Who was the first presidential candidate to strongly advocate social justice?

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The Greenback Party also nominated Peter Cooper (1876) and Benjamin Butler (with the Anti-Monopoly Party, 1884).

Nineteenth century social reformers tended to find one thing wrong with society (the gold standard, the tariff, monopolies, railroads, landlordism and high rents) and look for one thing to fix it (free coinage of silver, free trade, anti-trust legislation, federal regulation or ownership of railroads, the single tax). Once that was fixed they thought, things would be okay.

Earlier reformers were similar, focusing on the abolition of slavery, prohibition of liquor, the Homestead Act, women's suffrage, communal living, or changes in dress and diet. Whether anybody used the phrase "social justice" in an electoral campaign, I don't know, though Horace Greeley used the expression when he was writing for his newspaper. By the next century, you did have Roosevelt, Wilson, and Debs calling for "social justice."

[ProgressingAmerica]

You kind of took what I was going to type, before I typed it in that last post of yours.

In the earlier eras(as I have come to know and you basically said the same) reformers were mostly one single issue with one single solution. This is where TR comes in and everything changes.

"You want us to say "Theodore Roosevelt" and to condemn him for it."

Actually, I don't. It does me no favors that the facts repeatedly keep pointing where they point, meanwhile it does progressivism huge favors that TR stands on their front line. The problem is, the facts go where they go and I'm not going to compromise on that. Especially not for a progressive. Progressives don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

TR was not a one single issue with a one single solution reformer like the earlier reformers you eluded to.(and some, named) He is in fact the first all-encompassing "big government is the solution to all ills" candidate. And yes, he is the earliest that I can find who spoke openly of social justice - particularly, spoken of frequently.

If I wanted to do myself favors, I could just as easily cover it up at any time and just see no evil hear no evil speak no evil about the first progressive. When I first thought of asking the question, I honestly hoped I would come up with a different answer than TR because as I said, it doesn't do me any favors that he's always the guy. Perhaps I would've been better not to ask.

I try really hard to always rely on the original sources and link to them and show them, because that's what's most important.

[x]

One thing people know about TR is that he was a war hero. Also the teddy bear story. For Republicans, he's long been known as the "good Roosevelt," and gets a pass because he wasn't Wilson or FDR. He also had a winning personality, even when he was wrong, more like his cousin than Wilson who struck people as dour and sour.

The attacks on TR tend to balance out: he was a patriot who wanted a strong America, but he was a progressive and a centralizer; he was a progressive but also an imperialist and (like so many other people in his day) a racist. So people either concentrate on the negative and hate him or figure he couldn't be all bad and sort of like him.

I'm not saying you're wrong about TR. In a lot of ways he was the "missing link" between 19th and 20th century politics. You may be able to see him changing while he was still in office, but when he came back to the US after his travels I think he fell in with people who were much more progressive than he had been as president, and he figured he had to get in front to lead them.

Ego was also a very big part of progressive era politics. TR, FDR, and Wilson all wanted to put their own lasting stamp on American politics. Just like Teddy "wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening," he never saw a parade that he didn't want to lead.

But the great fear in his day was that a revolution was coming. When the Vanderbilts were living in copies of aristocratic French chateaux, it was natural for educated people to wonder whether or not what happened to the French nobles a century before might happen to America's rich. The other possible future they considered was rule by Caesars -- political or military or economic.

Roosevelt and Wilson saw themselves as advocating reform to prevent revolution, so politics wasn't just a matter of right versus left, conservative versus progressive. There was the capitalist status quo. There were the feared socialist revolutionaries. And there were the politicians in between trying to prevent revolution through progressive reforms. We don't look at politics as people back then did, so our interpretation is going to be different.