The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Largely to gain Nellie’s approbation, Will began to carry a book as a matter of course. “Trollope is a great favorite of mine because of the realistic every day tone which one finds in every line he writes,” he told her. “His heroes have failings human character is heir to, and we like them none the less on that account.” He became increasingly solicitous of Nellie’s happiness. When the German opera festival was in town, he accompanied her to hear Tannhäuser, admitting to his mother that while “my own appreciation of Wagner is not intense . . . [I] shall derive most if not all of my pleasure from her enjoyment of the music.”

  Eager to acknowledge Nellie’s own desire to accomplish something worthy, he spoke with disdain of two wealthy acquaintances whose chief literary nourishment was drawn from stock reports. “It seems to me that with their money and opportunities they could do so much good in this country where we are in such need of disinterested public work that their listlessness and idleness is little better than a sin. . . . If all the wealthy were of their kind I should become a communist.” He found validation for the more progressive ideals he and Nellie shared in reports from the East that “young men of wealth who do not have to devote their time to making a livelihood, are taking an interest in politics.” This is “a good augury,” he maintained, for it would infuse a generation’s political life with a growing zeal for public service. He was likely referring directly to Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, whose reform efforts on behalf of George Edmunds were then making news.

  By winter, he later confessed, “I was wakened to the fact that I loved her.” The truth of his feelings struck him “with overwhelming force,” and in late April 1885, he finally asked her to marry him. The proposal stunned Nellie, who feared that his precipitous declaration would compromise a friendship that had become vital to her. Moreover, she feared that marriage would destroy her hard-won chance to accomplish something worthy in her own right. She turned him down and told him never to speak of it again.

  Undeterred, Will remained certain that in time he could bring her to love him as he loved her. Only five days later, he penned a long letter, assuring her that the hesitation she felt about the institution of marriage was perfectly understandable. “I never have been certain that marriage was the happier state for women. I know it is for a man. Then too a mistake with him does not involve his entire life. With a woman a mistake is worse than death for in marriage she gives her all.” During a long walk a few days after that, he pressed his case, following up with another heartfelt letter. “I love you Nellie,” he declared. “I love you for all that you are. I love you for your noble consistent character . . . for all that you are, for all that you hope to be. . . . Oh how I will work and strive to be better and do better, how I will labor for our joint advancement if only you will let me. You will be my companion, my love and my life.”

  Her initial resistance to his entreaties only confirmed his admiration and intensified his own determination. “My love for you grew out of a friendship, intimate and of long standing,” he noted, methodically laying out his appeal. “That friendship of course was founded on a respect and admiration for your high character, your sweet womanly qualities and your intellectual superiority over any woman I know and for that quality in you which is called sympathy but I call it self forgetting companionableness. . . . Much as I should love to have you love me now and say so now, there is proud satisfaction I feel in that such a heart as yours can not be won in a moment.”

  Finally, Nellie agreed to an engagement. Far from curtailing her ambitions, she sensed that marriage to a man of Will’s enlightened temperament would create enhanced opportunities for them both. With her direction and support, he could be her emissary to the wider world she craved. “You know,” she told her mother soon after the engagement, “a lot of people think a great deal of Will. Some people even say that he may obtain some very important position in Washington.” Although her ambitions for her fiancé had a worldly aspect, Nellie clearly expected far more from him and from herself than mere status and stability.

  Will was ready to shout the news of their betrothal from every street corner. Nellie insisted that it remain a secret from all but their parents until she was ready for a public announcement. Forced to maintain a pretense of mere friendship before Howard, Allie, Horace, and all his friends, Will had to content himself with long letters to his parents, who were still in Europe. “The more I knew her,” Will told his father, “the deeper grew my respect for her, the warmer my friendship until it unconsciously ripened into a feeling that she was indispensable to my happiness. . . . I know you will love her when you come to know her and will appreciate as I do her noble character and clear cut intellect and well informed mind. She has been teaching for three years and has been no expense at all to her father. She has done this without encouragement by her family who thought the work too hard for her because she chafed under the conventionalities of society which would keep a young lady only for evening entertainments. She wanted something to do in life. . . . Her eagerness for knowledge of all kinds puts me to shame. Her capacity for work is wonderful.”

  That summer of 1885, when Nellie left for the Adirondacks with her family, Will experienced an unfamiliar sense of desolation. “Your sweet smile today as you stood on the stoop, I shall carry in my memory as something to console me with your absence,” he wrote only hours after she departed. “And now Nellie I fold you in my arms and imprint on your lips the kisses I was cheated out of by Fate today.” Solace came in the form of the daily letters he wrote. “The only real pleasure I take is in writing you,” he told her, “and in the hope, so often in vain, that the mail carrier’s appearance inspires in me. When I don’t get a letter I read all the old ones over again.” His familiar surroundings only exacerbated his restless loneliness. Everywhere he went—the library, the homes of their friends, the corner of Pike and Fifth—heightened his awareness of her absence. “It is the one who stays at home that feels the parting. New scenes, new interests, quickly dispel the pleasant sadness of the parting for the one who leaves.”

  To mollify his impatience for her return, he narrated the minutiae of the day without her, filling pages with political news, gossip about their friends, and images of the life they would lead once they were married. “I long to settle down in a home of our own,” he told her, adding, “we must continue the salon.” Nellie’s father had promised them a plot of land in Walnut Hills, where they planned to construct their home. “I shall have the greatest pride in entertaining my classmates, Bonesmen, under our roof where you and they can know each other.” Although Will’s vision of domestic bliss included social entertainment, it focused on the bond of marriage. His letters conjured evenings seated “comfortably and cosily before a bright fire,” reading and talking “with such demonstrations of affection as the unruly husband can not restrain.” While he acknowledged that his ideal might seem “commonplace” or “prosaic,” he fondly anticipated a married life resembling those depicted in Victorian novels, “where the husband was working hard, materially assisted and buoyed up by the earnest sympathy and intelligence of the wife.”

  He repeatedly assured Nellie that he would strive to make himself worthy of her. He had labored diligently in college to satisfy his parents; now he would persevere and please his wife. “His temperament,” one insightful journalist later reflected, “requires settled authority.” With Nellie to replace his father’s role of “guide, counsellor and friend,” he would find far greater success than he could ever have secured on his own. “You are becoming responsible for the actions of two persons now,” he frankly admitted to Nellie. “I feel a weight lifted from my shoulders.” While they might never be wealthy, they would build a rich life together. With her encouragement, he promised to overcome his reluctance and exact suitable payment for his legal work. “It is hard for me to learn to charge a fee without apologizing for its amount,” he confessed. “That is one of the defects in my character you must remedy. You must stiffen me in the
matter of fees.” He pledged that theirs would be “an equal partnership. You earn half of everything that comes in just as much as if you wrote the briefs or honeyfugled a jury. You may write the briefs, who knows?” He proudly reported that “business had been brisker” and that he had “done twice as much work” in the months since their engagement, a circumstance which his partner Major Lloyd attributed directly to Nellie’s influence.

  He conceded a natural tendency toward laziness and procrastination, a condition Nellie’s influence was certain to remedy in order to make him “a good and just member of society.” Indeed, just two weeks before his proposal, he had delivered “a very hastily prepared paper before the Unity Club on Pontifical Rome,” which, he acknowledged, did him “no credit.” Horace agreed. “As usual,” he told his mother, “he put the thing off until he had only two or three days to prepare it and then he had to toil like a slave. I told him I thought it would be a lesson worth a fortune to him if he were to make one complete & ignominious fizzle at this early period of his life from want of preparation. He did not do it this time but it was enough to serve as a warning. His was the best piece of the evening, but that is not saying much and he might have done much better. He has a wonderful power of work when he once gets started and the only danger is in his trusting to it too much.” Will’s own recognition of these deficits, and of the corresponding drive in Nellie’s character, contributed to his profound admiration for the woman he loved and to his deep-seated reliance upon her judgment and resolve.

  Will joined Nellie in the Adirondacks for two weeks in early August 1885. “Each day has found Nellie and me on the lake and in the woods,” he joyously reported to his mother. “She sews or sketches while I read aloud to her. We finished Their Wedding Journey by Howells and have begun The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.” At summer’s end, Nellie finally assented to make public the engagement.

  “I knew you would be delighted to hear,” Will wrote to Allie Keys. “Didn’t I know that you were hoping for this for so many months? Didn’t I tingle to my finger tips with gratitude to you for the many little schemes which you concocted to help me on in my suit, you little conspirator. . . . Oh, Alice, you do know the prize I have won . . . that no more perfect character than Nellie’s is among all our friends. You know what a constant source of comfort and strength she is to everyone who seeks it from her. . . . She has already made me a better man. My ideals of life are higher and I believe my purpose to attain them is stronger. Certainly there could not be given to a man a stronger motive for upright consistent, hardworking and kindly living than the approval and intelligent sympathy of such a wife.”

  “How much I appreciate your confidence in me,” Allie elatedly replied, “your telling me so much of what is in your heart. To have had either you or Nellie marry anyone I did not know or even did not love would have been hard for me, but I should have been happy in your happiness and tried not to be selfish. But to have you marry one another is such a joy to me that the sky has been bluer and the sunlight brighter ever since I heard. Yes, Will, I do know her, and it makes me so happy to think that some one is to have her who appreciates what she is who has known her long enough to understand her, for I do not think she is soon known or easily understood. . . . You and Howard—you have been the two best new friends I ever had, and I hope and believe I shall never lose you.” Allie’s fervent wishes were soon realized: she and Howard became engaged, and the two couples would remain devoted friends to the end of their lives.

  Certainly, Will and Nellie’s match met with resounding approval from friends and family. “What a pair you will be!” Horace told Will. “In all my acquaintance she is the girl I would have picked for you long ago & ever since and you are the one I would have chosen for her.” Indeed, it had appeared for a time that the two brothers might marry two Herron women, but Horace could not persuade Nellie’s beautiful sister Maria to accept his proposal of marriage. Nevertheless, their lives would intersect frequently in the years ahead.

  In late February 1886, Nellie and Allie traveled east together for two weeks. In New York, they stayed with Allie’s wealthy Aunt Phoebe, mistress of Sea Verge, the summer home where Will first realized the depths of his feelings for Nellie. The two old friends enjoyed their time together, walking around the city, shopping for books and clothes. They perused furniture stores and curiosity shops, looking for tables, sideboards, lamps, and etchings for their new homes. From Cincinnati, Will wrote frequently to Nellie, describing his daily routine in detail only a lover would not find exhausting. “I went to the gymnasium today wholly because of you,” he proudly reported. “It was Washington’s birthday and I felt lazy,” he admitted, but the thought of his fiancée mobilized him. Four days later, he returned to the gym, though he acknowledged, “I have given up weighing myself each day. ‘A watched pot never boils,’ and I shall try to surprise myself by waiting until you get home before I weigh again.”

  Proceeding to Washington, Nellie selected her wedding dress, “a superbly-fashioned satin robe with embroidered front.” Pining at home, Will tried to inject some levity into his letter: “I hope you will think of me tomorrow when you take your Sunday afternoon walk along the beautiful streets of Washington. I wonder, Nellie dear, if you and I will ever be there in any official capacity? Oh yes, I forgot, of course we shall when you become Secretary of the Treasury.” A few days later he wrote again, musing on the ten short months which had affected a sea change in both their lives since she had finally accepted his proposal: “The parlor is unchanged, the street is unchanged, the new custom house as it was then, but to me they all wear a different look, so different indeed that I almost forget how they did look before you made silent promise to be mine. . . . In that ten months we have had very few differences of any kind.”

  Nellie Herron and William Taft were married on June 19, 1886, in the parlor of the Herron house on Pike Street. Alphonso and Louise, who had returned from Europe the previous October, were present to celebrate their son’s marriage. Maria Herron and Fanny Taft served as bridesmaids. Horace was his brother’s best man. After what the Cincinnati Enquirer described as “a brilliant reception,” the young couple traveled to New York and prepared to embark for Europe and the honeymoon Nellie called “my first taste of the foreign travel of which I had always dreamed.”

  Aboard ship, they read aloud from Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield and the collected poems of Coleridge and Shelley in preparation for their visit to the English countryside. They visited Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-on-Avon, reveled at the sight of Gladstone’s Welsh castle in Hawarden, and dined in English country inns. Nellie pored through reports of parliamentary speeches by Gladstone and Parnell and hungered to hear live orations and debates. They continued through Scotland, Holland, and France, managing to travel for a hundred days on “just one thousand dollars,” thanks to Nellie’s unremitting budget.

  They returned to a home still under construction in Cincinnati and spent their first month living with Will’s parents. Nellie developed a strong attachment to Alphonso, whom she considered “gentle beyond anything I ever knew . . . one of the most lovable men that ever lived.” Both Alphonso and Louise, she wrote, “had created a family atmosphere in which the children breathed in the highest ideals, and were stimulated to sustained and strenuous intellectual and moral effort in order to conform to the family standard.” She marveled at the “strong minds, intellectual tastes, wide culture and catholic sympathies” that generated the loving yet rigorous environment of the Taft household.

  In January 1887, Nellie and Will moved into their redwood-shingled home overlooking a splendid stretch of the Ohio River and the lush hills and valleys on both the Ohio and Kentucky sides. The library, lined with bookshelves of solid walnut, housed Will’s accumulating legal texts, which he would continue to accrue until he had proudly amassed a catalogue of scholarly volumes that was estimated among the foremost in the country.

  NO SOONER WERE THE NEWLYWEDS settled in their n
ew home on McMillan Street than Will was surprised by Governor Foraker’s decision to appoint him to the bench. Hurrying home to share the astonishing news with his wife, he tried to appear casual. “Nellie,” he coyly questioned, “what would you think if I should be appointed a Judge of the Superior Court?” “Oh, don’t try to be funny,” Nellie answered. “That’s perfectly impossible.” A twenty-nine-year-old, she reasoned, would never receive an appointment over much more experienced lawyers. Quickly realizing that Will was not teasing, she was stunned and gratified by “the honour which came to us so unexpectedly.” Horace was thrilled. “Wasn’t it immense,” he wrote Nellie. “How does his Honor bear it? You’ll have to help him work with a vengeance now Nellie. Tie wet towels around his head. You & I know what kind of a judge he will make. We can afford to let the world find out.”

  Nellie’s elation soon gave way to misgivings, however, as she reflected that the appointment “was not a matter for such warm congratulation after all.” Indeed, the more she considered his new post and colleagues, the more unsettled she felt. “I saw him in close association with men not one of whom was less than fifteen years older than he, and most of whom were much more than that. He seemed to me suddenly to take on a maturity and sedateness quite out of keeping with his actual years and I dreaded to see him settled for good in the judiciary and missing all the youthful enthusiasms and exhilarating difficulties which a more general contact with the world would have given him. . . . I began even then to fear the narrowing effects of the Bench.” For the young woman who had hoped her husband’s career would carry them both to an exciting life in Washington, the superior court in Cincinnati assumed the aspect of a stumbling block rather than a stepping-stone.