LIBOR TRADERS AVOID CRIMINAL CHARGES IN BRITISH PROBE

Illustration by Andy J. Miller

Widespread U.S. unhappiness with the government would seem to call for a blockbuster election, such as the one we had exactly a century ago, when both candidates offered sweeping plans for public renewal.

An election fought over such visions makes more sense than our current jobs-growth donnybrook. The president has far more control over the federal government than over the economy. The 1912 election even provides a template for contention, with one candidate urging a Hamiltonian platform of reform through big government, and the other supporting (at least in the campaign) a progressive libertarianism.

Today, just 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time or more. Only 41 percent agree that the government is really run for the benefit of all the people.

President Barack Obama was elected in 2008 as a reformer who connected the recession with the absence of sensible oversight that can occur when special interests put their thumb on the scale. Two years later, the Tea Party rode a similar surge of anti-governmental anger fueled by the financial bailout and health-care reform or, as Sarah Palin put it, the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest.

This unhappiness mirrors the mood in 1912, when a swath of the U.S. also believed that special interests had subsumed the state. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were Progressives who railed against the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special bodies of capital and those who organize their use (Wilsons words) and politicians serving the great special interests of privilege (Roosevelts words). More than 75 percent of the U.S. votes cast in 1912 went to Wilson or Roosevelt or the Socialist Eugene V. Debs. The Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, received less than a quarter of the votes.

The election was the culmination of a wave of reform in the late 19th century, fueled by the malfeasance of politicians such as Boss Tweed. His archenemy, Samuel J. Tilden, ran on the 1876 Democratic ticket pledging to fight the corrupt centralism that had infected States and municipalities with the contagion of misrule, and locked fast the prosperity of an industrious people in the paralysis of hard times. For Tilden-era reformers, government would be fixed if civil-service reform replaced bad people with good people.

By the late 19th century, reformers came to blame the whole system, not just individual politicians. Muckrakers, such as Lincoln Steffens, uncovered the business leaders who funded the political machines. The transport magnate Robert Snyder, for example, paid $250,000 to St. Louis legislators in return for a traction franchise that he rapidly resold for $1.25 million. Corporate chieftains were rumored to run the U.S. Senate, as depicted in a splendidly vicious 1889 Puck cartoon. Some fad- like reforms sought more democracy, such as the referendum and judicial recall powers, and some involved less, such as replacing elected mayors with professional city managers.

Today, antipathy toward Wall Streets political clout and the bailout gets mixed together with essentially unrelated claims of other financial-sector misbehavior, such as credit- card fees. A century ago, hostility toward bribery and influence was also combined with resentment of other corporate misdeeds, such as Jay Goulds stock-market manipulations and Andrew Carnegies strike-breaking at the Homestead mill. Ida Tarbell lavished poisonous ink on John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Co., which used its alliance with the railroads to shut out rivals.

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Obama vs. Romney: The Battle of the Century