Evils of Compromise
Hesseltine, William B.
Evils of Compromise Altgeld's America: the Lincoln ideal versus changing realities, by Ray Ginger, Funk & Wagnalls. 376 pp. $4.95. History of the Progressive Party 1912-1916, by Amos R. E....
...Gary proposed to replace Taft with former President Theodore Roosevelt who believed that steel was a "good" trust...
...The trusts raised prices, starved labor, corrupted government...
...His sympathies are with the reformers, idealists, and humanitarians, but his adulation is tempered with honesty...
...The question, of course, is loaded...
...These two trusts, with the Morgan interests behind them and with control over newspapers and public information, represented the power of special privilege to destroy democracy and crush the individual...
...He might, indeed, have so continued had not his brother got into big trouble...
...305 pp...
...Thereafter he deserted petty reforms to throw himself wholeheartedly into reforming the national government...
...If he failed to get the Republican nomination, he would support a third party which, even though it would elect Wilson and the hated Democrats, would at least punish Taft...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine /Chicago, in the years around the ^ turn of the century, was a city in torment...
...Amos Pinchot came from a wealthy New York family, received the benefits of European travel and a Yale diploma, and entered, in a minor way, into the good works which befitted his station...
...In the ensuing hassle, Amos became his brother's counsel, wrote articles in his defense, and was startled to witness the interrelation of politics and economic forces...
...In the United States today," he asks, "where is the governor to rank with Altgeld, the social critic to rank with Veblen, the lawyer to rank with Darrow, the educator-philosopher to rank with Dewey...
...With it all there was the memory of the Haymarket Riots and the anarchists, the current experiences of George Pullman, the Socialists, and Eugene V. Debs...
...The basic problem, Amos Pinchot of New York came to think, was monopoly...
...In the meantime, a group of liberals, Amos and Gifford Pinchot prominent among them, elected an organization and sought for a candidate to present to the Republicans...
...Helping with both the organization and the finances was Frank Munsey of International Harvester...
...Years later, after he had opposed two world wars, had partaken of the fiasco of the "Committee of 48" in 1920, had denounced the New Deal as a fraud, he set about to write his "history" of the Bull Moose Party of 1912...
...Louis, Cleveland, or even Chicago, Amos Pinchot launched into the "history" of his connections with the Progressive Party...
...Graft and corruption characterized city and state governments, big business exploited labor and the consumers, while social workers and humanitarians chipped little splinters from the monolith of governmental and industrial evil...
...But implicit in this story is an answer to what happened to the so-called "Lincoln ideal" when confronted with changing realities: It compromised principles for "practical" advantages, and the light went out in Chicago...
...To his disgust, Perkins suppressed the anti-trust plank, and after the 1912 election Pinchot succeeded in getting the plank restored to the defunct platform...
...In 1916, the leader of the Bull Moose declined the nomination and went back to the Republicans...
...But for all his belief that he had seen inside the cup, Amos Pinchot remained incredibly naive...
...Clarence Darrow was as eager for money and success as the worst of the corrupt plutocrats whom he harried...
...In 1893 the Columbia Exposition—a gaudy, garish, boastful affair housed in confused architecture.—presented a facade of chaos to a disturbed world...
...There were virtues, he thinks, in the Chicago at the turn of the century—virtues that America lacks today...
...His brother was Gifford Pinchot, chief forester of the United States who charged that Secretary of the Interior R. A. Ballinger fraudulently turned over Alaskan coal lands to Morgan-Guggenheim interests...
...But there was also, confounding the turmoil even while trying to assuage the torment, Jane Addams and the women of Hull House, John Dewey trying to reorient American education at the University of Chicago, Thorstein Veblen, also at the University, sardonically assessing the struggle for status, the Municipal League laboring to overthrow the "gray wolves" of the common council and to promote public ownership of the transit system, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright trying to bring unity and integrity to architecture, Clarence Darrow laboring for justice in the mazes of the criminal law, Theodore Dreiser seeking to interpret the impact of chaos on human personality...
...Ray Ginger, once a reporter on the Chicago Tribune, traces in Altgeld's America the agonies of a changing Chicago between the Columbian Exposition and the defeat of municipal ownership in 1905...
...With this naive beginning, revealing that even when he wrote in 1933 he had learned nothing of the insurgent movement during Taft's Administration and had no knowledge of progressivism in Wisconsin or reform movements in St...
...Steel, manipulating the liberal sentiments of the country...
...on the side of civic righteousness...
...He left a few hours before Roosevelt...
...He was a trustee of charitable organizations— "petty movements, which . . . merely tickle the conscience of those who . . . picture themselves...
...It was less history than autobiography, but in it Amos Pinchot revealed the basic ineptness of his type of reformer when confronted with practical politics and forced to mingle with operating politicians...
...Steel...
...Perhaps the real question which emerges from these two accounts is not where are the Altgelds of yesteryear, but where are the Pinchots...
...New York University Press...
...He joined the Republican Club, the Boone and Crocket Club of big game hunters, the Racquet and Tennis, the Yale and the University Clubs...
...George Pullman was an idealist who wanted to regulate the moral life as well as the living conditions of his employees...
...The torment had its origin in the rapid growth in the years after the Civil War, in the influx of new population, the rise of new industries, the maladjustments inherent in the transformation from a rural to an urban society...
...Good Government Leagues"—the Goo-Goos—battled fruitlessly, like the Municipal League of Chicago, at electing honest men to office only to find that the good men frittered away their time on details, hesitated to take action, and failed to grapple with the basic problems...
...Steel and International Harvester...
...Steel was angry because President Taft was prosecuting the steel trust under the Sherman Act...
...Here were the forces of righteousness embattled against original sin...
...He was captivated by LaFollette, and regarded him as a "true" progressive...
...The "liberals" launched a LaFollette movement, but in the meantime kept trying to induce Roosevelt to endorse the "liberal" program...
...There the Potter Palmers lived in palaces while sweated sewing women worked on piece work in disease-breeding bedrooms...
...Part of the torment was the effort of an overgrown city, mingling crowded tenements with" broad fields, lavish mansions on a fetid lake shore, squalid factories with mud-bogged streets, to grow up...
...7.50...
...Part of the torment was the product of the government of the city—a board of aldermen who sold franchises to street railroads, sold protection to brothels, peddled the votes of laboring men to such princes of business as Marshall Field, Charles Tyson Yerkes, Swift, Armour, and the men of the First National Bank...
...And the worst offenders, in his way of thinking, were U.S...
...It is the story which is spelled out on the national scene in the autobiographical "history" of Amos Pinchot's dealing with the Bull Moose Party, Here, too, is the tale of principles being sacrificed to expediency, the tale of the well-meaning reformer, the man of humanitarian ideals, gulled by the professional "operator...
...In the end—in an unrelated homily mislabeled "Epilogue"—the author utters a cry of despair...
...Only history will tell whether there are today critics and reformers and governors to rank with this shabby galaxy...
...Part of the torment came from the clash of revolting labor and greedy monopoly, with the courts and the criminal law brazenly on the side of big business...
...The Liberals organized for Roosevelt, and the master organizer was George Perkins of U.S...
...Edited with a Biographical Introduction by Helene Maxwell Hooker...
...Chicago was America...
...There was some good in the worst men, some bad in the best—and as a result there was no solution, in these dozen years, for the torment in Chicago...
...History of the Progressive Party 1912-1916, by Amos R. E. Pinchot...
...But Roosevelt, he believed, could become a "liberal" and he had a better chance of getting the Republican nomination...
...All over the nation, in the first years of the Twentieth Century, there was torment...
...In this tormented world, are they still standing, naive, well-meaning, and gullible, waiting—waiting as usual for their betrayers...
...T. R. had betrayed the liberals to the monopolists...
...E. W. Scripps of the newspaper chain "had sent Gil-son Gardner scouting through the country seeking Presidential timber," and Gardner recommended Senator Robert M. LaFollette...
...In 1914 he launched an intra-party fight against Perkins, but Roosevelt defended his chairman, and it was Pinchot who left the party...
...In the Congressional investigation in the winter of 1909-10, he said, "I saw the inside of the American cup...
...Here were the embodied relics of the Lincoln ideal confronting the evils of an industrial society which Abraham Lincoln had helped to make but of which he never dreamed...
...In his version, Judge E. H. Gary of U.S...
...John Peter Altgeld, the governor who pardoned the surviving Haymarket anarchists, was a ruthlessly ambitious politician...
...What Pinchot thought he saw was the Morgan interests, or specifically U.S...
...For the most part, Pinchot's history is an account of his own fight to oust Perkins from the chairmanship of the Bull Moose Party and to direct the party to the single goal of attacking the trusts...
...Before he was through he had seen a little deeper into the cup...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
