Word: rooseveltism
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...Roosevelt's odds of unhorsing an incumbent President were long, but not as long as they would have been in previous election years, when nominees were chosen by a handful of bosses and rubber-stamped at state party caucuses. In 1912 a dozen states were letting voters do the choosing in primaries, a political innovation just beginning to catch on. If T.R. could win big in the primaries, he could present himself as the people's choice and Taft as the creature of the bosses...
Collectively, the primaries gave T.R. a shot at 362 votes, and he stunned the party by walking off with 278 of them. Taft finished a distant second, with 48. But in the 36 states without primaries, Roosevelt was outflanked by the bosses. In June, as delegates headed to Chicago for the national convention, Taft's men boasted that their candidate had 557 votes--17 more than he needed for the nomination. T.R. could see that his primary delegates plus delegates from renegade factions elsewhere had left him about 70 votes short. His aides noisily challenged the legitimacy of scores...
...bolt spared Roosevelt the humiliation of losing to Taft. It also kept his candidacy alive on a brand-new ticket of his own creation, the National Progressive Party, better known as the Bull Moose Party, a nickname that came from the answer T.R. had given when someone in a crowd yelled out to ask how he felt. "Like a bull moose," he yelled back...
...brief for a strong Federal Government, the Progressive platform was so far ahead of its time on many points (Social Security and the minimum wage, for example) that it would take a generation and another Roosevelt, T.R.'s fifth cousin Franklin, to bring them into being. In hopes of protecting the investing public from swindlers, the Progressives called for federal regulation of stock offerings and fuller disclosure of corporate financial transactions, ideas that found their way into the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission...
During his presidency, a time when corporations were growing ever larger, Roosevelt operated on the principle that the Federal Government was the only institution strong enough to combat their Darwinian tendency to crush competitors and maximize profits by keeping wages low and prices high. In 1912 he was even more adamant...