Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [130]
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.
The machinery does not exist (and can never be created as long as present political conditions are continued) which can secure what a future of real justice will undoubtedly develop, namely, the right of political expression by the negro who shows that he possesses the intelligence, integrity and self-respect which justify such right of political expression in his white neighbor.
We face certain actual facts, sad and unpleasant facts, but facts which must be faced if we are to dwell in the world of realities and not of shams.… I earnestly believe that by appealing to the best white men in the South, the men of justice and of vision as well as of strength and leadership, and by frankly putting the movement in their hands at the outset, we shall create a situation by which the colored men of the South will ultimately get justice as it is not possible for them to get justice if we are to continue and perpetuate the present conditions.
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,