What if President William McKinley had never been assassinated? I think President McKinley would have won Re-Election in 1904 over Democrat Alton Parker. I don't think President McKinley would have run for a Third Term considering how bad the health of his wife was I think Teddy Roosevelt would have had the 1908 Presidency handed to him on a silver platter easily beating William Jennings Bryan,he would have defeated Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 Elections for his Second Term and I think he would have beaten Democrat Thomas R Marshall for a Third Term as President in 1916.
If the GOP avoided a split like that of 1912 – and Theodore Roosevelt was the kind of strong leader who might have had enough power to allow that – it did not have too difficult as task to hold power throughout the 1900s and 1910s.
The Democratic Party had become insignificant in most of New England, the Pacific States and the Upper Midwest as a result of the System of 1896, and I do not see anyone before Al Smith managing to mobilise its urban white ethnic base enough to threaten a united GOP. Put plainly, if there had been someone in the 1900s and 1910s able to do what Al Smith did in the 1920s, it would have been done then.
The big question is whether Theodore Roosevelt would have been able to get America through World War
I as successfully as his distant cousin was to get the nation through World War II. Theodore’s imperialist leanings do not suggest he would have been able to avoid a war altogether, and the possibility of entering World War I on the
German side – more realistic with a Republican President not bound to the old-stock South – would have been very problematic for relationships with Canada and also with the Yankee populations that remained the core of the Republican Party.
For this reason, it is likely Theodore Roosevelt would have, as Wilson did, joined the war on the British side. The question is whether Teddy would have fought it better than did Wilson?
If he did not, he might have suffered a defeat rivalling Alf Landon’s in 1936 to a Democratic Party much less dissociated from the Southern landowners than even FDR’s party was. That might have led to a 1920s even more extreme in its racial discrimination – even to a Ku Klux Klan that ruled the whole US as it did states like Colorado and Indiana in reality.
If he did, would this have established longer-term GOP dominance than actually observed?
