Progressive Party of 1912–1924

Progressive Party of 1912–1924. Founded in Chicago in August 1912 by Republican party dissenters who favored the nomination of the former president Theodore Roosevelt over the incumbent William Howard Taft, the Progressive party was the culmination of an internecine battle between Regulars and western and midwestern Insurgents, led by the Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette. The two factions had clashed bitterly over tariff reduction, income taxation, conservation, business regulation, the direct election of senators, and other reform measures. In 1911, Insurgents had formed the national Progressive Republican League and promoted La Follette's candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. When Roosevelt, disillusioned with his handpicked successor, Taft, bested the incumbent in several primaries, he alienated not only Taft but La Follette as well.

Despite Roosevelt's popularity with the party rank and file, Taft's control of the Republican National Committee assured his nomination by the convention. Prepared in advance, the Roosevelt forces regrouped in another hall and nominated Roosevelt on what became the “Bull Moose” ticket. The party was a curious mixture of professional politicians, idealistic neo‐phytes, social reformers, and businessmen who saw in Roosevelt's “New Nationalism” potential for a “corporate liberalism,” in which the nation's largest corporations would work through federal government agencies to promote a stable, national, efficient socioeconomic order. The platform's “Social and Industrial Justice” section, drafted by social settlement residents, constituted a blueprint for the welfare state. A “top‐down” creation, the party hastened to field a full ticket for the 1912 congressional and state elections, guaranteeing Democratic victories in numerous states. Roosevelt garnered nearly 28 percent of the popular vote and eighty‐eight electoral votes, humiliating Taft and assuring the election of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson with a substantial working majority in both congressional houses.

The Progressive party fared poorly in 1914, and party diehards pleaded unsuccessfully with Roosevelt to carry the banner in 1916. When Senator La Follette resurrected the party label for his final run at the presidency in 1924, he appropriated only the name and some of the 1912 platform. Marginalized by his opposition to World War I and U.S. membership in the League of Nations, he was endorsed by the American Federation of Labor, the Nonpartisan League, the Socialist party of America, and other antiestablishment organizations that had rallied to La Follette's Conference for Progressive Political Action. La Follette won almost 17 percent of the popular vote but carried only Wisconsin and North Dakota. His major support came from west of the Mississippi, a protest vote against Calvin Coolidge's business‐oriented Republicanism. He also ran well among working‐class voters in several northeastern industrial cities and served as a “way station” for many who would later support Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Failing at grass roots organization, the Progressive party collapsed after La Follette's death in 1925. The Progressive party of 1948 bore no relationship to the earlier party of the same name.
See also New Deal Era, The; Political Parties; Progressive Era; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Kenneth Campbell MacKay , The Progressive Movement of 1924, 1947.
John Allen Gable , The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party, 1978.

John D. Buenker