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 3, 1936: President Franklin D. Roosevelt Is Re-Elected

November 3, 1936: President Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats his Republican opponent, Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, winning 46 out of 48 States, all but Vermont and Maine. He wins 523 Electoral Votes, Landon just 8. FDR wins 60.8 percent of the popular vote, to Landon's 36.5 percent.

Landon's next-best States? He won almost 48 percent in New Hampshire, almost 46 percent in his native Kansas, almost 45 percent in Delaware. If he had won those States, the Electoral Vote would have been 507-24 Roosevelt.

There were 8 other States where he got at least 40 percent. But even if he had won all of those, it would still have been 406-125 Roosevelt.

FDR increased his 1932 totals in part because black voters, still sticking with Herbert Hoover because he represented "the Party of Lincoln," saw that, while the Great Depression hit them harder than white people, as all economic slowdowns do, the New Deal helped them tremendously. (Though not fully: There was sharp criticism over a refusal to hire black people, including officials, in the various "Alphabet Soup" agencies.) Black voters gave Hoover a majority in 1932, but gave Roosevelt 71 percent of their vote in 1936.

In addition, Roosevelt broke the back of the Socialist movement in America. Norman Thomas, the Presbyterian minister who was the Socialist Party's nominee for President in every election from 1928 to 1948, was asked in 1936 if he thought Roosevelt had "carried out the Socialist platform." He said, "No, unless you mean he carried it out on a stretcher."

With Socialist labor leaders like Sidney Hillman, who ran the left-leaning Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), leading the way, people who had been voting Socialist voted Democratic. Thomas got 2.2 percent of the vote in 1932, but just 0.41 percent in 1936.

He actually finished 4th, behind the 1.9 percent of William Lemke, a former Republican Congressman from North Dakota. His Union Party was supported by such agitators as Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit-based "radio priest" who turned on FDR for his seeming ingratitude in making the difference for him in 1932 (a delusion, as Coughlin's support made absolutely no difference); Gerald L.K. Smith, a Disciples of Christ minister from Wisconsin, who started out as a leftist populist like Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, whose Presidential ambitions died with his assassination in 1935, but turned far-right, and who was one of the few public figures in America willing to be as publicly anti-Semitic as Coughlin; and Francis Townsend, a California physician known for a pension plan that presaged the Social Security Act that FDR signed in 1935.

In other words, the Union Party couldn't decide whether it wanted to be far-left (like Townsend or Long) or far-right (like Coughlin and Smith), an early example of what would come to be known as "Horseshoe Theory": That each extreme began to resemble the other.

Aside from his home State of North Dakota, where he got 13 percent, Lemke's best performance was 6.6 percent in neighboring Minnesota. Thomas topped out at 1.5 percent in New York.

Seeing the array of would-be candidates for 1936 in 1935, including the still-living Long, who was bold enough to say, "I can take him," FDR said, "Gosh, everyone seems to be against me. Everyone but the people."

Because Maine had previously held its Presidential election a few weeks earlier, and it usually matched the vote in the country overall, there was a saying: "As Maine goes, so goes the nation." In November 1936, that became, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont." Indeed, those would be the only 2 States that FDR never won. (Times have changed: Neither of those States have voted for the Republican Presidential nominee since 1988.)

A prankster put up a sign on the Badger's Island Bridge, over the Piscataqua River, connecting Portsmouth, New Hampshire with Kittery, Maine. Intended to be seen by people going to Maine, it read, "You are now leaving the United States."

Let the record show that Thomas did not swing a single State from Landon to Roosevelt. Nor did Lemke, with the possible exception of the other northern New England State, New Hampshire, where FDR got 49.7 percent, Landon got 48.0 percent, Lemke got 2.2 percent, and Thomas wasn't even on the ballot.

The Great Depression wasn't nearly as bad as it was in 1932, but by no means was it over. FDR winning was understandable -- but why by that much?

Well, the American people still did not trust the Republican Party. It had been just 4 years since the depth of the Depression. Plus, there were crazy people on the right wing back then, as there are now; and they made the GOP look not like the bunch of moderates their big names claimed to be, and Landon actually was, but like a bunch who couldn't be trusted with power.

Then there was the media. The major newspaper chains were all Republican-owned, and behind Landon. And in an era when they were the entirety of the media, Landon might have been a great candidate. He was smart, honest, and understood that he served the public, not the other way around. But this was now the era of radio and newsreels. He wasn't well-suited to it. FDR was.

The GOP didn't have anyone else who could beat FDR, either. Most of their big guns who had been elected in the Congressional elections of 1918, '20, '24 and '28 had been beaten in the elections of 1922, '26, '30, '32 and '34.

Finally, credit must be given to FDR: He was the master politician of his era, and his New Deal worked. Not perfectly, of course, but for the people for whom it did work, it was the difference between destitution and a living.

A story FDR liked to tell as he ran for a 2nd term in 1936 was this:

A wealthy man in a fine suit and top hat fell into deep water. He didn't know how to swim, and was on the verge of drowning. Hearing his cries, another man dove into the water, and saved him, as his top hat floated away. The man who had almost drowned regained his breath, and, for a moment, seemed grateful.

Three years later, though, he returned, and denounced his rescuer for not saving his hat, too!

The very rich, and their hired spokesmen, said FDR was trying to "destroy capitalism." Sound familiar? Their successors have said it about every Democratic President since.

Presidential candidates have frequently held rallies close to the election, sometimes in New York, sometimes in their hometowns. FDR, from Hyde Park, in Dutchess County, actually closer to Albany than to Midtown Manhattan, did have a home in Manhattan, so New York, for practical purposes, could be called his hometown. And so he had his close-to-Election Day rally at Madison Square Garden, arguably already, even though it did not use the slogan until well after its 1968 replacement was built, the world's most famous arena. Among other things, he said:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace -- business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that, in it, the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that, in it, these forces met their master!

And so they did.

FDR would be elected to a 3rd term in 1940, and a 4th in 1944, dying in office in 1945. Landon would serve out his term as Governor, return to the oil industry where he had made his money, and never ran for office again. He lived to be 100 years old, dying in 1987. His daughter, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, served Kansas in the U.S. Senate from 1978 to 1997.

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November 3, 1936 was, as all American Election Days are, a Tuesday. Baseball season had ended the month before. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And hockey season wouldn't start for another 2 days. So there were no scores on this historic day. But a sports legend was born on this day: Australian tennis star Roy Emerson.

February 26, 1906: Upton Sinclair Publishes "The Jungle"

February 26, 1906: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is published. It has a great effect on American life -- but not the one its author intended.

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, but, due to his father's alcoholism and inability to hold a job, he grew up in many places. He turned out to be a child genius, and, just days before his 14th birthday, living in Queens, he entered City College of New York. He wrote for local magazines, and made enough money to not only pay his tuition -- CCNY did not yet offer free tuition for City residents -- but, by age 17, to pay his parents' rent.

He graduated from CCNY, but then dropped out of Columbia University School of Law to focus on writing. He published his 1st novel, King Midas, in 1901. By 1904, he had written 4 novels, 3 with a Socialist theme, and Manassas, a story of the American Civil War.

That year, for 7 weeks, he worked undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants to see the working conditions. The result was The Jungle, which exposed those conditions, and the lives of the immigrants working there, many of whom continued to work while sick, because they couldn't afford not to. The novel was serialized in the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason the following year, and published in novel form the year after that.

What Sinclair wanted was to have America see that unregulated capitalism was destroying the lives of its workers, and call upon their government to do something about it. What he got was very different: Most people were appalled not by the working conditions and the living conditions on the South Side of Chicago and its slums, but by the process of the production of food.

It was like reading Moby Dick and moving toward electricity because whale oil is hard to obtain, instead of learning the lesson that when you seek revenge, you should dig two graves. Or reading On the Road, and instead of realizing that "kicks" are temporary, while art is forever, and beauty, friendship and love are what you should really seek, you go out and buy a car and drive out to California. Or reading All the President's Men, and instead of demanding that your government not do things like what the Nixon Administration did in Watergate, believing that all government is corrupt, and you need a "white knight" to fix it all, and turning to Ronald Reagan -- or Donald Trump.

The President then, Theodore Roosevelt, launched an investigation of the meatpacking industry. This led to the Pure Food and Drug Act, which revolutionized food safety. Sinclair wrote that this was not enough, and he considered it a way of buying the meat and meatpacking barons off.

Nevertheless, TR publicly said that a Republican crook is as bad as a Democratic crook. In a 1907 speech, he denounced "malefactors of great wealth," going on to say that there was a great contest between himself and them: "I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country: The people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men, whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable, because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization."

Sinclair didn't give up, ripping one great industry after another with his books: Wall Street in The Moneychangers in 1908, King Coal in 1917, education with The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools in 1924, Oil! in 1927 (which would be adapted into the 2007 film There Will Be Blood), the American justice system in Boston the same year (in the wake of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti), and the auto industry in The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America in 1937 (in the wake of Henry Ford's private armies firing on pro-union demonstrators).

One of the oil barons he detested was Harry Sinclair, who was also a sports mogul, running the Indianapolis-turned-Newark franchise of the Federal League, and breeding horses that, between them, won 3 Kentucky Derbies and 3 Belmont Stakes. He spent 6 months in prison for jury tampering during the Teapot Dome scandal. He and Upton Sinclair were not related.

Nor was either related to Sinclair Lewis, 7 years younger, who spent most of the 1920s publishing similar exposés of American life, and published anti-fascist literature in the 1930s. Sinclair Lewis admired Upton Sinclair, who nonetheless wrote to him and offered a criticism alternately glowing and stinging, but, in my opinion, accurate in both cases:

Everything of yours that I have read is about half and half… Wherever you are writing about the underworld, you are at your best, and when you come up to your own social level or higher, you are no good.

In 1934, with TR's cousin Franklin Roosevelt having become President and implemented the early part of his New Deal, Upton Sinclair left the Socialist Party and joined the Democratic Party, and ran for Governor of California. He called his movement EPIC: End Poverty In California. Although he had no experience in public office, he meant it, and people believed that he meant it.

No one believed it more than the Hollywood studio bosses, all of them conservative Calvin Coolidge-style, FDR-hating Republicans because they were very wealthy. They used the media, including the San Francisco-based empire of William Randolph Hearst (once a Democratic Congressman representing a district in New York City, but now one of the most conservative men in America), to make false propaganda claims, including the idea that a Governor Sinclair would turn California "Communist." They also pressured their employees to vote for the incumbent Republican Governor, Frank Merriam.

Merriam won with 48.9 percent of the vote, the Sinclair's 37.8, and Progressive Party nominee Raymond Haight's 13.0. In popular votes, Merriam won 1,138,000 to Sinclair's 879,000. Of California's 58 Counties, Sinclair won only 6, while Haight won 3.

Because of the 3-way vote, Sinclair didn't top 46 percent in any County, topping out at 45.6 in Contra Costa County, in the East Bay across from San Francisco. He got 42.0 percent in Los Angeles County, and 38.9 percent in San Francisco County (contiguous with the City of San Francisco), 37.7 percent in Alameda County (including Oakland and Berkeley), and 36.6 percent in San Diego -- but didn't win any of those big Counties. Haight's presence on the ballot didn't cost him the election; the Red-baiting media buy did.

In 1951, the year that Sinclair Lewis died, Upton Sinclair wrote, "The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC... I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them."

He died in a nursing home in Bound Brook, Somerset County, New Jersey on November 25, 1968, a few weeks after his 90th birthday. Ironically, Bound Brook was then, and for many years thereafter, the home of the publishing house for the extreme right-wing John Birch Society. He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

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February 26, 1906 was a Monday. Baseball was about to start Spring Training. Football was in the off-season. Basketball and hockey were still all-amateur. There were no games on this historic day. However, the next 2 days saw a challenge for the Stanley Cup, then a "challenge trophy": You won the series, you got the Cup.

The Ottawa Hockey Club, a.k.a. the Silver Seven and forerunners of the original Ottawa Senators (who went out of business in 1934, during Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor), defeated Queen's University of Kingston, Ontario, 16-7 on February 27, and 12-7 on February 8, to retain the Cup.

On March 6 and 8, they defeated Smiths Falls Hockey Club to keep the Cup again. Then they took on the Montreal Wanderers, a bunch of small but tough guys known as "The Little Men of Iron." Featuring future NHL team bosses Art Ross and Lester Patrick on defense, the Wanderers beat Ottawa 9-1 in Montreal on March 14. Ottawa won 9-3 in Ottawa on March 17. But since it was a two-games, total-goals series, Montreal beat Ottawa on aggregated, 12-10, and won the Cup. It was the 1st of 4 times in 5 years that they would win it.