Tweet
By BILL KELLER
THE BULLY PULPIT
Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Illustrated. 909 pp. Simon & Schuster. $40.
If you find the grubby spectacle of today’s Washington cause for shame and despair — and, really, how could you not? — then I suggest you turn off the TV and board Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest time machine. Let her transport you back to the turn of the 20th century, to a time when this country had politicians of stature and conscience, when the public believed that government could right great wrongs, when, before truncated attention spans, a 50,000-word exposé of corruption could sell out magazines and galvanize a reluctant Congress. The villains seemed bigger, too, or at least more brazen — industrial barons and political bosses who monopolized entire industries, strangled entire cities. And “change” was not just a slogan. “There are but a handful of times in the history of our country,” Goodwin writes in her introduction, “when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge.” The years covered in this book are such a time. It makes a pretty grand story.
Like her last book, “Team of Rivals,” which prompted talk-show comparisons of Abraham Lincoln’s and Barack Obama’s inclusive approaches to cabinet-making, her new book implicitly invites us to look afresh at our own time. In the 1890s, as now, there was a growing preoccupation with economic inequality. Then, as now, the liveliest political drama played out within a bitterly divided Republican Party. But back then the Republican insurgents were progressives, among them Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, challenging the party’s long defense of laissez-faire and building a federal regulatory apparatus. Now, as William Howard Taft’s great-grandson pointed out in a recent Op-Ed lament, the Republican insurgents champion “bomb-throwing obstructionism” and “empty nihilism” in an effort to dismantle the regulatory machinery the progressives constructed. I foresee a lot of Doris Kearns Goodwin on “Morning Joe” and “Charlie Rose” in the weeks ahead.
The title, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” suggests three books in one, two biographies and a press history, and Goodwin does indeed have an ambitious undertaking. Besides the two principals, her cast includes their adored wives — Edith Roosevelt (literary and reclusive, a brake on her impetuous husband) and Nellie Taft (politically aware and astute, a goad to her chronically circumspect husband); they are treated not just as first ladies but as essential partners in and insightful commentators on the careers of their mates. There is also a colorful cast of industrialists, labor leaders, political rivals, cabinet members and, especially, fired-up journalists. Goodwin directs her characters with precision and affection, and the story comes together like a well-wrought novel.
“The Bully Pulpit” is built around two relationships — one between Roosevelt and Taft, lifelong friends and reformist comrades, until the partnership ruptured; the other between power and the press.
Roosevelt is familiar and irresistible: almost comically energetic, the charging hero of the Rough Riders, the naturalist and hyperactive sportsman who leads visitors on high-speed, off-path hikes through Rock Creek Park, the intellectual omnivore who wrote 40 books including “narratives of hunting expeditions, meditations and natural histories on wolves, the grizzly bear and the black-tailed deer, biographies of public figures, literary essays, commentaries on war and peace, and sketches of birds,” not to mention a respected four-volume history of the American frontier.
No wonder, then, that Goodwin says her original plan when she set out seven years ago was to write a history of Roosevelt and the Progressive era. In the course of her research, however, she decided history had underestimated Taft’s contribution to the “molt” from which a new, more compassionate America emerged. And so her Teddy book grew into a tandem biography.
The two men could hardly have been more different. Both were favored children in families that prized public service. But Roosevelt, born sickly and timid, was bathed in unquestioning love, taken on global adventures, driven by his father to triumph over any obstacle, including severe asthma and other childhood infirmities. Taft experienced his parents’ love “as a conditional reward dependent upon his achievements.” He was affable and morally conscientious but not a voracious scholar. Born in robust health, he eventually settled into a lifelong battle with obesity, which Goodwin chronicles in straight-faced updates on his diets, industrial-strength bathroom scales and wardrobe retrofits.
By today’s standards — by any standards — both men were achievers of the first order, with résumés and encomiums that make most of today’s politicians seem slight. Henry Adams would call Taft “the best equipped man for the presidency who had been suggested by either party during his lifetime.” But while Teddy Roosevelt was a full-blooded political animal, Taft, averse to speechmaking and public confrontation, would have been perfectly happy to spend his life presiding over courtrooms. (He ended his life in the job he had always craved, chief justice of the United States.)
The two men met in the 1890s when they were already comers in President Benjamin Harrison’s Washington, Roosevelt as a civil service commissioner, Taft as solicitor-general. They bonded over civil service reform, and became so close that their correspondence reads like love letters. (Roosevelt addresses Taft in one missive as “you beloved individual.”) As war secretary Taft would become the most indispensable member of President Roose*velt’s cabinet, a “veritable pack horse” for the administration, the overseer of the Philippines and the Panama Canal commission, the president’s campaign surrogate, an effective lobbyist of Congress and Roosevelt’s confidant in all things.
“Though the two men had strikingly different temperaments — Roosevelt’s original and active nature at odds with Taft’s ruminative and judicial disposition — their opposing qualities actually proved complementary, allowing them to forge a powerful camaraderie and rare collaboration,” Goodwin writes. Together they would “fundamentally enlarge the bounds of economic opportunity and social justice.”
Cue the muckrakers.
In 1893, the publisher Sam McClure assembled a dream team of young writers and started a magazine, bearing his own name, that aimed to rattle the ramparts of power and mobilize the literate middle class. The new technology of photo engraving made the venture economically feasible, the corrupt hegemony of trusts and political machines made for abundant subject matter, and a growing national discontent provided an eager audience. McClure’s published wave upon wave of exquisitely researched exposés. One issue alone, in January 1903, would include Ida Tarbell on the predatory practices of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens on the avaricious political cabal that ran Minneapolis and Ray Stannard Baker on turmoil in the labor unions. The public could not get enough of it.
Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, TR, and Taft
“Month after month they would swallow dissertations of ten or twelve thousand words without even blinking — and ask for more,” an astonished Baker would recall.
The writers of McClure’s became the shock troops of the progressive movement, “putting faces and names to the giant corporations, shining a bright light on the sordid maneuvers that were crushing independent businessmen in one sector after another.” In Roosevelt they found the most effective patron a journalist could hope for.
From the beginning of his political career, as the youngest member of the New York State Assembly, Roosevelt “understood that the most effective means of circumventing the machines and transforming popular sentiment was to establish a good rapport with the press corps.” Many politicians, of course, have courted the press and used the media to rally popular pressure. Roosevelt’s bond with the press was of a different order. Goodwin calls it “authentically collegial.” A more apt word might be symbiotic.
Before they were his co-conspirators, the journalists were his tutors. Roosevelt in his 20s was slow to grow a social conscience, accepting the prevailing Republican gospel of unfettered commerce and self-reliance. But as he moved up the political ladder — civil service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, governor of the state — journalists like Steffens and the veteran police reporter Jacob Riis introduced the young politician to the underbelly of unregulated capitalism, accompanying their eager pupil on surprise visits to tenement sweatshops and coaching him in the perfidy of the party bosses. As governor, Roosevelt so alienated Boss Platt and the Republican machine that after one term he was compelled to retreat into the largely irrelevant job of William McKinley’s vice president.
Which soon became not so irrelevant when a young anarchist shot President McKinley, making Roosevelt at 42 the youngest president in the country’s history. By then, he had already cultivated a cohort of reporters and editors who were less a sounding board than an adjunct staff.
In those days before sophisticated polls and focus groups, the press was the White House intelligence network. Roosevelt “read daily excerpts from scores of newspapers . . . and tested his ideas on reporters.”
He allowed reporters to question him during his midday shave. Editors and writers who caught his attention would be invited for luncheon conversations that might last until midnight. With his many favorites, Roosevelt exchanged voluminous correspondence, sometimes two or three letters a week. He shared early drafts of his major policy speeches and legislative proposals, and they briefed him on their reporting projects before publication.
The exposés — Ray Baker’s six-part, 50,000-word series on the railroads’ corrupt stranglehold on commerce, or Upton Sinclair’s noxious novelized revelations about the meatpacking industry — aroused the political support for Roose*velt’s initiatives. More than that, the president and the journalists sat for hours debating what should go into those initiatives: what powers to give the new Interstate Commerce Commission, what the Pure Food and Drug Act should require, which monopolies to prosecute under the antitrust laws.
The golden age Goodwin describes was, probably inevitably, short-lived. The success of McClure’s and Collier’s and the other premier investigative publications inspired many imitators who were more strident and less conscientious about their reporting. A “national fatigue with the ubiquitous literature of exposure” set in.
And the crusading journalists gradually became disillusioned by their hero. For Tarbell, it was Roosevelt’s acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone, which displayed a despotic quality. Steffens lost patience with the compromises necessary to enact legislation and drifted to socialism. Ray Baker, disappointed by the president’s caution, fumed that “Roosevelt never leads; he always follows.”
The disenchantment was mutual. “His exasperation with the proliferation of increasingly sensational and shoddily investigated exposure journalism had been slowly building,” Goodwin writes. In 1906 Roosevelt vented his anger in a speech at the annual Gridiron Dinner, castigating the new journalists for ignoring success and inflaming public passions. (It was this speech that popularized the term “muckrakers,” which the journalists later adopted as a badge of honor.) The next morning Steffens called on the president. “Well,” he said, “you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you.”
The relationship didn’t end quite yet, but it never fully recovered. And when Roosevelt’s presidency gave way to Taft’s, the partnership was essentially over. Taft was as conscientious a reformer as Roose*velt, but no match for him as a leader, and he knew it. “When I hear someone say Mr. President,” Taft confessed, “I look around expecting to see Roosevelt.” The clamor of public dissension and the passion of political proselytizing — the bully pulpit — held no appeal for Taft. “As a former judge, he assumed that his decisions would speak for themselves,” Goodwin writes. On his signature cause, lowering the protectionist tariffs that had widened the gulf between rich and poor, he had a natural ally in Tarbell, who had spent two years researching and writing on the subject; he never summoned her to his side. Baker and William Allen White and other journalists also signaled a willingness to work with him on his progressive agenda, but he preferred to work within the system. And as a result his single-term presidency is generally counted a failure.
The wave of reforms set in motion by Roosevelt, Taft and the muckrakers would continue into Woodrow Wilson’s presidency and bequeath to us, among other things, the progressive income tax, direct election of senators and the women’s vote. But the golden age of reformist politicians harnessed to crusading journalists in common purpose was over.
Much of the pleasure of this book — besides recalling for us that once, leaders stood tall, our government didn’t seem to be in a state of constant stalemate and journalism got results — is the re-creation of a day when life moved at a statelier pace. At one point, Taft leads a traveling congressional delegation of 80 people on a three-month mission to the Philippines and the Far East. “In the evenings, guests enjoyed formal dances, sleight-of-hand performances, mock trials and pillow fights.” Today such a trip would be called a “codel” and condensed to a jet-lagged weekend of drive-by fact-finding.
At the turn of the 20th century, the educated classes were such prolific letter-writers and journal-keepers that a contemporary reader wonders when they found time for anything else. Roosevelt and Taft and their wives and siblings and parents and children all wrote each other copious, loving and often eloquent reports. Goodwin seems to have read them all, along with every newspaper and magazine published during those years — the footnotes fill 115 pages of agate type — and used them to put political intrigues and moral dilemmas and daily lives into rich and elegant language. Imagine “The West Wing” scripted by Henry James.
Although Goodwin infuses most of her men and women with personality, no one matches the sheer vitality of Roosevelt. In truth, the book flags a bit when he has grudgingly relinquished the presidency and gone to chase big game in Africa. The White House without Roosevelt is like the Henry IV plays when Falstaff leaves the stage. Beginning around Page 550 I occasionally found myself remembering Nellie Taft’s admonishment to her verbose husband: “Many a good thing is spoiled by there being too much of it.”
The story picks up again when Roosevelt — hungry for the spotlight and convinced his old friend has gone soft — reappears for a bitter third-party presidential run against the incumbent Taft and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Goodwin quotes Wilson confiding to a friend his sense of inadequacy beside the ex-*president: “He appeals to their imagination; I do not. He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”
As if to dramatize the point, the month before the election Roosevelt is preparing to address a campaign crowd in Milwaukee when he is shot point blank in the chest by a would-be assassin. The candidate clasps a handkerchief to the wound and goes on with his speech — for an hour and a half.
He doesn’t win the election, but he steals the story.
Bill Keller is a former executive editor of The Times and an Op-Ed columnist for the paper.
Comment