The muckrakers didn't know much about economics or the Constitution, but they were experts at agitation and propaganda. The totalitarians of the 20th Century learnt much from the yellow journalists of the turn of the century. It was probably the novelty of journalism to many readers, and the changes society was going through that made the impression the muckrakers left on the coutnry so great. And how do you tell people in an age of yellow journalism and growing democratic/majoritarian sentiment that they are better off not having a direct voice in electing their Senators? Lloyd George in Britain was conducting his campaign to limit the powers of the House of Lords at the same time as the campaign for direct election.
The first resolution for direct election of Senators was introduced in 1826. Over the next 85 years there were 197 such resolutions. Starting in 1893 the House started passing them with the necessary 2/3 vote. The Populists supported direct election from 1892, the Democrats from 1900, the Prohibitionists from 1904. Hearst himself submitted such a resolution in 1905 when he was a Congressman, and his publications supported his cause. When the Democrats won big in 1910 and bigger in 1912 passage of the Amendment became inevitable. Even some of the Senators Phillips attacked supported it.
Phillips didn't live to see it, though. In 1911 a socially prominent, but mentally unhinged, Washingtonian who was convinced the writer was persecuting his sister in his novels about fallen women assassinated Phillips.
Roosevelt loved to tell people, businessmen, especially, that he was all that stood between prosperity and ruin, that they must take him and his progressivism or succumb to a socialism that would destroy everything. He always stood sideways on issues, and I think this was his rationalization for his radicalism.
Instead, all he did was legitimize William Jennings Bryan.
Politics are dangerous, and one can never say what might have been. I'll take a shot, wasted as it'll get me:
Had McKinley taken on the anthracite strike, the Panama Canal, and big business (Hanna blamed Morgan and Harriman for the Northern Securities trust bust -- which the very conservative lawyer, Philander Knox, prosecuted), the results would have been the same as Roosevelt achieved, but the expectations would have been radically different. Whereas Roosevelt used those instances as stepping stones, McKinley would have pursued them as mere obstacles. A look at the way McKinley handled the entry to the Spanish War illuminates this: he went reluctantly, but he went on his own terms, and very successfully.
I'm thinking that McKinley would have launched the 20th Century on firmer ground than Roosevelt. Roosevelt, rather, mucked it up (to use his term). He did it by talking Bryan's talk, and going half way there. Modern reactionaries ought find little appealling in the way Roosevelt adopted his opponents' politics.
(Roosevelt had the great fortune of going up against the conservative Parker in 1904; Bryan's people sat out the election, and Roosevelt didn't have to do or say anything radical that would offend his conservative Republican base).
I won't say that Roosevelt's co-option of progressivism and Bryan wasn't successful. I will say that it was unfortunate.
1912 was the product of eleven years of hysteria forced upon the nation, chiefly by the muckrakers, but much facilitated by their president of 1901-1909, and, especially, ex-president thereafter. Roosevelt spent 1910 to 1912 perfecting his radical/conservative posture, tuning his appeal to the fearful and the cautiously fearful who were otherwise afraid of Bryan.
It was up to Taft to uphold the intrepid. Taft from 1910:
The present political situation is a curious one. Indeed, the condition of public opinion is curious. It seems to be feeling the effect of the flood of misrepresentation which manifests itself in a protest against everything and everybody who is not in the forefront crying "Stop thief!"And this one is my fave:
I had a letter the other day from a man who said: "I don't like the tariff bill which was passed and which you signed. I don't like your association with Joe Cannon. I don't like your association with Aldrich. I don't like what you are doing with respect to the magazines and the periodicals and suppressing free speech.* I don't like anything about your administration."
Well, I sat down and dictated the following: "My dear Sir: You are in a bad way."
* a reference to the 2nd class postal rate hike proposalsI do not wonder what would have happened to the nation had Bryan won in 1908. Taft did the nation a tremendous service.