the last candidate, was at the convention in command of the conservative delegates, who were defeated and ignored by the convention. Reporters who measured popularity by noise noted that the Denver Convention applauded Bryan for eighty-seven minutes, whereas the name of Roosevelt had received only forty-six minutes' applause at Chicago. John W. Kern, of Indiana, was nominated for VicePresident.

Third parties

The minor parties of 1908 presented numerous and unimportant tickets. William Randolph Hearst, a consistent Democratic opponent of Bryan, formed his own Independence Party, and nominated himself for President. The Populist Party had nearly disappeared. "You ask me what we are to do," wrote Thomas E. Watson after he had received the Populist nomination for the presi dency. "Frankly, I don't know. The Democratic Party is chaotic; the Republican Party is becoming so; the Populist Party is dead, and we are all at sea." A handful of former Populists, still clinging to a hope of a union of agricultural and industrial discontent, tried to form a new American Party, and nominated Wharton Barker for the presidency, but the American Party "died a-borning," wrote its vicepresidential candidate, "Calamity" Weller, of Iowa. “The only difficulty was we could not raise money enough to put it on its feet and keep it there until it could run the race with decent and enticing respectability."

The Socialists renominated Eugene V. Debs, but ran an unimportant third in the canvass, with 421,000 votes. The effort of its leaders to attract the vote of organized labor was persistent. The New York Call, founded as a daily May 30, 1908, with this in view, interpreted the news of the day from a Socialist slant. The Western Federation of Miners had been captured by the Socialist leaders, but organized labor in general followed the course urged by Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, which was to support their friends, punish their enemies, and keep out of politics as a body.

The point over which labor was fighting in 1908 was the

attitude of the courts toward strikes. For fifteen years, since Debs was jailed for contempt in the Pull- Labor and man strike of 1893, the practice had increased politics of forbidding, by injunction, acts that the unions regarded as necessary. The sympathetic strike, boycott, and interference with business by picketing and intimidation, were at various times forbidden by this practice, and violators of the injunctions, imprisoned for contempt of court, found themselves with slight legal redress. Opposition to what the unions described as government by injunction pervaded the ranks of organized labor. Gompers himself was involved in contempt proceedings with the Supreme Court, arising from the Buck Stove and Range Case. At Chicago he appeared before the Republican Committee on Platform, seeking an anti-injunction plank, and was rebuffed. At Denver he was better treated, and when the Democratic Party included a protest against injunctions in its platform, Gompers came out in support of Bryan and the Democratic ticket, urging labor to follow him and reward its friends, thus beginning a sort of alliance with the Democratic Party that lasted until the World War.

The presidential canvass of 1908 was carried out in good temper so far as the chief candidates were concerned. Bryan, rehabilitated by Roosevelt's support of many of his policies, contested with Taft as to which leader and party might the better carry out the program upon which both ostensibly agreed. "The time is ripe," he wrote, "for an appeal to the moral sense of the nation; the time is ripe for the arraignment of the plutocratic tendencies of the Republican Party before the bar of public conscience; and the Democratic Party was never in better position than now to make this appeal."

No episode of the canvass was as sharp in a personal way as Roosevelt's denunciation of Parker in 1904. An attempt was made to discredit Taft as a Unitarian, which was rebuked by a letter from Roosevelt upon religion and politics that silenced those who were trying to inject denominational theology into the campaign. An attempt to make

political capital out of a casual remark by Taft with reference to General Grant was equally unsuccessful. A forged letter bearing the signature of Grover Cleveland, and announcing his preference for Taft over Bryan, aroused a ripple of interest, but had no result. Only Hearst succeeded in diverting public attention to irrelevant matters.

In the middle of September, while Hearst was campaigning for himself as a candidate of the Independence Party, he read into his speeches letters that some one had stolen from the files of the Standard Oil Company. However he got them, they cut into both great parties alike. Haskell, the Oklahoma member of the Democratic National Committee and its treasurer, was shown to have had such business relations with the Standard Oil Company as to prevent his further use by a party that denounced monopoly. J. B. Foraker, of Ohio, one of the Stalwart Republican contestants for the nomination, was similarly caught in the exposure. Foraker maintained with angry insistence the correctness of his relation, and it was a commonplace that he had never even pretended to desire Government control over business; but he, too, speedily retired from public life. The public temper that the muckrakers had produced and that the Roosevelt attacks upon the habits of business had intensified, was dominant in both parties. Whether voting for Taft or Bryan, the bulk of the voters desired a further extension of the policies of Government control.

of Taft

Taft and Sherman were chosen in an election that revealed an unusual amount of independent voting. DemoElection cratic governors were elected in four of the States that the Republican ticket carried for the presidency. The signs indicated that neither party organization retained its usual control over the loyalty of its members. Only the "Solid South" remained thoroughly regular. Here the process of disfranchising the negro by constitutional amendment was brought near to completion when Georgia, in October, 1908, adopted a suffrage amendment establishing a new educational qualification for the franchise that barred most negroes. The Democratic Party

continued in complete control of the Southern vote. Such political debates as there were were restricted to the primaries of that party. On election day the outcome was known in advance, and only a handful of voters cast their ballots.

The main issue in the election was the relative responsibility of Taft or Bryan.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The autobiographical writings of Foraker, Roosevelt, La Follette, and Mrs. Taft throw considerable light upon the period 1905-10, which remains, withal, without much source material apart from the current periodical literature, the usual Government reports, and the Congressional Record.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE PARTY PLEDGE

"NEVER before in our time has the entry of a new President into office marked so slight a break politically between the present and the past," said the New York Tribune, as it commented upon the installation of Judge Taft on March 4, 1909. The new Administration was regarded as a continuation of the old, and Taft in his inaugural frankly accepted the duty of upholding the policies of Roosevelt. He pledged himself to bring forward as soon as possible amendments to the Sherman Act for the improvement of public control over trusts, and officially announced his intention to call the Sixty-First Congress -the eighth consecutive Republican Congress -in an early special session to revise the tariff. There was no denunciation in his message, but through it there ran the belief that the work ahead would call for creative and constructive legislation of the highest order.

of Roosevelt

Roosevelt left Washington for Oyster Bay immediately after the inaugural ceremony, creating a new precedent Departure by not returning to the White House with his successor. The ceremonies themselves, held in the Senate Chamber because of a heavy storm, were of necessity simple in character, and the throngs of visitors and attendant governors with their trains found their opportunities for display curtailed. The last days of the preceding Administration had been turbulent, with Congress indignant at Roosevelt, and with an unseemly discussion of governmental practices emphasizing the fact that for the time being Roosevelt's hold over the politicians of his party had been broken. There was a new temper in Washington politics from the date of the inauguration, while Colonel Roosevelt in Oyster Bay kept his hands off the policies of Taft, and tested the camping outfit with which he proposed