Many believed, including Wilson, that they had found just such a figure in Theodore Roosevelt. More than a popular leader, he was the designated idol of a true leadership cult. William Allen White, the famed progressive writer, recalled in 1934 that he'd been "a young arrogant protagonist of the divine rule of the plutocracy" until Roosevelt "shattered the foundations of my political ideals. As they crumbled then and there, politically, I put his heel on my neck and I became his man."14 Roosevelt was the first to translate "L'etat, c'est moi" into the American argot, often claiming that the nation's sovereignty was indistinguishable from his own august personage. As president, he regularly exceeded the bounds of his traditional and legal powers, doing his will first and waiting (or not) for the courts and the legislatures to catch up.
This captured in small relief the basic difference between Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, bitter rivals and the only two proudly progressive presidents of the Progressive Era. These were very different men with very similar ideas. Roosevelt was a great actor upon the world stage; Wilson saw himself more as a director. Roosevelt was the "bull moose" who charged into any problem; Wilson was the "schoolmaster" who first drew up a lesson plan. One wanted to lead a band of brothers, the other a graduate seminar. But if the roles they played were different, the moral of the story was the same. While Wilson wrote treatises explaining why Americans should abandon their "blind devotion" to the Constitution, Teddy was rough-riding all over the document, doing what he pleased and giving bellicose speeches about how the courts had sided against "popular rights" and were "lagging behind" the new realities. Indeed, William Howard Taft — Roosevelt's honorable yet overwhelmed successor in the White House — might not have chosen to run for reelection, hence denying Roosevelt the Republican nomination, had he not been convinced that Roosevelt's "impatience with the delay of the law" made him "not unlike Napoleon."15
There were many fault lines running through Progressivism. On one side, there were the likes of John Dewey and Jane Addams, who were more socialistic and academic in their approach to politics and policy. On the other were the nationalists who appealed more directly to patriotism and militarism. Wilson and Roosevelt more or less represented the two sides. In much the same way national socialists often split into two camps emphasizing either nationalism or socialism, some progressives concentrated on social reform while others were more concerned with American "greatness."
One might also put it that Roosevelt reflected the masculine side of Progressivism — the daddy party — while Wilson represented the movement's maternal side. Roosevelt certainly trumpeted the "manly virtues" at every opportunity. He wanted a ruling elite drawn from a (metaphorical) warrior caste that embraced the "strenuous life," a meritocracy of vigor dedicated to defeating the decadence of "soft living." Wilson's ruling elite would be drawn from the ranks of "disinterested" technocrats, bureaucrats, and social workers who understood the root causes of social decay.
Few progressives saw these as opposing values. There was no inherent trade-off between militant nationalism and progressive reform; rather, they complemented each other (a similar complementarity existed between the different branches of progressive eugenicists, as we'll see). Consider, for example, Senator Albert J. Beveridge, the most important progressive in the U.S. Senate during the first decade of the twentieth century. When Upton Sinclair's Jungle exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry, it was Beveridge who led the fight for reform, sponsoring the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. He shepherded the fights against child labor and in favor of the eight-hour workday. He was perhaps Teddy Roosevelt's chief senatorial ally in the progressive insurgency against the "conservative" wing of the Republican Party. He was the bane of special interests, railroad magnates, and trusts and the friend of reformers, conservationists, and moderns everywhere. And he was a thoroughly bloodthirsty imperialist. "The opposition tells us we ought not to rule a people without their consent. I answer, the rule of liberty, that all just governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government."16 Indeed, the progressives in Congress actively supported or went along with virtually every major military excursion of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. Under Wilson, they were decidedly more hawkish than the White House. All the while it fell to the conservatives in Congress to fight expenditures on such things as the "big navy," the cornerstone of the imperial project. Indeed, it must be understood that imperialism was as central to Progressivism as efforts to clean up the food supply or make factories safe.17
The 1912 election boiled down to a national referendum on the sort of Progressivism America wanted, or at least the sort of Progressivism it would get. The beleaguered incumbent, William Howard Taft, had never wanted to be president. His real dream — which he later accomplished — was to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. Taft meant it when he said he was the conservative in the race. He was a conservative liberal — among the last of a dying breed. He believed classical liberalism — or his fairly worldly version of it — needed to be defended against ideologues who would read their own will into the law.
Today the issues in the 1912 campaign seem narrow and distant. Wilson championed the "New Freedom," which included what he called the "second struggle for emancipation" — this time from the trusts and big corporations. Roosevelt campaigned on the "New Nationalism," which took a different view of corporations. Teddy, the famous trustbuster, had resigned himself to "bigness" and now believed the state should use the trusts for its own purposes rather than engage in an endless and fruitless battle to break them up. "The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed," he explained. "The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare." Teddy's New Nationalism was equal parts nationalism and socialism. "The New Nationalism," Roosevelt proclaimed, "rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." This sort of rhetoric conjured fears among classical liberals (again, increasingly called conservatives) that Teddy would ride roughshod over American liberties. "Where will it all end?" asked the liberal editor of the New York World about the rush to centralize government power. "Despotism? Caesarism?"18
Huey Long famously said — or allegedly famously said — that if fascism ever came to America it would be called "Americanism." It's interesting, then, that this is the name Teddy Roosevelt gave to his new ideology. Not everyone was blind to this distressing side of Roosevelt's personality. The America "that Roosevelt dreamed of was always a sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regimented within," declared H. L. Mencken. Deriding Roosevelt as a "Tammany Nietzsche" who'd converted to the "religion of militarists," Mencken scored him for stressing "the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft pedal upon the duty of the state to the citizen."19