Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 Original Campaign Manifesto, Released Two Days Before the Election That Brought Him into the White House

He would represent “the plain people with the rest”, and pursue “a carefully considered course of moderate yet courageous reform”

The 1912 presidential election took place on November 5, and there were three major party candidates. Running for reelection was President William H. Taft, representing the old guard of the Republican Party. But this was an age of progressivism, and the other two candidates were progressives. One was the enormously popular former president Theodore Roosevelt running on the Progressive Party ticket. That party’s platform called for dissolution of “the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics”, restrictions on campaign finance contributions, a reduction of the tariff, an eight-hour workday, suffrage for women, and similar reforms. New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, the candidate of the Democratic Party, had the task of drawing clear lines of difference between himself and Roosevelt, so as to entice progressives to vote for him.

To wrap up the campaign he determined to issue a manifesto, drawing distinctions between the other two candidates and parties and himself, and painting a vision of what he hoped to accomplish as president. These would be his final words to the American people as they made their last minute decisions on whom to entrust with the presidency. It was released to the press on November 3 and published on November 4, the last day before Americans would flock to the polls.

Autograph manuscript signed, November 3, 1912, being the original draft of this manifesto. First he took on Taft and his Old Guard Republicans, and those he felt controlled them: “The issue is now clearly made up, and goes to the people. I, for one, do not doubt the verdict. The voters must make one or another of three choices. First, entrust the Government to the regular Republican party again, which always begins a campaign with promises of action and then always, at the end, draws back and warns against change, dreading to attempt anything at all, for fear it should not satisfy those who control credit [the big financiers and bankers] and whom it has so long permitted to act as trustees for the people in every matter of policy.”

Next the took on TR, gingerly, without mentioning the Progressive Party or Roosevelt by name, yet warning he would seek to center too much power in the presidency: “Second, place the guidance of these affairs in the hands of men who are searching about for some new way in which to perform old duties, all along plain and imperative, which can easily be performed without the invocation of new methods, for example, without shifting the whole energy and initiation of the law to the executive branch of the government.”

Vote for Wilson, he continued, and he would govern with a united party, not seek to usurp power, and include in his councils people of all stripes and social conditions. “Third, go forward, without postponement or experiment or confusion, to effect the reforms which the whole country waits for, and which all parties profess to believe necessary, through the instrumentality of a great established and undivided party, clear and explicit as to its purposes, willing to effect them by the ordinary process of legislation, willing to be guided by the common counsel of the nation as a whole, the plain people with the rest, regardless of every interest, the little as well as the big, because connected with every interest by sympathy and comprehension, and soberly determined to obey the voice of thoughtful men everywhere by a carefully considered course of moderate yet courageous reform.”

He concluded, “The mere statement of the choices is a prediction. We shall trust ourselves, and let the little groups of discoverers who would have us vest our powers in them learn, in their turn and at their leisure, to trust us also.”

On November 5, Wilson was elected president. Taft would go on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921. For TR, he left a great legacy from his years as president, but this would prove to be his last hurrah.