From January 23 to June 4, 1912, delegates to the 1912 Republican National Convention were selected through a series of primaries, caucuses, and conventions to determine the party's nominee for president in the 1912 election. Incumbent president William Howard Taft was chosen over former president Theodore Roosevelt. Taft's victory at the national convention precipitated a fissure in the Republican Party, with Roosevelt standing for the presidency as the candidate of an independent Progressive Party, and the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson over the divided Republicans.
For the first time, a large number of delegates were selected through direct primary elections rather than local or state party conventions. Primary elections were a progressive reform supported by Roosevelt and his allies, and the primaries were largely dominated by Roosevelt or Robert M. La Follette, a fellow progressive who entered the race early. However, President Taft was equally dominant under the traditional caucus and convention systems, where executive patronage power could be leveraged in his favor and party bosses were able to maneuver delegations towards him.
At the conclusion of the delegation selection process, Roosevelt had won 411 instructed delegates, Taft had 201, and 254 were contested between the two candidates. Of the remaining delegates, 46 were pledged to the minor candidates Albert B. Cummins and Robert M. La Follette and 166 were uninstructed. In the end, Taft won the vast majority of the party conventions, delivering him a working majority outright, and many Roosevelt supporters abstained from voting at the convention before forming their own party.
Background 1908 presidential election
In 1908, popular incumbent president Theodore Roosevelt declined entreaties to seek another term in office, keeping to a spontaneous pledge he made upon securing re-election in 1904. His initial choice for a successor was Secretary of State Elihu Root, but Root's career as a corporate attorney had rendered him unpalatable to progressives, and he declined to seek the presidency. Instead, Roosevelt endorsed Secretary of War William Howard Taft. With Roosevelt's support and steadfast refusal to accept the nomination himself, Taft easily won the Republican nomination and the general election over William Jennings Bryan. Roosevelt, after privately expressing some skepticism over Taft's decision not to retain his cabinet officers, departed for an African safari and European tour which kept him overseas into 1910, at least in part to give Taft latitude to operate politically.
Roosevelt's return trip from Khartoum brought him international as well as domestic prestige. He was fêted at the leading European courts, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for his mediation of the Treaty of Portsmouth, and delivered a series of lectures at leading European institutions, including his famous "man in the arena" speech at the Sorbonne. The New York Times wrote, "No foreign ruler or man of eminence could have aroused more universal attention, received a warmer welcome, or achieved greater popularity among every class of society." He returned to the United States on June 18, 1910.
Party split Payne-Aldrich tariff
As part of the 1908 platform, the party pledged itself to "tariff revision," which nearly all observers took to mean a reduction in the record-high rates under the Dingley Tariff of 1898. Instead, Senator Nelson Aldrich and Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon worked to pass the Payne-Aldrich tariff, which reduced rates on some imports but raised them on most. Robert M. La Follette and Jonathan P. Dolliver, both members of the progressive faction, led the opposition to the tariff legislation in the U.S. Senate. Taft, who studied under William Graham Sumner in college, opposed high tariffs. He stated that Aldrich was "ready to sacrifice the party" and told La Follette that he would veto the legislation, but later gave his support to the legislation after meetings with Aldrich and Cannon. He signed the bill into law on August 5, 1909.
Taft, unlike his predecessor, refused to interfere with legislation through executive leverage, and his efforts at mediation between progressives and conservatives failed. Seizing on the plain meaning of "revision" in the 1908 platform, Aldrich questioned, "Where did we ever make the statement that we would revise the tariff downward?" Though Taft had been a bystander in the tariff's passage, he defended it in a speaking tour soon after its passage into law. He said, "On the whole... I think the Payne bill is the best bill that the Republican Party ever passed."
Pinchot-Ballinger controversy
One of the cabinet secretaries not retained by the Taft administration was James R. Garfield, a progressive and close advisor to Roosevelt. He was replaced by commissioner of the General Land Office Richard Ballinger. Within weeks of taking office, Ballinger privatized three million acres of federally preserved land, a reversal of Roosevelt's aggressive conservation policies. Ballinger made a purely legalistic argument for the reversal, claiming that requisite data and congressional approval must be secured before public seizure of any land. Taft backed Ballinger in his insistence that conservation could only be pursued "on the basis of law."
Ballinger's chief critic was his own subordinate, head of the United States Forestry Service Gifford Pinchot, who had overseen Roosevelt's conservation efforts from that office and had become Roosevelt's close personal friend. The Pinchot-Ballinger controversy soon became a proxy for several latent political conflicts—progressives versus conservatives, corporate interests versus public rights, East versus West—and consequently Pinchot's cause became the opening volley in the 1912 campaign to defeat Taft. In August 1909, both men spoke at the National Irrigation Conference in Spokane. Pinchot "threw down the gauntlet" by stating "unequivocally" that a national hydropower trust was "in the process of formation," aided by "strict construction" of the law, which inevitably championed "the great interests as against the people." Ballinger, under attack from Pinchot and the progressive press, merely recited a "routine dissertation on public-land matters." He was the only speaker not to accept questions, which drew an open rebuke from California governor George Pardee.
Immediately after his Spokane speech, Pinchot took his case directly to Taft, claiming that waterpower interests had begun an immense land grab in Montana. Soon after, Pinchot and regional forestry official Louis Glavis additionally advised Taft that Ballinger had, as commissioner, obstructed antitrust investigations into a Seattle developer who later became his legal client. In September, Taft rejected their findings and publicly exonerated Ballinger of wrong-doing and criticized Glavis's zeal. In January 1910, Pinchot took the case public in an open letter to Dolliver, after which Taft promptly fired him for insubordination.
Still in Africa, Roosevelt declined to publicly comment but privately wrote Pinchot, "I cannot believe it. I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered." Separately, he wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that he would "say nothing about politics until I have been home long enough to know the situation" and that he believed the party "must renominate" Taft. Nevertheless, public speculation mounted. Dolliver said, "With Pinchot knocked out and Aldrich put in command, I think you can hear a roar in East Africa."
Pinchot met Roosevelt at Porto Maurizio on the latter's return journey through Europe, where he shared his and others' criticisms of the Taft administration. Roosevelt then wrote to Lodge of his impression that the administration had "completely twisted round the policies I advocated and acted upon."
Through the spring of 1910, as Roosevelt made his return from Europe, Congress held hearings into Taft's handling of the controversy.
Joseph Gurney Cannon Taft personally disliked Cannon and discussed the idea of removing him from the speakership with Roosevelt shortly before ascending to the presidency. The declining Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives meant that the progressive faction of the Republicans could challenge Cannon by allying with the Democrats. Twelve Republican representatives refused to vote for Cannon in the 1909 speaker election. Cannon removed his opponents from committee posts and Taft declined to object to these actions.
On August 5, 1909, Cannon announced the selection for the permanent committees. This selection removed progressives Charles N. Fowler, Augustus P. Gardner, and Henry Allen Cooper from their positions as committee chairs. This produced a progressive backlash and progressives organized candidates to primary Republican incumbents who supported Cannon and the Payne-Aldrich tariff.
A poll by the Chicago Tribune in late 1909 showed that 80% of newspaper editors west of the Allegheny Mountains wanted Cannon removed. Lodge wrote to Roosevelt in November stating that there was an understanding that Cannon would not be reelected speaker of the 62nd United States Congress. Taft asked Knox to suggest in "certain Senatorial and other quarters" that this was the best time for Cannon to retire on his own volition. In 1910, a proposal by Representative George W. Norris to greatly reduce the power of the speaker was approved by a vote of 191 to 156, with 46 Republicans in support. Cannon did not resign and a motion of dismissal by Representative Albert S. Burleson failed. Cannon was replaced in Republican leadership by James Robert Mann as Minority Leader after the 1910 election.
1910 elections
Taft gave a speech in Winona, Minnesota to defend Representative James A. Tawney and the Payne-Aldrich tariff. Historian George E. Mowry wrote that this speech as "a major milestone in the alienation of progressive Republican sentiment from the Taft administration". The backlash to this speech and Taft's tour led to Lodge to write to Roosevelt about his concerns of La Follette and Cummins tearing the party apart. However, Taft was unaware of the internal disputes as he was surrounded by local leaders and wrote that his tour achieved everything he wanted in a letter to Secretary of State Philander C. Knox. Taft later told Attorney General George W. Wickersham that he may have been mistaken in defending Aldrich.
Conservative and pro-Taft incumbents suffered multiple losses in the 1910 elections. Hiram Johnson was elected as governor of California, La Follette defeated his conservative primary opponent, and Miles Poindexter was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Roosevelt's western trip and New Nationalism
In advance of the New York convention, Roosevelt embarked on a western tour, ostensibly as an independent commentator for The Outlook. Some in the press already treated this as the start of a presidential campaign. "It is incredible that there should remain a single American citizen who does not see that Theodore Roosevelt has undertaken a campaign for the presidential nomination in 1912," wrote the New York Sun. Speaking in Denver on August 29, Roosevelt delivered one of his first political speeches since leaving office, denouncing the Lochner v. New York decision and accusing the Supreme Court of favoring corporations over "popular rights."