r nothing. They wanted a new
party of radical ideas regardless of anything in the way of reformation
and progress that the old parties might achieve. There were others who
preferred to go back to the Republican party rather than to keep up the
Progressive party as a mere minority party of protest, but who hoped in
going back to be able to influence their old party along the lines of
progress. There were those who were Rooseveltians pure and simple and
who would follow him wherever he led.

All these groups wanted Roosevelt as President. They united to hold a
convention of the Progressive party at Chicago in 1916 on the same days
on which the Republican Convention met there. Each convention opened
with a calculating eye upon the activities of the other. But both
watched with even more anxious surmise for some sign of intention from
the Progressive leader back at Oyster Bay. He held in his single hand
the power of life and death for the Progressive party. His decision as
to cooperative action with the Republicans or individual action as a
Progressive would be the most important single factor in the campaign
against Woodrow Wilson, who was certain of renomination. Three
questions confronted and puzzled the two bodies of delegates: Would
the Republicans nominate Roosevelt or another? If another, what would
Roosevelt do? If another, what would the Progressives do?

For three days the Republican National Convention proceeded steadily
and stolidly upon its appointed course. Everything had been done in
the stereotyped way on the stereotyped time-table in the stereotyped
language. No impropriety or infelicity had been permitted to mar the
smooth texture of its surface. The temporary chairman in his keynote
speech had been as mildly oratorical, as diffusely patriotic, and as
nobly sentimental as any Fourth of July orator of a bygone day. The
whole tone of the Convention had been subdued and decorous with the
decorum of incertitude and timidity. That Convention did not know what
it wanted. It only knew that there was one thing that it did not want
and that it was afraid of, and another thing it would rather not
have and was afraid it would have to take. It wanted neither Theodore
Roosevelt nor Charles E. Hughes, and its members were distinctly
uncomfortable at the thought that they might have to take one or the
other. It was an old-fashioned convention of the hand-picked variety.
It smacked of the former days when the direct prim