President Theodore Roosevelt was a very loved president. He did many great things to help out America and the world. The thing he was most proud of doing during his presidency was land conservation. Roosevelt was a huge environmentalist, so he made about 1,000 consecutive orders about creating national forests. During the end of his presidency, he had 150 million lands reserved just to be forests.
Republicans aren’t that big on the environment so they didn’t support Roosevelt. Having said that, that also means he did this all by himself. When his presidency was over, he had so much power that he said he wanted his good friend, Taft to be president and that happened.
He choose Taft because they were very close friends and Roosevelt thought that Taft would continue to care for the environment as much as he did. The thing is, even though they were close, their political beliefs were another thing. They didn’t agree on politics. Taft wanted to help out businesses more than the environment, like almost all Republicans. When Taft became president, he started undoing all of Roosevelt’s consecutive orders. Soon after, he and Roosevelt started disagreeing with each other. What really drove Roosevelt to go against Taft was the Luchner vs.
New York. Case. This said that it was unconstitutional to set a law that creates maximum hours that a worker can work. Roosevelt hated this, he thought there should be a limit. I agree with Roosevelt on that, but Taft did not. In my opinion and I’m guessing in Teddy’s opinion, there should be a limit on how many hours you can work.
I understand that the workers aren’t being forced to, but they over work themselves. Usually when people work around 12-14 hours at their jobs, when they come home they continue to work on it. So when they aren’t working, they feel a sense of loss and anxiety. Overworking can be very harmful. Just like drugs, it can be addicting. Mental health professionals consider overworking to be a condition that can have mental and physical damage. Even though it’s the workers choice to work many hours in a day, they might need a little reassurance that it’s okay to not work that much and that they need to slow and calm down with their work. (Korkki, 2007) That’s my opinion and obviously President Taft didn’t have the same one.
He thought there should be no limit to how many hours you can work and this statement from him drove Teddy over the top. He started going around the nation protesting about Taft. He was saying how bad of a president Taft was and people started agreeing with him. The mid term election, also called the primary, is coming up and Roosevelt was saying to vote for progressive Republicans, and obviously Taft is doing the opposite saying no, vote for conservatives. This then led to half of the people voting for Roosevelt and half voting for Taft.
This then resulted in the Republican Party splitting. When one party splits, the other party automatically wins, and so even though this was the era of Republicans, Democrats won. This once again happened in the presidential election causing a Democratic president to win. In 2016, Donald Trump, our current president, ran for president as a Republican even though he has been a Democratic his whole life.
For the mid term election, there was about fifteen different people running for the Republican Party candidate. Trump was getting around 10-20% of the votes while all the other candidates were getting like 5-9%. Trump had the highest number, so he won the primary candidate. Around the end, more Republicans were against him than with him. He ended up getting 40-50% of the support. He said if you guys don’t support me, I will split and make my own party. This way, the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton being the candidate, would win.
Honestly this is one of the very few times I have said that something Trump did was clever. So, in my opinion the 1912 election did have an impact on the 2016 election. Even though in the 1912 election, the Republican Party did split, in the 2016 one, it did not.
Although the 1912 election and 2016 election didn’t have the same results, Trump most likely got his idea from one of these elections that split the party, and 1912 was one example. I do think that the Republicans learned something from the history of these elections. That’s why they didn’t let Trump split up the party, they saw what happened the other times. For example, in the 1992 election, President George H.
W. Bush is running for reelection. He had promised to not raise taxes and that’s exactly what he ended up doing. This made the conservatives mad because they hate taxes. A guy named Ross Perot said if you guys vote for me, I will be a real conservative. Because Bush was not able to keep a promise he made, it split the party and the opposite party ended up winning. This and the 1912 election probably made Republicans realize that if Trump split up the Republican Party, the Democratic Party would win.
I do not think it’s worth it to split up a party. It seems useless to me. You’re going to form a whole different party but end up losing anyway so there’s no point.
When a party splits, the opposite party is going to win, so I don’t see the point at all. Honestly I don’t know why parties still split up. Like I said, it seems useless to me, so I don’t understand why some people still do it. Maybe one reason may be that they wanted to threaten to split the party, like Trump but maybe it didn’t go their way so the party actually did end up splitting up. Another reason may be that the person splitting it up may feel empowered, like maybe they feel important and in power.
They might feel as though they have so much power that they can split a party. These are just guesses but I would like to know the actual reason myself.
