1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs--The Election That Changed the Country

Beginning with former president Theodore Roosevelt's return in 1910 from his African safari, Chace brilliantly unfolds a dazzling political circus that featured four extraordinary candidates.

When Roosevelt failed to defeat his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican nomination, he ran as a radical reformer on the Bull Moose ticket. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson, the ex-president of Princeton, astonished everyone by seizing the Democratic nomination from the bosses who had made him New Jersey's governor. Most revealing of the reformist spirit sweeping the land was the charismatic socialist Eugene Debs, who polled an unprecedented one million votes.

Wilson's "accidental" election had lasting impact on America and the world. The broken friendship between Taft and TR inflicted wounds on the Republican Party that have never healed, and the party passed into the hands of a conservative ascendancy that reached its fullness under Reagan and George W. Bush. Wilson's victory imbued the Democratic Party with a progressive idealism later incarnated in FDR, Truman, and LBJ.

1912 changed America.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 08/01/2005
ISBN: 9780743273558
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.14w x 0.86d

Review Citations: Ingram Advance 08/01/2005 pg. 61
New York Times 08/28/2005 pg. 24

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 86235 / 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs--The Election That Changed the Country
Reading Level: 10.7 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 20