Building a Democratic Majority: The Progressive Party Vote and the Federal Trade Commission

On 30 May 1914, Theodore Roosevelt fired the opening shots of the midterm elections against the party of Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt framed the off-year elections as a referendum on the failures of the New Freedom, the Democrats' three-pronged program to curb the power of the trusts. Rather than bringing monopolies to heal, the former president asserted, Democratic policy had simply driven the economy into recession. “[T]he Democratic party,” Roosevelt explained on another occasion “has been engaged in what is fundamentally an effort to restore the unlimited competition of two generations back and to subject this to only an ineffective and weak government control”. To all, Roosevelt's counsel was constant: the prudent course of citizens that fall was to register a vote for social and industrial progress, to support the Progressive party candidate for Congress.