-fourth Congress; elected to the Fifty-fifth and to the eleven succeeding Congresses and served from March 4, 1897, until his death; minority leader (Sixtieth and Sixty-first Congresses), Speaker of the House of Representatives (Sixty-second through Sixty-fifth Congresses), minority leader (Sixty-sixth Congress); unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1920 to the Sixty-seventh Congress; chairman of the Democratic National Convention in 1904; died in Washington, D.C., on March 2, 1921; funeral services were held in the Hall of the House of Representatives; interment in City Cemetery, Bowling Green, Mo.
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Josephus Daniels:
Josephus Daniels was born in Washington, North Carolina, on May 18, 1862. After attending the Wilson Collegiate Institute and earning a degree in law at the University of North Carolina, Daniels went in the newspaper business, editing the Raleigh State Chronicle. He then consolidated the Chronicle with the North Carolinian and the News and Observer to form North Carolina's most influential newspaper: the Raleigh News and Observer.
President Woodrow Wilson appointed Daniels secretary of the Navy in March 1913, a post Daniels would hold until the end of the Wilson administration. During that time, he founded the Naval Consulting Board, asking famed inventor Thomas Edison to become its chair; the board later established the Naval Research Lab.
Daniels broke with tradition by allowing women to serve in the Navy; he also required the use of dog tags on every sailor and banned the use of alcohol on navy vessels. After leaving office in March 1921, Daniels returned to editing the News and Observer before serving as U.S. ambassador to Mexico. He died on January 15, 1948, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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(no image)The Life of Woodrow Wilson: 1856-1924 by Josephus Daniels
William Randolph Hearst:
William Randolph Hearst is an important figure from the 20th century whose influence extended to publishing, politics, motion pictures, the art world and everyday American life.
Born in San Francisco, California, on April 29, 1863, as the only child of George and Phoebe Hearst, young William had the opportunity to see and experience the world as few do because of his father’s successful mining career. At the age of ten, Hearst and his mother toured Europe, gathering ideas and inspiration from the grandeur and scale of castles, art and history.
In 1887, Hearst became proprietor of the San Francisco Examiner. Shortly after, he purchased the New York Morning Journal, which would become the second in a long list of newspaper holdings that Hearst acquired throughout his life. He started one of the first print-media companies to enter radio broadcasting and was an early pioneer of television. Hearst was a major producer of movie newsreels, and is widely credited with creating the comic strip syndication business. In 1902, his interest in politics led to his election to the United States House of Representatives as a Congressman from New York.
In addition to his successful business endeavors, Hearst amassed a vast and impressive art collection that included classical paintings, tapestries, religious textiles, oriental rugs, antiquities, sculptures, silver, furniture and antique ceilings. Much of this collection found its home at the Hearst Castle and Hearst’s various other properties.
He was married to Millicent Willson and the couple had five sons. William Randolph Hearst died on August 14, 1951, and is interred in the Hearst family mausoleum at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, California.
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David Nasaw
Eugene Debs:
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1855, the son of poor Alsatian immigrants. Though his parents encouraged an intellectual spirit, Debs left high school after one year to become a locomotive paint-scraper. There, among the rough-and-tumble of railway men, Debs found his calling. From his membership in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen to his role co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (the "wobblies"), Debs raised his voice in defense of the common man.
The years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century brought America unprecedented prosperity -- but relatively few people, men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Sr., controlled the new wealth. For the nation's working class, and leaders like Eugene Debs, it was a time to be angry. From steel fabrication to mining American industries saw major protests as workers tried to secure 8-hour workdays, living wages, and other fundamental improvements.
After leading the American Railway Union in a confrontation with federal troops sent to break up the Pullman strike of 1894, Debs was jailed for six months for contempt of court. It was then that he came to a set of beliefs that roughly mirrored the socialist tenets of the European labor movements. Upon his release, Debs became a featured speaker for the Socialist Party, and ran for president in 1900 as their nominee. He lost, but continued to be the partyís candidate in several subsequent elections.
Debs found his greatest success in the 1912 Election, when he campaigned against Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson, incumbent President William Howard Taft, and former President Theodore Roosevelt. Debs received almost a million votes - six percent of the ballots cast.
After four consecutive losing presidential campaigns, in 1916 Debs decided to run for an Indiana Congressional seat. He campaigned on a pacifist platform of American neutrality in the First World War, and was elected. Once the United States entered the war, Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act after making what the district attorney of Canton, Ohio called an anti-war speech in 1918. Debs in fact only mentioned the war once, but under this repressive new law, was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. Nominated for a fifth time as the Socialist Party's presidential candidate in 1920, Debs campaigned from his jail cell and garnered over a million votes. Despite repeated pleas from Debs' supporters, President Wilson refused to release Debs from prison. President Harding finally ordered him set free on Christmas Day 1921.
Debs lived until 1926, leaving a legacy best summed up in his own words. "Yes, I am my brother's keeper," he wrote. "I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe myself."
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Progressive Party:The Progressive Party of 1912 was an American political party. It was formed by former President Theodore Roosevelt, after a split in the Republican Party between himself and President William Howard Taft.
The party also became known as the Bull Moose Party when former President Roosevelt boasted, "It takes more than that to kill a bull moose" while giving a scheduled campaign speech minutes after being wounded in an assassination attempt during the 1912 campaign in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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Sidney M. Milkis
Interesting, but scary, to read about Deb's imprisonment under the the Espionage Act. Remembering opposition to the Vietnam War and the recent Middle East Wars, I guess our concept of free speech has greatly expanded.
Indeed, Ann, we will see how Cooper deals with this. It was an ugly time in our history and under Wilson's watch.
Progressive Party Platform (1912) Part One:Declaration of Principles of the Progressive Party
The conscience of the people, in a time of grave national problems, has called into being a new party, born of the Nation's awakened sense of justice. We of the Progressive Party here dedicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the duty laid upon us by our fathers to maintain that government of the people, by the people and for the people whose foundation they laid.
We hold with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln that the people are the masters of their Constitution, to fulfill its purposes and to safeguard it from those who, by perversion of its intent, would convert it into an instrument of injustice. In accordance with the needs of each generation the people must use their sovereign powers to establish and maintain equal opportunity and industrial justice, to secure which this Government was founded and without which no republic can endure.
This country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions and its laws should be utilized, maintained or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.
It is time to set the public welfare in the first place.
The Old Parties
Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people.
From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.
To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
The deliberate betrayal of its trust by the Republican Party, and the fatal incapacity of the Democratic Party to deal with the new issues of the new time, have compelled the people to forge a new instrument of government through which to give effect to their will in laws and institutions.
Unhampered by tradition, uncorrupted by power, undismayed by the magnitude of the task, the new party offers itself as the instrument of the people to sweep away old abuses, to build a new and nobler commonwealth.
A Covenant with the People
This declaration is our covenant with the people, and we hereby bind the party and its candidates in State and Nation to the pledges made herein.
The Rule of the People
The Progressive Party, committed to the principle of government by a self-controlled democracy expressing its will through representatives of the people, pledges itself to secure such alterations in the fundamental law of the several States and of the United States as shall insure the representative character of the Government.
In particular, the party declares for direct primaries for nomination of State and National officers, for Nation-wide preferential primaries for candidates for the Presidency, for the direct election of United States Senators by the people; and we urge on the States the policy of the short ballot, with responsibility to the people secured by the initiative, referendum and recall.
Amendment of Constitution
The Progressive Party, believing that a free people should have the power from time to time to amend their fundamental law so as to adapt it progressively to the changing needs of the people, pledges itself to provide a more easy and expeditious method of amending the Federal Constitution.
Nation and State
Up to the limit of the Constitution, and later by amendment of the Constitution, if found necessary, we advocate bringing under effective national jurisdiction those problems which have expanded beyond reach of the individual states.
It is as grotesque as it is intolerable that the several States should by unequal laws in matter of common concern become competing commercial agencies, barter the lives of their children, the health of their women and the safety and well-being of their working people for the profit of their financial interests.
The extreme insistence on States' rights by the Democratic Party in the Baltimore platform demonstrates anew its inability to understand the world into which it has survived or to administer the affairs of a Union States which have in all essential respects become one people.
Social and Industrial Strength
The supreme duty of the Nation is the conservation of human resources through an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice. We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for:--
Effective legislation looking to the prevention of industrial accidents, occupational diseases, overwork, involuntary unemployment, and other injurious effects incident to modern industry;
The fixing of minimum safety and health standards for the various occupations, and the exercise of the public authority of State and Nation, including the Federal control over inter-State commerce and the taxing power, to maintain such standards;
The prohibition of child labor;
Minimum wage standards for working women, to provide a living scale in all industrial occupations;
The prohibition of night work for women and the establishment of an eight hour day for women and young persons;
One day's rest in seven for all wage-workers;
The abolition of the convict contract labor system; substituting a system of prison production for governmental consumption only; and the application of prisoners' earnings to the support of their dependent families;
Publicity as to wages, hours and conditions and labor; full reports upon industrial accidents and diseases, and the opening to public inspection of all tallies, weights, measures and check systems on labor products;
Standards of compensation for death by industrial accident and injury and trade diseases which will transfer the burden of lost earnings from the families of working people to the industry, and thus to the community;
The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use;
The development of the creative labor power of America by lifting the last load of illiteracy from American youth and establishing continuation schools for industrial education under public control and encouraging agricultural education and demonstration in rural schools;
The establishment of industrial research laboratories to put the methods and discoveries of science at the service of American producers.
We favor the organization of the workers, men and women as a means of protecting their interests and of promoting their progress.
Business
We believe that true popular government, justice and prosperity go hand in hand, and so believing, it is our purpose to secure that large measure of general prosperity which is the fruit of legitimate and honest business, fostered by equal justice and by sound progressive laws.
We demand that the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens not confined to individuals or classes and that the test of corporate efficiency shall be the ability better to serve the public; that those who profit by control of business affairs shall justify that profit and that control by sharing with the public the fruits thereof.
We therefore demand a strong National regulation of inter-State corporations. The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modern business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for National and international business efficiency. but the existing concentration of vast wealth under a corporate system, unguarded and uncontrolled by the Nation, has placed in the hands of a few men enormous, secret, irresponsible power over the daily life of the citizen--a power insufferable in a free government and certain of abuse.
This power has been abused, in monopoly of National resources, in stock watering, in unfair competition and unfair privileges, and finally in sinister influences on the public agencies of State and Nation. We do not fear commercial power, but we insist that it shall be exercised openly, under publicity, supervision and regulation of the most efficient sort, which will preserver its good while eradicating and preventing its evils.
To that end we urge the establishment of a strong Federal administrative commission of high standing, which shall maintain permanent active supervision over industrial corporations engaged in inter-State commerce, or such of them as are of public importance, doing for them what the Government now does for the National banks, and what is now done for the railroads by the Inter-State Commerce Commission.
Such a commission must enforce the complete publicity of those corporation transactions which are of public interest; must attack unfair competition, false capitalization and special privilege, and by continuous trained watchfulness guard and keep open equally to all the highways of American commerce.
Thus the business man will have certain knowledge of the law, and will be able to conduct his business easily in conformity therewith; the investor will find security for his capital; dividends will be rendered more certain, and the savings of the people will be drawn naturally and safely into the channels of trade.
Under such a system of constructive regulation, legitimate business, freed from confusion, uncertainty and fruitless litigation, will develop normally in response to the energy and enterprise of the American business man.
We favor strengthening the Sherman law by prohibiting agreements to divide territory or limit output; refusing to sell to customers who buy from business rivals; to sell below cost in certain areas while maintaining higher prices in other places; using the power of transportation to aid or injure special business concerns; and other unfair trade practices.
Commercial Development
The time has come when the Federal Government should co-operate with the manufacturers and producers in extending our foreign commerce. To this end we demand adequate appropriations by Congress and the appointment of diplomatic and consular officers solely with a view to their special fitness and worth, and not in consideration of political expediency.
It is imperative to the welfare of our people that we enlarge and extend our foreign commerce. We are pre-eminently fitted to do this because as a people we have developed high skill in the art of manufacturing; our business men are strong executives, strong organizers. In every way possible our Federal Government should co-operate in this important matter. Anyone who has had the opportunity to study and observe first-hand Germany's course in this respect must realize that their policy of co-operation between Government and business has in comparatively few years made them a leading competitor for the commerce of the world. It should be remembered that they are doing this on a national scale and with large units of business, while the Democrats would have us believe that we should do it with small units of business, which would be controlled not by the National Government but by forty-nine conflicting sovereignties. Such a policy is utterly out of keeping with the progress of the times and gives our great commercial rivals in Europe--hungry for international markets--golden opportunities of which they are rapidly taking advantage.
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Progressive Party Platform (1912), Part Two:Tariff
We believe in a protective tariff which shall equalize conditions of competition between the United States and foreign countries, both for the farmer and the manufacturer, and which shall maintain for labor an adequate standard of living.
Primarily the benefit of any tariff should be disclosed in the pay envelope of the laborer. We declare that no industry deserves protection which is unfair to labor or which is operating in violation of Federal law. We believe that the presumptions always in favor of the consuming public.
We demand tariff revision because the present tariff is unjust to the people of the United States. Fair-dealing toward the people requires an immediate downward revision of those schedules wherein duties are shown to be unjust or excessive.
We pledge ourselves to the establishment of a non-partisan scientific tariff commission, reporting both to the President and to either branch of Congress, which shall report, first, as to the costs of production, efficiency of labor, capitalization, industrial organization and efficiency and the general competitive position in this country and abroad of industries seeking protection from Congress; second, as to the revenue-producing power of the tariff and its relation to the resources of government; and third, as to the effect of the tariff on prices, operations of middlemen, and on the purchasing power of the consumer.
We believe that this commission should have plenary power to elicit information, and for this purpose to prescribe a uniform system of accounting for the great protected industries. The work of the commission should not prevent the immediate adoption of acts reducing those schedules generally recognized as excessive.
We condemn the Payne-Aldrich bill as unjust to the people. The Republican organization is in the hands of those who have broken and cannot again be trusted to keep, the promise of necessary downward revision. The Democratic Party is committed to the destruction of the protective system through a tariff for revenue only--a policy which would inevitably produce widespread industrial and commercial disaster.
We demand the immediate repeal of the Canadian Reciprocity Act.
High Cost of Living
The high cost of living is due partly to worldwide and partly to local causes; partly to natural and partly to artificial causes. The measures proposed in this platform on various subject, such as the tariff, the trusts and conservation, will of themselves tend to remove the artificial causes.
There will remain other elements, such as the tendency to leave the country for the city, waste, extravagance, bad system of taxation, poor methods of raising crops and bad business methods in marketing crops.
To remedy these conditions requires the fullest information, and based on this information, effective Government supervision and control to remove all the artificial causes. We pledge ourselves to such full and immediate inquiry and to immediate action to deal with every need such inquiry discloses.
Currency
We believe there exists imperative need for prompt legislation for the improvement of our National currency system. We believe the present method of issuing notes through private agencies is harmful and unscientific.
The issue of currency is fundamentally government function and the system should have as basic principles soundness and elasticity. The control should be lodged with the Government and should be protected from domination manipulation by Wall Street or any special interests.
We are opposed to the so-called Aldrich currency bill, because its provisions would place our currency and credit system in private hands, not subject to effective public control.
Conservation
The natural resources of the Nation must be promptly developed and generously used to supply the people's needs, but we cannot safely allow them to be wasted, exploited, monopolized or controlled against the general good. We heartily favor the policy of conservation, and we pledge our party to protect the National forests without hindering their legitimate use for the benefit of all the people.
Agricultural lands in the National forests are, and should remain, open to the genuine settler. Conservation will not retard legitimate development. The honest settler must receive his patent promptly, without needless restrictions or delays.
We believe that the remaining forests, coal and oil lands, water powers and other natural resources still in State or National control (except agricultural lands) are more likely to be wisely conserved and utilized for the general welfare if held in the public hands.
In order that consumers and producers, managers and workmen, now and hereafter, need not pay toll to private monopolies of power and raw material, we demand that such resources shall be retained by the State of Nation and opened to immediate use under laws which will encourage development and make to the people a moderate return for benefits conferred.
In particular we pledge our party to require reasonable compensation to the public for water-power rights hereafter granted by the public.
We pledge legislation to lease the public grazing lands under equitable provisions now pending which will increase the production of food for the people and thoroughly safeguard the rights of the actual homemaker. Natural resources, whose conservation is necessary for the National welfare, should be owned or controlled by the Nation.
Waterways
The rivers of the United States are the natural arteries of this continent. We demand that they shall be opened to traffic as indispensable parts of a great Nation-wide system of transportation in which the Panama Canal will be the central link, thus enabling the whole interior of the United States to share with the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards in the benefit derived from canal.
It is a National obligation to develop our rivers, and especially the Mississippi and its tributaries, without delay, under a comprehensive general plan covering each river system from its source to its mouth, designed to secure its highest usefulness for navigation, irrigation, domestic supply, water power and the prevention of floods.
We pledge our party to the immediate preparation of such a plan, which should be made and carried out in close and friendly co-operation between the Nation, the States and the cities affected.
Under such a plan, the destructive floods of the Mississippi and other streams, which represent vast and needless loss to the Nation, would be controlled by forest conservation and water storage at the headwaters, and by levees below; land sufficient to support millions of people would be reclaimed from the deserts and the swamps, water power enough to transform the industrial standing of whole States would be developed, adequate water terminals would be provided, transportation by river would revive, and the railroads would be compelled to co-operate as freely with the boat lines as with each other.
The equipment, organization and experience acquires in constructing the Panama Canal soon will be available for the Lakes-to-the-Gulf deep waterway and other portions of this great work, and should be utilized by the Nation in co-operation with the various States, at the lowest net cost to the people.
Panama Canal
The Panama Canal, built and paid for by the American people, must be used primarily for their benefit.
We demand that the canal shall be so operated as to break the transportation monopoly mow held and misused by the transcontinental railroads by maintaining sea competition with them; that ships directly or indirectly owned or controlled by American railroad corporations shall not be permitted to use the canal, and that American ships engaged in coastwise trade shall pay no tolls.
The Progressive Party will favor legislation having for its aim the development of friendship and commerce between the United States and Latin-American nations.
Alaska
The coal and other natural resources of Alaska should be opened to development at once. They are owned by the people of the United States, and are safe from monopoly, waste or destruction only while so owned.
We demand that they shall neither be sold nor given away, except under the homestead law, but while held in Government ownership shall be opened to use promptly upon liberal terms requiring immediate development.
Thus the benefit of cheap fuel will accrue to the government of the United Stated and to the people of Alaska and the Pacific Coast; the settlement of extensive agricultural lands will be hastened; the extermination of the salmon will be prevented, and the just and wise development of Alaskan resources will take the place of private extortion or monopoly.
We demand also that extortion or monopoly in transportation shall be prevented by the prompt acquisition, construction or improvement by the Government of such railroads, harbor and other facilities for transportation as the welfare of the people may demand.
We promise the people of the Territory of Alaska the same measure of local self-government that was given to other American territories, and that officials appointed there shall be qualified by previous bona-fide residence in the Territory.
Equal Suffrage
The Progressive Party, believing that no people can justly claim to be a true democracy which denies political rights on account of sex, pledges itself to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.
Corrupt Practices
We pledge our party to legislation that will compel strict limitation on all campaign contributions and expenditures, and detailed publicity of both before as well as after primaries and elections.
Publicity and Public Service
We pledge our party to legislation compelling the registration of lobbyists; publicity of committee hearings except on foreign affairs, and recording of all votes in committee; and forbidding Federal appointees from holding office in State of National political organizations, or taking part as officers or delegates in political conventions for the nomination of elective State or National officials.
The Courts
The Progressive Party demands such restriction of the power of the courts as shall leave to the people the ultimate authority to determine fundamental questions of social welfare and public policy. To secure this end it pledges itself to provide:
1. That when an act, passed under the police power of the State, is held unconstitutional under the State Constitution, by the courts, the people, after an ample interval for deliberation, shall have opportunity to vote on the question whether they desire the act to become a law, notwithstanding such decision.
2. That every decision of the highest appellate court of a State declaring an act of the Legislature unconstitutional on the ground of its violation of the Federal Constitution shall be subject to the same review by the Supreme Court of the United States as is now accorded to decisions sustaining such legislation.
Administration of Justice
The Progressive Party, in order to secure to the people a better administration of justice and by that means to bring about a more general respect for the law and the courts, pledges itself to work unceasingly for the reform of legal procedure and judicial and methods.
We believe that the issuance of injunctions in cases arising out of labor disputes should be prohibited when such injunctions would not apply when no labor disputes existed.
We also believe that a person cited for contempt in the disputes, except when such contempt was committed in the actual presence of the court or so near thereto as to interfere with the proper administration of justice, should have a right to trial by jury.
Progressive Party Platform (1912), Part Three:Department of Labor
We pledge our party to establish a Department of Labor with a seat in the cabinet, and with wide jurisdiction over matters affecting the conditions of labor and living.
Country Life
The development and prosperity of country life as important to the people who live in the cities as they are to the farmers. Increase of prosperity on the farm will favorably affect the cost of living and promote the interests of all who dwell in the country, and all who depend upon its products for clothing, shelter and food.
We pledge out party to foster the development of agricultural credit and co-operation, the teaching of agriculture in schools, agricultural college extension, the use of mechanical power on the farm, and to re-establish the Country Life Commission, thus directly promoting the welfare of the farmers, and bringing the benefits of better farming, better business and better living within their reach.
Health
We favor the union of all the existing agencies of the Federal Government dealing with the public health into a single National health service without discrimination against or for any one set of therapeutic methods, school of medicine, or school of healing with such additional powers as may be necessary to enable it to perform efficiently such duties in the protection of the public from preventable diseases as may be properly undertaken by the Federal authorities; including the executing of existing laws regarding pure food; quarantine and cognate subjects; the promotion of appropriate action for the improvement of vital statistics and the extension of the registration area of such statistics and co-operation with the health activities of the various States and cities of the Nation.
Patents
We pledge ourselves to the enactment of a patent law which will make it impossible for patents to be suppressed or used against the public welfare in the interests of injurious monopolies.
Inter-State Commerce Commission
We pledge our party to secure to the Inter-State Commerce Commission the power to value the physical property of railroads. In order that the power of the commission to protect the people may not be impaired or destroyed, we demand the abolition of the Commerce Court.
Good Roads
We recognize the vital importance of good roads and we pledge out party to foster their extension in every proper way, and we favor the early construction of National highways. We also favor the extension of the rural free delivery service.
Inheritance and Income Tax
We believe in a graduated inheritance tax as a National means of equalizing the obligations of holder of property to government, and we hereby pledge our party to enact such a Federal law as will tax large inheritances returning to the States an equitable percentage of all amounts collected.
We favor the ratification of the pending amendment to the Constitution giving the Government power to levy an income tax.
Peace and National Defense
Progressive Party deplores the survival in our civilization of the barbaric system of warfare among nations with its enormous waste of resources even in time of peace, and the consequent impoverishment of the life of the toiling masses. We pledge the party to use its best endeavors to substitutes judicial an other peaceful means of settling international differences.
We favor an international agreement for the limitation of naval forces. Pending such an agreement, and as the best means of preserving peace, we pledge ourselves to maintain for the present the policy of building two battleships a year.
Treaty Rights
We pledge our party to protect the rights of American citizenship at home and abroad. No treaty should receive the sanction of our government which discriminates between American citizens because of birthplace, race or religion, or that does not recognize the absolute right of expatriation.
The Immigrant
Through the establishment of industrial standards we propose to secure to the able-bodied immigrant and to his native fellow workers a larger share of American opportunity.
We denounce the fatal policy of indifference and neglect which has left our enormous immigrant population to become the prey of chance and cupidity.
We favor governmental action to encourage the distribution of immigrants away from the congested cities, to rigidly supervise all private agencies dealing with them and to promote their assimilation, education and advancement.
Pensions
We pledge ourselves to a wise and just policy of pensioning American soldiers and sailors and their widows and children they Federal Government. And we approve the policy of the Southern States in granting pensions to the ex-Confederate soldiers and sailors and their widows and children.
Parcels Post
We pledge our party to the immediate creation of a parcels post, with rates proportionate to distance and service.
Civil Service
We condemn the violations of the civil service law under the present administration, including the coercion and assessment of subordinate employees, and the President' s refusal to punish such violation after a finding of guilty by his own commission; his distribution of patronage among subservient Congressmen, while withholding it from those who refuse support of administration measures; his withdrawal of nominations from the Senate until political support for himself was secured, and his open use of the offices to reward those who voted for his renomination.
To eradicate these abuses, we demand not only the enforcement of the civil service act in letter and spirit, but also legislation which will bring under the competitive system postmasters, collectors, marshals and all other non-political officers, as well as the enactment of an equitable retirement law, and we also insist upon continuous service during good behavior and efficiency.
Government Business Organization
We pledge our party to readjustment of the business methods of the National Government and a proper co-ordination of the Federal bureaus, which will increase the economy and efficiency of the Government service, prevent duplications and secret better results to the taxpayers for every dollar expended.
Government Supervision Over Investment
The people of the United States are swindled out of many millions of dollars every year, through worthless investments. The plain people, the wage-earner and the men and women with small savings, have no way of knowing the merit of concerns sending out highly colored prospectuses offering stock for sale, prospectuses that make big returns seem certain and fortunes easily within grasp.
We hold it to be the duty of the Government to protect its people form this kind of piracy. We, therefore, demand wise carefully-thought-out legislation that will give us such Governmental supervision over this matter as will furnish to the people of the United States this much-needed protection, and we pledge ourselves thereto.
Conclusion
On these principles and on the recognized desirability of uniting the Progressive forces of the Nation into an organization which shall unequivocally represent the Progressive spirit and policy we appeal for the support of all American citizens without regard to previous political affiliations.
1912 Assassination Attempt on TR's Life:
The damaged eyeglass case that helped slow the trajectory of the bullet that hit Theodore Roosevelt. (National Park Service)
Roosevelt was in Milwaukee on the presidential campaign trail, stumping as the candidate of the new, independent Progressive Party, which had split from the Republican Party earlier that year. Roosevelt already had served two terms as chief executive (1901-1909), but his dissatisfaction with his chosen successor William Taft had led him to seek the office again as the champion of progressive reform, much to the dismay of his progressive rival, Wisconsin's own Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr. Roosevelt's Progressive Party had been dubbed the "Bull Moose Party" after the candidate's proclaimed vigor and strength.
Unbeknownst to Roosevelt, a New York bartender had been stalking him for three weeks through eight states by the time he arrived in Milwaukee. Intent on killing the candidate and having missed several opportunities to do so, John Schrank saw his chance when Roosevelt left Milwaukee's Hotel Gilpatrick for his speaking engagement at the auditorium. As his touring car prepared to depart, the ex-president stood to wave to the gathered crowd and Schrank fired the .38-caliber revolver he had hidden in his coat. The crowd pounced on Schrank and as policemen apprehended him, Roosevelt tried to calm the throng.
On the way to the auditorium, Roosevelt's aides realized that he had been hit in the right side of the chest. Seeing the blood on his shirt, vest, and coat, they pleaded with him to seek medical help, but Roosevelt trivialized the wound and insisted on keeping his engagement. Fortunately, Roosevelt's life was spared by the contents of his breast pocket -- his metal spectacle case and the thick, folded manuscript of his speech -- which absorbed much of the force of the bullet.
When Roosevelt appeared before the crowd at Milwaukee Auditorium, the chairman of the Progressive Party speakers' bureau, Henry Cochems, announced that the candidate had been shot. Roosevelt confirmed the news by opening his vest and the assemblage was stunned. He made light of the wound throughout his eighty-minute speech, declaring at one point, "It takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose."
Following the engagement, Roosevelt was rushed to Milwaukee's Johnston Emergency Hospital, where an X-ray confirmed that the bullet had lodged in his chest wall. At 12:30 the next morning, Roosevelt boarded a train for Chicago's Mercy Hospital, where doctors conducted further tests. Seeing that the bullet posed no threat to internal organs, they decided to leave the bullet where it was; Roosevelt carried the bullet inside him the rest of his life.
The candidate returned to the campaign trail after his release from the hospital on October 21. Two weeks later, the split between Republicans and Progressives assured Democrat Woodrow Wilson of victory in the presidential election. Roosevelt came in second, ahead of Taft.
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W.E.B. Dubois:
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 - August 27, 1963) was an American civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. He became a naturalized citizen of Ghana in 1963 at the age of 95.
On Feb. 23, 1868, W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Mass., where he grew up. During his youth he did some newspaper reporting. In 1884 he graduated as valedictorian from high school. He got his bachelor of arts from Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., in 1888, having spent summers teaching in African American schools in Nashville's rural areas. In 1888 he entered Harvard University as a junior, took a bachelor of arts cum laude in 1890, and was one of six commencement speakers. From 1892 to 1894 he pursued graduate studies in history and economics at the University of Berlin on a Slater Fund fellowship. He served for 2 years as professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
In 1891 Du Bois got his master of arts and in 1895 his doctorate in history from Harvard. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, was published as No. 1 in the Harvard Historical Series. This important work has yet to be surpassed. In 1896 he married Nina Gomer, and they had two children.
In 1896-1897 Du Bois became assistant instructor in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. There he conducted the pioneering sociological study of an urban community, published as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). These first two works assured Du Bois's place among America's leading scholars.
Du Bois's life and work were an inseparable mixture of scholarship, protest activity, and polemics. All of his efforts were geared toward gaining equal treatment for black people in a world dominated by whites and toward marshaling and presenting evidence to refute the myths of racial inferiority.
As Racial Activist
In 1905 Du Bois was a founder and general secretary of the Niagara movement, an African American protest group of scholars and professionals. Du Bois founded and edited the Moon (1906) and the Horizon (1907-1910) as organs for the Niagara movement. In 1909 Du Bois was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and from 1910 to 1934 served it as director of publicity and research, a member of the board of directors, and editor of the Crisis, its monthly magazine.
In the Crisis, Du Bois directed a constant stream of agitation--often bitter and sarcastic--at white Americans while serving as a source of information and pride to African Americans. The magazine always published young African American writers. Racial protest during the decade following World War I focused on securing anti-lynching legislation. During this period the NAACP was the leading protest organization and Du Bois its leading figure.
In 1934 Du Bois resigned from the NAACP board and from the Crisis because of his new advocacy of an African American nationalist strategy: African American controlled institutions, schools, and economic cooperatives. This approach opposed the NAACP's commitment to integration. However, he returned to the NAACP as director of special research from 1944 to 1948. During this period he was active in placing the grievances of African Americans before the United Nations, serving as a consultant to the UN founding convention (1945) and writing the famous "An Appeal to the World" (1947).
Du Bois was a member of the Socialist party from 1910 to 1912 and always considered himself a Socialist. In 1948 he was cochairman of the Council on African Affairs; in 1949 he attended the New York, Paris, and Moscow peace congresses; in 1950 he served as chairman of the Peace Information Center and ran for the U.S. Senate on the American Labor party ticket in New York. In 1950-1951 Du Bois was tried and acquitted as an agent of a foreign power in one of the most ludicrous actions ever taken by the American government. Du Bois traveled widely throughout Russia and China in 1958-1959 and in 1961 joined the Communist party of the United States. He also took up residence in Ghana, Africa, in 1961.
Pan-Africanism
Du Bois was also active in behalf of pan-Africanism and concerned with the conditions of people of African descent wherever they lived. In 1900 he attended the First Pan-African Conference held in London, was elected a vice president, and wrote the "Address to the Nations of the World." The Niagara movement included a "pan-African department." In 1911 Du Bois attended the First Universal Races Congress in London along with black intellectuals from Africa and the West Indies.
Du Bois organized a series of pan-African congresses around the world, in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927. The delegations comprised intellectuals from Africa, the West Indies, and the United States. Though resolutions condemning colonialism and calling for alleviation of the oppression of Africans were passed, little concrete action was taken. The Fifth Congress (1945, Manchester, England) elected Du Bois as chairman, but the power was clearly in the hands of younger activists, such as George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah, who later became significant in the independence movements of their respective countries. Du Bois's final pan-African gesture was to take up citizenship in Ghana in 1961 at the request of President Kwame Nkrumah and to begin work as director of the Encyclopedia Africana.
As Scholar
Du Bois's most lasting contribution is his writing. As poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, sociologist, historian, and journalist, he wrote 21 books, edited 15 more, and published over 100 essays and articles. Only a few of his most significant works will be mentioned here.
From 1897 to 1910 Du Bois served as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, where he organized conferences titled the Atlanta University Studies of the Negro Problem and edited or co-edited 16 of the annual publications, on such topics as The Negro in Business (1899), The Negro Artisan (1902), The Negro Church (1903), Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans (1907), and The Negro American Family (1908). Other significant publications were The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), one of the outstanding collections of essays in American letters, and John Brown (1909), a sympathetic portrayal published in the American Crisis Biographies series.
Du Bois also wrote two novels, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and Dark Princess: A Romance (1928); a book of essays and poetry, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920); and two histories of black people, The Negro (1915) and The Gift of Black Folk: Negroes in the Making of America (1924).
From 1934 to 1944 Du Bois was chairman of the department of sociology at Atlanta University. In 1940 he founded Phylon, a social science quarterly. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935), perhaps his most significant historical work, details the role of African Americans in American society, specifically during the Reconstruction period. The book was criticized for its use of Marxist concepts and for its attacks on the racist character of much of American historiography. However, it remains the best single source on its subject.
Black Folk, Then and Now (1939) is an elaboration of the history of black people in Africa and the New World. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) is a brief call for the granting of independence to Africans, and The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1947; enlarged ed. 1965) is a major work anticipating many later scholarly conclusions regarding the significance and complexity of African history and culture. A trilogy of novels, collectively entitled The Black Flame (1957, 1959, 1961), and a selection of his writings, An ABC of Color (1963), are also worthy.
Du Bois received many honorary degrees, was a fellow and life member of the American Association for the Advancement of 카지노싸이트, and a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was the outstanding African American intellectual of his period in America.
Du Bois died in Ghana on Aug. 27, 1963, on the eve of the civil rights march in Washington, D.C. He was given a state funeral, at which Kwame Nkrumah remarked that he was "a phenomenon."
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David Levering Lewis
W.E.B. Du Bois
Jane Addams:
(Laura) Jane Addams (September 6, 1860-May 21, 1935) won worldwide recognition in the first third of the twentieth century as a pioneer social worker in America, as a feminist, and as an internationalist.
She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous miller and local political leader who served for sixteen years as a state senator and fought as an officer in the Civil War; he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln whose letters to him began «My Dear Double D-'ed Addams». Because of a congenital spinal defect, Jane was not physically vigorous when young nor truly robust even later in life, but her spinal difficulty was remedied by surgery.
In 1881 Jane Addams was graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor's degree only after the school became accredited the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be. At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London's East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being «to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.
Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from troubled people. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull-House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, a labor museum.
As her reputation grew, Miss Addams was drawn into larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed to Chicago's Board of Education and subsequently made chairman of the School Management Committee; in 1908 she participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and in the next year became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In her own area of Chicago she led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, and sanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910 she received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman by Yale University.
Jane Addams was an ardent feminist by philosophy. In those days before women's suffrage she believed that women should make their voices heard in legislation and therefore should have the right to vote, but more comprehensively, she thought that women should generate aspirations and search out opportunities to realize them.
For her own aspiration to rid the world of war, Jane Addams created opportunities or seized those offered to her to advance the cause. In 1906 she gave a course of lectures at the University of Wisconsin summer session which she published the next year as a book, Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke for peace in 1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of the Peace Palace at The Hague and in the next two years, as a lecturer sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, spoke against America's entry into the First World War. In January, 1915, she accepted the chairmanship of the Women's Peace Party, an American organization, and four months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened at The Hague largely upon the initiative of Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist leader of many and varied talents. When this congress later founded the organization called the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Jane Addams served as president until 1929, as presiding officer of its six international conferences in those years, and as honorary president for the remainder of her life.
Publicly opposed to America's entry into the war, Miss Addams was attacked in the press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she found an outlet for her humanitarian impulses as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women and children of the enemy nations, the story of which she told in her book Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).
After sustaining a heart attack in 1926, Miss Addams never fully regained her health. Indeed, she was being admitted to a Baltimore hospital on the very day, December 10, 1931, that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo. She died in 1935 three days after an operation revealed unsuspected cancer. The funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull-House.
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Louise W. Knight
Charles Richard Crane:
Heir to a fortune from his father's plumbing-fixture business, Charles R. Crane was a major contributor to Woodrow Wilson's U.S. presidential campaigns. His experience as a member of the King-Crane Commission of 1919 turned him against Zionism and made him a passionate spokesman for the independence of the Arab states. Following a term as a U.S. minister to China (1921 - 1922), Crane founded the New York - based Institute for Current World Affairs (ICWA) in 1925. The institute employed field representatives in Mexico, Jerusalem, and occasionally Moscow. The representatives compiled regular reports on developments in their regions and shared their expertise during ICWA-sponsored lecture tours to major U.S. universities. The reports were also made available to the U.S. State Department. From 1930 to 1941, the institute's Middle East representative was George Antonius, who researched and wrote his groundbreaking study The Arab Awakening; while in the employ of the ICWA. In the late 1920s Crane became so enamored of the rugged beauty of Yemen that he sponsored a team of engineers to develop that country's communications infrastructure.
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Henry Morgenthau, Sr:
Henry Morgenthau (1856-1946) served as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey during the First World War.
Although born in Mannheim, Germany into a German Jewish family on 26 April 1856 Morgenthau's family emigrated to the U.S. when he was a boy; in time he became a naturalised American.
After law training Morgenthau practiced in New York and amassed a sizeable fortune as a consequence of real estate speculation. A wealthy supporter of the Democratic Party Morgenthau served as the party's Finance Chairman in 1912 and 1916 in preparation for the two presidential campaigns won by Woodrow Wilson.
As a keen supporter of Wilson Morgenthau received his reward with a posting to Turkey as U.S. Ambassador in 1913, remaining in Constantinople until 1916. Alarmed at reports of the Armenian massacres - in the wake of surging nationalism in Turkey - he repeatedly appealed to the U.S. government to intervene, without success.
He appealed instead to both Ottoman rulers - notably Minister of the Interior Talaat - and German military leaders, also without result. Finally he publicised his opinions to the international media. To that end his 1918 book of memoirs, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, documented his experiences while in Turkey, including his vivid views of the Armenian massacres. He entitled the chapter on the Armenians "The Murder of a Nation".
Morgenthau attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 - intended to establish a lasting peace settlement - as an expert on Middle East and East European affairs. He went on to play a post-war role in generating relief funds for East European countries and served as chairman of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission under the auspices of the League of Nations.
The father of Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as Secretary of the Treasury in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, Henry Morgenthau published two further volumes of autobiography: All in a Lifetime (1922) and I Was Sent to Athens (1929).
He died on 25 November 1946 of a cerebral haemorrhage aged 90.
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1912 Election Results:
The United States presidential election of 1912 was fought among three major candidates. Incumbent President William Howard Taft was renominated by the Republican Party with the support of the conservative wing of the party. After former President Theodore Roosevelt failed to receive the Republican nomination, he called his own convention and created the Progressive Party (nicknamed the "Bull Moose Party"). It nominated Roosevelt and ran candidates for other offices in major states. Democrat Woodrow Wilson was nominated on the 46th ballot of a contentious convention, thanks to the support of William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate who still had a large and loyal following in 1912.
Wilson defeated both Taft and Roosevelt in the general election, winning a huge majority in the Electoral College, and won 42% of the popular vote while his nearest rival won 27%. Wilson became the only elected President of the Democratic Party between 1892 and 1932. Wilson was the second of only two Democrats to be elected President between 1860 and 1932. This was also the last election in which a candidate who was not a Republican or Democrat came second in either the popular vote or the Electoral College and the first election where the 48 states of the continental United States participated.
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Too bad we didnt take bolder actions after the Great Recession
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The A to Z from the Great War to the Great Depression (The A to Z Guide Series) (other topics)Dawn of Desegregation: J.A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott (other topics)
Notable U.S. Ambassadors Since 1775: A Biographical Dictionary (other topics)
Historical Dictionary of United States Political Parties (other topics)
Lawyers Lawyer: The Life of John W. Davis (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Ophelia De Laine Gona (other topics)Harold F. Bass Jr. (other topics)
William Henry Harbaugh (other topics)
Cathal J. Nolan (other topics)
Neil A. Wynn (other topics)
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John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) began his career in 1857 as an accountant, and worked for several New York banking firms until he became a partner in Drexel, Morgan and Company in 1871, which was reorganized as J.P. Morgan and Company in 1895. Described as a coldly rational man, Morgan began reorganizing railroads in 1885, becoming a board member and gaining control of large amounts of stock of many of the rail companies he helped restructure. In 1896, Morgan embarked on consolidations in the electric, steel (creating U.S. Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation, in 1901), and agricultural equipment manufacturing industries. By the early 1900s, Morgan was the main force behind the Trusts, controlling virtually all the basic American industries. He then looked to the financial and insurance industries, in which his banking firm also achieved a concentration of control. Morgan was also among the foremost collectors of art and books of his day; his book collection and the building that housed it in New York City are now The Pierpont Morgan Library.
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