ELECTION #30, 1904. The NASTY-METER is 2.

QUOTE from Wall Street tycoon Henry Clay Frick about Teddy Roosevelt: "We bought the son of a bitch but he didn't stay bought."

The election of 1904 is probably the least exciting campaign in our history.

The CANDIDATES in 1904.

REPUBLICAN: TEDDY ROOSEVELT.
President McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901 and died six days later. Much to the chagrin of some Republican tycoons VP Teddy Roosevelt became President. Understanding the deep voter dissatisfaction with big business, Roosevelt went after "the malefactors of great wealth" in antitrust suits while at the same time maintaining generally cordial relations with the Wall Street capitalists who would fund his 1904 campaign. He was nominated to great acclaim on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Chicago.

DEMOCRAT: ALTON B. PARKER.

Parker was probably one of the most obscure presidential candidates of all time. His backgroud was that he was chief justice of the New York Court of Appeals. He was so colorless that Roosevelt referred to him as "the neutral-tinted individual."

The CAMPAIGN in 1904.

The only thing of note was that Roosevelt thought he might lose New York so he made a personal appeal to his Wall Street connections which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars being bestowed upon him overnight. These enormous sums embarrassed Roosevelt and he was worried that the tycoons like J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford Frick would feel they had him bought. Read the QUOTE above to see what Frick had to say a couple years later.

The WINNER was TEDDY ROOSEVELT and he was already the 26th president of the U.S.

Roosevelt got 7,626,593 and 336 electoral.

Parker got 5,082.898 popular and 140 electoral.