Beginning with former president Theodore Roosevelt’s return in 1910 from his African safari, Chace brilliantly unfolds a dazzling political circus that featured four extraordinary candidates. When Roosevelt failed to defeat his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican nomination, he ran as a radical reformer on the Bull Moose ticket. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson, the ex-president of Princeton, astonished everyone by seizing the Democratic nomination from the bosses who had made him New Jersey’s governor. Most revealing of the reformist spirit sweeping the land was the charismatic socialist Eugene Debs, who polled an unprecedented one million votes. Wilson’s “accidental” election had lasting impact on America and the world. The broken friendship between Taft and TR inflicted wounds on the Republican Party that have never healed, and the party passed into the hands of a conservative ascendancy that reached its fullness under Reagan and George W. Bush. Wilson’s victory imbued the Democratic Party with a progressive idealism later incarnated in FDR, Truman, and LBJ. 1912 changed America.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Republican Party stood at the brink of an internal civil war. After a devastating financial crisis, furious voters sent a new breed of politician to Washington. These young Republican firebrands, led by "Fighting Bob" La Follette of Wisconsin, vowed to overthrow the party leaders and purge Wall Street's corrupting influence from Washington. Their opponents called them "radicals," and "fanatics." They called themselves Progressives. President Theodore Roosevelt disapproved of La Follette's confrontational methods. Fearful of splitting the party, he compromised with the conservative House Speaker, "Uncle Joe" Cannon, to pass modest reforms. But as La Follette's crusade gathered momentum, the country polarized, and the middle ground melted away. Three years after the end of his presidency, Roosevelt embraced La Follette's militant tactics and went to war against the Republican establishment, bringing him face to face with his handpicked successor, William Taft. Their epic battle shattered the Republican Party and permanently realigned the electorate, dividing the country into two camps: Progressive and Conservative. Unreasonable Men takes us into the heart of the epic power struggle that created the progressive movement and defined modern American politics. Recounting the fateful clash between the pragmatic Roosevelt and the radical La Follette, Wolraich's riveting narrative reveals how a few Republican insurgents broke the conservative chokehold on Congress and initiated the greatest period of political change in America's history.

Faced with the challenge of adapting America’s political and social order to the rise of corporate capitalism, in 1912 four presidential candidates — Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Eugene Debs — shaped Americans’ thoughts about their public futures. Their positions would come to frame national conversation over the role of corporations in American life, determine the relation between the state and society that still controls our thinking about market regulation, and usher in a period of Progressive reform. Connecting the debates of 1912 to some of the most pressing issues of the Progressive Era, this volume presents selected sensational speeches, correspondence between these important figures and their allies and opponents, and 12 lively political cartoons. The documents are supported by an interpretive essay, a chronology, a bibliography, and a series of questions for student consideration, including ideas for a classroom debate.