On a cool summer evening 100 years ago, a confident Republican presidential nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, sat in his ornate suite at Portland’s Benson Hotel and made a decision that likely cost him the election. In 1916, the Republican Party needed a unifier. Four years earlier, the party had split in two when the Old Guard clashed with the party’s progressive wing—throwing the 1912 election to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Nowhere were the Republican wounds more raw than in progressive-leaning California, where the feud of 1912 continued. Click here to read the full article from the U.S. District Court of Oregon Historical Society.