A Roosevelt Menace.

New York Times 100 years ago today, July 17, 1912:
    Thirty-six years ago the country passed through the trying experience of a disputed Presidential election. It was the more trying because the dispute, in substance, turned not so much on which party had the most honest votes, but on which was most deeply tainted with illegality, corruption, and chicanery. There had been a disgusting amount of these on each side and, to add to the confusion, the validity of the State Governments and their Electoral machinery in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana was, not without ground, attacked.
    In the troublous situation thus created there naturally arose the suggestion of some Presidential Elector in a Republican State using the discretion originally lodged in the office, and casting the one vote for the Democratic candidate which would have given him the election. This suggestion was made in Massachusetts, where there was a strong sentiment of disapproval for the Republican policy in the South, and it was directed to Mr. Jambs Russell Lowell, an Elector who was known to be in sympathy with this sentiment. It was soon disclosed that Mr. Lowell considered himself bound by the time-honored, though tacit, obligation of an Elector toward the party of which he was the representative for a specific function, clearly understood at the time of conferring and accepting the nomination as Elector.
    The desperate adventurer who is trying to launch a Third Party this year is plotting to bring about a situation essentially like that of 1876 in several important features. He seeks to set up "contests" in the Electoral Colleges of a number of States, of the same impudent sort as those he invented for the Convention of the Republican Party, and he bases the later on the earlier. Asserting that the composition of the convention whose nomination he moved heaven and earth to secure, and which would have gone unchallenged had he succeeded, was invalid, he is engaged in a mad hunt for Republican candidates for Elector who will betray their party in his interest. Where the Electors are nominated by State Conventions, he is seeking, by the aid of the unscrupulous politicians whom he has won to his side, to capture the conventions. Where he cannot do that, he is organizing bolts to "steal" the Electors. Where Electors are chosen at primaries under State law, he will adjure the Republicans that have been or may be named to reject the authority of the Republican National Convention and, if elected, to cast their votes for him, who, whatever else he may pretend to be, is not and can not be a Republican candidate.
    It is too early to predict the outcome of this reckless plotting. It may very well come to nothing as the cold light of discussion is, for some four months, turned upon this man and his aims. The intent of him is plain enough, and the baleful influence of even partial success is obvious. One thing, in the confusion he essays to spread, cannot be denied: If Woodrow Wilson has a clear and indisputable majority of the Electoral votes, the vain things imagined by this reckless plotter will be of no effect.