August 2011 meeting: "1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs--The Election that Changed the Country"

The History Book Club met in August 2011 to discuss 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs--The Election that Changed the Country by James Chace. This was the last meeting of the club at Borders before it closed.

Click here for a video of a discussion of the book by author James Chace.

Here is the description of the book from the Barnes and Noble website:

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.

 Click here for a blog post by one of our members reporting on the meeting.

Click here for a blog post by the same member commenting on the book before the meeting.