1904 Presidential Election

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Alfred F. Jones
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	1904 Presidential Election « on: May 28, 2014, 08:47:02 PM »
	« edited: May 28, 2014, 10:45:30 PM by Senator Alfred F. Jones »

President Joseph Cannon was left to stew in his own juices at the Union Convention as the more tactful, less racist Henry Cabot Lodge (a super duper friend of perennial almost-President Henry Adams) easily took the nomination from him, picking Michigan Senator Julius C. Burrows as his running mate in order to appeal to African-Americans, up to this point a core Populist voting bloc. Although he has stated his support for the reinstatement of the Reed Brigade, he wants to fully roll back all the delicious progress we’ve made on the issues of the common people under Zeb and Iggy and go back that horrible time when we had sixteen years of Union dominance and people worked thirty hours a day, ten days a week, and so on and so forth. An early supporter of Vance and Donnelly’s foreign policies, he also supports “keeping our nation strongly on the world stage, that the old empires of Europe may tremble before the might of a new rising power to aid the free peoples of the world.” As a side note (and an issue various Populist surrogates have been raising to their immigrant faction), he also supports rather tight immigration restrictions into the United States, for fear that any new immigrants might not assimilate well into American culture.

In one of the nation’s most unexpected upsets so far, the People’s Alliance rallied strongly around Indiana Representative and former union activist Eugene Debs, a leader of the party’s left wing. In order to appease both the moderates and the party establishment (not that the two are distinct groups), he decided to pick his runner-up in the convention, Senate Majority Leader William Jennings Bryan; there were also hopes that the pick would boost Congressman Debs’s isolationist foreign policy credentials. Debs and Bryan are running on a platform of first and foremost reforming the Senate, with a proposed 16th Amendment to ensure direct election of Senators (the 15th Amendment, quietly passed under Cannon’s rule, had clarified the line of succession for the Presidency down through the Cabinet in the wake of the Great Confusion of ’01), and then moving on to other things such as withdrawal from what Debs calls “America’s stolen goods” overseas and the traditional Populist slate of pro-worker reforms (nationalization, ending child labor, the like). He has not made as much of an issue of it and has specifically stated that economic and governmental issues shall take precedence, but he has remarked privately that he would like to see the Reed Brigade restored to its former position.

The Bull-Moose convention was an unexpectedly quiet one, with party founder Theodore Roosevelt capturing the nomination by a unanimous vote and selecting Debs’s fellow Indianan Senator Albert Beveridge, a progressive and staunch expansionist (or imperialist, to use the term preferred by the PA’s various newspapers) who has a longstanding rivalry with Bryan. Like Debs and his comrades in the PA, the two are campaigning against corporate greed and political corruption, but unlike the Populists they are not so radical in their proposals – Roosevelt has stated his intent to keep all forms of industry in private hands and to only bust what he deems “bad trusts”, despite repeated catcalls of “Moderate Hero!” from the purple party. Noncommittal on the Reed Brigade, Roosevelt sides with Lodge against Debs and isolationism, believing that the United States must have a strong hand in world affairs and continue to rule over its colonies.

This election has shaped up to be a close race and an exciting one too, with Debs and Roosevelt teaming up (although hesitantly) to attack Lodge’s rather right-wing economic policy and Roosevelt and Lodge (rather more comfortable together than the previous pair) hammering Debs’s isolationism.

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