Won't Force Negro Party On South.

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 7, 1912:
That, Explains the Colonel to Cheering Convention, Is Why He Opposed Seating Contestants.
AGAINST 'ROTTEN BOROUGHS'
Let Southern Negroes Win by Merit, Not Color, He Declares, and Convention Indorses His Stand.
Special to The New York Times.
    CHICAGO, Aug. 6.— Facing a widespread revolt among negro voters on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line as a result of his "Progressive" policy of barring Southern negroes from seats in the convention, Col. Roosevelt was compelled to-day to take personal charge of the difficult situation growing out of the drawing of the color line.
    When the convention went into session to-day it was after an all-night session of the Committee on Credentials, during which that body had indorsed the "lily white" decision of the Colonel's National Progressive Committee and purged the temporary roll of the convention of every negro contestant from the South.
    There was some bitter truth telling at the long session of the Committee on Credentials, and when daylight shimmered on the window panes of the room where the committee met, negroes from the North joined their colored brethren from the South in denouncing the Colonel's policy and protesting against the action of the committee, which they called gross injustice and discrimination against the black man from the South, although a movement was being started for which was claimed the lofty purpose of a second emancipation.
    The negroes who had been shut out, strongly supported by colored delegates from Northern and border States, threatened to take the matter first to Col. Roosevelt, and, if they failed to get redress, to take their fight into the convention itself.
    It was the Mississippi contest, where the Committee on Credentials voted to seat a white delegation elected at a convention called by W. B. Fridge, the Colonel's National Committeeman, as an affair for "white citizens" only, which aroused most resentment. The "lily white" regulars were seated by a vote of 17 to 16, and charges were openly made that a fraudulent proxy figured in the majority side.
    The Colonel awoke this morning to have echoes of the all-night battle dinned into his ears. He was urged by some friends to consent to a compromise, but was adamant against all such propositions. He told his advisers that he would take the bull by the horns, and expressed himself as confident that when the convention had heard his side the negro contestants from the South would know that his attitude had been misunderstood, and that they could not gain anything by starting trouble on the floor.

Think Query Was Inspired.
    Most of those who attended the convention thought that when the Colonel departed from his typewritten speech long enough to discuss his views on the question of negro delegates from the South it was on the spur of the moment. A question, shouted from the floor gave the Colonel his cue. The general impression to-night, however, is that the Colonel's interlocutor was primed to propound his convenient query.
    It was only through one of the dozen negro delegates from the North, who had seats in the convention, that trouble could be started. The Colonel, who is a great believer in the theory that more flies can be caught with molasses than with vinegar, said in his reply to the query a lot of pretty things about the Northern negroes. What he said about the Southern negroes was not at all nice.
    "In Republican National Conventions hitherto there has been a large representation of colored men, all from non-Republican States, the virtue of the Republicans of the Republican States taking only the form of trying to make the Democratic States be good. Do you see what I mean?
    "The colored delegates came from the States that never cast a Republican Electoral vote, that never elected a colored man to office, where, largely owing to the action participated in for forty-five years by the Republican Party, the colored man has, as a matter of fact, gradually lost all his political rights. So that the old policy of attempting to impose on the Southern States from without a certain rule of conduct toward the negro has, in fact, broken down.
    "I regret to say that every man who has ever been to a National convention knows that the character of the great majority of the colored delegates from the South — from those old, rotten borough States — was such as to reflect discredit upon the Republican Party and upon the race itself," said the Colonel amid applause.

Praise for Northern Negroes.
    "Now, as soon as the Progressive Party was formed, I at once set about, as many other men in different States did, securing from the Northern States themselves an ample recognition of the colored man in these States, so that as a matter of fact there is in this convention a representation from the Republican States of colored men such as there never has been before anything like in any convention in the country, [applause] and, more than that, a representation of colored men who, in point of character, intelligence, and good citizenship, stand on an exact equality with any of the whites among whom they sit." [Applause.]
    The Colonel pointed out that West Virginia, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania had voluntarily chosen colored delegates to the convention, and went on:
    "Do you think Rhode Island or West Virginia or New York would have sent them if they had been told they had to? They would not have. You had to let the movement come from within.
    "From Maryland and West Virginia there have come to this convention colored delegates sent because they represent an element of colored men who have won the esteem and respect of their white neighbors, so that all the honest and decent men can join in sending the delegates of both colors, and they send them here honestly, and send them here of their own free will.
    "The other system of trying to force in the far Southern States conditions that we cannot make exist there has failed. I propose to take toward the Southern States the exact attitude that we took toward West Virginia and Maryland, and I believe in adopting that action we shall naturally and spontaneously see from those Southern States the repetition of the conditions in West Virginia and Maryland, so that in future Progressive National Conventions you will see colored delegates come from the South Atlantic and Gulf States precisely as they now come from West Virginia and from Maryland.

Setting Up Standard for South.
    "Now, friends, I hold that the white man and the colored man who endeavor to make the colored man discontented with what we are doing are the worst foes of the colored race. I hold we are standing against the brutality of the Democracy and the hypocrisy of the Republicans. [Applause.]
    "We are, in the first place, beginning, where all charity must begin, at home. We are beginning by trying to take the steps to do justice to the colored man in our own States. We are setting the standard in border States like West Virginia and Maryland, and setting a standard to which we can have a reasonable hope that our brethren of the South will come up when we no longer attempt to drive them, when it is a matter of honorable obligation with them as with us, to which we have a reasonable right to hope that they will themselves come up and to which a delegate in this convention from Georgia says he believes they will come up.
    "Now, friends, the easy thing for me to have done in this matter, if I had been interested only in my own political advancement, was to have repeated the dreadful blunders made for so many years by the Republican Party; to have uttered insincere platitudes about the black man and kept him out of the Northern delegations and brought him in from the South as a cheap method of paying any obligation to him.
    "That might have helped me; it would have helped me with those people who accept fine phrases as a substitute for honest action. It might have helped me. It would have driven still further down the black man of the South. It would have kept the white men of the South solidified in an angry, victive defensive alliance against any party that did justice to the negro, and it would have sown the seeds at the outset in this Progressive Party, seeds of dissolution which we saw blossom into a perfect flower in the Republican Convention in this city six weeks ago.
    "Now, I have taken the action which, as far as I am able to judge my own soul, I believe with all my heart is the only action that offered any chance of hope to the black man in the South, to the white man in the South, and which offers a better chance to the black man in the North, which has already given to the black man in the North a better chance than he ever had before.
    "And if I had advocated the following of any other action I should have been in the position of insincerely advocating for purposes of temporary political advantage a course of action which has been followed for forty-five years in the Republican Party, which has during that period hurt the negro in the South, hurt the white man in the South, and finally has brought to disaster — and to crushing disaster and death — the great Republican Party itself. [Applause.]
    "Now, friends, I think I can say that I have at any rate met perfectly, fearlessly, and conscientiously the question you have put to me." [Applause.]

Committee Sop to Contestants.
    The Colonel made his speech Just before the report of the Committee on Credentials, over which the trouble was expected to be presented. When it was handed in and read it was found that a sop had been thrown to the colored contestants from Mississippi in that it contained a mild censure on Committeeman Fridge.
    "We regard the Fridge delegates entitled to seats in the convention, but disavow the part of the call contained in the word 'white,' " said the report "We approve the position taken in the letter addressed to Julian Harris of Georgia by Col. Theodore Roosevelt."
    There was no minority report, and the report of the committee in its entirety, covering all the contests, was adopted be the convention without a murmur of dissent.
    At the meeting of the New York delegates to-day Prof. Alfred Hayes of Cornell again brought up the resolution drafted by Prof. Joel E. Spingarn, formerly of Columbia, and approved by Col. Roosevelt, in which the attitude of the National Progressive Party on the negro question was defined. The resolution, which was tabled at the meeting of the delegation yesterday, met the same fate when called up to-day.

AS NEWSPAPERS HERE SEE IT.
Editorial Comment on Bull Moose Convention and Roosevelt's Speech.
    The newspapers of this city, in their editorials on the Bull Moose convention and Col. Roosevelt's speech to the delegates yesterday, (printed in full on Pages 8 and 9 of this issue.) say this morning:

Still at Armageddon.
The World.
    Mr. Roosevelt's speech yesterday nominating himself for President was in harmony with the hymn of the convention. He literally led the delegates anywhere and everywhere. A political party intrusted with Government which undertook to translate the Roosevelt speech into legislation would soon end in an insane asylum. It could be held in control only by a straight jacket.
    In justice to Mr. Roosevelt's intelligence, it should be said that this speech was not intended as a programme of Government. It was intended as a cunning, demagogic bid for votes. If Mr. Roosevelt were President again he would not undertake to carry out this speech in the form of legislation or administration. He would undertake only enough of it to keep the country seething with agitation and his own name on the front page of the newspapers every morning.
    No census of fools has ever been taken in this country, but thanks to Mr. Roosevelt's personally conducted third-term party, we are in a fair way to have them all counted.

Roosevelt at His Worst.
The Sun
    Mr. Roosevelt's bid for the Presidency is couched in familiar Rooseveltese and contains his deepest alterable convictions up to the time of its composition. It is a manifesto of revolution. It is a programme of wild and dangerous changes. It proposes popular nullification of the Constitution. It proposes State Socialism.
    For a generation Theodore Roosevelt has been gorged with honors by the Republican Party. He is now bound to destroy it because it refuses him that third term denied to Grant and by long prescription and tradition held to be dangerous and forbidden. What are Washington and Jefferson to that swollen and purulent ambition?
    There is no danger that Theodore Roosevelt will be President again. But to think that such a man has been President, could be President elsewhere than among those congenial sons of mischief and cunning, the Yahoos!

Armageddon Again.
The Herald.
    The Third Termer does not appear to be able to get away from Armageddon. He thought the regular Republican National Convention held in Chicago last June was Armageddon, and shouted at the end of the first of many speeches he made there, "We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord." But it proved to be not Armageddon, but Waterloo.
    Now again he cries at the end of his new confession of faith, "We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord."
    Therefore let it be the battle cry.
    Who can fail to be solemnly impressed as Mr. Timothy Woodruff, now unhappily suspected by female members of the Bull Moose herd of being a reactionary, repeating "We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord."
    But soon or late, perhaps not until the cold gray dawn of the morning after election, they will all know that it is not the battle of Armageddon that they are fighting, but the battle of Bull Moose Run.

The New Socialism.
The Tribune.
    In his speech yesterday before the National Progressive Convention Col. Roosevelt put in no disclaimer to President Taft's recent charge that both he and Gov. Wilson "in their attacks upon existing conditions and in their attempt to satisfy the popular unrest by promising of remedies," are, at least unconsciously, "embracing Socialism." So far as Col. Roosevelt is concerned, the Socialist character of the remedies which he offers is concealed only to the extent of substituting one descriptive phrase for another, and calling his programme not one of Socialism but of "Social Justice." All his suggestions for legislative reforms run in the direction of limitations on individual rights, and the weakening of the political institutions which have served most effectively to protect liberty and property.
    The new Roosevelt party will be a more formidable agency of Socialism than the party of Debs, because it will work for immediate political results. It will go one mile, two miles, or ten miles along the road toward Socialism as the exigencies of each situation warrant, and will gradually accustom the unthinking to Socialistic schemes by labeling them schemes for the realization of social justice. If the Progressive Party can make the courts subservient to the opinion of a temporary majority and can undertake the regulation of commerce, industry, and wages, it will soon he in a position to root up the old system of individual rights and balances, and, as President Taft put it, to pass laws which "lead directly to the appropriation of what belongs to one man to another."

Roosevelt Socialism.
The Press.
    It is a perfectly fair thing for anybody, if he believes in Socialism, to proclaim it and work for it. This is the right of everybody, and, whether you agree with him or not, you cannot dispute his right to propose Socialistic programmes, and if he does so you cannot say he is unfair merely to do so.
    It is not fair to urge Socialistic measures and at the same time to deny that they are Socialistic measures. Though he may not realize the fact Mr. Roosevelt docs recommend Socialistic measures. A very considerable part of his "Confession of Faith" reeks with Socialism, some of it half-baked, some of it thoroughly done, but in either event Socialism as recognized and declared by the Socialists.
    We would have Mr. Roosevelt, we would have any public leader, both know and frankly acknowledge the nature of the things he proposes.