ROOSEVELT'S TREACHERY TO PROGRESSIVISM
Quick, Herbert
Roosevelt's Treachery to Progressivism What Senator La Follette Predicted Six Years Ago Has Come to Pass By HERBERT QUICK BEAUTIFUL Evelyn Hope is dead"—and so is the Progressive party, the...
...And yet, it is exactly the plan Roosevelt pursued when President...
...He completely dominates its policy and the real significance of his tactics is revealed as it could not be in the more complex political situations in which he has been a conspicuous figure...
...Well, exactly that began to take place in 1912...
...That sounded interesting, but not half so much as it does after watching the rise, the fall and the assassination of the Progressive party...
...Prior to this time, he had believed that Taft could not be beaten—which was correct, as it turned out— and that Taft, renominated, the thing to do was to have him beaten at the polls...
...He knew the chances were he would be beaten...
...He will not last...
...He has tried to strangle at its birth every progressive movement which he could not control...
...After that election the word began coming to the big insurgents by the political grapevine telegraph lines that Roosevelt was getting more and more insurgent in his views, and was beginning to have his doubts about Taft...
...He will either fight us, or he will thrust himself on as the creator and leader of the movement which lor seven years as President he tried to hamstring by the power of his great office...
...He said something to me which so fitted into what my broker friend said it rather piqued my curiosity...
...He was so needed that even as the heart panteth for the water-brooks, so panted the hearts of most of those present for the return of Roosevelt...
...It was a great, an inspiring time...
...His following was made up partly of his own tried and true group, in Wisconsin, North Dakota and the Northwest generally, and partly of the progressive crowd who had been with Roosevelt...
...He asserted that La Follette was that man...
...But whispers did come to my ears, and I suppose to others who get at the inside of things, that he would be a candidate...
...History will say, and in saying will cover some great names with eternal shame...
...The message this iron ore man brought from New York, according to my informant, was this: They say in New York they are going to nominate Roosevelt to succeed Taft...
...When Roosevelt returns," Fighting Bob went on, "the first great peril of our movement will be upon it...
...Some of these men were greatly troubled when Roosevelt began to show them that in his opinion the movement had now gained such strength he ought to seize upon it for himself...
...Possibly the Colonel may have thought of that, however...
...The third party movement promises to illumine this inherent weakness of Roosevelt as has no other phase of his political career...
...So he went back home and sent word to the insurgency group in Washington that he changed his mind about Taft's strength, and that he thought the insurgents ought to nominate a candidate against him...
...In the spring of 1911 he found out more about it He took a swing around the circle on a speech-making tour, and he found out two things...
...They say Roosevelt is the only man able to ride that wave into power and control it so it won't do us any actual harn "I told them I was against him and asked how they knew he wouldn't throw them down when they got him in...
...It looked as if the Republican party would soon be captured by the insurgents and returned to the democracy of Lincoln...
...Oh, if he were only here now...
...Talk ran on Roosevelt, then surrounded with newspaper men on his homeward trip from Africa, all eager to know what he was going to do politically...
...Then there was no Progressive party, but a powerful progressive movement in the Republican party, which commanded the sympathy and aid of many progressive Democrats...
...He controlled absolutely the Republican state convention of 1910 at Saratoga, and had adopted a platform lauding Taft and the Taft administration to the skies, and nominated Stimson for governor...
...He sent word to La Follette that La Follette could run and be defeated without being injured...
...They were all foreshadowed by what had occurred...
...So Wall Street is for T. R. as an insurgent candidate...
...What life is left in it we abandon to you...
...When did Roosevelt return from Africa...
...Who killed it...
...By reference to the books I find he reached the United States in June, 1910...
...This was in the latter part of 1911 and the first six weeks of 1912...
...That being the case, some of the things mentioned above had not yet taken place...
...Whence did these whispers come...
...Principles and issues must constitute the basis of any great movement...
...He refused to run unless the men asking him to run would agree to stand by him to the end, and unless enough money could be collected to enable the movement to have some chance to succeed...
...In the end the people of this country will get his true measure...
...He lost the election—and he lost interest in reform...
...He talks for progressivism, but he has put on guard against us who were making the fight in the states, his judges, his district attorneys, his postmasters and United States officials generally over whose prostrate forms we have had to march to every victory we have won in the past nine years...
...TAKE A LOOK at the progressive movement in the beginning of 1912: Roosevelt encouraging La Follette to run against Taft, Roosevelt's progressive friends encouraged by him to boost La Follette and his candidacy, no thought in progressive ranks that Roosevelt had any intention of running himself against Taft, La Follette burning up the midwest in whirlwind speeches of the old La Follette type...
...I can date the occurrence by that...
...I wonder a little whether his place in history ha3 not now been spoiled quite as thoroughly...
...They said it was their best chance, that Taft was a dead cock in the pit...
...WHO should be the insurgent candidate against Taft...
...Our company wondered about this, too...
...Now, however, he became favorable to a fight against Taft's renomination...
...FOUR YEARS AGO (August 10, 1912) the following comment appeared in an editorial entitled "Roosevelt Tactics," in LA FOLLETTE'S MAGAZINE: Roosevelt Threats THE LAST THING to be tolerated of a new political party, professing to stand for progress, is to hark back to boss and machine rule through threats and coercion of candidates for office...
...The movement was strongest in the Middle West, and on the Pacific Coast...
...We are a happy family of fighters...
...Roosevelt's whole record demonstrates that he has no constructive power...
...One day as early as the late summer of 1911 I met on the Twentieth Century Limited a New York, FOUR YEARS AGO (August 10, 1912) the following comment appeared in an editorial entitled "Roosevelt Tactics," in LA FOLLETTE'S MAGAZINE: Time Will Tell "HOW do you stand on ME...
...He is not a progressive, except with his tongue, and never was...
...they were all already conceived in the womb of Time...
...He refused to identify himself with the Progressive Republican movement...
...There were gasps of astonishment...
...Roosevelt is not concerned about a progressive Congress...
...It nominated Roosevelt for President, and adjourned...
...ROOSEVELT appeals to Progres...
...A person had become all...
...Well, the man who told me," said the broker, "says Roosevelt may or may not know it, but Wall Street is going to see that he is nominated and elected.'" "Wall Street...
...It marked the lowest declination of the Colonel's star since he had been in public life...
...But the Progressive party on the wane contained nothing of interest to Roosevelt...
...He will make principles hazy and exalt personalities...
...Surely, La Follette's talk in 1910 to the effect that T. R. would be the evil genius of the insurgent movement seemed the wildest sort of pessimism...
...Clearly the only thing of any value about it was the good will...
...How can that be...
...Every man in the group agreed to his terms, and he began his spectacular campaign...
...He would be a tower of strength for that decency and righteousness of which he was always talking...
...but he made it clear that he would not stand for any quitting in any other man's interest after his hat went into the ring...
...He would not promise to get out in the open for La Follette...
...The acid of Roosevelt's activities was set to work dissolving the insurgent group and destroying La Follette's candidacy...
...The war broke out, and at once Roosevelt threw overboard his economic demands, and went mad on two things—Preparedness and Hatred for Wilson...
...Here is the knife...
...FOUR YEARS AGO (July 13, 1912) the following editorial appeared on the front cover of LA FOLLETTE'S MAGAZINE: The New Party MR...
...but he did promise to assume what may be called a position of "benevolent neutrality...
...And then, the Progressive party, robbed of its principles by Roosevelt, and robbed also of its one idol, did the most bitterly appropriate thing ever done in American politics...
...Put the Progressive party out of its misery!' La Follette was truly a prophet...
...You have done it to death...
...La Follette listened to these generous rhapsodies, saying nothing, until the question as to his views on the return of the Colonel was plumped directly at him...
...Why does he want to control them...
...Surely not...
...As my influencing contribution to the verdict of history, let me tell of what took place at the Maple Bluff Farm, the home of Senator "Bob" La Follette at Madison, Wisconsin, some five or six years ago...
...No whisper came to my ears, from progressive circles, up to this time that Roosevelt had any intention of running for the nomination...
...but it was not without its witnesses for truth in every state in the union...
...He has always played this kind of a political game...
...for if he associates himself with us openly or covertly he will either rule us or ruin us—and if he rules he will surely ruin us...
...I understand," said he, "Roosevelt is to be given the nomination next summer and Taft will be dropped...
...I suspect that not two persons there believed in what La Follette said...
...I exclaimed...
...Some began to make demands that La Follette divide certain delegations with Roosevelt, What was it La Follette said that Sunday in 1910...
...Of course, it would be reactionary...
...Dolliver, who had so long trod with Aldrich and his group the downward road of political iniquity, had felt his great soul in revolt, and in a three days' onslaught in the Senate had driven the big burglars before him cowed and trembling...
...What La Follette predicted in 1910 had come to pass...
...but let it go...
...An Aldrich Senate and a Cannon House are satisfactory to him, if he can win more easily with that kind of a combination...
...The first was that his New York defeat had not robbed him of his great hold on the people of the country...
...Imagine a Congress elected on this basis...
...What would become of the progressive movement under such leadership...
...At that time Dolliver, Bristow, La Follette, Bourne, Poindexter, Pinchot, Gronna, Hubbard, Cummins—the great insurgent group—for months had Taft's hide nailed to the insurgent back fence, and insurgency was sweeping the country like wildfire...
...the second was that insurgency was rampant...
...that he is progressive only in words...
...La Follette burned up the prairies, swept over the trans-Missouri territory, electrified New York, thrilled Illinois and Ohio...
...I think," said he, "that every true friend of the Progressive movement ought to wish that Colonel Roosevelt might stay just where he is—in Africa...
...Issues had disappeared...
...He had already accomplished so much that his Wisconsin achievements alone will give him place among the greatest of American statesmen...
...It is the Roosevelt way...
...It was this that made his administration as President, although a time of reform agitation, barren of constructive legislation and a period for growth of evils that might have been avoided under wiser leadership...
...That was the question in the latter part of 1911...
...It had become a Roosevelt party and nothing more...
...is Roosevelt's sole test of qualification for a Progressive...
...They urge that we all get behind the Colonel in a quiet way, because this wave of anarchy and socialism and La Folletism out west is getting so strong it threatens all our interests...
...that he is ever ready to compromise in order to win, regardless of platform promises or progressive principles...
...He did not say that Taft's defeat at the polls, with no fight made which would bring any other Republican into prominence against him in 1912, would have left the ways greased for the launching of the Colonel's boom as the savior of the G. O. P. in 1916...
...Has he any sinister motive...
...Roosevelt split the Republican party, and founded the Progressive party...
...He will smear over and obscure the issues...
...It was the unanimous opinion of the insurgent group that La Follette was the man...
...The Perkinses, Flinns, Munseys, McCormicks, Walter Browns, Dan Hannas and the rest of the plutocrats and machinists who came in with the Colonel, went out with him...
...ROOSEVELT returned June 18, 1910...
...No party was ever successfully organized about a man...
...And yet, Roosevelt threatens to beat senators, congressmen, governors, sheriffs, and coroners unless the declare for HIM...
...The Colonel and the Colonel's nominee were licked limp in New York in that election...
...I will not say, but in all history there is no instance of a similar policy except for sinister motives...
...The question now is: Was La Follette a prophet in May, 1910...
...Insurgency everywhere was setting the Aldriches, Cannons, Balling-ers, Tafts, Hitchcocks, Penroses, Cranes, Butlers, Lodges, Lippitts, Smoots and their ilk into tremors of fear and rage...
...By this act it said to the Colonel: "We made a party for you—the Progressive party...
...It is characteristic of Roosevelt that while he seizes upon issues that make good propaganda and gives them publicity, he has not the patience nor stability nor depth of conviction to prevent his sacrificing essential principles and permanent results to personal considerations and temporary advantage...
...broker—one of those men who associate with insiders, but who really take little interest in politics...
...He will introduce disunion among us...
...In other words, Roosevelt did all he could to boom the insurgent fight against Taft's renomination...
...However that may be, the best thing we can hope for is that when he returns he will fight us openly...
...Why," said I, "he has said he wouldn't be a candidate...
...LA FOLLETTE had spent a decade putting Wisconsin at the head of the movement by his sturdy radicalism, and his sane, sound, democratic program of legislation...
...He is a man, who owns so much iron ore he can walk right into the Holy of Holies in New York...
...He began speaking well of La Follette's work in Wisconsin...
...Roosevelt's Treachery to Progressivism What Senator La Follette Predicted Six Years Ago Has Come to Pass By HERBERT QUICK BEAUTIFUL Evelyn Hope is dead"—and so is the Progressive party, the beauti-ful Evelyn Hope of American history...
...The Progressive party met at Chicago, without a single vestige left, so far as its proceedings show, of the old fervor for reform...
...At La Follette's home, which become a sort of shrine to which the insurgents went for inspiration, there was about the usual Sunday group on that sunny May Sunday in 1910...
...He supported Lodge for United States Senator two years ago, and Penrose for United States Senator four years ago...
...Would he support the horrible, clumsy, senseless sordid, plutocratic Taft administration for which he was so solely responsible...
...I didn't think much of this bald dining car chat, but within a few weeks I was in Minneapolis, and there met an old friend who was a political writer on a stand-pat Twin Cities paper...
...They are the death rattle in its throat...
...To his friends he said that for him to run and lose would "spoil his place in history...
...He declared that in his judgment Taft could not be beaten, and it would be folly to try it Roosevelt himself was for Taft...
...Every intelligent observer west of the meridian of Indianapolis knew it—and the Colonel knew it Hence these messages...
...Well," said he, "they say that this insurgent movement out west is getting dangerous, and that T. R. is the only man who can rope it and hog-tie it and keep it from doing any harm...
...Would he take sides with righteousness...
...From Wall Street of all places...
...Just possibly...
...If Roosevelt goes into the progressive movement, he will smear and obscure principles and issues, and personalities will take their places...
...He sent word that a man should be put up against him in the convention...
...It was scarcely out of its swaddling clothes, and it lies here on its little white cot, with some devoted souls standing by, still insisting that it lives—but the sounds which issue from its lips are not breathing...
...sives to join his party...
...I saw a Duluth man the other day," said he, "who told me something that rather startled me...
Vol. 8 • July 1916 • No. 7
