Speech or Document 2

A CONFESSION OF FAITH

FROM AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY IN CHICAGO, AUGUST 6, 1912

To you, men and women who have come here to this great city of this great State formally to launch a new party, a party of the people of the whole Union, the National Progressive Party, I extend my hearty greeting.  You are taking a bold and a greatly needed step for the service of our beloved country.  The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly what should be said on the vital issues of the day.  This new movement is a movement of truth, sincerity and wisdom, a movement which proposes to put at the service of all our people the collective power of the people, through their governmental agencies, alike in the Nation and in the several States.  We propose boldly to face the real and great questions of the day, and not skillfully to evade them as do the old parties.  We propose to raise aloft a standard to which all honest men can repair, and under which all can fight, no matter what their past political differences, if they are content to face the future and no longer to dwell among the dead issues of the past.  We propose to put forth a platform which shall not be a platform of the ordinary and insincere kind, but shall be a contract with the people; and, if the people accept this contract by putting us in power, we shall hold ourselves under honorable obligation to fulfil every promise it contains as loyally as if it were actually enforceable under the penalties of the law.

The prime need today is to face the fact that we are now in the midst of a great economic evolution.  There is urgent necessity of applying both common sense and the highest ethical standard to this movement for better economic conditions among the mass of our people if we are to make it one of healthy evolution and not one of revolution.  It is, from the standpoint of our country, wicked as well as foolish longer to refuse to face the real issues of the day.  Only by so facing them can we go forward; and to do this we must break up the old party organizations and obliterate the old cleavage lines on the dead issues inherited from fifty years ago.

Our fight is a fundamental fight against both of the old corrupt party machines, for both are under the dominion of the plunder league of the professional politicians who are controlled and sustained by the great beneficiaries of privilege and reaction.  How close is the alliance between the two machines is shown by the attitude of that portion of those Northeastern newspapers, including the majority of the great dailies in all the Northeastern cities — Boston, Buffalo, Springfield, Hartford, Philadelphia and, above all, New York — which are controlled by or representative of the interests which, in popular phrase, are conveniently grouped together as the Wall Street interests.  The large majority of these papers supported Judge Parker for the Presidency in 1904; almost unanimously they supported Mr.  Taft for the Republican nomination this year; the large majority are now supporting Professor Wilson for the election.  Some of them still prefer Mr.  Taft to Mr.  Wilson, but all make either Mr.  Taft or Mr.  Wilson their first choice; and one of the ludicrous features of the campaign is that those papers supporting Professor Wilson show the most jealous partisanship for Mr.  Taft whenever they think his interests are jeopardized by the Progressive movement — that, for instance, any electors will obey the will of the majority of the Republican voters at the primaries, and vote for me instead of obeying the will of the Messrs.  Barnes-Penrose-Guggenheim combination by voting for Mr.  Taft.  No better proof can be given than this of the fact that the fundamental concern of the privileged interests is to beat the new party.  Some of them would rather beat it with Mr.  Wilson; others would rather beat it with Mr.  Taft; but the difference between Mr.  Wilson and Mr.  Taft they consider as trivial, as a mere matter of personal preference.  Their real fight is for either, as against the Progressives.  They represent the allied reactionaries of the country, and they are against the new party because to their unerring vision it is evident that the real danger to privilege comes from the new party, and from the new party alone.  The men who presided over the Baltimore and the Chicago conventions, and the great bosses who controlled the two conventions, Mr.  Root and Mr.  Parker, Mr.  Barnes and Mr.  Murphy, Mr.  Penrose and Mr.  Taggart, Mr.  Guggenheim and Mr.  Sullivan, differ from one another of course on certain points.  But these are the differences which one corporation lawyer has with another corporation lawyer when acting for different corporations.  They come together at once as against a common enemy when the dominion of both is threatened by the supremacy of the people of the United States, now aroused to the need of a National alignment on the vital economic issues of this generation.

Neither the Republican nor the Democratic platform contains the slightest promise of approaching the great problems of today either with understanding or good faith; and yet never was there greater need in this Nation than now of understanding and of action taken in good faith, on the part of the men and the organizations shaping our Governmental policy.  Moreover, our needs are such that there should be coherent action among those responsible for the conduct of National affairs and those responsible for the conduct of State affairs; because our aim should be the same in both State and Nation; that is, to use the Government as an efficient agency for the practical betterment of social and economic conditions throughout this land.  There are other important things to be done, but this is the most important thing.  It is preposterous to leave such a movement in the hands of men who have broken their promises as have the present heads of the Republican organization (not of the Republican voters, for they in no shape represent the rank and file of the Republican voters).  These men by their deeds give the lie to their words.  There is no health in them, and they can not be trusted.  But the Democratic Party is just as little to be trusted.  The Underwood-Fitzgerald combination in the House of Representatives has shown that it can not safely be trusted to maintain the interests of this country abroad or to represent the interests of the plain people at home.  The control of the various State bosses in the State organizations has been strengthened by the action at Baltimore; and scant indeed would be the use of exchanging the whips of Messrs.  Barnes, Penrose and Guggenheim for the scorpions of Messrs.  Murphy, Taggart and Sullivan.  Finally, the Democratic platform not only shows an utter failure to understand either present conditions or the means of making these conditions better but also a reckless willingness to try to attract various sections of the electorate by making mutually incompatible promises which there is not the slightest intention of redeeming, and which, if redeemed, would result in sheer ruin.  Far-seeing patriots should turn scornfully from men who seek power on a platform which with exquisite nicety combines silly inability to understand the National needs and dishonest insincerity in promising conflicting and impossible remedies.

If this country is really to go forward along the path of social and economic justice, there must be a new party of Nation-wide and non-sectional principles, a party where the titular National chiefs and the real State leaders shall be in genuine accord, a party in whose counsels the people shall be supreme, a party that shall represent in the Nation and the several States alike the same cause, the cause of human rights and of Governmental efficiency.  At present both the old parties are controlled by professional politicians in the interests of the privileged classes, and apparently each has set up as its ideal of business and political development a government by financial despotism tempered by make-believe political assassination.  Democrat and Republican alike, they represent government of the needy many by professional politicians in the interests of the rich few.  This is class government, and class government of a peculiarly unwholesome kind.

It seems to me, therefore, that the time is ripe, and overripe, for a genuine Progressive movement, Nation-wide and justice-loving, sprung from and responsible to the people themselves, and sundered by a great gulf from both of the old party organizations, while representing all that is best in the hopes, beliefs and aspirations of the plain people who make up the immense majority of the rank and file of both the old parties.

The first essential in the Progressive program is the right of the people to rule.  But a few months ago our opponents were assuring us with insincere clamor that it was absurd for us to talk about desiring that the people should rule, because, as a matter of fact, the people actually do rule.  Since that time the actions of the Chicago convention, and to an only less degree of the Baltimore convention, have shown in striking fashion how little the people do rule under our present conditions.

We should provide by National law for Presidential primaries.  We should provide for the election of United States Senators by popular vote.  We should provide for a short ballot; nothing makes it harder for the people to control their public servants than to force them to vote for so many officials that they can not really keep track of any one of them, so that each becomes indistinguishable in the crowd around him.  There must be stringent and efficient corrupt practices acts, applying to the primaries as well as the elections; and there should be publicity of campaign contributions during the campaign.

We should provide throughout this Union for giving the people in every State the real right to rule themselves, and really and not nominally to control their public servants and their agencies for doing the public business; an incident of this being giving the people the right themselves to do this public business if they find it impossible to get what they desire through the existing agencies.  I do not attempt to dogmatize as to the machinery by which this end should be achieved.  In each community it must be shaped so as to correspond not merely with the needs but with the customs and ways of thought of that community, and no community has a right to dictate to any other in this matter.  But wherever representative government has in actual fact become non-representative there the people should secure to themselves the initiative, the referendum and the recall, doing it in such fashion as to make it evident that they do not intend to use these instrumentalities wantonly or frequently, but to hold them ready for use in order to correct the misdeeds or failures of the public servants when it has become evident that these misdeeds and failures can not be corrected in ordinary and normal fashion.  The administrative officer should be given full power, for otherwise he can not do well the people's work; and the people should be given full power over him.

I do not mean that we shall abandon representative government; on the contrary, I mean that we shall devise methods by which our Government shall become really representative.  To use such measures as the initiative, referendum, and recall indiscriminately and promiscuously on all kinds of occasions would undoubtedly cause disaster ; but events have shown that at present our institutions are not representative — at any rate in many States, and sometimes in the Nation — and that we can not wisely afford to let this condition of things remain longer uncorrected.  We have permitted the growing up of a breed of politicians who, sometimes for improper political purposes, sometimes as a means of serving the great special interests of privilege which stand behind them, twist so-called representative institutions into a means of thwarting instead of expressing the deliberate and well-thought-out judgment of the people as a whole.  This can not be permitted.  We choose our representatives for two purposes.  In the first place, we choose them with the desire that, as experts, they shall study certain matters with which we, the people as a whole, can not be intimately acquainted, and that as regards these matters they shall formulate a policy for our betterment.  Even as regards such a policy, and the actions taken there under, we ourselves should have the right ultimately to vote our disapproval of it, if we feel such disapproval.  But, in the next place, our representatives are chosen to carry out certain policies as to which we have definitely made up our minds, and here we expect them to represent us by doing what we have decided ought to be done.  All I desire to do by securing more direct control of the Governmental agents and agencies of the people is to give the people the chance to make their representatives really represent them whenever the Government becomes misrepresentative instead of representative.