Which president promoted the New Nationalism platform?

• A. Woodrow Wilson
• B. Theodore Roosevelt
• C. William Howard Taft
• D. Franklin D. Roosevelt

Answer: (B)

Understanding Progressive Era debates about how the federal government should handle big business and social reform helps here. Theodore Roosevelt championed New Nationalism, a program that argued for a strong federal role in the economy: aggressive regulation of corporations, expanded government oversight, and social welfare measures to protect workers and promote public welfare. It called for national standards and a guiding hand from Washington to curb abuses and ensure fair play in the marketplace. This approach contrasted with the later emphasis of Wilson’s New Freedom, which aimed to restore competition by limiting the power of trusts rather than expanding federal control, and with Taft’s more incremental reforms and the much later New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt. So the individual who promoted New Nationalism was Theodore Roosevelt, whose 1912 campaign upped the federal government’s role in economic and social policy.