True. The 1912 election is a centerpiece in history classes, but while the total number of votes increased from 1908, the percentage of voter turnout actually went down. If the statistics are right, a higher percentage of the population even turned out in 1904.
Of course the muckrakers and yellow journalists impacted the politics, but I just don't see it as defining of politics the way you do. The MSM of the day far more spoke to the rising middle class than to tenements, disease, and anarchists.
Certainly the prestige press like the Times wrote for the middle class, not for tenement dwellers and anarchists, but the situation may have been like today's: the people who really influence politics are elites and activists and those who are intensely interested in things that the general public isn't. I'm definitely no expert on the period, but my understanding is that leaders like Roosevelt and Wilson and intellectuals like Brooks Adams were very much captured by visions of ancient Rome and the French Revolution - plutocracy, decadence and anarchy.
To anxious patricians and professors, add the many religious believers inspired by the social gospel, and young intellectuals and social workers. Add to that the many businessmen who were somehow taken with TR's progressive movement. It wasn't a mass movement of the people who put Roosevelt and then Wilson in the White House, but once there, they were able to act on what they and others had been thinking and talking about.
I suspect people voted for Roosevelt and Wilson just because they considered them to be the rightful Republican and Democrat nominees (even when TR was running as a Progressive), but I have to wonder about the "drip-drip-drip" effect. People weren't crying out for reform, but if they heard about the Bradley Martin's decadent ball, or the Jungle or The Shame of the Cities or the Triangle Shirtwaist fire it might have made them more favorable to notions of reform. Not "the people," but enough people to affect the thinking of the day.
In my research of the 1907-1913 period, I read the NYTimes editions from every day (literally) and surveyed the Washington Star across the same. I also surveyed many of the major progressive periodicals, such as McClures, American Magazine, Collier's Pearson's and Scribner's, among others, as well as some of the more mainstream publications such as Munsey's or the Saturday Evening Post.
That is very commendable. Keep us informed as your work progresses.
No doubt the progressive extremes believed in their crusades. For Wilson, it was all just a continuation of their thrice-losing candidate, WJ Bryan, only Wilson got lucky w/ the TR-Taft split. So the Democratic agenda was aligned with that of the progressives, certainly, and there’s a good chunk of the electorate. Yes, it was there, but it was not the dominant perspective, as seen by the prior elections going back to Cleveland (not a radical). The progressive age was a moment, not an enduring movement that without FDR’s depression would be but an ongoing leftist sideshow, with many components enacted into law but without the pervasive leftism. Taft’s take on the incoming Wilson presidency was dead on: “I hope he doesn’t try to out-Herod Herod.” Oh, well.
As for TR, I get that he bought in to his own rhetoric, but he did so like a used car salesman, not a true believer. He saw political opportunity and seized it, knowing that his one chance was to hype the outrage and scare voters to his side. Roosevelt’s core problem was that he had to destroy Lafollette in order to advance the Bull Moose, which he did it by outrunning Lafollette to the left. At every opportunity he scaled up the outrage, something you can track in his rhetoric from 1910 at Osawotomie onward to 1912, which ended with his ludicrous “Armageddon” speech.
TR knew it, too. After the 1912 election, he wrote to Pinchot (a useful idiot), “Perhaps we keyed our note very high, probably too high” and admitted that voters weren’t convinced that progressives “were not engaged in an assault on property, or in wild and foolish radicalism.”
Perhaps there’s something to admire in TR’s political gaming, but I don’t see it. I see it more like another entirely cynical, self-serving politician, Bill Clinton. (And, yes, I did just compare TR to Clinton.)
Btw, glad you mentioned The Jungle and Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. I’m not as familiar with reactions to Bradley Martin’s ball or The Shame of the Cities, but I do know that the public reaction to The Jungle and the fire was not aligned with progressivism as much as straight reactionary fear.
The Jungle scared the white middle class because they were horrified at the idea that a black man had fallen into and had been chopped up in their food supply (a scene included in the periodical but not the published version, and one deliberately designed to provoke outrage) and the overriding concern for the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was to put municipal limits on the height of buildings, not labor reform. Only Washington DC (Philly was slow to rescind it) has maintained height restrictions that were placed on buildings in cities across the nation following the fire.
As always, our leftists historians read too much into their own validations and confirmation bias and miss these larger contemporaneous meanings.
Your thoughts are, as ever, very much appreciated, btw.