Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [134]
The dead weight of orphanage and depleted craftsmanship, of crippled workers and workers suffering from trade diseases, of casual labor, of insecure old age, and of household depletion due to industrial conditions are, like our depleted soils, our gashed mountainsides and flooded river bottoms, so many strains upon the national structure, draining the reserve strength of all industries and showing beyond all peradventure the public element and public concern in industrial health.
He declared, as he had so often done as president, “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country.” He promised a sheaf of new federal statutes to set minimum wage and workplace standards, compensate for job-related injuries, strengthen his own pure-food law of 1906, and institute a system of “social insurance” with medical coverage for the poor. He endorsed an income-tax amendment to the Constitution. If he was returned to the White House, new or revived federal agencies would include a department of public health, plus commissions to inquire into the rising cost of living, improve rural conditions, and regulate interstate industrial corporations. He warned that the last-named commission would have “complete power” to investigate, monitor, publicize, and if necessary prosecute irresponsible trusts.
“ ‘AND THEY WISHED MORE!’ ”
Roosevelt’s two-hour address to the Progressive National Convention, 6 August 1912. (photo credit i11.2)
Once or twice, quailing at the bulk of his twenty-thousand-word typescript, he suggested that sections of it should be omitted “as read.” The crowd was insatiable: “Go on, go on.” He tried to skip the tariff, his least favorite subject, and was reprimanded. Even so, he tore out and crumpled some later pages. It was plain that he had written them for press release, rather than to be declaimed.
At last came the line all wanted to hear, from his oration at the Chicago Auditorium. “I say in closing what in that speech I said in closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
The response was tumultuous. If Progressivism was, as more and more critics were suggesting, a religion, it needed its mantras, and could not hear them enough. Roosevelt ducked out of the hall at 3:30 P.M., pursued by the sound of ten thousand voices singing his name, to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland.”
WHEN RAYMOND ROBINS* saw him again, in his hotel parlor late that night, he was resting his tired head against the mantelpiece.
“Colonel,” Robins said, “they have just voted down four planks.”
In another room, a subcommittee of the Resolutions Committee, chaired by William Draper Lewis, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law department, was trying to nail down the Party’s campaign platform. Lewis had been agonizing over this all-important “contract with the people” since July. A group of moonbeamers, led by Gifford and Amos Pinchot, was determined to substitute some radical planks for the more pragmatic ones favored by Perkins, Beveridge, and the Colonel himself. Their efforts had apparently succeeded.
“Each one of those planks will go back,” Roosevelt angrily told Robins, “or I am not a candidate.”
The result, in the small hours of Wednesday morning, was a compromise platform that mentioned neither prohibition nor race, but awarded the Colonel his battleships and retained the regulatory plank as written by himself and Perkins—more accurately, handwritten on various slips of paper, some of them dating as far back as May. It formalized in prose all the other promises Beveridge and Roosevelt