National Affairs: Protestants

The following is an extract from a 'document given to the press and published in many Republican papers:

The undersigned, who were supporters of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party, hereby express resentment at the attempt to arrogate the name of "Progressive" for the radical movement represented by the candidacy of Senator Robert M. LaFollette, and join in this statement of reasons why his candidacy is not entitled to Progressive support.

The movement in which we united with Theodore Roosevelt and millions of other Americans, under the historic name of "Progressive," was not radical. Its purpose was to improve American institutions, not to substitute others for them. It stood for political and social justice, not economic revolution. It believed in democracy, not socialism. . . . The only political party of which Senator La-Follette is the avowed candidate is the Socialist Party. The rest consists of incongruous groups invited as class blocks rather than as citizens holding common views, who agree only in their disagreement.

The Republican Party, which he now repudiates, was satisfactory to him when it had shrunk to a minority fragment dominated exclusively by its conservative element. He said in 1912: "If they [the leaders] are recreant to their trust, the party may suffer the temporary defeat of its purposes. But what abject folly to seek upon such a basis to destroy a great political party. . . . with a clear progressive majority in its ranks, within which there has been builded up a progressive movement that promises to make the Republican Party the instrument through which the government will be restored to the people. . . . And upon that fact in recent political history, I appealed to progressive Republicans everywhere to maintain their organization within the Republican Party. What Senator LaFollette would not do for a sound progressive movement because he was not the candidate, he now does for a destructive, radical one because he is a candidate.

Of him Roosevelt said: "He is acting in such fashion as to make him one of the most potent enemies of this country and a most sinister enemy of democracy. . . . We are to stand against men of the stamp of LaFollette. We had this type in the Civil War. Then we called them "Copperheads."