Season 27, Day 18 - "The Moose Is Loose"
It's Party week, and today's quiz is inspired by the Bull Moose Party.
Bull Moose Party
“I am as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit.”
The Bull Moose Party, formally known as the Progressive Party, was a political party founded in 1912 to nominate Teddy Roosevelt for president. Roosevelt had been narrowly defeated for the Republican Party nomination by the incumbent president William Howard Taft, who had been the former president’s Secretary of War and protégé. Disagreeing with President Taft’s increasingly conservative policies, Roosevelt decided to seek a third term, which was allowable prior to the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. The Bull Moose ticket of Teddy Roosevelt and California governor Hiram Johnson split the Republican vote, finishing ahead of Taft but behind Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson (Eugene Debs finished 4th with 6% of the popular vote, still the highest ever percentage for a socialist candidate.) The Bull Moose Party is still the only third party to finish ahead of a major party in a U.S. presidential election. The Bull Moose Party called for many political reforms including women’s suffrage and the direct election of U.S. senators. It was the first of three political parties called the “Progressive Party”; the other two nominated Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette in 1924 and former vice president Henry Wallace in 1948. The name came from Roosevelt telling a reporter he felt “strong as a bull moose” after losing the Republican nomination; he had previously written “I am as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit” after his nomination for vice president in 1900, once described his ranch hands as “tough, hardy, resolute fellows… able to travel like bull moose,” and after a failed assassination attempt in Milwaukee said “you see, it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!” A 1912 speech about the Bull Moose Party popularized the political use of the term “grass roots” (“This party has come from the grassroots. It has grown from the soil of people’s hard necessities.”)