United States presidential election, 1904

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United States presidential election, 1904
8 November 1904
	Winner	Runner up
Nominee	Theodore Roosevelt	Alton Brooks Parker
Party	Republican	Democratic
Home State	New York	New York
Running mate	Charles Warren Fairbanks	Henry Gassaway Davis
Electoral Vote	336	140
States Carried	29	17
Popular Vote	7,630,457	5,083,880
Percentage	56.4%	37.6%
Presidential election results map. Blue denotes states won by Roosevelt/Fairbanks, Red denotes those won by Parker/Davis. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
Before Election Theodore Roosevelt Republican		After Election Theodore Roosevelt Republican

The United States presidential election of 1904 was held on November 8, 1904. Incumbent President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican who had succeeded to the Presidency upon William McKinley's assassination, easily won a term of his own, thus becoming the first "accidental" president to do so.

Nominations

TR leads party to landslide win in 1904

Republican Party nomination

Republican candidates

• Charles W. Fairbanks, U.S. senator from Indiana
• Mark Hanna, U.S. senator from Ohio
• Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States from New York

Theodore Roosevelt wasn't particularly popular among the Republican party bosses, and in early 1903, there was talk of running Mark Hanna for the nomination against the young incumbent, but this did not last long; Hanna's supporters were outmaneuvered in the June 1903 Ohio state convention and "TR" was endorsed a year early. Hanna then proclaimed he wasn't running. Thus with no opposition at all (Hanna died in early 1904) Roosevelt was unanimously nominated at the convention in Chicago. Conservative Indiana senator Charles W. Fairbanks was nominated for Vice President.

Democratic Party nomination

Parker/Davis campaign poster

Democratic candidates

• Francis M. Cockrell, U.S. senator from Missouri
• George Gray, former U.S. senator from Delaware
• William Randolph Hearst, U.S. representative from New York
• Nelson A. Miles, retired Commanding General of the United States Army from Massachusetts
• Richard Olney, former Secretary of State from Massachusetts
• Alton B. Parker, judge from New York
• Edward C. Wall, delegate from Wisconsin

With Roosevelt's popularity nearing its peak, William Jennings Bryan, the nominee of 1896 and 1900, had decided to sit this one out, leaving what was considered the most worthless Democratic nomination since 1872 wide open. With former President Grover Cleveland refusing to come out of retirement as well, the Democrats met in Saint Louis in a surly and depressed mood. The only candidate who really wanted the nod was William Randolph Hearst, but the delegates instead nominated an unknown Bourbon Democrat named Alton B. Parker, a judge on New York state Court of Appeals, who accepted after he demanded, and got, an endorsement of the gold standard in the party's platform. 81-year-old millionaire industrialist Henry G. Davis of West Virginia was nominated as his running mate, ostensibly to pay for the campaign with his own funds, something he refused to do.

General election

Campaign

Election poster for Eugene V. Debs, Socialist Party of America candidate for President, 1904

The lackluster Judge Parker made little headway against the wildly popular Roosevelt, who had already adopted popular reform positions such as increased regulation of the large corporations and conservation of natural resources, not to mention the "winning" of Panama, the Northern Securities suit, Conquest of the Philippines, the Venezuela affair, and so on and so forth. With the whole country cheering TR's campaign screeching "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!" There was little Parker could do to avoid being run over.

There was a ray of hope for the Judge, however. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World carried a full page story about alleged corruption in the Bureau of Corporations. TR admitted certain payments had been made, but denied any "blackmail." Roosevelt was so beloved that the issue didn't have traction and Parker carried only the southern states, and the charismatic Roosevelt won the most decisive victory since 1872.

Results

Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1904 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (July 28, 2005).

Source (Electoral Vote): Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (July 31, 2005).

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

United States presidential election, 1904

The New York Times front page from the day after the election: November 9, 1904.

• History of the United States (1865–1918)

Further reading

Books

• Blum, John Morton (1954). The Republican Roosevelt. 
  • Series of essays that examine how Roosevelt did politics
• Gould, Lewis L. (1991). The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. 
• Harbaugh, William Henry (1963). The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. 
• Morris, Edmund (2001). Theodore Rex. 
  • Biography of Roosevelt during the years 1901–1909

Web

• 1904 popular vote by counties

Navigation

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