The People’s Candidate
Picnic Scene, Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project
Here is another story in our series Stumping and Eating which looks at the role of food and politics. The 1912 presidential election featured a crowded field of candidates. Republican Incumbent William Howard Taft, New Jersey Governor and former Princeton University President, Woodrow Wilson ran as the nominee for the Democratic Party. Former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt ran as the Bull Moose Party candidate, and Eugene V. Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate with the support of The International Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor movement. In 1912 tariffs, monopolies and trust, labor Relations, and immigration served as hotly debated election year issues. Other topics included prohibition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights protection for African-Americans and other lower caste groups in the United States. The Republican Party rejected tariffs; Democrats supported tariffs and denounced policies that open the nation's borders to Catholic immigrants. The Bull Moose Party favored busting monopolies like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company and improving conditions for workers.[1]
Democratic Party candidate Woodrow Wilson spoke to 2,500 farmers at a picnic in New Jersey as part of his 1912 election campaign. In his speech, he said tariffs represented one of, “the greatest impositions upon the farmer that had ever been devised.”[2] The incumbent Republican President William H. Taft’s veto of the steel tariff bill had increased the cost farmer's had to pay for the tools of their trade. Although Wilson had been an elite, his stance against tariffs and for farmers made him and other Democrats populist and the people’s candidate The split of the Republican vote provided a path for the Democratic Party to take the White House from the Republicans.[3]
[1] The Globe, August 22, 1912.
[2] The Independent, August 22, 1912.
[3] The Austin Statesman, October 21, 1912.
Editor Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie. Follow Dr Opie and share a link to the series
