in the political graveyard — noted famous political figures lost to forgotten political figures.
Yeah, what the Hell was this guy thinking?
Name Ambassador James Watson Gerard  Votes 133,815 (62.08%)
St. Sen. Franklin Delano Roosevelt  63,879 (29.64%)
James S. McDonough  17,862 (8.29%
So. Â About the man Roosevelt lost to in a 1914 Senate bid — he never really had any intention on winning (Just trying to up his name recognition):
Remarkably for a former Ambassador to the country, Gerard regarded Germany with little less than loathing. His bile was reserved not only for native Germans, but was also taken to include German-American U.S. citizens.Â
Gerard gained particular notoriety for a speech given on 25 November 1917 to the Ladies Aid Society of St. Mary’s Hospital in New York. During the course of his speech he feared for the possibility of up to half a million German-Americans rising up and wreaking havoc within the U.S. once General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (AEF) took part in its first major offensive against the German enemy.Â
His solution was startlingly simple: to hang German-Americans from lamp posts. Unsurprisingly Gerard was unsuccessful in his bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1920.Â
Well… we were right there at war with Germany. Â And another Presidential candidate running around wanting to imprison people based on little more than supposition, Mitchell Palmer — well, he might’ve gotten in had the political climate in 1920 been as it was in 1919 — as it were he bobbed up and down and finished off third.