page_title: 1912 United States presidential election
section_title: Socialist Party nomination
hierarchical_section_title: 1912 United States presidential election / Nominations / Socialist Party nomination
context_page_description: The 1912 United States presidential election was the 32nd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5. Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey unseated incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft and defeated former President Theodore Roosevelt, who ran under the banner of the new Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. As of 2020, this is the most recent presidential election in which a top two finisher was neither a Democrat nor a Republican.
  Roosevelt served as president from 1901 to 1909 as a Republican, and Taft succeeded him with his support. However, Taft's actions as President displeased Roosevelt, and Roosevelt challenged Taft for the party nomination at the 1912 Republican National Convention. When Taft and his conservative allies narrowly prevailed, Roosevelt rallied his progressive supporters and launched a third party bid. At the Democratic Convention, Wilson won the presidential nomination on the 46th ballot, defeating Speaker of the House Champ Clark and several other candidates with the support of William Jennings Bryan and other progressive Democrats. The Socialist Party renominated its perennial standard-bearer, Eugene V. Debs.
context_section_description: Socialist candidates:
  Eugene V. Debs, former State Senator from Indiana
  Emil Seidel, Mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin
  Charles Edward Russell, journalist from Iowa
  The Socialist Party of America was a highly factionalized coalition of local parties based in industrial cities and rooted in ethnic, especially German and Finnish, communities. It had some support in formerly Populist rural and mining areas in the West, especially Oklahoma. By 1912, the party claimed more than a thousand locally elected officials in 33 states and 160 cities, especially the Midwest. Eugene V. Debs had run for president in 1900, 1904, and 1908, primarily to encourage the local effort, and he did so again in 1912 with little challenge to his nomination.
  The party was divided into two main factions. The conservative faction led by Congressman Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee promoted pragmatic democratic reform, fought corruption, and opposed immigration as both a wage suppressant and drain on public resources. The radical faction sought to overthrow capitalism, tried to infiltrate labor unions, and sought to cooperate with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies"). It supported immigration as a means to increase ranks for the war on capitalism. With few exceptions, the party had weak or nonexistent links to local labor unions.
  Many of these issues had been debated at the First National Congress of the Socialist Party in 1910 and again at the 1912 national convention in Indianapolis. At the convention, the radicals won an early test by seating IWW leader Bill Haywood on the Executive Committee and passed a resolution favoring industrial unionism. Conservatives responded by amending the party constitution to expel any who favored industrial sabotage or syndicalism (both being positions of the IWW) and who refused to participate in American elections. The convention adopted a conservative platform calling for cooperative organization of prisons, a national bureau of health, and abolition of the Senate and of the presidential veto.
  Debs did not attend. He saw his mission as keeping the disparate units together in the hope that someday a common goal would be found.
caption: Eugene V. Debs's 6% was an all-time high for the Socialist Party
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