plank was suddenly dropped, shocking reformers like Gifford Pinchot, who saw Roosevelt as a true trust-buster. They blamed Perkins, who was still on the board of U.S. Steel and remained on it until his death. Perkins's ties to big business alarmed the radical wing of the party. Roosevelt lost to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson After 1913, he focused on New York City politics while he continued as Progressive National Chairman. In 1916 he campaigned for Charles Evans Hughes and the GOP. The result was a deep split in the new party that was never resolved. Perkins was in effective control of the party in 1913, but the Progressives fared poorly in local elections. He went public with his denunciations of antitrust programs, arguing, "The country knows that the Progressive Party believes that large business units are necessary in this day of interstate and inter-national communication and trade." Increasingly at odds with Progressives hostile to big business and humbled by the party's very poor showing in the 1914 elections, Perkins watched his Progressive Party support the Republican presidential candidate (Charles Evans Hughes) in 1916, after which the party and soon disintegrated. On September 7, 1917, the New York State Senate rejected his nomination as Chairman of the recently-established New York State Food Control Commission. On October 2, the State Senate rejected again his nomination and instead confirmed the appointment of John Mitchell, Jacob Gould Schurman and Charles A. Wieting to the Food Control Commission. As chairman of a finance committee of YMCA, he raised $200,000,000 for welfare work among American soldiers abroad. Palisades Interstate Park Commission In 1900, Theodore Roosevelt (then New York governor) appointed Perkins president of the newly formed Palisades Interstate Park Commission. It had been formed with the aim of stopping the destruction of the Palisades, a line of steep cliffs along the west side of the lower Hudson River, in northeast New Jersey and southern New York. Although the Palisades and the Hudson Highlands were admired for their beauty, and were featured in paintings of the Hudson River School, they were also viewed as a rich source of traprock (basalt) by quarrymen seeking to provide building material for the growth of nearby Manhattan Island. By the early 1900s, development along the lower Hudson River had begun to destroy much of the area's natural beauty. The Commission was authorized to acquire land between Fort Lee, New Jersey, and