1912 : Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs -The Election That Changed the Country

The book does center around the political contest known as the Presidential Election of 1912, but it veers off on many tangents that are unrelated to the contest. It is true that there were four major candidates for President that year, and all of them had a story to tell, but this book does not cover that story as well as it should.

The book spends entirely too much time discussing the history of the candidates for President - in fact almost 1/2 of the book is devoted to biographical sketches of these four men.

The most exciting (and relevant) section of the book details the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore in 1912 -Chace does a great job of relaying the exuberance felt by the attendees of the convention, and gets the reader very excited about this important moment in American Political History when Woodrow Wilson, soon to be elected the 28th President of the United States, was selected as the standard bearer for the Democratic Party. To a much lesser scale, and not quite as well, Chace describes the Republican, Progressive, and Socialist conventions which led to the nomination of William H. Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eugene V. Debs respectively.

The election gets almost no attention at all in this book, but the Wilson administration does get a significant amount of attention, as does the legacy of Wilson and the impact of both Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt on a future Presidents administration - that of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

All told, I cannot recommend this book to anyone that is looking for a comprehensive story of the 1912 Presidential Election. However, if one is looking for brief (very brief) biographical sketches of the candidates, this is a great book, with some very exciting highlights of an important political campaign thrown in.