The Stern, Unflinching Performance of Duty

Chapter 7 analyzes Roosevelt’s career after leaving the White House, with a focus on World War I. It considers his relationship with Woodrow Wilson and argues that, although TR disagreed with Wilson on key policies and regarding Wilson’s leadership style, his attacks on the president were personal and often so extreme that they were counterproductive. The chapter argues that though Roosevelt’s advocacy of two themes, preparedness and Americanism, initially attracted limited support, by 1916 he had begun to play a key role in shaping public discussions about the war. Though Roosevelt’s rhetoric was sometimes incendiary and contributed to discrimination against German-Americans and antiwar figures such as Senator Robert La Follette, by 1918 he emerged as a leading candidate for president in 1920. Only TR’s death, in early 1919, prevented his return to the pinnacle of US politics.

Disappointed Hopes?

How did the first female voters use their ballots? Focusing on the presidential election of 1924—in which Progressive Robert M. La Follette secured 17% of the vote—this chapter examines the expectation that women would be particularly likely to support candidates associated with the Progressive movement. Employing new strategies to estimate women’s vote choice using aggregate data, the findings show that female voters were not uniquely likely to support the Progressive candidate. Rather, in a small number of Republican-dominated midwestern states, female voters were more Republican than men, and men were more Progressive than women, in their voting choices. As a result, the presence of female voters actually stabilized the electorate, reinforcing the Republican advantage in most states and dampening the Progressive surge in the Midwest in particular. The conclusion places these findings in the broader perspective of the nearly one hundred years of female electoral participation that has followed.