The conservative Taft contended with major factional splits within his Republican Party. Instead of using his position as president to bridge compromise, Taft alienated the progressive wing of the party, which had championed his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. While conservatives controlled the largest number of elected positions for Republicans, progressive politics had been what brought many voters to the polls. The clash of these units of the Republican Party, combined with the message of unity from the Democratic Party, was enough to allow the Democrats to take control of the House, ending 16 years in opposition. This was the first time that the Socialist Party won a seat.
Issues
Protection was the ideological cement holding the Republican coalition together. High tariffs were used by Republicans to promise higher sales to business, higher wages to industrial workers, and higher demand for their crops to farmers. Progressive insurgents said it promoted monopoly. Democrats said it was a tax on the little man. It had greatest support in the Northeast, and greatest opposition in the South and West. The Midwest was the battleground.[3] The great battle over the high Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act in 1910 ripped the Republicans apart and set up the realignment in favor of the Democrats.[4]
^ Includes Congressmen Theron Akin of the 25th District of New York, and Samuel Tribble of the 8th District of Georgia.
^ Theron Akin had been endorsed by the local Democratic Party in opposition to the Republican incumbent Cyrus Durey, but made known his intention to caucus with the Republican Party as a Progressive Republican upon being sworn in.
^ Samuel Tribble ran as an Independent Democrat in opposition to incumbent Congressman William Howard.
^There was 1 Socialist and 1 Progressive Republican
^Howard R. Smith, and John Fraser Hart, "The American tariff map." Geographical Review 45.3 (1955): 327-346 online.
^Stanley D. Solvick, "William Howard Taft and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50.3 (1963): 424-442 online
^Dubin, Michael J. (1998). United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997: The Official Results of the Elections of the 1st through 105th Congresses. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. p. 375. ISBN0-7864-0283-0.
Baker, John D. “The Character of the Congressional Revolution of 1910.” Journal of American History 60#3 (1973), pp. 679–691. online on the revolt against Cannon
Coletta, Paolo E. The Presidency of William Howard Taft (1973) pp 101–120.
Rubin, Ruth Bloch. "Organizing for Insurgency: Intraparty Organization and the Development of the House Insurgency, 1908–1910." Studies in American Political Development 27.2 (2013): 86-110 online.
Solvick, Stanley D. "William Howard Taft and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50.3 (1963): 424-442 online.
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