Colonel Roosevelt (50 page)

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.

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,

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.’ ”