National Third Political Party Day:
June 22nd

In June of 1912, a tightly controlled Republican Party Convention nominated William Howard Taft. This followed a bitter primary season, with former President Theodore Roosevelt winning nine out of the twelve Presidential primaries (Taft won only one; future third-party Progressive candidate Robert M. La Follette won two). On June 22nd, as the convention prepared to make the Taft nomination official, Theodore Roosevelt called for his supporters to walk off the floor. On that evening, he called for the formation of a Progressive Party that would launch what became the most successful third party bid for the Presidency in the 20th Century. Roosevelt's candidacy was a rebellion against a Republican Party controlled by wealthy conservatives, and he finished second in the general election, behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in both electoral and popular votes.

Since that time, there have been three other major national third party candidates for President; Robert LaFollette in 1924, who sprang from the same Progressive roots as Roosevelt, John Anderson in 1980, and Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. (George Wallace in 1968 ran a strong third party effort, but was primarily a regional candidate). Third party candidates have won state-wide office, and Congressional seats, including the long-shot election of former Navy SEAL and pro-wrestler Jessie Ventura as the Governor of Minnesota in 1998. These candidates offer new ideas and perspectives missing from the ossified agendas of the Democratic and Republican Parties. These aging components of our "two-party system" are often so tangled in obligations to vested special interests that a truly creative leader could never emerge with new, innovative ideas, no matter how attractive those ideas might be.

So on the anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt's formation of the first and most successful third party Presidential run in modern American politics, let's celebrate third political parties, perennial sources of the visionary ideas that have shaped, and will shape, our future.

Richard Warren Field
November, 1999

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