There is a theory that says that all of the blood of the 20th century can be laid at the feet of William Howard Taft.
The 1912 Presidential election began with Theodore Roosevelt's
displeasure with Taft, his chosen successor. The Republican convention
for the nomination that year was prepared to go for Roosevelt; Taft's
supporters effectively kept them out of the hall, ensuring that TR
would be cut out of the process. Roosevelt bolted the convention and
began his own, third-party candidacy. Had Taft bowed out of the 1912
election in favor of the much more popular Roosevelt, TR would easily
have beaten Wilson in a two-man race and with an unsplit Republican
party. Having TR in charge might well have either seen a diplomatic
answer to European tensions leading to WWI, or a lessened war itself
due to his early and vigorous entry of the USA into the thick of it.
Come War's end, he would never have been drawn into the treaties that
forced the economic strangulation of Germany, which would have denied
Hitler the unrest he needed to build wounded German Nationalism into
National Socialism. It also might well have prevented the toppling of
the Tzar because the severe difficulties that led to the Russian
Revolution might have been averted with a shortened WWI. No crushed
Germany, no Hitler. No Hitler, no Final Solution, no Holocaust. Also no
Cold war, no Mao Zedong, no WWII, no Lenin, no Soviet Union, probably
no Korea or Vietnam. Not to mention no misguided Prohibition and the
resulting rise of organized crime - maybe even the saved lives of millions who died in the 1917 influenza epidemic, spread rapidly by the soldiers of the Great War.
Taft insisted on running. Woodrow Wilson inevitably carried the
election due to the split Republican party (Roosevelt ran second - the highest vote count of any third-party candidate, ever). Wilson waited to enter WWI
until his second term, carrying out a policy of isolationism until the
soils of Europe were saturated with blood. The Treaty of Versailles
ending WWI carved up Europe along lines that bred hatred, anger and
resentment. War reparations forced on Germany guaranteed the poverty of
German citizens, ripening them for the appeals of a man telling them
they were the chosen, the wronged, the Master Race.
TR proved throughout his Presidency that he had the right stuff
to steer the global conflicts of the nineteens away from disaster. He was the first President to think and act globally, and won the Nobel Prize for his flawless mediation of the Russo-Japanese War.
It is interesting to consider that it might have been a very different 20th century.
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