American Experience

Historian John Milton Cooper on the Progressive Party

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JOHN COOPER: The 1912 convention is one of the truly great shows of American politics because here you have Theodore Roosevelt, the ex-president who has challenged the president for the nomination. It's not clear who's going to get it. There are about -- well, there are a lot of delegates that are contested. So and really who gets nominated is going to hinge on who gets how many of these delegates. The party bosses, controlled in the interests of President Taft, award just about all of these delegates to him. It's a steal. It's an absolute steal. It infuriates the Roosevelt supporters. They denounce it. They walk out. It's a wonderful show.

It's more show than substance, though, because even if the conservatives had acted with much more finesse and done it more carefully and with more of an appearance of fairness, Theodore Roosevelt had already decided that if he didn't win that nomination, he was going to walk out of the convention and he was going to start a new party, which is exactly what he does, he and his supporters do.

What he is doing in leading the Progressives in 1912 is laying out what he believes is the correct approach to reform, to handling not only the trust problem, but basically how the country ought to be led, what kind of leadership we ought to have, how we ought to practice democratic politics in the 20th century in a complex industrial society, in a nation that's a great power, how we ought to be doing these things. I mean he's exposing his -- the ideals behind his thinking.

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