November 5, 1912: America's Wildest Presidential Election

November 5, 1912: Woodrow Wilson is elected the 28th President of the United States. The Governor of New Jersey and the former President of Princeton University, he remains the only New Jersey-based politician ever to become President, although he was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia and South Carolina.

He wins because the Republican Party is split between the conservative wing, led by incumbent President William Howard Taft, and the progressive wing, led by former President Theodore Roosevelt, who believes that Taft and his allies have betrayed what he tried to do from 1901 to 1909.

It's actually a 4-way race, also including the Socialist Party nominee, labor union leader Eugene V. Debs. In the popular vote, it's Wilson 6.3 million, Roosevelt 4.1 million, Taft 3.5 million, and Debs 900,000. (Debs would slightly top that total when he ran while in prison in 1920, but with a lower percentage of the vote.) In popular vote percentage, it's Wilson 41.8, Roosevelt 27.4, Taft 23.2, Debs 6.0 -- meaning that, combined, the 2 Republicans got 50.6 percent, a majority, making Wilson a plurality President.

But it's Electoral Votes that matter. Wilson won 435, Roosevelt 88 (winning Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Washington, and 11 of the 13 then available in California), Taft 8 (winning only Utah and Vermont), while Debs won 2 Counties in Minnesota and 1 in North Dakota, but no States.

Wilson won 40 of the 48 States then in the Union -- New Mexico and Arizona having gained Statehood that very year, and voting for President for the 1st time. Had the votes for TR and the votes for Taft been combined in each State, Wilson would have won Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia -- 13 States, all of them Southern, for a total of 149 Electoral Votes, while the Republican nominee would have won 382. But Taft's conservatism and TR's ego split the GOP, and Wilson got in.

Although Wilson has become identified with Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived before entering the White House; and elsewhere in Washington, where he lived after leaving, his birthplace was in Staunton, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western part of the State (not to be confused with the separate State of West Virginia), and the house where he was born, and a now-connected house next door, have been converted into his Presidential Library, which opened on January 1, 1990.

The bridge carrying Interstate 95 over the Potomac, at the southern end of the District of Columbia, is the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. And, on the Virginia side, in Arlington, a major thoroughfare is named Wilson Boulevard. High schools have been named for Wilson in Camden, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; Portsmouth, Virginia; Beckley, West Virginia; Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles and Long Beach, California; and Tacoma, Washington.

The USS Woodrow Wilson was a submarine in service from 1963 to 1994. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars opened in Washington in 1968.

There are high schools named for Wilson in Los Angeles, in neighboring Long Beach, in Dallas, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and in Virginia and West Virginia. The Wilson High in Dallas is the only high school in the country to graduate 2 winners of the Heisman Trophy: Davey O'Brien of Texas Christian University in 1938, and Tim Brown of Notre Dame in 1987.

But Wilson's racism has led to several cities taking his name off schools, replacing them with the names of black leaders: August Martin in New York's Jamaica neighborhood in Queens, Jackson-Reed in D.C., Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Portland, and Silas in Tacoma.

Also named Woodrow Wilson High School, but no longer: Eastside High in Camden, New Jersey; Harry S Truman High in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania; Manor High in Portsmouth, Virginia; Dakota High in Fargo, North Dakota; and, outright closed, in Middletown, Connecticut; Youngstown, Ohio; and San Francisco.

Statues of Wilson are more common in Europe, where he's more popular than in America, including in Poznan, Poland; Prague, Czechia; and Tirana, Albania. A Wilson statue was removed from the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. But the "Presidential City" display in Rapid City, South Dakota still has him on display.

Statue, Rapid City, South Dakota

In 1934, a gold certificate bearing Wilson's portrait and the value of $100,000 was issued by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. It was a one-time thing, to help stabilize the economy during the Great Depression. It was never put into circulation, only 12 are known to survive, and it is illegal for private citizens to possess them.

Wilson remains the last President born in Virginia, and the only one to represent New Jersey in politics.

Wilson, in 1944, was the 1st color film about a President. Alexander Knox starred, with Ruth Nelson as 1st wife Ellen, Geraldine Fitzgerald as 2nd wife Edith, Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life) as private secretary Joseph Tumulty, a young Vincent Price as son-in-law and Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, and Cedric Hardwicke as Wilson's Congressional nemesis, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

Among the other actors who have played Wilson are: Earl Lee in The Story of Will Rogers in 1952, Whit Bissell in Profiles in Courage in 1965, Frank Forsyth in Oh! What a Lovely War in 1969, Backstairs at the White House in 1979, Josef Sommer in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in 1993, Bob Gunton in Iron Jawed Angels in 2004, Bryan Scott Johnson in Timeless in 2018, and Ian Kelly in The King's Man in 2021.

Bainbridge Colby, Secretary of State for the last year of the Administration, was  the last surviving member of the Wilson Cabinet, living until 1950.

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Like all modern U.S. Election Days, November 5, 1912  was a Tuesday, so no football; and November, so no baseball. And neither the NBA nor the NHL had been founded yet. So there were no scores on this historic day.

November 4, 1924: Keeping Cool With Coolidge

November 4, 1924: President Calvin Coolidge, who took the office on the death of Warren Harding the year before, is elected to a full term in his own right. The Republican, who had been Governor of Massachusetts before being Vice President, took advantage of a split in the Democratic Party that nullified a split in the Republican ranks.

The slogan was "Keep Cool with Coolidge" -- alternately, "Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge" -- and the nation agreed. He won 382 Electoral Votes, and 54 percent of the popular vote. John W. Davis, a former Congressman from West Virginia and U.S. Ambassador to Britain, won 136 Electoral Votes, but his 29 percent represents the lowest popular-vote percentage in the history of the Democratic Party. Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, formerly a Republican but now the leader of the Progressive Party, won his home State for 13 Electoral Votes, and took 16 percent of the vote.

Charles G. Dawes was elected to fill the vacancy in the Vice Presidency, caused by Coolidge's ascendancy. A Mayflower descendant, and also a descendant of William Dawes, one of Paul Revere's co-riders, a Chicago utilities executive who had served as Harding's Budget Director.

The following year, his Dawes Plan for easing the payment of war reparations won him the Nobel Peace Prize. He was also a musical composer, and his "Melody in A Major" became popular upon publication in 1912. In 1951, Carl Sigman added lyrics to it, and it became "It's All In the Game." In 1958, black singer Tommy Edwards had a Number 1 hit with it. Dawes is the highest-ranking government official ever to have had a Number 1 hit.

Coolidge had recently lost his 16-year-old son John to an infection that could have been easily treated had antibiotics been invented. He had also recently watched the Washington Senators win the World Series. He did not like baseball, but his wife Grace did.

He was known as "Silent Cal" for his reticence. Legend has it that 2 women, seeing him at a party, made a bet. So one walked up to him and said, "I made a bet with my friend that I could get you to say 3 words to me." And Coolidge said, "You lose."

Even when he decided not to run for a 2nd full term, he was brief: He told the press simply, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928," and walked away. He may have seen the Crash of 1929 coming, and didn't want to get blamed for it. He should be, but he left his successor, Herbert Hoover, holding the bag.

Interestingly, Coolidge and Dawes did not get along, and when it was suggested at the 1928 Republican Convention that Dawes be nominated for a 2nd term as Vice President, along with Hoover, Coolidge stepped in and prevented it, and Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas was nominated instead, a choice both Coolidge and Hoover could live with.

Charles G. Dawes

As a consolation prize, Hoover appointed Dawes to be U.S. Ambassador to Britain. He didn't get along well with King George V, but the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII and the Duke of Windsor, liked him. As the Depression kept going, Hoover asked Dawes to come home, and run the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which he did for the remainder of the term. He was offered the Vice Presidential nomination in 1932 and the Presidential nomination in 1936, as a reminder of the "good" Coolidge years, but declined both times. He died in 1951.

La Follette had been a Republican, serving Wisconsin in the House of Representatives from 1885 to 1891, as Governor from 1901 to 1906, and as U.S. Senator ever since. He was a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, who split from the Republican Party and ran as the Presidential nominee of the new Progressive Party in 1912, finishing 2nd.

TR's Progressive Party fell apart, so when he ran in 1924, "Fightin' Bob" La Follette formed a new one, but it did no good, as he won only his home State. He died on June 18, 1925, 7 months after the election, and 4 days after his 70th birthday. His son, Robert Jr., was appointed to his seat, and members of the La Follette family continue to serve the State of Wisconsin to this day. The Progressive Party that nominated Henry Wallace for President in 1948 shared little but name with the parties of 1912 and 1924.

In 1957, future President John F. Kennedy, then a Senator from Massachusetts, headed a committee to name the 5 greatest Senators in history, and La Follette was chosen. The others were another from the 20th Century, Robert Taft of Ohio; and 3 leading Senators of the pre-Civil War era: Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Portraits of these "Famous Five" were hung in the Senate Reception Room.

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November 4, 1924 was, like all modern American Election Days, a Tuesday. Despite Coolidge's landslide, Nellie Tayloe Ross, a Democrat, was elected Governor of Wyoming, to replace her late husband, William B. Ross. I have a separate entry for that occurrence.

The World Series had ended 25 days before, with the Washington Senators winning, as it turned out, their only World Championship. As I mentioned, Calvin and Grace Coolidge were in attendance. Football was in midweek. The NHL season was 25 days away. And professional basketball barely existed. So there were no scores on this historic day.

July 23, 1948: The Progressive Convention Nominates Henry Wallace

July 23, 1948: As the Democratic and Republican Parties both did this year, the Progressive Party holds its Convention at the Convention Hall of the Philadelphia Civic Center. The left-wing party, with little connection besides name to the Theodore Roosevelt party of that name of 1912 and the Robert LaFollette version of 1924, nominates Henry Wallace for President.

Henry Agard Wallace was born on October 7, 1888 in Orient, Iowa, and grows up in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1923, when his father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, was serving as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the younger Henry actually did more to support American farmers and feed people all over the world, developing a hybrid corn he called Copper Cross. It revolutionized corn production.

A split between the Wallaces and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, himself an Iowa native, led to the Wallaces leaving the Republican Party and supporting the Progressive Party candidacy of Governor Robert La Follette of Wisconsin in 1924. It may also have hastened the death of the elder Henry, right before the election, which Coolidge won.

When Hoover was elected President in 1928, the stock market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression followed within a year, devastating the already hard-hit American farmers. In 1932, the younger Henry Wallace worked for the election of Democratic Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. When FDR won, he appointed Wallace to his father's old post. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that Wallace was "the best Secretary of Agriculture the country has ever had," but also that he was "an incorrigibly naive politician."

In 1940, FDR ran for a 3rd term, with Wallace as his Vice President. Farmers, labor leaders and civil rights activists were happy with this, but Southerners didn't like his closeness to black leaders, and big business didn't like his openness to the Soviet Union. In 1942, he gave a speech, citing a term coined by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, saying, "Some of have spoken of the 'American Century.' I say that the century on which we are entering, the century which will come into being after this war, can be, and must be, the Century of the Common Man."

But the Democratic Party's conservative wing, believing (correctly, as it turned out) that FDR was a sick man, and might not survive a 4th term, didn't want Wallace succeeding him. In 1944, for one of the few times in his career, FDR got ganged-up-on, and dropped Wallace from the ticket, in favor of Senator Harry Truman of Missouri.

With some irony, Wallace was appointed to Hoover's old job, Secretary of Commerce. FDR died in 1945, and Truman became President. Wallace split with Truman over Cold War policy, resigned in 1946, and ran for President to Truman's left in 1948.

The Vice Presidential nominee was Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho, also normally a Democrat. Just 44 years old, and in his 1st term, he had run for the Senate in 1940 (a special election) and 1942, and finally won in 1944. He was considered the 2nd-most liberal Senator, behind Wayne Morse of Oregon, a Republican who eventually became an Independent, and then a Democrat. In 1945, he submitted a resolution to the Senate, "favoring the creation of a world republic." A one-world government has long been a great fear of conservatives, afraid that it would, by nature, be Communist.

Taylor (left) and Wallace

Before going into politics, Taylor had been recorded singing country music, and his sister was a jazz singer under her married name, Lee Morse. (Her husband, though a supporter of Glen's, was no relation to Wayne.)

Wallace gave his acceptance speech outdoors -- not at nearby Franklin Field, owned by the University of Pennsylvania, and not exactly welcoming to leftists, but halfway across the city, at Shibe Park, then the home of baseball's Athletics and Phillies and football's Eagles.

You talk about your "Hollywood liberals": The Progressives had the support of John Huston, Lee J. Cobb, Uta Hagen, Judy Holliday, Sam Jaffe, and, singing its campaign songs, Paul Robeson.

Also: Writers W.E.B. DuBois, Howard Fast, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Helman, Garson Kanin, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, S.J. Perelman, Budd Schulberg, I.F. Stone, Mark Van Doren, and the big new thing in American letters, Norman Mailer, who had published his debut novel, the World War II story The Naked and the Dead, a few weeks earlier. Also: Musical personalities Aaron Copland, Artie Shaw and Burl Ives; scientist Linus Pauling; and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

However, the Wallace campaign also had big support from the Communist Party, which tainted it in the eyes of average Americans. It was tainted to the point that most conservatives didn't both to attack it. An exception was far-right fanatic Westbrook Pegler, of William Randolph Hearst's newspaper syndicate: He called Wallace a "messianic fumbler" and "off-center mentally." The former charge had some reason, as he had some religious views that were considered unacceptable then, and would even be odd now; the latter charge could have been leveled at Pegler himself.

The fear among Democrats was that the Progressives would pull enough liberal votes -- hard-left, labor and black -- from New York City to cost Harry Truman New York State, Philadelphia to cost him Pennsylvania, Boston to cost him Massachusetts, Detroit to cost him Michigan, Chicago to cost him Illinois, and Los Angeles and San Francisco to cost him California, thus costing him the election. And, of course, Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina had temporarily left the Democrats to lead the States' Rights Party, the "Dixiecrats," and Democrats feared that would help cost them the election as well.

In the end, the popular vote was as follows: Truman, a little over 24 million; Dewey, a little under 22 million; Thurmond, 1,176,023; and Wallace, 1,157,328. Percentages: Truman 49.5, Dewey 45.0, Thurmond 2.41, Wallace 2.37. Electoral Votes: Truman 303, Dewey 189, Thurmond 39, Wallace none. Wallace did not win a single State, or even a single County. He couldn't even beat a segregationist, who wasn't even on the ballot in all the States, for 3rd place overall.

Dewey did, indeed, win New York (where he lived), Pennsylvania and Michigan (where he was born). And Wallace did win 60 percent of the votes he would win in New York State and California alone.

Had Wallace also thrown Illinois and California to Dewey, Dewey would have led in Electoral Votes, 252-250, but fallen short of the 269 needed to be elected. The election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives, then controlled by the Republicans, and Dewey would have won. Instead, Truman hung on to Illinois by 33,000 votes, and California by 18,000 votes, and won.

Wallace got 2.37 percent of the popular vote. Openly leftist candidates have struggled to do even that well since. In 2000, Ralph Nader got 2.74 percent. In 2016, Jill Stein got 1.07 percent. Each time, it was enough to cost the Democratic nominee the election, something Wallace was unable to do.

He turned back toward earlier stances after 1948. He repudiated the Soviet Union in 1952, and did not endorse a candidate in that year's election. He endorsed President Dwight D. Eisenhower for re-election in 1956, and refused to endorse a candidate in 1960. Nevertheless, he supported Democratic Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1963, as part of a discussion of the 30th Anniversary of FDR's Inauguration and the New Deal in 1933, he appeared on the NET (forerunner of PBS) talk show The Open Mind, hosted by Rutgers University professor Richard D. Heffner. The other guests were James Roosevelt, FDR's son and a close aide, and later a Congressman from California; James A. Farley, FDR's campaign manager and Postmaster General; Thomas G. Corcoran, a.k.a. Tommy the Cork, a New Deal official who had become an advisor to LBJ; and Ernest K. Lindley, who covered the FDR Administration for the New York Herald Tribune and later The Washington Post.

Shortly after that appearance, in which he barely moved and looked stiff and uncomfortable, Wallace was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Like the most famous ALS patient, whose name was given to the disease, Lou Gehrig, he consulted numerous specialists and tried various methods of treating the disease, saying, "I look on myself as an ALS guinea-pig, willing to try almost anything." Nothing worked, and he died on November 18, 1965, at the age of 87.

The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the largest agricultural research complex in the world, was named for him, and is located in the Washington suburb of Beltsville, Maryland. The visitor center at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, New York is named the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center. It doesn't have a statue of Wallace, but it does have one of what FDR called "my little dog, Fala."

None of Wallace's children entered politics, but his grandson, Scott Wallace, was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in Pennsylvania's 1st District in 2018, losing a close race with nearly 49 percent of the vote.

Wallace's running mate, Glen Taylor, lost his bid for re-election in the 1950 Democratic Primary, and ran and lost again in 1954 and 1956. Having lost his hair earlier than most men, he wore homemade hairpieces, and began designing and selling them after leaving politics. By 1960, Taylor Topper was America's leading hairpiece company. It is now known as Taylormade Hair Replacement.

He also went back to show business, appearing in 9 episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. He died in 1984, at the age of 80.

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July 23, 1948 was a Friday. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Giants beat the Chicago Cubs, 5-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Larry Jansen pitched a 5-hit shutout. Johnny Mize hit a home run.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-3 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Erv Palica was the winning pitcher. Pee Wee Reese and Tommy Brown hit home runs. Jackie Robinson went 2-for-4 with a stolen base and an RBI. For the Pirates, Ralph Kiner went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Chicago White Sox, 13-1 at Fenway Park in Boston. Ted Williams went 2-for-4 with a walk and 3 RBIs. The only Boston home run was hit by Bobby Doerr. The best White Sox player of the era, Luke Appling, went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators, 11-5 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-1 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Boston Braves, 7-5 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Stan Musial went 3-for-4 with a walk and an RBI.

* The Philadelphia Athletics and the St. Louis Browns were rained out at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader on August 27. The A's swept, 6-0 and 9-1. Dick Fowler pitched a 3-hit shutout in the opener.

* And the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians were not scheduled.