Word: wilsone
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...Election Day, Nov. 5, was only two months off when the Progressives went forth to proselytize. Taft had already dropped from sight, telling the newspapers that he planned to take a long vacation and would stand on his record. It was said that the ideological difference between Roosevelt and Wilson was the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but on one fundamental they sharply disagreed. Wilson was a states'-rights man who contended that the history of liberty was a history of limiting the power of the national government. Roosevelt was a confirmed nationalist, convinced that the history of social progress...
...competition. The tariff had been created decades earlier to raise revenue (income tax being a thing of the future) and to nurture a stripling American manufacturing establishment. As the manufacturers prospered, they convinced their captives in Congress that ever thicker blankets of protection were needed to preserve American jobs. Wilson, calling the tariff "stiff and stupid," promised an immediate revision. Roosevelt, arguing that a speedy change would disrupt the economy, proposed a permanent nonpartisan commission of experts able to make impartial recommendations for more gradual reform...
...members--accomplished, public-spirited business leaders--would study a company's affairs, require change when there were signs of monopoly and stamp a company "approved" when all was in order. Once approved, the company could operate without fear of prosecution under the country's confusing antitrust law. To Wilson, the corporations commission was a dangerous merger of business and government, sure to enable Big Business to regulate the regulators. Even Taft roused himself to condemn it as "the most monstrous monopoly of power in the history of the world...
While Taft vacationed and Wilson gave as few speeches as possible, Roosevelt raced up the East Coast and down, across the South and into the Midwest. In Milwaukee, Wis., on Oct. 14, as he stood in an open car to salute a cheering crowd, a man a few feet away drew a revolver and fired, hitting Roosevelt in the chest and knocking him back into the car seat...
Roosevelt had set sail for South America in the fall of 1913, not quite a year after his failed attempt to regain the presidency. As a third-party candidate vying for a third term, he had split the Republican vote, putting a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, in the White House for the first time in 16 years. After the election, Roosevelt found himself a pariah, ridiculed by his enemies and hated by many of his old Republican friends and backers. Hunkered down at Sagamore Hill, his secluded home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., he fought to stave off depression and despair...