On Saturday morning, I was reading about Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign in 1912 and watching archival videos of the 1992 Republican National Convention (RNC). The latter opened with Ronald Reagan’s last convention speech, a victory lap for the man who won the Cold War.
Before sundown, Donald Trump had joined Roosevelt and Reagan as Republican presidents who survived assassination attempts. That will influence the RNC unfolding this week in Milwaukee, the very city where Roosevelt was shot in 1912.
There are deeper echoes still. Trump’s RNC this week has its roots in the conventions of 1912 and 1992, where his positions were argued long beforehand.
In 1912, Roosevelt was a former president, having succeeded William McKinley after his assassination in 1901, and having been re-elected in his own right in 1904. In 1908, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s preferred successor, was elected when Roosevelt declined to run again.
By 1912, though, Roosevelt was disillusioned with Taft’s conservatism and his preference for open trade and commercial interests over Roosevelt’s progressive focus on the working man against the monied class. It is more complicated than that, but those were the main lines of argument when Roosevelt launched a populist challenge to Taft for the Republican nomination.
In a time when party officials controlled the nomination process, Taft’s domination of the Republican apparatus ensured that he would win the nomination. Roosevelt bolted from the Chicago convention, vowing to run as a third-party candidate, which he did for the Progressive party, known as the Bull Moose party.
Trump has done what Roosevelt did not do; he did not need to form his own party, but took over the existing Republican one. And there are further similarities between Roosevelt and Trump.
They both indulge in insults — Roosevelt was not above making fun of Taft for being fat. They both come from privileged families but style themselves as populists with an unusually charismatic following. And the apocalyptic rhetorical style of Trump was matched, in that summer of 1912, by perhaps the most famous line ever spoken at a Republican convention.
“We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” thundered Teddy Roosevelt in Chicago to his fellow Republicans. He repeated the line later that summer to his newly fellow Progressives.
Roosevelt would lose in the fall. The Republican vote split and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected. Wilson carried 40 states, Roosevelt carried six and Taft only two.
While Taft suffered an election loss, he won the party argument. The Republicans would be the party of small government, low taxes and open trade. They would follow the new consensus eventually worked out by Wilson — and later FDR and Harry Truman — of an internationalist foreign policy. Roosevelt was the most attractive candidate in 1912 personally, but he lost the policy argument decisively.
Yet no argument is ever permanently won or lost in politics. At the 1992 RNC in Houston, the embers of 1912 were being stirred up. The Cold War had been won, President George H. W. Bush was running for re-election. He had been riding high after the 1991 Gulf War, but an economic downturn set in and he was paying a political price for violating his no-new-taxes pledge.
Patrick Buchanan, a conservative commentator and former White House aide — for both Richard Nixon and Reagan — launched a primary campaign against Bush. After a surprisingly strong showing (but defeat) in New Hampshire, Buchanan’s campaign fizzled, but it struck a chord.
The themes then are familiar now, as Buchanan inveighed against a “globalist” Bush, the “Brussels bureaucrats (building a) European superstate,” mass immigration and a “new world order” that would cost American treasure and blood abroad.
Buchanan is more refined, learned and coherent than Donald Trump, but he lacked the latter’s celebrity and timing. What Buchanan started in 1991 took 25 years to prevail, but it did in 2016 with Trump’s election. From 1912 to 1992 to 2016, a line — but not a straight line — could be drawn from Roosevelt to Trump.
In a bid for party unity, Buchanan was invited to address the 1992 RNC on the first night. It was expected that no one would much remember what Buchanan said, as the featured speaker that night was the great man himself, the Gipper returning for one last performance, his “goodbye” to America.
“This fellow they have nominated claims that he is the new Thomas Jefferson,” the old man said. “Well, let me tell you something, I knew Thomas Jefferson.”
It was vintage Reagan. Claiming that victory in the Cold War vindicated his foreign policy of peace through strength, he defended the same Republican themes that Taft defended in 1912: smaller government, lower taxes, personal freedom and responsibility. It was an emotional and stirring coda, marked by his sunny optimism and trademark good humour.
“When we see all that rhetorical smoke billowing out from the Democrats,” Reagan said, bringing the house down. “Well, I’d follow the example of their nominee: don’t inhale!”
Buchanan endorsed Bush, and did not highlight his rejection of free trade or the Gulf War. Protectionism and isolationism — “America First” — was the old-but-new-again conservatism that Buchanan advocated. But on that night in Houston, he spoke of a “cultural war,” a new politics of values and a clash between the American people and the elites represented by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Buchanan, too, spoke with humour, but it was more biting, more Trump than Reagan. All the future Trump themes, and some of the Trump style, was there in 1992.
Buchanan’s challenge to Bush in the primaries opened the door in the general election to the third-party challenge of Texas celebrity businessman Ross Perot. In another echo of 1912, Perot split the vote and a Democrat was elected.
On Monday in Milwaukee, Trump appointed his running mate and presumptive successor, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. Vance is much like Buchanan. He too is more refined, more learned and more coherent than Trump, and committed to the same Buchanan priorities.
Vance was born during Reagan’s presidency. Reagan, in his young adult Democrat days, admired FDR. Vance is more likely to look back to Theodore Roosevelt for inspiration.
Roosevelt said it in 1912. Buchanan didn’t say but he meant it in 1992. Trump has much less religious sensibility than either of them, but he means it in almost every speech: “We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord!”
National Post