Birth of a New Party

The Progressive Party was born during the Republican convention.   Roosevelt supporters revolted from the GOP and, with their candidate's support, vowed to begin a new "progressive" party.

What follows is a contemporary account of the birth of the Progressive Party of 1912.

THE NIGHT OF JUNE 19, 1912--THE SCENE IN THE CONGRESS HOTEL, AND THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO COLONEL ROOSEVELT'S DECLARATION FOR A NEW PARTY

On the night of June 19, 1912, word was brought from the Coliseum to the Congress Hotel, where Colonel Theodore Roosevelt had his headquarters, that the Committee on Credentials had met and with the "reactionary and stand-Pat" element in control had passed resolutions practically sustaining the fraudulently elected delegates to the National Convention.

Within an hour of the receipt of this news a new party had been born.

With a few exceptions -there was not a man in the crowd that gathered in Colonel Roosevelt's headquarters who would not have preferred, for one reason or another, to have carried on the fight for Progressive principles within the Republican party itself.

It had been shown at the primaries that a vast majority of the Republican party favored the Progressive cause, and this in itself made the severance the harder. From far and near, however, Colonel Roosevelt had received plea after plea not to allow the Old Guard machinery at Chicago to steal the nomination, but to go out and found a party that would be free from the barnacles of both parties, and would be an instrument for working out cleanly and honestly the problems of the day.

The answer of the Credentials Committee to the cry for fair play was the final straw. It showed that the Old Guard Republicans who held the machinery did not intend to have an honest convention, and, therefore, any, nomination coming from the hands of that Committee could not help but be tainted.

The man who saw this more clearly than any one else, and who understood more fully than any one, that any further tolerance or even suggestion of compromise with such machinery meant the repudiation of popular government, was the head of the Progressive movement, Colonel Roosevelt himself.

Word was sent to the Progressive members of the Committee on Credentials, most of whom were men coming from Republican States, the electoral vote of which was necessary for the election of a Republican President, and they left the committee room and went immediately the Congress Hotel and went into a conference with Colonel Roosevelt. Other leaders joined the conference the headquarters was crowded with men who for four months had led movements in various States to save the Republican party from ruin. Almost without exception these men were men who would have preferred to continue out of affectionate association their fight for progressive principles within the Republican party.

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Scanned from George Henry Payne, The Birth of the New Party or Progressive Democracy (n.p., 1912): 19-21