Evidently not, since it did not successfully emerge in Rusia until the 1917 Revolution. Had there been no Great War, or no American participation in it, would Communism have been stillborn? But Roosevelt certainly had many on his coat-tails attracted to the Labour and Socialist movements then active in the U.S.
I'd give Taft far greater marks on that, for he stood for constitutional government....
Socialist leader Eugene Debs backed Taft, who Debs saw as being defeatable. Roosevelt undermined those whose support might have gone to the Socialists, and thereby weakened the Socialist cause.
Socialist leader Eugene Debs backed Taft...Perhaps as a political manouver, and I don't know anything about it. As a philosophy, forget it. In fact, many of Debs' closest advisers helped prepare the Bull Moose platform. Debs took almost 900,000 votes that year.