James Chace (1931–2004)
Author of 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs--The Election that Changed the Country
About the Author
James Chace is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law at Bard College. The former managing editor of Foreign Affairs and editor of World Policy Journal, he is the author of eight previous books
Image credit: Photograph by Enrico Ferorelli
Works by James Chace
1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs--The Election that Changed the Country (2004) 406 copies, 13 reviews
Associated Works
What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (1999) — Contributor — 1,807 copies, 25 reviews
What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2001) — Contributor — 1,039 copies, 11 reviews
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Autumn 1992 (1992) — Co-Author "The United States, the U.N., and Korea" — 16 copies
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Spring 1998 (1998) — Author "Bismark's Empire: Stillborn" — 15 copies
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Spring 1997 (1997) — Author "The Day the Cold War Started" — 13 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Chace, James
- Legal name
- Chace, James Clarke
- Birthdate
- 1931-10-16
- Date of death
- 2004-10-08
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Fall River, Massachusetts
- Place of death
- Paris, France
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
- Education
- Harvard University
- Occupations
- historian
- Relationships
- Valentine, Jean (spouse)
Members
Reviews
Lists
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 11
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 639
- Popularity
- #39,445
- Rating
- 3.5
- Reviews
- 18
- ISBNs
- 19
- Languages
- 2
- Favorited
- 1
When the election was over Wilson took the presidency. He became the only Democrat to serve as president between 1892 and 1932.
The Republicans, after owning the presidency for the past twenty years, were divided. Roosevelt, known to all as TR, had made his mark as president with a progressive agenda. He was disappointed that his hand-picked successor Taft had let the conservative Republican Congress run things. Roosevelt felt he could not in good conscience support Taft for a second term and threw his own hat in the ring.
When Taft outmaneuvered TR for the nomination at the Republican convention Roosevelt struck out on his own and formed the Progressive Party. With TR as it's presidential candidate, it became better known as the Bull Moose party.
Eugene Debs meanwhile, was the perennial candidate for the Socialist Party. But he was also a well respected labor leader and political activist. His candidacy rose in the wave of popularity for the progressive ideas he had long championed. Unfortunately for him, Roosevelt and Wilson took many of his ideas and incorporated them into their own platforms.
In 1912 author James Chace spends as much time on the biographies of the four candidates as he does on the presidential race. Thus, with five story threads to cover in less than 300 pages the book is more atmospheric than it is thorough. He succeeds mostly in giving a good sense of who the four candidates were.
Wilson and Roosevelt play the lead roles in the book. Wilson rose from the presidency of Princeton to the presidency of the United States. Much of his success came when he turned on the political bosses who had supported his run for the governorship of New Jersey. That turn solidified Wilson’s progressive credentials, so important to the 1912 campaign. Still, it took 46 rounds of voting for him to win the nomination at the Democratic convention.
Wilson depended on a “Southern strategy” to get and keep the White House. As a southerner himself he believed in the separation of the races. African Americans saw him as a white supremacist, and he showed them to be right by bringing Jim Crow rules into Federal jobs. He was not particularly fond of immigrants from Eastern Europe either. That issue caused him problems during the 1912 campaign, when he was forced to disown some of his documented statements on immigration.
TR had been unable to see Taft’s presidency as anything other than a poor reflection on him and a threat to his legacy. This blinded him to the potential for working with Taft to put himself back into the Republican nominee role. Instead TR antagonised the President, and forced Taft to run against him for the nomination.
Taft, you see, had never wanted to be president to begin with, being pushed into it by Roosevelt and his ambitious wife. After he lost the presidency in 1912 he finally got his wish to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was nominated to the post by President Harding in 1921. Taft is the only person to have ever been President and Chief Justice.
It is Debs who comes off as the most “modern” of the four. It's his progressive agenda that finally flourished under FDR during the Great Depression. Sadly, Debs didn’t live to see it.
The first decades of the twentieth century in America are a fascinating time. So much change was in the air. 1912 works best as a summary of the four men and their presidential race. It doesn’t go far beyond the summary level to put the race into the context of those times. If you are interested in the timeframe, or in presidential politics, it is a good starting point, but for me it’s a Two Star ⭐⭐ read.… (more)