Lessons from the presidential election of 1912
By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist
There have been many comments in the past week about Elon Musk and his idea of promoting a third party.
Don’t do it, Elon, and this column will explain why.
When President McKinley was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt succeeded him. Teddy then ran and won in 1904.
In the exuberance of his win, Roosevelt promised he wouldn’t run again in 1908. In 1908, Roosevelt pushed Cincinnati’s William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War, as his replacement. Taft handily won in 1908, but Roosevelt was unhappy that Taft’s policies did not follow lockstep after his own.
This brings us to 1912 and the election of egos (sound familiar?). Roosevelt tried to grab the Republican nomination from Taft. It didn’t work. The Republicans renominated Taft.
Teddy and his ego started a new party – the Bull Moose Party.
The results of the election of 1912 were as follows: Woodrow Wilson (435 electoral votes but only 42% of the popular vote); Theodore Roosevelt (88 electoral votes and 27% of the popular vote); William Howard Taft (eight electoral votes and 23% of the popular vote) and Eugene V. Debs, the perennial socialist candid from Terre Haute, Ind. (no electoral votes and 6% of the popular vote).
It is possible that had Roosevelt not let his ego get the best of him that Taft would have been reelected.
What was the consequence of Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., being elected? The Federal Reserve Bank was created during his two terms in office. The first federal income tax outside of war times was enacted and still strangles us to this day.
Wilson then got us into World War I. Following that, he paraded his pompous posterior to Europe and orchestrated the “Peace Treaty” of 1919 as well as the founding of the League of Nations.
After coming home victorious, the U.S. Senate would not ratify these documents. Wilson went on a whistlestop tour of the U.S., attempting to rally support. On said tour, he suffered a major stroke in Pueblo, Colo. He was brought back to the White House, and it is alleged his wife ran the government for the rest of his term (again, sound familiar?).
The nefarious peace treaty of 1919 was developed without the presence of the main antagonist, Germany. They were merely brought in at the end and told to sign or else.
This flawed treaty, Wilson’s work, is often viewed as the match that lit World War II a mere 20 years later.
Do us a favor, Elon, and go back to being an engineer/scientist.
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.
I'm in awe of every serviceman who stepped up...
Either way Jim, if it was Belleau Wood, Wake Island, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Midway, or any other WWI or WWII fracas: The American men brought ferocious and tenacity to the Hun and to the empire of Japan circa 1941. I often play the 'what if' game for each era that I achieved 18 years old and a HS diploma... 1917: Many are enlisting in the Marines. (plus all the years and young men enlisting during the Boxer rebellion in China and the central American Banana Wars. (Then Wake Island could've used another Marine or two, during the '41 siege.) Fast forward past WWII Marine landings and Korea and Chesty Puller's beach landings. (to Danang 1965). Communism and socialism have no place near the American way of life. Take your vote-buying, fake sympathy, boo hoo antics, and shove it! Americans provide for themselves, and for their close friends and neighbors to pick up the slack. The remote state and federal governments need to stay remote, meek, and assume 'a last resort' frame of mind.