Taming the Wild Beast of Populism Party bosses wanted Taft. TR wanted the presidency back. He thought primaries would let the voters decide.By Robert Merry
Beware the zeal of the reformer. True, the reform impulse has occupied a long and sometimes necessary place in American politics, going back to Andrew Jackson’s fiery allegation that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay stole the 1824 presidential election through a “corrupt bargain.” Four years later, Jackson rode to the White House on the wings of the outrage he had summoned. His refrain—that malefactors of power had undermined American democracy by thwarting the will of the people—has probably been the most catalytic recurrent theme in the country’s politics. Even when the flames of populist passion subside, they seem ever-present through a kind of after-burner of latent protest.
Yet the political reforms generated by these passions often go awry, producing unintended consequences. Sometimes they fall victim to the vicissitudes of human nature and the reality that politics is rarely about good guys versus bad guys. Reformers are human, and often when power comes their way their frailties are exposed.
Let The People Rule
By Geoffrey Cowan
Norton, 404 pages, $27.95
A particularly potent period of reformist zeal followed the tumultuous campaign year of 1968, when activist Democrats infuriated by the Vietnam War flooded the early presidential primary states and obliterated President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second full term. For their pains they got, instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who embraced Johnson’s war policy and cadged his party’s nomination without having entered a single primary. The reformist refrain went up: The party’s nomination process was dominated by backroom bosses who exercised power without regard to voter sentiment.
The reformist answer was to revise party rules in order to encourage states to select national convention delegates through primaries rather than boss-controlled caucuses and state conventions. The result was the nominating system we have today, with generally 80% of national convention delegates selected through primaries.
One particularly effective activist in the cause was young Geoffrey Cowan, fresh out of Yale Law School. ABC News anchorman Howard K. Smith said that Mr. Cowan “did more to change Democratic conventions than anybody since Andrew Jackson first started them.’’ Now a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, he still finds inspiration in that grand thrust to open up the nominating process. Hence this book, in which Mr. Cowan harks back to the tempestuous campaign of 1912, when former President Theodore Roosevelt sought to reclaim the White House and first pushed primaries onto the political scene. “Whatever shortcomings they may have brought with them,’’ writes Mr. Cowan, “ . . . the presidential primaries that TR did so much to create and popularize in 1912 have, indeed, given the people the right to rule.’’
But the tale is not quite as simple as that, as Mr. Cowan goes on to show. TR himself evinced little interest in the budding call for primaries until he saw that this particular reform could help him unseat the sitting president, William Howard Taft. He once told the great reformer, Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, that he found it “half amusing and half pathetic to see so many good people convinced that the world can be reformed . . . merely by reforming the machinery of government.’’ He even suggested that it was a “perfectly sound belief’’ that “only certain people are fit for democracy.’’
But now he wanted the presidency back, and so he became a reformer—“a late and somewhat reluctant convert to popular democracy,’’ as Mr. Cowan puts it. It didn’t matter that Taft had previously been one of his best friends.” One loves him at first sight,’’ he had said about the affable and brilliant Taft. Now poor Taft fell victim to TR’s withering attacks.
The 1912 presidential campaign makes for a dazzling story, and Mr. Cowan tells it well. It begins in earnest on March 19, when La Follette, presenting himself as the true reformist candidate, won the North Dakota primary, the country’s first-ever statewide direct presidential primary. Roosevelt promptly unfurled a fiery speech at New York’s Carnegie Hall designed to capture the reformist banner for himself. He called his speech “The Right of the People to Rule’’ and sought to identify the nation’s fundamental issue: “Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not.’’ The push for primaries became a centerpiece of his campaign.
The national focus quickly turned to the looming primary contests, and a new kind of drama emerged in presidential politics. When Taft pulled out narrow victories in New York and Indiana, Roosevelt appeared finished. But then he won big in Illinois—61% of the vote, a cache of 68 delegates. This, writes Mr. Cowan, was “the first decisive presidential primary victory in history.’’
In all, Roosevelt won nine of the year’s 13 primaries. He captured two-thirds of the delegates at stake and more than half the popular votes. Clearly, Col. Roosevelt enjoyed widespread national support. But party bosses still held sway in other states, and they rallied behind the sitting president, who by that time had unleashed a furious polemical assault on the erstwhile friend who now sought to destroy his presidency. Advisers urged Taft to “smash the colonel to a pulp,’’ and the Washington Post said it had become “a war to the knife.’’
With no more delegates available through primaries, TR turned his attention to challenging the legitimacy of Taft delegates. When Roosevelt was told by his staff that they had a strong case against 28 Taft men, the great reformer shot back, “Twenty-eight! Why, if you got the whole lot it wouldn’t change the result. . . . You must make it at least a hundred.’’ Ultimately, the TR forces challenged the credentials of 72 Taft delegates, a figure driven wholly by political expediency.
When the strategy didn’t work, as we all know, Roosevelt stormed out of the Republicans’ national convention in Chicago and founded his own Progressive Party. Less well known is his decision to bar from the new party’s ranks Southern blacks. TR hoped, in vain, that this move would help him capture Southern states in the general election—essentially, an endorsement of the anti-black Jim Crow laws then gaining force throughout the South.
Mr. Cowan brings fresh depth and breadth to this sordid tale. Thus do we see, through his research and deft storytelling, how reform movements are often encased in self-interested cant. As he writes: “Almost everyone in public life has good reason to conflate means and ends and, in some instances, to write rules that favor their cause or try to use existing rules to game the system.’’
And what of those post-1968 reforms that gave us the current primary system? They have been traduced by significant developments over the past few decades—a mix of early candidate debates sponsored by cable networks; early polling bouncing off those debates; hovering money men who open their checkbooks, or not, based on those polls; and opinion-obsessed commentators declaring the viability of candidates based on all of the above. Many candidates rise or fall long before any citizen gets a chance to vote.
The new bosses in this early selection process—pollsters, money men, commentators—are impervious to voter sentiment as defined by actual election results. One could argue that they have far less interest in the people’s wishes than those bosses of old, obsessed as they were with ensuring that the party picked a winner.
Which raises a question: Whatever happened to the principle of letting the people rule?
—Mr. Merry is political editor of the National Interest and author, most recently, of “Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.”
Comments are closed.
