During the first week of September, a large headline at the top of a popular website proclaimed “It. Is. Close.” when analyzing the 2024 presidential election.
That’s an election sentiment that a guest speaker at Monmouth College won’t be using when he discusses his new book that focuses on one of the major figures of the 1904 presidential election.
Published by the State University of New York Press, Brad Nahrstadt’s Alton B. Parker: The Man Who Challenged Roosevelt is available in hardback and paperback. A 1989 graduate of Monmouth and a member of the college’s board of trustees, Nahrstadt will speak at 6 p.m. Sept. 12 in the Morgan Room of Poling Hall. His talk is free and open to the public.
Despite not having a political background, Parker was selected by the Democratic Party as its presidential candidate for the 1904 election. His opponent, incumbent President Teddy Roosevelt, “was at the height of his popularity,” said Nahrstadt, who is the retired chief operating officer of the Chicago law firm Donahue Brown Mathewson & Smyth.
“Parker was a lawyer and a judge (in New York), and I was a practicing attorney, so I felt a kind of kinship with him,” said Nahrstadt. “I started collecting anything that I could find that I thought might shed some light on who Alton Parker was, what he did and about the campaign in 1904.”
The basic information was readily available. Roosevelt routed Parker, capturing more than 56% of the more than 12.7 million votes cast and winning the electoral vote 336 to 140. Parker won only 13 of the 45 states, all in what was once known in electoral politics as the Solid South.
Much of the other information required more diligence on Nahrstadt’s part, as Parker was the lone major party presidential candidate not to be the subject of a biography. Eventually, Nahrstadt acquired what he called “an entire bookshelf full of material.”
“There was a history teacher in, of all places, Peoria, Illinois, who in 1976 self-published somewhat of a biography about Parker,” he said. “It was longer than most things that had been written about him, but it really didn’t have a lot of information about his early life, and it really just ended with the election. It’s almost impossible to find. I managed to track down a copy at a used bookstore.”
Nahrstadt will share many more of his findings during his talk but, along with Roosevelt’s popularity, here’s another reason why the 1904 election “Just. Wasn’t. Close.”
“Parker was a pretty firm believer that it was beneath a candidate to go out and campaign,” said Nahrstadt. “People should know your positions and they should know what you had done in the past – what your record says about you – and that should be enough.”
As the clock ticked toward early November, the faults in that plan were becoming apparent.
“He and his managers realized much too late in the game that that wasn’t working,” said Nahrstadt. “People didn’t know who he was. People in New York knew who he was (although there was no home state advantage, since Roosevelt was also a New Yorker), but outside New York, people didn’t know who he was. … He just did too little, too late, and he lost in spectacular fashion. That’s really part of the reason why he was never written about. People just forgot about him.”
***Courtesy of Barry McNamara, Monmouth College***
