The third act in the drama of the Progressive party was filled with the
campaign for the Presidency. It was a three-cornered fight. Taft stood
for Republican conservatism and clung to the old things. Roosevelt
fought for the progressive rewriting of Republican principles with added
emphasis on popular government and social justice as defined in the New
Nationalism. The Democratic party under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson
espoused with more or less enthusiasm the old Democratic principles
freshly interpreted and revivified in the declaration they called the
New Freedom. The campaign marked the definite entrance of the nation
upon a new era. One thing was clear from the beginning: the day of
conservatism and reaction was over; the people of the United States
had definitely crossed their Rubicon and had committed themselves to
spiritual and moral progress.
The campaign had one dramatic incident. On the 14th of October, just
before entering the Auditorium at Milwaukee, Roosevelt was shot by a
fanatic. His immediate action was above everything characteristic. Some
time later in reply to a remark that he had been foolhardy in going on
with his speech just after the attack, Roosevelt said, "Why, you know,
I didn't think I had been mortally wounded. If I had been mortally
wounded, I would have bled from the lungs. When I got into the motor I
coughed hard three times, and put my hand up to my mouth; as I did not
find any blood, I thought that I was not seriously hurt, and went on
with my speech."
The opening words of the speech which followed were equally typical:
"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know
whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes
more than that to kill a Bull Moose.... The bullet is in me now, so that
I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.... First of
all, I want to say this about myself; I have altogether too important
things to think of to feel any concern over my own death; and now I
cannot speak insincerely to you within five minutes of being shot. I
am telling you the literal truth when I say that my concern is for many
other things. It is not in the least for my own life. I want you to
understand that I am ahead of the game anyway. No man has had a happier
life than I have led; a happier life in every way. I have been able to
do certain things that I greatly wished to do, and I am interested in
doing other things. I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that I am
very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not. It was just as when
I was colonel of my regiment. I always felt that a private was to be
excused for feeling at times some pangs of anxiety about his personal
safety, but I cannot understand a man fit to be a colonel who can pay
any heed to his personal safety when he is occupied as he ought to be
occupied with the absorbing desire to do his duty."
There was a great deal of self-revelation in these words. Even the
critic accustomed to ascribe to Roosevelt egotism and love of gallery
applause must concede the courage, will-power, and self-forgetfulness
disclosed by the incident.
The election was a debacle for reaction, a victory for Democracy, a
triumph in defeat for the Progressive party. Taft carried two States,
Utah and Vermont, with eight electoral votes; Woodrow Wilson carried
forty States, with 435 electoral votes; and Roosevelt carried five
States, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington,
and eleven out of the thirteen votes of California, giving him 88
electoral votes. Taft's popular vote was 3,484,956; Wilson's was
6,293,019; while Roosevelt's was 4,119,507. The fact that Wilson was
elected by a minority popular vote is not the significant thing, for it
is far beyond the capability of any political observer to declare what
would have been the result if there had been but two parties in the
field. The triumph for the Progressive party lay in the certainty that
its emergence had compelled the election of a President whose face was
toward the future. If the Roosevelt delegates at Chicago in June had
acquiesced in the result of the steam-roller Convention, it is highly
probable that Woodrow Wilson would not have been the choice of the
Democratic Convention that met later at Baltimore.
During the succeeding four years the Progressive party, as a national
organization, continued steadily to "dwindle, peak, and pine." More and
more of its members and supporters slipped or stepped boldly back to the
Republican party. Its quondam Democratic members had largely returned to
their former allegiance with Wilson, either at the election or after it.
Roosevelt once more withdrew from active participation in public life,
until the Great War, with its gradually increasing intrusions upon
American interests and American rights, aroused him to vigorous and
aggressive utterance on American responsibility and American duty. He
became a vigorous critic of the Administration.
Once more a demand began to spring up for his nomination for the
Presidency; the Progressive party began to show signs of reviving
consciousness. There had persisted through the years a little band of
irreconcilables who were Progressives or nothing. They wanted a new
party of radical ideas regardless of anything in the way of reformation
and progress that the old parties might achieve. There were others who
preferred to go back to the Republican party rather than to keep up the
Progressive party as a mere minority party of protest, but who hoped in
going back to be able to influence their old party along the lines of
progress. There were those who were Rooseveltians pure and simple and
who would follow him wherever he led.
All these groups wanted Roosevelt as President. They united to hold a
convention of the Progressive party at Chicago in 1916 on the same days
on which the Republican Convention met there. Each convention opened
with a calculating eye upon the activities of the other. But both
watched with even more anxious surmise for some sign of intention from
the Progressive leader back at Oyster Bay. He held in his single hand
the power of life and death for the Progressive party. His decision as
to cooperative action with the Republicans or individual action as a
Progressive would be the most important single factor in the campaign
against Woodrow Wilson, who was certain of renomination. Three
questions confronted and puzzled the two bodies of delegates: Would
the Republicans nominate Roosevelt or another? If another, what would
Roosevelt do? If another, what would the Progressives do?
For three days the Republican National Convention proceeded steadily
and stolidly upon its appointed course. Everything had been done in
the stereotyped way on the stereotyped time-table in the stereotyped
language. No impropriety or infelicity had been permitted to mar the
smooth texture of its surface. The temporary chairman in his keynote
speech had been as mildly oratorical, as diffusely patriotic, and as
nobly sentimental as any Fourth of July orator of a bygone day. The
whole tone of the Convention had been subdued and decorous with the
decorum of incertitude and timidity. That Convention did not know what
it wanted. It only knew that there was one thing that it did not want
and that it was afraid of, and another thing it would rather not
have and was afraid it would have to take. It wanted neither Theodore
Roosevelt nor Charles E. Hughes, and its members were distinctly
uncomfortable at the thought that they might have to take one or the
other. It was an old-fashioned convention of the hand-picked variety.
It smacked of the former days when the direct primary had not
yet introduced the disturbing thought that the voters and not the
office-holders and party leaders ought to select their candidates.
It was a docile, submissive convention, not because it was ruled by a
strong group of men who knew what they wanted and proposed to compel
their followers to give it to them, but because it was composed of
politicians great and small to whom party regularity was the breath of
their nostrils. They were ready to do the regular thing; but the only
two things in sight were confoundedly irregular.
Two drafts were ready for their drinking and they dreaded both. They
could nominate one of two men, and to nominate either of them was to
fling open the gates of the citadel of party regularity and conformity
and let the enemy in. Was it to be Roosevelt or Hughes? Roosevelt they
would not have. Hughes they would give their eye teeth not to take. No
wonder they were subdued and inarticulate. No wonder they suffered and
were unhappy. So they droned along through their stereotyped routine,
hoping dully against fate.
The hot-heads in the Progressive Convention wanted no delay, no
compromise. They would have nominated Theodore Roosevelt out of hand
with a whoop, and let the Republican Convention take him or leave him.
But the cooler leaders realized the importance of union between the two
parties and knew, or accurately guessed, what the attitude of Roosevelt
would be. With firm hand they kept the Convention from hasty and
irrevocable action. They proposed that overtures be made to the
Republican Convention with a view to harmonious agreement. A conference
was held between committees of the two conventions to see if common
ground could be discovered. At the first session of the joint committee
it appeared that there was sincere desire on both sides to get together,
but that the Progressives would have no one but Roosevelt, while the
Republicans would not have him but were united on no one else. When the
balloting began in the Republican Convention, the only candidate who
received even a respectable block of votes was Hughes, but his total
was hardly more than half of the necessary majority. For several ballots
there was no considerable gain for any of the numerous candidates,
and when the Convention adjourned late Friday night the outcome was as
uncertain as ever. But by Saturday morning the Republican leaders and
delegates had resigned themselves to the inevitable, and the nomination
of Hughes was assured. When the Progressive Convention met that morning,
the conference committee reported that the Republican members of the
committee had proposed unanimously the selection of Hughes as the
candidate of both parties.
Thus began the final scene in the Progressive drama, and a more
thrilling and intense occasion it would be difficult to imagine. It was
apparent that the Progressive delegates would have none of it. They were
there to nominate their own beloved leader and they intended to do it.
A telegram was received from Oyster Bay proposing Senator Lodge as the
compromise candidate, and the restive delegates in the Auditorium could
with the greatest difficulty be held back until the telegram could be
received and read at the Coliseum. A direct telephone wire from
the Coliseum to a receiver on the stage of the Auditorium kept the
Progressive body in instant touch with events in the other Convention.
In the Auditorium the atmosphere was electric. The delegates bubbled
with excitement. They wanted to nominate Roosevelt and be done with it.
The fear that the other Convention would steal a march on them and make
its nomination first set them crazy with impatience. The hall rumbled
and sputtered and fizzed and detonated. The floor looked like a giant
corn popper with the kernels jumping and exploding like mad.
The delegates wanted action; the leaders wanted to be sure that they had
kept faith with Roosevelt and with the general situation by giving the
Republican delegates a chance to hear his last proposal. Bainbridge
Colby, of New York, put Roosevelt in nomination with brevity and vigor;
Hiram Johnson seconded the nomination with his accustomed fire. Then,
as the word came over the wire that balloting had been resumed in the
Coliseum, the question was put at thirty-one minutes past twelve, and
every delegate and every alternate in the Convention leaped to his feet
with upstretched arm and shouted "Aye."
Doubtless more thrilling moments may come to some men at some time,
somewhere, but you will hardly find a delegate of that Progressive
Convention to believe it. Then the Convention adjourned, to meet again
at three to hear what the man they had nominated would say.
At five o'clock in the afternoon, after a couple of hours of impatient
and anxious marking time with routine matters, the Progressive delegates
received the reply from their leader. It read thus:
"I am very grateful for the honor you confer upon me by nominating me as
President. I cannot accept it at this time. I do not know the attitude
of the candidate of the Republican party toward the vital questions of
the day. Therefore, if you desire an immediate decision, I must decline
the nomination.
"But if you prefer to wait, I suggest that my conditional refusal to
run be placed in the hands of the Progressive National Committee. If
Mr. Hughes's statements, when he makes them, shall satisfy the committee
that it is for the interest of the country that he be elected, they can
act accordingly and treat my refusal as definitely accepted.
"If they are not satisfied, they can so notify the Progressive party,
and at the same time they can confer with me, and then determine on
whatever action we may severally deem appropriate to meet the needs of
the country.
"THEODORE ROOSEVELT."
Puzzled, disheartened, overwhelmed, the Progressive delegates went
away. They could not then see how wise, how farsighted, how inevitable
Roosevelt's decision was. Some of them will never see it. Probably few
of them as they went out of those doors realized that they had taken
part in the last act of the romantic and tragic drama of the National
Progressive party. But such was the fact, for the march of events was
too much for it. Fate, not its enemies, brought it to an end.
So was born, lived a little space, and died the Progressive party. At
its birth it caused the nomination, by the Democrats, and the election,
by the people, of Woodrow Wilson. At its death it brought about the
nomination of Charles E. Hughes by the Republicans. It forced the
writing into the platforms of the more conservative parties of
principles and programmes of popular rights and social regeneration.
The Progressive party never attained to power, but it wielded a potent
power. It was a glorious failure.