THE CASE OF MR. ROOSEVELT
The Case of Mr. Roosevelt BRYAN at Baltimore, foregoing all chance of his own nomination, marshalling all his forces, braving Tammany and the trusts to rescue his party from their domination,...
...But Mr...
...He ruthlessly sacrificed everything to the one idea of his being the one candidate...
...He submitted no suggestion as to a platform of progressive principles...
...It was a proceeding with which each was acquainted and which each had sanctioned in prior conventions...
...But Roosevelt would not consider Hadely He would have no one but himself...
...We are behind England in this matter of assuring our workers a wage above the bare margin of existence...
...He did have enough delegates in that convention ultimately to have nominated a real progressive and adopted a strong progressive platform...
...He wanted one thing—he wanted the nomination...
...The advice was accepted...
...The British government passed the trades board act of 1909 which inaugurated the policy of the legal minimum wage...
...Furthermore this committee pointed out that wage boards were practicable, were beneficial, and should be tried...
...The story of the passage of this Bill is told by Mrs...
...Roosevelt was not governed by a suggestion of that spirit of high patriotic and unselfish purpose of which Bryan furnished such a magnificent example one week later in the Democratic convention at Baltimore...
...He could even have nominated Hadley on such a platform, and progressive Republicans could have supported Hadley in much the same spirit as hundreds of thousands of them will now support Wilson...
...Bourbonism, as represented by President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University, wrote that platform...
...Evans points out, of a measure as carefully worked out, as constructive, and as enduring in principle as the Wisconsin bill...
...Bourbonism's Platform AFTER POINTING with pride and viewing with satisfaction to the extent of several paragraphs, the Republican platform—adopted over the united protest of the Wisconsin and North Dakota delegates—gets down to business in the following words: "We believe in our self-controlled representative democracy, which is a government of laws, not of men, and in which order is the prerequisite of progress...
...He therefore deliberately chose to claim every thing, to cry fraud, to bully the national committee and the convention, and sought to create a condition which would make impossible a calm investigation of cases upon merit, and to carry the convention by storm...
...The reason is obvious...
...He was not there to preserve the integrity of the Republican party, and make it an instrument for the promotion of progressive principles and the restoration of government to the people...
...Recognition of the Minimum Wage ELIZABETH GARDINER EVANS served with distinction on the commission appointed in Massachusetts to investigate the need of a minimum wage board which should maintain a just wage scale...
...K." A government of laws, not of men...
...Each candidate was trying to seat a sufficient number of fraudulently credentialed delegates, added to those regularly chosen to support him, to secure control of the convention, and "steam-roll" the nomination...
...Instead, he filled the public ear with sound and fury...
...He gagged his followers in the convention without putting upon record any facts upon which the public could base a definite, intelligent judgment regarding the validity of Taft's nomination...
...Efforts to secure a legal minimum wage in this country have been less successful...
...Evans remarks: "In these measures is surely a leaven which may be trusted in time to go far toward leavening the whole lump...
...Yes, the Payne-Aldrich law, for example...
...and the anti-trust law enacted by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust cases...
...And yet he did not have enough votes to nominate himself upon any honest basis...
...This explains the extraordinary conduct of Roosevelt...
...Roosevelt BRYAN at Baltimore, foregoing all chance of his own nomination, marshalling all his forces, braving Tammany and the trusts to rescue his party from their domination, carrying the convention for the adoption of the most progressive Democratic platform yet offered, and the nomination of the most progressive Democratic candidate available, was a towering figure of moral power and patriotic devotion to civic righteousness...
...Roosevelt had as great an opportunity to serve the progressive cause at Chicago, as Bryan had at Baltimore...
...That this is the true psychology of the Roosevelt proceedings becomes perfectly plain...
...Otherwise he would have directed his floor managers to contest every inch of the ground for a progressive platform before the committee on resolutions and in the open convention...
...In 1908 a committee of the House of Commons reported that it was quite as legitimate to establish by legislation a minimum standard of remuneration as it was to establish such a standard of sanitation, cleanliness, ventilation, air-space, and hours of work...
...But that even a cautious and guarded acceptance of this principle of the minimum wage should find its way into the statute books of a New England state is perhaps to be taken everywhere as a most hopeful indication of progress...
...This the managers upon both sides well understood...
...If he had the evidence to prove that Taft could not be honestly and fairly nominated, why did he not direct his lieutenants to present that evidence to the national committee, and then to the convention and the country, so clearly that the convention would not have dared to nominate Taft and that Taft could not, in honor, have accepted the nomination, if made...
...An analysis of the testimony will, I am convinced, show that neither Taft nor Roosevelt had a majority of honestly or regularly elected delegates...
...This bill, writes Charles F. Gettemy in The American Yearbook for 1911, is a "distinctively American product and offered the promise of a mode of determining wages under the authority of law that would be workable and practicable even under peculiar American conditions...
...But Roosevelt was serving the man, not the cause...
...Massachusetts has stopped far short, as Mrs...
...Special Privilege, as represented by Senators Crane and Penrose and "Boss" Barnes, stamped it with the official "0...
...It is a deeply significant legislative act...
...He could not enter upon such an analysis of the evidence as would prove Taft's regularly elected delegates in the minority, without inevitably subjecting his own spuriously credentialed delegates to an examination so critical as to expose the falsity of his own contention that he had an honestly elected majority of the delegates...
...Contrast with that the following one sentence from the rejected La Follette platform: "Over and above constitutions and statutes, and greater than all, is the supreme sovereignty of the people...
...He was there to force his own nomination or to smash the convention...
...Roosevelt at Chicago, backed by money derived from the stock watering operations of the Steel Trust and the Harvester Trust, organizing what are now confessed to have been "fake" contests as to nearly two hundred delegates in order to control the Republican convention and secure his own nomination, refusing to aid in making a progressive platform, bound to have the nomination or destroy the Republican party, was a most striking example of misdirected power and unworthy ambition...
...In Minnesota an attempt was made in 1911 to pass such a bill, modeled on the English act but restricted by constitutional barriers and limited only to women and minors, but it failed of passage...
...Neither of them has been fried by the severest tests...
...He offered no reason for a third party excepting his own overmastering craving for a third term...
...In Wisconsin, in the same year, a bill was brought before the legislature which was drafted by the eminent economist, John R. Commons...
...As Mrs...
...At the first suggestion of Hadly he ordered the third party maneuvers, lest he lose his followers...
...Neither Hadley nor Wilson are veterans in the progressive ranks...
...Evans on page seven of this magazine...
...Property, not humanity—that is the "key note" of this most reactionary document...
...He clamored loudly for purging the convention roll of "tainted" delegates, without purging his own candidacy of his tainted contests and his tainted trust support...
...The Massachusetts legislature, acting upon this recommendation, passed a Minimum Wage Bill, which, if not thorougn-going, is at least a long step forward in that it gives legislative recognition to the revolutionary principle of the minimum wage and provides ah entering wedge for a more nearly perfect law...
...Both appear to be men of high ideals whose records, though short, give promise...
...She joined with a majority of this commission in signing a report favoring the establishment of such a board...
...This bill likewise failed of passage...
Vol. 4 • July 1912 • No. 28
