NEW FREEDOM

The presidential election of 1912 marked the culmination of a twenty-year struggle against political and economic privilege. Most Progressives sought to replace rampant individualism with collective organization in the public interest, but by 1912 the nature and extent of federal economic and social intervention had become the subject of fierce debate. President William Howard Taft represented old guard conservatism. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive party ticket, advocated a "New Nationalism," a coherent platform of social and economic regulation.

In response, the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, formulated what he called the "New Freedom." Federal power, he argued, should be used only to sweep away social, economic, and political privilege and to restore business competition. Corporate monopolies, which were the great bugbear of the age, should be dismantled rather than regulated. Wilson also denounced Roosevelt's social and labor policies as paternalistic, arguing that the New Nationalism would sap entrepreneurial initiative and that it was potentially despotic. Untrammeled free enterprise had to remain the basis of American freedom. The irony is that Wilson, in office, came to see the New Freedom as increasingly anachronistic, and by 1915 his administration had enacted the principal tenets of Roosevelt's 1912 platform.

See also Elections: 1912; Wilson, Woodrow.