the GOP a firm grip on the reigns of national power. A few years later, however,

progressive tendencies and calls for an activist government to improve the lives of the

working class and immigrants threatened this seemingly dominant ideology. In 1901,

Theodore Roosevelt, selected as Vice-Presidential nominee largely in order to remove

him from the New York GOP, where he had grown unpopular in party circles, took

office after McKinley's assassination and became a leading advocate for

progressivism. Roosevelt increased business regulation and his Justice Department

filed some forty-three anti-trust cases. Roosevelt's dissatisfaction with his own hand-

picked successor, William Howard Taft, led to open partisan warfare and a three-way

Presidential race in 1912, with Taft and Roosevelt splitting the Republican Party. The

eventual Democratic victor, Woodrow Wilson, co-opted a large part of Roosevelt's

platform and Republicans scrambled to refocus themselves once again as the party of

industrialism, big business, and free-market economics.4

 While progressives such as Robert La Follette and George Norris remained in

the party during the Wilson Administration, they had little national influence. Pro-

business leaders such as Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge trumpeted a

platform that propelled the Republicans to three successive presidential victories in

the Roaring Twenties. Herbert Hoover, the champion of corporatism and self-reliance,

presided over the United States when the bubble of prosperity burst in 1929 and threw

the nation, and the world, into severe economic collapse. Hoover proposed increased

government intervention to regulate the economy, but soon came under fire from

business leaders who believed the depression simply was a temporary corrective in


4 Gould, Grand Old Party; Mayer, The Republican Party. The most recent work on the 1912 election is
James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs The Election that ( /I,,I.-.. the Country (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). Others include Francis L. Broderick, Progressivism at Risk: El.,. r ,,i
a President in 1912 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989); and Lewis L. Gould, Reform and
F, ,i,,. ',, American Politics from Roosevelt to Wilson (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press,
1996).