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Throughout the election season of 1912, the future of American constitutional government was up for grabs. Of the four significant candidates vying for the presidency, three had leveled open challenges against the constitutional status quo. “That damned cowboy,” Theodore Roosevelt, was seeking a promise-breaking third term under the banner of the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party after bolting the Republican National Convention. 1 Col. Roosevelt advocated a novel “pure democracy”: a new political settlement that included a more expedient constitutional amendment process; the use of the popular initiative and referendum; and the popular recall of judges and judicial decisions, referring to constitutional limitations on democracy as “fetters.” 2 Woodrow Wilson, who thought that America's foundational texts “read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age,” carried the Democratic nomination and planned on transforming American government. 3 Eugene Debs, an ardent socialist and “Wobbly,” stood atop a platform that called for a convention to rewrite the Constitution and made war on the capitalist system. 4 Only the incumbent president, William Howard Taft, and the rump of the bruised Republican Party defended an “independent judiciary” and a reverence for the Constitution, under which “the United States has grown to be one of the great civilized and civilizing powers of the earth.” 5
What had happened? Never had the state of constitutional government itself met such frustration. In fact, one of the few things that remained above reproach throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century was the Constitution itself. Citizens and their elected representatives had always debated what the document really meant, but, barring a few radicals, the public man ever sought to identify himself and his beliefs as faithful to the framers’ legacy. 6 Given this fundamental agreement, the politically suitable disposition was conservative. The proper statesman was “sane,” “safe,” and “conservative,” and sought to maintain and safeguard traditional rights, whatever those happened to be. 7 By century's end, however, large cracks emerged in this conservative consensus. First populists in the West and South, and then progressives across the nation, asserted that the old forms and strictures of government were no longer adequate to meet the needs of an industrialized economy. Old-school conservatives were flummoxed. “The foundations upon which we builded are questioned,” lamented the venerable statesman, Elihu Root.