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1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs-The Election that Changed the Country. By James Chace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. 323 pp.
Author James Chace, a professor of government and public law and international journal editor, contends that "the year 1912 constitutes a defining moment in American history" (p. 6), as that year's presidential campaign "tackled the central question of America's exceptional destiny" (p. 8). Dividing the text into four parts, Chace portrays the central participants in the 1912 election and its aftermath, including President William Howard Taft, former President Theodore Roosevelt, New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist leader Eugene Debs. The information in the volume emanates from newspaper accounts as well as from secondary sources.
Part I depicts each of the aforementioned candidates before the election began. Theodore Roosevelt and one of his sons had ventured on a safari to British East Africa for a year. Now back in the States in 1910, Roosevelt found it harder to stay out of politics with each passing month. His successor, Republican William Howard Taft, found things tough going during his first two years in office, culminating in the retaking of the House of Representatives by the Democrats in the midterm congressional elections of 1910. Woodrow Wilson, who had left the Princeton University presidency to assume the governorship of New Jersey, quickly built a national reputation based on his highly successful...