NEW NATIONALISM

NEW NATIONALISM is the term used to describe Theodore Roosevelt's political philosophy that the nation is the best instrument for advancing progressive democracy. In 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt returned from safari to plunge into the 1910 congressional elections. The Republican Party was deciding, Roosevelt believed, whether to be "the party of the plain people" or "the party of privilege." On 31 August in Osawatomie, Kansas, Roosevelt called for a "New Nationalism" to "deal with new problems. The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage."

Roosevelt's New Nationalism sought a transcendent idealism and a renewed faith through the power of democratic nationalism and activist government. The phrase came from Herbert Croly's 1909 work, The Promise of American Life, which was itself inspired by Roosevelt's presidency. Roosevelt collected his 1910 campaign speeches under the title "The New Nationalism."

"The New Nationalism" became Roosevelt's campaign platform in fighting his handpicked successor William Howard Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912. Roosevelt advocated a strong, Hamiltonian government to balance big business. He advocated more corporate regulation, the physical evaluation of railroads, a graduated income tax, a reformed banking system, labor legislation, a direct primary, and a corrupt practices act.

During an unprecedented popular primary campaign in a dozen states, Roosevelt ripped into Taft and the Republican old guard, as the defenders of "privilege and injustice." Responding, Taft became the first president to stump for his own renomination. Eventually, Roosevelt won Republican hearts but Taft won the nomination, thanks to the party "steamroller" of bosses and officeholders.

The Democratic candidate, New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, positioned himself between Taft, the hostage of big business, and Roosevelt, the apostle of big government. Wilson advocated a "New Freedom." Influenced by the progressive reformer Louis D. Brandeis, Wilson viewed decentralized government and constrained corporations as the recipe for a just democracy. Roosevelt's run for the presidency under the Progressive Party banner kept the central issues—and these two outsized personalities—in the forefront of Wilson's winning 1912 campaign.

Yet, the Roosevelt-Wilson contrast was not as dramatic as it appeared, then or now. Even as Roosevelt championed the rights of labor over property, he asked Americans "whenever they go in for reform," to "exact justice from one side as much as from the other." While the difference in emphasis was significant—and pointed to two major trends in American progressivism—both the New Nationalism and the New Freedom highlighted the reform consensus. Roosevelt reflected more of the fire breathing moralism of the politician Robert La Follette; Wilson displayed more the crisp, rational, monastic efficiency of the social crusader Jane Addams. Yet both men and both doctrines reflected a growing commitment in the early twentieth century to face the challenges of bigness, of modern corporate power, of the dislocations wrought by industrial capitalism. And both ideas helped shape the great reform movements of the twentieth century, including the New Deal and the Great Society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blum, John Morton. The Republican Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954.

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

GilTroy

See alsoNew Freedom ; Taft-Roosevelt Split .

new nationalism, a term coined to describe the rise, in the quarter‐century before 1914, of a more radical nationalist sentiment. The long‐term background to this development was the disillusionment with parliamentary nationalism created by the fall of Parnell, the factional conflict that followed, and the apparent decline of the reunited Nationalist Party into a conservative counter‐establishment. An immediate stimulus was provided by three events: the centenary of the insurrection of 1798, the Boer War, and the visit of Queen Victoria, with accompanying counter‐demonstrations, in 1900. The chief manifestations of changing attitudes were the growth of new forms of cultural nationalism (the Gaelic Athletic Association and Gaelic League), the appearance of the first Sinn Féin, and the takeover of the Irish Republican Brotherhood by a new generation of activists. What remains unclear is whether these developments, involving small if highly committed groups, were in themselves sufficient to undermine the constitutionalism of the Nationalist Party, or whether it was only the novel circumstances of the First World War that allowed radical nationalism in its different forms to move from the fringes of Irish politics to the very centre.

New Nationalism (USA) The programme of Progressive political and economic reform proposals associated with the 1912 presidential candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt. It comprised social reform through progressive taxation to reduce inequalities of wealth. He also proposed health and safety legislation aimed particularly at women and children, as well as accident insurance for workers. Roosevelt's programme also sought to promote the economy through enlightened reform, including low tariffs and trust regulation—but not abolition—for businesses.