Today -100: August 2, 1912: Of race and progress

Blacks in Mississippi hold their own Bull Moose convention separate from the white convention and elect their own delegates to the Chicago convention.

Roosevelt sanctions the exclusion of negro delegates to the national “Progressive” Party convention from the Southern states, but he tries to position it as a principled position, to prevent a situation like that at the Republican Convention, where black delegates from the Democratic South represented no one, there being no functioning R party there, and were used as fodder by the national party establishment. There will be black delegates from the North, he says, a fair number of them in fact.

At the White House, Taft gives a speech accepting the nomination. He is against socialism. I mean, if you were wondering about that. He admits that certain douchebags have accumulated “ill-gotten wealth,” but says the best way to deal with this is “to await the diminution of this evil by natural causes”. He says Wilson and Roosevelt’s policies both lead to “appropriation of what belongs to one man to another.” He is also against Progressive reform of political institutions, because the American people are too lazy to handle referenda and recalls and so on.

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