Will they have a detailed look at the part the Times itself played in creating the Wilson Administration? Wilson himself said that he owed his securing of the Democratic nomination to an earlier editorial by Charles Ransom Miller, then-editor of the New York Times....
November 5, 1912
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
Wilson First, Taft Second
The first and vital object to be accomplished to-day is the election of Woodrow Wilson. It is next in importance that Mr. Taft should lead Mr. Roosevelt in the Electoral and the popular vote. It has for many years been desirable that political power in the Nation should be transferred from the Republicans to the Democrats. The desired transfer has been postponed because the Democratic Party has wandered in strange places, has committed itself to unsafe doctrines under distrusted leaders. That has been cured. The Democracy has returned from its wanderings, it is again a united party, and its candidate, passing in triumph all the tests and challenges of the campaign, stands before the country as a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people. Without misgiving, with entire safety, and to the advantage of the Nation, the Democrats may now be returned to power. The country has made up its mind upon that point. Mr. Wilson will be elected to-day.
It is to the interest of the Nation that the Republican Party should be preserved as an organized, coherent opposition. The public welfare is not served by the collapse of a great party, by the rise of discordant factions in place of a compact organization. It is of great moment, it is of urgent need, that the Republican candidate should come out second in the poll, second, not third, in the Electoral College and in the popular vote. The party will then be in a position to rebuild, to free itself from the influences that have diminished its estate, to hold again the place in the politics and in the affairs of the Nation to which it is entitled by its historic achievements.
More urgent yet is the need that the Progressive Party and its candidates should be put in third place. It would be of ill omen, it would be a disquieting indication of unsound popular judgment, of unsteadiness, and of want of sense and responsibility in the electorate, if so large a part of the people should yield to the appeals of Mr. Roosevelt as to put him second in the polling. The essential part of his programme is the crippling and overthrow of institutions of which we are with good reason most proud, of established parts of our Governmental system which we cannot without the gravest danger permit to be effaced. That Mr. Roosevelt is unsafe in counsel and in policy is proved again by the authoritarian review of his Madison Square Garden speech in which Elihu Root, John G. Milburn, Louis Marshall, and William D. Guthrie show that in his attack upon the courts of this State Mr. Roosevelt totally misapprehended the law and absolutely misstated the facts of the cases, very important cases, upon which he based his arguments. His misstatements were not of negligible detail, but of the very substance of the litigations. Sober-minded men do not need to be warned that a man who blunders in this way with respect to decisions of courts of record, whose appeal for votes rest upon the grossest misapprehension of law and fact, cannot with safety be vested with the highest powers under our Government of laws. We are accustomed to feel and to believe that the American people are enlightened, that their collective judgment is sound. It would be a cause not merely for chagrin but for apprehension if the larger part of the great party that has so long held power should now yield to the persuasions of a man whom in their wisdom and their calmness they should reject.