Socialists Co-opted by Democrats and Republicans:

Using Otto von Bismarck as an example, later nationalist leaders would emulate his co-opting of the socialist revolutionaries to ensure future political dominance. By 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were co-opting Eugene Debs Socialist party platform, and to the point where by 1936 the Democratic party was a near-copy of the Communist Party USA. BY 1952, liberal Republicans had by-passed conservative Robert A. Taft in favor of Dwight Eisenhower - the United States Constitution was all but forgotten. The author below errs in suggesting that there were “democratic values that the Founders envisaged,” as the Founders’ feared democratic impulses; the turn of the century reform movement was the predictable result of 45 years of near-complete aristocratic Republican party-big business rule of the country.

Bernhard Thuersam

Socialists Co-opted by Democrats and Republicans:

“The vote polled in 1912 by [Eugene] Debs, who garnered the largest share of the popular total ever won by a Socialist candidate, revealed the depth of the reformist forces sweeping the land. The Democrats during Wilson’s first term quickly picked up many of the social remedies Debs – and a radicalized [Theodore] Roosevelt – had championed.

Like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson embraced change, both men recognizing that their own careers could not flourish if they were to hold back the tide of reform. Neither leader believed that repose was essential to the happiness of mankind. The issues at stake were vital if America was to transform itself into a society that would deal effectively with the problems of the new century without sacrificing the democratic values that the Founders envisaged.

With the influx of new immigrants, many of them were condemned to work in squalid sweatshops and live in the deteriorating conditions of the urban poor. Journalists, social workers, ministers, and middle-class Americans were outraged at the widespread corruption of political bossism in the nation’s cities.

Above all, there was the question of how to curb the excesses of big business, symbolized by the great trusts, which had accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism. For Roosevelt, calling for a “New Nationalism,” the role of government was to regulate big business, which was surely here to stay. For Wilson’s “New Freedom,” the government’s task was to restore competition in a world dominated by technology and mass markets that crushed small business.

For Debs, America needed federal control of basic industries and a broad-based trade unionism. As for [William Howard] Taft, the White House simply needed to apply laws that were designed to restrain the excesses of industrial capitalism. Indeed, all four men struggled to balance nineteenth-century democratic values with emerging twentieth-century technologies. For Roosevelt and Wilson, this required the bold use of executive power, between them they created the modern presidency.

In its essence, 1912 introduced a conflict between progressive idealism, later incarnated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal – and subsequently by Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton – and conservative values…..For the rest of the century and even into the next, the Republican party was riven by the struggle between reform and reaction, and between unilateralism in foreign relations and cosmopolitan internationalism.

(1912, Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs, The election That Changed the Country, James Chace, Simon & Shuster, 2004, pp. 7-8)