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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Reviews of the new magazine, which included short stories, articles, and book reviews, were positive; the Nation rated it “among the most attractive of the monthly magazines.” While Phillips ran the office, McClure took to the road, hoping to persuade New England writers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich to barter articles for a new bicycle. “I was in the big game, in the real business of the world,” he recalled. “Up to this time I had always lived in the future and felt that I was simply getting ready for something. Now I began to live in the present.”

  Wheelman was the first professional enterprise into which McClure poured his astounding energy. Ascending the steps to that office at 597 Washington Street in Boston, he bid a final farewell to his youthful self. “When I have passed that place in later years,” he recalled in his autobiography in a haunting passage, “I have fairly seen him standing there—a thin boy, with a face somewhat worn from loneliness and wanting things he couldn’t get, a little hurt at being left so unceremoniously. When I went up the steps, he stopped outside; and it now seems to me that I stopped on the steps and looked at him, and that when he looked at me I turned and never spoke to him and went into the building. I came out with a job, but I never saw him again, and now I have no sense of identity with that boy.”

  McClure had not seen Hattie since her brutal rejection; then, as he worked hard to produce Wheelman in the fall, she reached out to him, insisting that she had deceived him because she simply “could not” bring herself to disobey her father. “I felt that you would take nothing as a reason for our separation,” she endeavored to explain, “as long as you believed that I loved you—and so I gave you, falsely, the only reason that I knew would be valid in your eyes . . . I perjured myself . . . I loved you then, and love you still.” In September 1883, they were quietly married, with John Phillips serving as McClure’s best man. Sam and Hattie began their married life in Boston, but only three months later, when Sam was offered a position as an editorial assistant with the prestigious Century magazine, they moved to New York.

  The following summer, after the birth of the first of his four children, Sam found himself increasingly restless in his new job. He yearned for independent control of some venture and finally hit upon an idea he shared with Roswell Smith, the editor of the Century. He proposed that the Century underwrite a Literary Associated Press, a syndicate that would purchase stories and articles from well-known authors and then sell them at reduced rates to numerous newspapers for simultaneous publication, usually in their new Sunday supplements. “I saw it, in all its ramifications, as completely as I ever did afterward,” McClure later explained, “and I don’t think I ever added anything to my first conception.” Roswell Smith liked the idea but thought it unsuitable for his magazine. He offered McClure “a month’s vacation with full pay” to see if he could launch the project on his own, with the opportunity to return to the Century should the venture fail.

  In a matter of weeks, McClure’s syndicate was up and running. His first sale was a short story by the popular writer Hjalmar H. Boyesen, which he bought for $150 and promptly sold to a sufficient number of newspapers to make “a handsome profit.” He then utilized the proceeds to send a thousand circulars to editors across the nation. This flyer explained how “a dozen, or twenty, or fifty newspapers—selected so as to avoid conflict in circulation—can thus secure a story for a sum which will be very small for each paper, but which will in the aggregate be sufficiently large to secure the best work by the best authors.”

  The syndicate grew so steadily that by 1887, his biographer Peter Lyon estimates, McClure was “distributing fifty thousand words a week to well over one hundred newspapers.” John Phillips, after three years in graduate school, first at Harvard and then in Leipzig, Germany, once again joined his friend and assumed responsibility for the daily management of the syndicate, a role for which he was “much better fitted” than McClure. “He had an orderly and organizing mind—which I had not,” McClure acknowledged. “I usually lost interest in a scheme as soon as it was started, and had no power of developing a plan and carrying it out to its least detail, as Mr. Phillips had.” With his trusted friend at the helm, McClure was free to travel “from one end of the country to the other” and eventually “from one end of Europe to the other—always seeking new material, and always, like the retriever, coming back with a treasure-trove in his teeth.”

  “McClure was a Columbus among editors,” proclaimed the writer and critic Jeannette L. Gilder. “I doubt if there is any man in his profession who has to his credit the discovery of more big writers.” At the time, three principal literary journals—Century, Atlantic, and Harper’s—had a stranglehold on America’s literary market. They were defenders of everything “dignified and conservative in the magazine world.” Young writers, particularly those who embraced the new realistic style scorned by established critics, had difficulty publishing their stories. McClure gave them a chance. “My qualifications for being an editor,” he explained, “were that I was open-minded, naturally enthusiastic, and not afraid to experiment with a new man.”

  McClure, who had adopted the designation “S. S.” rather than Sam, is credited with introducing Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Arthur Conan Doyle to American readers. “He secured the best writers in the world,” one reviewer noted. “He had the discernment in some cases and the good luck in others to establish connections with rising authors at the happy moment when they were about to step across the threshold of fame. He helped them and they helped him. His treatment of them was both honorable and generous.” McClure noted proudly that he had purchased Kipling’s work “before the name of Kipling had been printed in a newspaper in this country.” After reading one of Conan Doyle’s short stories, McClure promptly purchased a dozen Sherlock Holmes mysteries at the bargain price of $60 apiece. “To find the best authors,” he boasted, “is like being able to tell good wine without the labels.”

  The McClure syndicate serialized The Quality of Mercy, a novel by the controversial champion of realism, William Dean Howells; they printed stories by Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola which shocked genteel readers, and published a series of polemics by William Morris on socialism, Hamlin Garland on wheat farmers, and Henry Harland on life in the slums of New York’s Jewish East Side. Even as he provided a platform for new voices and radical topics, McClure filled the preponderance of his pages with stories and poems from established writers and more staid articles on standard subjects of interest—religion, adventure, travel, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War.

  By the early 1890s, the success of the McClure syndicate was assured. “I propose to down all competition, and in a short time I can dominate the world in my line,” he bragged headily. “My blood is like champagne.” Such unqualified success, however, seemed a harbinger to the restlessness that had plagued him since childhood, the compulsive drive to stave off depression through ceaseless activity. He felt compelled to tackle something new lest depression, always waiting in the wings, resume center stage. In 1892, he and Phillips began discussing the creation of a new low-priced, high-quality illustrated magazine. “I would rather edit a magazine,” McClure told Hattie, “than be President of the United States a hundred thousand times over.”

  Conventional wisdom held that 35 cents was the lowest price a publisher of a quality magazine could charge and still anticipate “a reasonable profit.” At 35 cents, a magazine was necessarily targeted to the “moneyed and well-educated classes,” a parameter which kept the contents “leisurely in habit, literary in tone, retrospective rather than timely, and friendly to the interests of the upper classes.” McClure’s resolve to put a quality magazine “within reach of all who care about good literature” at 15 cents per copy was tantamount to revolution.

  New technology made his rash endeavor to compete with publications like the Century or the Atlantic feasible. “The impregnability of the older magazines,” McClure explained, “was
largely due to the costliness of wood-engraving. Only an established publication with a large working capital could afford illustrations made by that process.” Photo engraving was the innovation that fundamentally altered the printing industry. At a fraction of the cost of wood engraving, the new process allowed publishers “to make pictures directly from photographs, which were cheap, instead of from drawings, which were expensive.”

  McClure envisioned a new magazine containing four sections: “The Edge of the Future” would feature interviews in which scientists such as Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell discussed their recent inventions; “Human Documents” would showcase portraits of famous people at different ages; “The Real Conversations” would present one distinguished person interviewing another; and the final section would offer short stories initially drawn from the best fiction already published in the syndicate, thereby costing him almost nothing to reprint. McClure hoped to use syndicate profits to support the new magazine until it could stand on its own. One of his trips west to garner support for the magazine included a visit to Davenport, Iowa, where he reconnected with his Knox classmate Albert Brady and persuaded him to come on board as his advertising manager.

  For all his plans, McClure could not have anticipated the Panic of 1893, the run on the banks, and the burgeoning unemployment that bankrupted some newspapers and forced others to slash expenses. In this climate, the syndicate became one of the first things struggling newspapers jettisoned. “There was certainly never a more inopportune time to launch a new business,” McClure lamented. He had little personal capital to invest in the venture, having paid syndicate authors handsomely and incurred heavy expenses searching out new world-class writers. He had built up an invaluable asset, however: “the good will of thousands of people”—friends, fellow editors, and writers. Phillips persuaded his father to place a mortgage on his Galesburg home, bringing in $4,500; Conan Doyle invested $5,000; Colonel Pope supplied $6,000; and the geologist Henry Drummond, whose articles would frequently appear in the new journal, invested $2,000 and volunteered an additional loan of $1,000.

  The first issue, appearing on the stands in June 1893, received uniformly favorable reviews. “It is not often that a new periodical begins its career with prestige enough to make its success a certainty from the very first number,” noted the Review of Reviews, but “the wisest judges concede it a place among the winners.” The Providence Journal rated the magazine “no little of a triumph,” applauding its freshness and originality: “It is not an imitation of anything existing in this country.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger placed it in the “front rank at once,” while the Atlanta Constitution hailed it as “unusually brilliant.” From Theodore Roosevelt came a letter of congratulations on “the first issue of your excellent magazine.”

  McClure immediately understood that his magazine must have “a unity” beyond a mere compilation of freelance articles suiting the individual tastes of miscellaneous authors. He dreamed of creating a full-time staff of writers who would be guaranteed salary and generous expense accounts. The job of staff writer was a new concept; in years to come, McClure would claim he himself “almost invented” it—a justifiable assertion at a time when few magazines subsidized their writers. He wished a writing staff to collaborate with him and with each other, treating mutually agreed-upon topics “in line with the general attitude of the publication.” He wanted “to deal with important social, economic and political questions, to present the new and great inventions and discoveries, to give the best in literature,” and above all, to become “a power in the land . . . a power for good.”

  Indeed, the ultimate success of McClure’s—its literary worth, its major contributions to Progressive era reforms, and its significant role in the rise of Theodore Roosevelt—can be directly traced to the prodigiously gifted writing staff McClure assembled. Along with the nucleus consisting of Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White, the McClure’s staff intermittently included Burton Hendrick, Mark Sullivan, George Kibbe Turner, Will Irwin, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris. This talented pool of writers produced hundreds of influential pieces which played a major role in shaping public discourse around the most pressing economic and social issues of the day.

  IDA MINERVA TARBELL, THE FIRST to join McClure’s stable of writers, became the “mother hen” of the group. The story of the first meeting between McClure and Tarbell in the summer of 1892 would be told and retold in the years ahead. McClure had briefly stopped in Paris on one of his whirlwind tours in search of material for his new magazine. Thirty-four and unmarried, Tarbell had been living on the Left Bank for twelve months, struggling to support herself with freelance articles for American newspapers. Her free hours were spent in the manuscript room of the Bibliothèque Nationale researching the life of Mme Roland, a celebrated figure in the French Revolution. One of her newspaper articles, “The Paving of the Streets of Paris by Monsieur Alphand,” had landed on McClure’s desk. “This girl can write,” McClure told Phillips. “I want to get her to do some work for the magazine.” The piece, he later said, “possessed exactly the qualities” he desired—a clear narrative style alive with human interest, sound judgment, and trustworthy facts.

  Tarbell was then lodging in a boardinghouse on an obscure, crooked street “unknown to half the cochers of Paris.” Yet, somehow, McClure managed to locate the place one Monday evening, “bareheaded, watch in hand, breathless” from racing up the eighty steps to her fourth-floor chamber. “I’ve just ten minutes,” he gasped; “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see [John] Tyndall.” Those minutes stretched to nearly three hours as McClure regaled her with childhood tales in Ireland, his struggles at Knox College and desperate pursuit of Hattie, his creation of the syndicate and friendship with Phillips. Finally, he laid out his plans for the new magazine and her involvement in it. Captivated by his “outrightness, his enthusiasm and confidence,” Tarbell, in turn, confided her own experiences, her hopes and ambitions.

  Though less extreme than McClure’s, Ida’s history was shaped by an equally fierce resolution to succeed. The oldest of four children, she was born the same year as McClure and raised in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the discovery of oil had transformed wilderness areas into bustling cities and towns. Her father, Franklin Tarbell, was making “more than he could ever have dreamed” as an independent oil producer. Titusville, where Franklin built a substantial home for his growing family, was flourishing, “confident of its future,” boasting graded roads, handsome homes, college preparatory high schools, and a newly built opera house. “Things were going well in father’s business,” Ida recalled; “there was ease such as we had never known, luxuries we had never heard of.”

  For the local oilmen, who drilled the wells and sustained a booming local economy, it seemed there was “nothing they did not hope and dare.” The triumph of optimism in Titusville was destined to end, however: “Suddenly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.” That mysterious hand belonged to none other than John D. Rockefeller, as Tarbell would boldly elucidate years later in her chronicle of the history of the Standard Oil Company for McClure’s magazine—the landmark series that would affirm her reputation as the leading investigative journalist of her day.

  At the time, all that Ida’s father and his colleagues knew was that the railroads arbitrarily doubled their published rates for carrying petroleum—crude and refined—to the east coast, a huge inflation heralding ruin for the entire region. The local oilmen eventually discovered that Rockefeller had forged an alliance between the railroads and a small group of privileged refiners. His “big scheme” enabled those in the newly formed South Improvement Company to receive secret rebates on every barrel shipped, while outside companies would be charged increased rates to make up for the insiders’ discount. This deal, meant to destroy small competitors, Tarbell later explained, “started the Standard
Oil Company off on the road to monopoly.”

  The local producers joined together to retaliate. “There were nightly anti-monopoly meetings,” Ida recalled, “violent speeches, processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members of the offending corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground.” The tensions of these confrontations were reflected in the Tarbell household. Franklin Tarbell no longer entertained his family with “the funny things he had seen and heard during the day” or relaxed with an after-dinner cigar to the music he loved. If the machinations behind the conflict were “all pretty hazy” to young Ida, she gleaned enough from her father’s conversation to comprehend that “what had been undertaken was wrong.” From that painful, disruptive period, she wrote, “there was born in me a hatred of privilege”—in this case, the powerful oilmen preying on the independents, but eventually “privilege of any sort.”

  As her father fought against monopoly, her mother struggled with a painful “readjustment of her status in the home and in society.” Esther Tarbell, Ida later wrote, “had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement.” She had taught for a dozen years before her marriage and had planned on “seeking a higher education.” Had she remained single, Ida believed, “she would have sought to ‘vindicate her sex.’ . . . The fight would have delighted her.” But after marriage she “found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region, confronted by the sternest of problems,” which compelled the investment of her energies into the well-being of her family. Witnessing her mother’s frustration, Ida determined early on that she “would never marry.” She was certain that having a husband and children would thwart her freedom and curtail her nascent ambition. At fourteen, she fell to her knees and entreated God to prevent her ever marrying.

  Captivated by the natural world, Ida had spent the long afternoons of her childhood wandering around the countryside to gather leaves and plant specimens in her area, “classifying them by shapes, veins, stalks, color.” She began her high school years already intent upon a career as a biologist. Graduating at the top of her class at Titusville High, she enrolled in Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1876, the same year that Roosevelt matriculated at Harvard. At eighteen, Ida had reached her commanding height of five feet ten inches. She was not considered pretty. Her nose and ears were too big, but her “luminous eyes” indicated unusual sensitivity and intelligence.