How, though, could he claim to be the leader of a new national party unless it had a full ticket in every state? Lack of local and federal candidates would fatally weaken it in regions where Taft or Wilson were strong. And his own campaign would look like a search for glory, rather than leadership of a popular upsurge.
In weighing this and other tactical problems before the convention, Roosevelt turned less to the Pinchot brothers than to a man identified with everything they despised: big-business, laissez-faire, monopolistic capital. George Walbridge Perkins—fifty years old, flush with the proceeds of a fabulous career at the House of Morgan—was a convert to the cause of progressivism. He had surpassed Frank Munsey as the Party’s biggest bankroller. To old-money liberals like the Pinchot brothers, there was something suspect about a nouveau riche altruist declaring that he had the welfare of the people at heart. “Roosevelt has the right idea,” the historian Frederick Jackson Turner commented, “but if he keeps Mr. Perkins as his chef, he is likely to have to take his omelet with Mr. Morgan’s spoon instead of the people’s spoon.”
“A NEW POLITICAL ANIMAL, ALL TEETH AND ANTLERS.”
Roosevelt emerges as a third-party candidate for the presidency, summer 1912. (photo credit i11.1)
Conversely, it was difficult for small-town Midwesterners such as William Allen White to believe that Perkins—so sleek, so at ease entertaining on his palatial estate overlooking the Hudson River—had started out as an office boy in Chicago. He had come by his millions through adroit corporate climbing, up through the executive ranks of insurance and banking companies to the top echelon of some of the world’s greatest conglomerates, including U. S. Steel. For well over a decade this rise had coincided, not always harmoniously, with that of Theodore Roosevelt.
If anything had converted Perkins, fully and finally, to the progressive cause, it was the Colonel’s famous blast against the Taft administration for finding fault with the merger of U.S. Steel and Tennessee Coal & Iron. He believed, with Roosevelt, that there should be an entente between socially responsible entrepreneurs and a powerful, yet non-prosecutorial, government.
Exquisitely undertailored, in custom clothes that favored shades of gray and white, Perkins was a slender man with a trim, soft mustache and a soft voice. He smiled often, and was in constant motion even at rest: toe-tapping, thumb-flicking, black eyes snapping. The pudgy little White envied the drape of his mohair suits, while Gifford Pinchot despaired of ever being able to make Roosevelt laugh the way Perkins did. Behind their jealousy, however, lay an honest concern. They wondered if his real cause was not Roosevelt, but regulatory policy. If he ever became Secretary of Commerce, champagne would surely foam in a thousand corporate boardrooms.
Deep down, Roosevelt preferred the society of sophisticates (Perkins was “George,” White always a surname), as long as they embraced the values of the middle class. Perkins shared his own cheerful nature and freakish ability to be both fast and thorough in dispatching great quantities of work. There was no question as to who should become the chief executive officer of the Progressive Party.
Pinchot, White, and Hiram Johnson, respectively burgeoning as leaders of eastern, central, and West Coast delegations to the convention, worried less about this than about Perkins’s influence on the drafting of the Party platform. He was heard to say that competition in the marketplace was a waste of energy. To White, that sounded like a trust lord talking. It would be a cruel irony if Roosevelt allowed the platform’s antitrust plank to be edited by this silky-smooth, check-writing ambassador from Wall Street.
ONE OF THE REASONS the Colonel liked Perkins was that they could talk about things other than policy, unlike the “moonbeamers,” as Frank Munsey called ideologues of the far left, obsessed with social and economic theory. Roosevelt himself was so bored by some of the doctrinaires who droned around him through the first week of August that he would excuse himself and sneak off somewhere with a novel, until retrieved and reprimanded by his wife.
He had plenty of patience, however, for crucial discussions, choosing eventually to run on “a straight-out progressive ticket” in most states of the union. Excepted only were those in the hopelessly reactionary South, Wisconsin as the pocket principality of Senator La Follette, and six Republican states (Maine, West Virginia, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, and California), progressive enough to have voted for him already. Elsewhere, he felt the third-party ticket would give him a chance to cut into Wilson’s support.
More than that, he wanted to cut into Taft’s. He would show no mercy for the entire Fagin’s den who had ganged up on him in Chicago. “I regard Taft as the receiver of a swindled nomination,” he wrote Van Valkenburg. “I cannot consent to do anything that looks as if I was joining with him. I won’t go into a friendly contest with a pickpocket as to which of us should keep my watch which he stole.”
AS THE CONVENTION loomed nearer, Roosevelt had to decide a moral issue that, agonizingly for him, related to the cause of his departure from the party of Abraham Lincoln. It concerned the right of certain delegations to attend a national convention over the claims of others. Except that this time, the rivals were all for him, and all hailed from Southern states. They differed only in that some were white and some black.
Since he personified the Progressive Party, his opinion in the matter would define its larger attitude to the question of race. A firm, yet compassionate statement would, he hoped, offer voters an alternative to the Democratic Party’s “lily-white” philosophy, and the Republican Party’s sectional mix of tolerance and exploitation on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Such a statement would help clarify his racial views, which had confused many people over the years. Was he still, to white Southerners, the “coon-flavored” President of 1901, who had wined and dined Booker T. Washington? Or was he rather the reactionary commander in chief of 1906, who had dishonorably discharged a whole Negro regiment in Brownsville, Texas, on trumped-up evidence of rioting?
In his own mind, Roosevelt was a fair man, inclined neither to patronize nor sentimentalize those darker and poorer than himself. He was proud of having fought to elevate blacks to federal office as President, and if the number was small, it was better than Taft’s deliberate score of zero. He had appointed an anti-peonage judge in the South, and been the first chief executive ever to speak out against the “inhuman cruelty and barbarity” of lynching. Brownsville was the one race-related incident in his career that might be ascribed to prejudice. But even then, he had prejudged only in the sense that he had been too quick to uphold an army investigation of the case.
Without exception, black people who knew him, from Dr. Washington down to James Amos, his valet, found his goodwill to be sincere, and never more so than when they advanced themselves by their own efforts—some farther, in the relative scheme of things, than he with all his privileges. Yet stray observations over the years had revealed him to be enlightened only in contrast to those of his peers who were outspoken in their xenophobia. Associating with such friends, he was as inclined to agree as disagree, assuring the novelist Owen Wister that blacks were “altogether inferior to the whites,” and the historian James Ford Rhodes that the Fifteenth Amendment had been “bad policy,” and the elephant hunter Quentin Grogan that if he could eliminate every Negro in America at the touch of a button, he would “jump on it with both feet.” Or so they chose to remember.
Roosevelt was struck by the extremes of advice he was now getting on the race question, from visitors and correspondents who all assumed he was their soul mate. Some wanted the Progressive Party to be exclusively white; others, segregated. He wondered if he could not persuade the former element—concentrated in the Old Confederacy—that he posed no reconstructive threat. If so, many of those who found Wilson’s brand of progressivism attractive might find his more so. To break up the “solid” Democratic South, with its 126 electoral votes, would stamp his campaign as truly revolutionary.
He decided to publish an open letter on
the subject, and addressed it to Julian Harris, son of the Georgian folklorist Joel Chandler Harris.
“We have made the Progressive issue a moral, not a racial issue,” he wrote. “I believe that in this movement only damage will come if we either abandon our ideals on the one hand, or, on the other, fail resolutely to look facts in the face, however unpleasant these facts may be.” One fact was that Southern Democrats would never be wooed if their most unifying neurosis was threatened. “Our objective must be the same everywhere, but the methods by which we strive to attain it must be adapted to the needs of the several states, or it will never be attained at all.”
He noted that in a broad swath of the North, extending from Rhode Island west to Illinois, as well as in Maryland, the Progressive Party was already selecting black officials and delegates—acting “with fuller recognition of the rights of the colored man than ever the Republican party did.” In the South, however, it was confronted with the phenomenon that over forty-five years, “colored” and “Republican” had become synonymous terms. That was to say, Southern Negroes had been persuaded to trade disenfranchisement for the privilege, and cash profits, of sending representatives to Northern Republican presidential conventions. Roosevelt did not have to reach back any further than last June to cite the venal, “rotten-borough” black delegates who had stood by in Chicago while the RNC “defied and betrayed the will of the mass of the plain people of the party.”
In view of this ugly record, he felt that the Progressive Party would be doomed if it “prostituted” itself at the outset to Southern politicians of color.
The machinery does not exist (and can never be created as long as present political conditions are continued) which can secure what a future of real justice will undoubtedly develop, namely, the right of political expression by the negro who shows that he possesses the intelligence, integrity and self-respect which justify such right of political expression in his white neighbor.
We face certain actual facts, sad and unpleasant facts, but facts which must be faced if we are to dwell in the world of realities and not of shams.… I earnestly believe that by appealing to the best white men in the South, the men of justice and of vision as well as of strength and leadership, and by frankly putting the movement in their hands at the outset, we shall create a situation by which the colored men of the South will ultimately get justice as it is not possible for them to get justice if we are to continue and perpetuate the present conditions.
MANY OF THE Progressive delegates converging on the Chicago Coliseum on Monday, 4 August, could be excused a sense of déjà vu, having been there as Republicans only seven weeks before. Once again the streets reverberated with bands, straw-hatted politicos strode along arm in arm, and flags bedecked the enormous turreted building on Wabash Avenue. Again Roosevelt established himself in the Congress Hotel, at the end of the same telephone line through to the convention floor. Except now, the only suspense was over whom he would pick as his running mate.
Further differences were apparent inside the Coliseum. Barbed wire no longer spiked the rostrum. Bright red was the prevailing color, save for scores of Stars and Stripes hanging from high rafters, interspersed with mysterious bags of white cotton. From opposite ends of the hall, a giant stuffed moose head and an oil-painted Roosevelt exchanged comradely stares.
In June, the prevailing mood among delegates had been sour and fractious. Now all was unity and exaltation. The semi-religious glow that had infused the bolters then, with Hiram Johnson declaiming, “Our work is holy work,” warmed into flame as the New York delegation, led by Oscar Solomon Straus, marched into the hall singing,
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
The record size of the convention (two thousand delegates and alternates, representing every state in the Union except South Carolina) astounded political reporters aware of the difficulty of organizing a new party in less time than corn took to grow. A sense of mass belonging thrilled the delegates themselves, many of whom had suffered, back home, the obloquy of heresy. Squads seating themselves under the banners of New Hampshire and Maine were encouraged by the sight of others in Western sombreros, or the white starched suits of Mississippi and Florida. All could be excused the delusion that Progressivism (at last styled with a capital P) was strong everywhere in the country, unified behind the most formidable campaigner in American history. Their common accessory was a red bandanna, tied around the neck in Rough Rider style—“common” indeed to observers who associated red with the rise of the proletariat.
Yet there was nothing lumpen about these Progressives, no representation of the poor-white element seen at Democratic conventions. They were scrubbed and prosperous-looking, well dressed and well behaved, churchgoing, charitable, bourgeois to a fault. Even the cigar-chomping Boss Flinn of Pennsylvania took care to spit sideways, so as not to stain his immaculate clothes. William Allen White surveyed the crowd and saw the sort of people he wrote for in the Emporia Gazette. He figured that there was not a delegate on the floor making less than two thousand dollars a year, or more than ten thousand—with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as George Perkins, “spick-and-span, oiled and curled like an Assyrian bull.”
White was struck by how many women he saw in the delegate rows, looking as businesslike as possible in their frilly shirtwaisters: female doctors, lawyers, teachers, and community activists. Not a few were in their early twenties—“rich young girls who had gone in for settlement work.” All seemed to take it for granted that the Progressive platform would recognize universal woman suffrage.
The social pioneer Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House project and arguably the most famous woman in America, entered to reverential applause, a Bull Moose badge on her breast. She took her place in the front row of the VIP enclave, to the joy of officials who had feared she might stay away. Roosevelt’s decision not to seat Southern black delegates had disturbed her, and she had pleaded in vain with the provisional Party Committee to modify it. She was also a pacifist, and thought that the Colonel was too fond of battleships. Only the overriding importance he attached to social reform persuaded Miss Addams to support him rather than Wilson. She had agreed with some reluctance to second his nomination.
The convention came to order at 1:40 P.M., with an opening prayer remarkable for the loudness of its “Amens.” Then Albert J. Beveridge mounted the rostrum, a short, handsome figure dwarfed by a yellow soundboard that hung above him like an airfoil.
The former senator had to get things going with a keynote address that would compensate for the absence of the one man everybody wanted to see. Roosevelt had in fact wanted to make a brief, inspirational appearance after the first fall of the gavel. But Beveridge, a narcissist of the purest bloom, had demanded the afternoon’s headlines to himself. He was then prepared to act unflamboyantly as chairman of the convention.
Roosevelt could not argue against the wisdom of giving a better speaker than himself a chance to articulate the basic tenets of Progressivism—in a voice more silvery, with gestures less punchy. Back in the days of McKinley, Beveridge had won fame as a boyish, golden-haired prophet of America’s imperialistic destiny. Now he was older, darker, and less jingoistic, but still full of frustrated ambition. He had agonized for a long time about leaving the Republican Party, aware that he might never again represent Indiana in Congress. His ego, however, could not resist this new opportunity to be an oracle.
He spoke for an hour and a half, beginning with a rhythmic affirmation of the Progressive creed: “We stand for a nobler America.… We stand for social brotherhood as against savage individualism. We stand for an intelligent cooperation instead of a reckless competition.… Ours is a battle for the actual rights of man.” The Party, he said, had been gestating for years, as ordinary Americans of all political persuasions grew to resent special-interest rule, “the invisible government behind our visible government.” He called for the reforms that Roosevelt
had itemized at Osawatomie and elsewhere—direct primaries, direct election of senators, the initiative, referendum, and recall—arguing that popular rule would alleviate bossism, social insecurity, worker abuse, and the oligarchical concentration of wealth. America was blessed in being prosperous and thinly peopled, but cursed in making a cult of selfishness. “The Progressive motto is, ‘Pass prosperity around.’ ”
Vigorously, his fine eyes glowing, Beveridge also inveighed against child labor, neglect of the elderly, and sex discrimination. The Party, he said, demanded that women be paid as much as men. What was more, “Votes for women are theirs as a matter of natural right alone.” At this, the convention exploded. Delegates of both sexes clambered onto their chairs and shouted approval. Jane Addams controled her emotions, but her face was triumphant. Even men were seen wiping away tears everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“It was not a convention at all,” a New York Times reporter wrote that night. “It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts.”
ENTHUSIASM BECAME ECSTASY the following day, when Theodore Roosevelt materialized beneath the yellow airfoil. No presidential candidate had ever before attended a national convention. For fifty-eight minutes he stood grinning as the Coliseum shook with noise.
At least ten thousand people flooded the floor in a red tide of bandannas. Hats encircled with rings rose on the ends of canes. Two black Northern delegates climbed onstage, and Roosevelt gratefully reached out for them. They huddled with him as he talked and gesticulated, his words inaudible a few feet away. Then one pounded him on the shoulder, and for a moment the trio stood hand in hand, to roars of applause and imitation moose calls.
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