"Tariffs Are Rigged Against Them"

"In the 1920s, Republicans returned to power and resumed their protectionist agenda, but when crop prices fell, Midwesterners again turned on the party. Chastened by Taft's experience, President Herbert Hoover promised to aid farmers by raising agricultural tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 did protect crops, but it also radically increased the duties on manufactured goods, provoking a trade war with Europe at the worst possible time. As the Great Depression spread misery across the country, voters blamed Hoover's tariff. In 1932, they elected FDR in a landslide and pummeled the GOP.
"Reduced to a perennial minority, Republicans finally abandoned their protectionist doctrine and embraced free trade. The ferocious tariff debate that had dominated American politics since the nation's founding slipped into the shadows, remembered only by historians and economists.
"Until Donald Trump."

At The Atlantic, Michael Wolraich discusses taxes on imported goods, past and present.

Styles for 1912

"The exciting portion of the 2012 primary season may be winding down, but one hundred years ago one of the most dramatic elections in American history was just getting underway. Which made us wonder: what would it be like to cover the 1912 race the same way we cover the current contest? An experiment then: blogging the 1912 election."

Gabriel Snyder at The Atlantic Wire introduces the 1912 Project.

Fit as a Bull Moose

"Morris recounts his battle first to wrest control of his party from Taft and the conservatives and, when that failed (only because of 'naked robbery' by 'the forces of reaction,' Roosevelt insisted), to lead a third-party campaign he understood to be doomed almost from the start. Roosevelt’s courage cannot be questioned. Who else would have insisted on delivering an 80-minute speech with a would-be assassin’s bullet freshly lodged in his chest? And the Progressive platform on which he ran was a bold, even visionary document: it recognized labor’s right to organize and promised to curtail campaign spending, promote conservation and provide federal insurance for the elderly, the jobless and the sick. But the evangelistic fervor with which he campaigned probably alienated more voters than it attracted. He had the satisfaction of swamping Taft on Election Day, but the victory went to Wilson, giving the Democrats the White House for the first time in a quarter of a century."

Geoffrey C. Ward reviews Edmund Morris's Colonel Roosevelt in The New York Times.

The Curse of Bigness

"Ideas, especially those born on the campaign trail, rarely turn out as planned. In the long view of history, Wilson's victory mattered not because his presidency bequeathed a regulatory regime so different from what Roosevelt would have overseen, but because progressivism itself prevailed. From one perspective, the most important fact about the outcome was that Taft, representing the stand-patters, finished third—the only incumbent ever to seek re-election and do so."

David Greenberg in Slate considers the differences between Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom during the 1912 election.

"Did You Have to Make the Chair so Large?"

"Ten presidents have signed the guest book, including Theodore Roosevelt, whose bodyguards were still nervous after the assassination of his predecessor, William McKinley. During Roosevelt's visit, the lights in the hotel suddenly went out, and when Miller came running to see what was wrong, he found Roosevelt lying on the ground for his own protection, ringed by guards, docent Mel Gutierrez said."

In the Los Angeles Times, Steve Harvey visits Riverside's Mission Inn, which dates back to 1876.

"Who's the Twenty-Seventh Prez Who's Got the Ladies Doin' Everything He Says?"

Taft! (via YouTube.)