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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  As the sole woman in the freshman class, and one of four in the entire college, she felt herself “an invader.” But in the college library she found “the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.” Though she may have been “shy and immature,” Ida was a tenacious student, and she had the good fortune of studying under “a great natural teacher,” Jeremiah Tingley, the chair of the science department. Like Professor Hurd, Tingley had studied under Louis Agassiz and absorbed the celebrated scientist’s “faith in observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature.” Sensing Ida’s enthusiasm and native intelligence, he took particular interest in her progress. Coupled with her own fierce drive, this support helped her excel once again. “She would arise at four A.M. and get to work studying,” a classmate recalled. “She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection . . . but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.”

  After graduation, Ida taught for two years at Poland Union Seminary in Poland, Ohio, hoping to save enough money to “go abroad and study with some great biologist.” But her wages were low, and two years later she had managed to save nothing to further her dream of studying in Europe. She returned to Meadville, where she took a temporary job annotating articles for The Chautauquan, the official publication of the recently founded Chautauqua Institution, a summer camp that provided Bible studies and lectures on science, the arts, and humanities. What began as a temporary assignment became a full-time job as she rose to become managing editor of The Chautauquan, discovering in the process a great fascination with storytelling and the delineation of character. “My early absorption in rocks and plants had veered to as intense an interest in human beings,” she reported. “I was feeling the same passion to understand men and women, the same eagerness to collect and classify information about them . . . I recognized that men and women were as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as well as of botany.”

  She and her colleagues on the liberal monthly magazine were “ardent supporters” of the inclusive labor organization the Knights of Labor and their fight for an eight-hour workday. “We discussed interminably the growing problem of the slums, were particularly strong for cooperative housing, laundries and bakeshops,” she recalled. She came to the conclusion that “a trilogy of wrongs” was responsible for the maldistribution of wealth: “discriminatory transportation rates, tariffs save for revenue only, and private ownership of natural resources.”

  “My life was busy, varied, unfolding pleasantly in many ways, but it also after six years was increasingly unsatisfactory,” she later wrote. “I was trapped—comfortably, most pleasantly, most securely, but trapped.” While she stayed up nights working out several ideas for a novel, her days were occupied with the myriad demands of editing the magazine. Furthermore, the design she had brought to the “disorderly fashion” in which the editor-in-chief, Dr. Theodore L. Flood, had formerly managed the magazine was never truly credited. Inevitably, she found herself “secretly, very secretly, meditating a change.” She envisioned herself in Paris, researching and writing a biography of Mme Roland, an alluring character she had included in a series of sketches for The Chautauquan on women of the French Revolution. Though she still had little money saved, Ida aspired to earn a living writing articles on Parisian life for several of the newspaper syndicates in the United States.

  Dr. Flood was stunned when Ida revealed that she was leaving for Paris. “How will you support yourself?” he demanded. When she replied that she would make her way by writing, his retort was memorably cruel and condescending. “You’re not a writer,” he announced. “You’ll starve.” Flood struck deep-seated anxieties in Ida about her vocation as a writer, yet she would not be deterred. She persuaded two of her friends from The Chautauquan to join her, and the three set sail for Europe in August 1891. After searching several days for affordable lodgings, they found a boardinghouse in the Latin Quarter run by Mme Bonnet, a cheerful, welcoming landlady. Though their rooms were tiny, they shared a salon with an amiable group of Egyptian students. Before long, they had developed close friendships.

  Ida set to work immediately, outlining a series of articles on the daily life of Paris. She astutely guessed that people back home would want to know the very things she herself was curious about: what Parisians did for entertainment; what they ate and drank; how the city preserved the beauty of its parks and sidewalks; whether it was safe for women to walk the streets at night. For an article on the poor, she worked for a time in a soup kitchen. She haunted the shops in the Jewish section for a story on Parisian Jews. “There were a multitude of things I thirsted to know,” Ida wrote. “And if I could get my bread and butter finding out, what luck! What luck!”

  “There were few mornings that I was not at my desk at eight o’clock,” she remembered; “there were few nights that I went to bed before midnight, and there was real drudgery in making legible copy after my article was written.” On weekends, she allowed time for expeditions to the cathedrals and the museums, as well as Versailles and Fontainebleau. Before seven weeks had passed, she had sent a dozen articles to various papers at home but had heard nothing in return. It seemed as if Dr. Flood’s prediction would prove correct. Finally, in early November, she received her first check, from the Cincinnati Times-Star, the paper edited by Will Taft’s brother Charles. “It was not much, $6.00,” she reported to her family. “How the doctor would scorn it! But I was glad to get it because it’s a start.”

  In the meantime, she and her friends managed to enjoy their “bohemian poverty.” They dined two nights a week with Mme Bonnet, who provided “a good dinner of 6 courses with cider and wine for 40 cents.” These were “happy evenings,” Ida recalled, “for the Egyptians loved games, tricks, charades, play of any sort.” They found a local restaurant that catered to Americans and offered a noonday meal for 23 cents. “Think of us,” she wrote home, “going into a place where there is sawdust on the floor, a bar in one corner, every table with wine and many men smoking cigarettes, but there are lots of ladies, American artists, and then everybody does it.” For their remaining meals, they pledged to spend only 12 cents to offset the expense of the dinners, buying “not a morsel more” than they absolutely required—“a single egg, one roll or croissant, a gill of milk, two cups apiece of café au lait, never having a drop left in the pot.”

  Winter came early to Paris that year. “It is the most heartless weather I ever experienced,” she told her family. “It is clear and dry but the wind cuts like a knife.” With only one little heating grate in the room where she wrote, she sat at her desk with one shawl wrapped around her legs, another over her head, and a hand stove to keep her feet warm. At night she wore everything but her sealskin coat to bed. Still, she was convinced that no one in Paris was having more fun. “It isn’t money after all that makes the best of things,” she assured them.

  A breakthrough came in December when Scribner’s accepted a piece of short fiction pending her agreement on several changes. “I think after ‘mature deliberation’ for about 1/50 of a second that I’ll allow the changes to be made,” she excitedly told her parents. “That it has been accepted at all is a tremendous encouragement to me. It gives me heart and hope.” Scribner’s paid $100 for the story, nearly the amount she had brought to cover her passage to Europe and her first months in Paris. “What excitement in our little salon when I showed my companions that check!” Her success freed her to attend courses at the Sorbonne on French history and literature, to spend time at the library going through the papers of Mme Roland, relax with friends in the cafés, and buy a new pair of shoes.

  In the months that followed, more and more newspapers accepted her articles. “Writing $5 and $10 articles” was admittedly “an awful slow way of making one’s living,” but Ida had proved Dr. Flood wrong and banished her own doubts. She was a working woman, living in a city she adored, surviving on her own as a published writer.

  McClure’s invitation to join him as he launche
d his new magazine intrigued Ida, but she was unwilling to leave for New York before her research on Mme Roland was complete. She happily agreed, however, to contribute freelance articles from Paris once the magazine was under way. His mission that summer evening in 1892 accomplished, McClure suddenly jumped to his feet. “I must go,” he said. “Could you lend me forty dollars? It is too late to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.” As it happened, Ida had exactly that sum stashed in a drawer, saved for a long-awaited vacation. “It never occurred to me to do anything but give it to him,” she recalled, though the next day she suffered “some bad moments,” fearing he would “simply never think of it again.” The following day, a forty-dollar check was sent from McClure’s office in London.

  Work for the new magazine opened up a broad new world of intellectual adventure. She studied microbe theory and interviewed Louis Pasteur in his home, examined the psychology of legerdemain, investigated the new Bertillon system of criminal identification, surveyed public health practices in French cities, and secured contributions from Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Alexandre Dumas. McClure was thrilled with her work. “We all hope you are not planning to get married and cut short your career,” he told her. “All of the articles which you have sent to us recently are most admirably done . . . I have always liked your work, as you know, but of late you have been surpassing yourself.”

  The only snag in this propitious arrangement was that McClure had no money to compensate her efforts. Despite rave reviews, the new magazine was struggling to survive in the midst of the severe depression. Indeed, the situation at home was so bleak, Esther Tarbell informed her daughter, that people were “actually starving by hundreds and thousands.” The alarming circumstances had convinced her mother that “monopolies are fearful evils,” a plague to confront by peaceful means or “by force, if it must be.”

  Irrepressible Ida, “on the ragged edge of bankruptcy,” nonetheless insisted she was “gay as a cricket.” She continued to believe in McClure. “The little magazine is sure to live,” she assured her family; “they are honest and energetic and young and they’ll pull through.” Her prediction proved on the mark. Month by month, McClure’s circulation continued to increase. In April 1894, McClure returned to Paris, this time securing Ida’s commitment to begin full-time work on the magazine in the fall. But first she would spend the summer with her parents in Titusville, where she hoped to complete her book on Mme Roland.

  Tarbell had been home for only six weeks when she received an urgent wire from McClure, begging her to come to New York. An intense fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte had recently swept Europe and McClure believed that America, too, would be captivated anew by the French emperor. McClure had made connection with Gardiner Green Hubbard, father-in-law to Alexander Graham Bell and owner of a valuable collection of Napoleon portraits. McClure secured Hubbard’s permission to reproduce the portraits alongside a short biography of Napoleon by an English author, Robert Sherard. The illustrated series, set to begin in November, had been heavily promoted. When the manuscript arrived, Hubbard found the tone “so contemptuously anti-Napoleon” that he withdrew permission to let his pictures accompany the text. In desperation, McClure turned to Ida.

  Though the task of producing the first installment in six weeks seemed impossible, Ida agreed to try. She left at once for Washington, where she was given a suite in Hubbard’s magnificent country estate on Woodley Lane, not far from Roosevelt’s modest Dupont Circle home. In addition to Hubbard’s immense library, she had access to the State Department archives, which held printed copies of all Napoleon’s official correspondence. Granted a desk at the Library of Congress, Tarbell was able to summon books and pamphlets from what turned out to be an exceptional collection covering the Napoleonic era.

  Despite her embarrassment at constructing “biography on the gallop,” Ida not only met the deadline but produced a work of quality. When the seven installments were completed, the New York Press hailed the series as “the best short life of Napoleon we have ever seen.” From the reigning Napoleon expert came the welcome, heartening comment: “I have often wished that I had had, as you did, the prod of necessity behind me, the obligation to get it out at a fixed time, to put it through, no time to idle, to weigh, only to set down. You got something that way—a living sketch.” An additional benefit of her accomplishment was Scribner’s agreement to publish her book on Mme Roland.

  On the strength of the Napoleon series, the circulation of McClure’s doubled, reaching nearly 100,000 by publication of the final installment. Even before it was finished, McClure conjured another series for Tarbell—a short life of Abraham Lincoln. “His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln,” explained Tarbell later; he was certain that thirty years after Lincoln’s death, hundreds of people remained whose reminiscences were still untapped. Characteristically, once having conceived of the project, McClure “could think of nothing but Lincoln, morning, noon, and night.”

  “Out with you,” he ordered Ida. “Look, see, report.” Before her departure, she called on John Nicolay, whose monumental biography had recently been serialized in the Century. Nicolay greeted her coldly. He assured her that he and his co-author John Hay had discovered “all there was worth telling of Lincoln’s life.” She would be well advised “not to touch so hopeless an assignment.” When the Century’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, was questioned about his opinion of McClure’s magazine, he scoffed: “They got a girl to write a Life of Lincoln.”

  Nicolay’s disdain influenced her “plan of campaign.” Rather than start her inquiry “at the end of the story with the great and known,” she would begin “in Kentucky with the humble and unknown.” She would trace Lincoln’s life chronologically, through the little towns and settlements where he had lived and worked. Tarbell’s approach unearthed scores of people who had known him in those early days. She scoured local histories, probed court records and newspaper clippings. Combining the skills of an investigative reporter with those of a detective, artist, and biographer, she coaxed reluctant people and jogged their memories with the hard evidence she had discovered. McClure covered all her expenses and kept her on salary during the three-year period of her research and writing. She completed her project in a charming Washington boardinghouse on I Street between Ninth and Tenth, a lodging shared by Massachusetts senator and Mrs. George Hoar. McClure scrutinized multiple drafts of every installment, assuring that the narrative retained its momentum.

  The series proved a popular and critical triumph. “It is not only full of new things,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, “but is so distinct and clear in local color that an interest attaches to it which is not found in other biographies.” When the first installment appeared, McClure’s circulation increased by 40,000 copies to 190,000. A month later, it reached a quarter of a million, exceeding both the Century and Harper’s Monthly.

  With the completion of the Lincoln series, McClure brought Tarbell to New York as the desk editor of the magazine. The publication was then housed on the sixth floor of the Lexington Building on 25th Street. Working in the office each day, Tarbell soon understood the critical role that John S. Phillips, whom they called “JSP,” played in the success of the magazine. If McClure was the wind in the sails, with “great power to stir excitement by his suggestions, his endless searching after something new, alive, startling,” the stabilizing ballast was the steady, unflappable Phillips. “Here’s a man,” Tarbell wrote, “who knows the power of patience in dealing with the impatient.” Phillips lived in the city during the week so that he could be available day and night; on weekends, he joined his wife, Jennie, and their small children in Goshen, New York, a small town in the foothills of the Catskills. It was said in the office “that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.”

  “I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human,” Tarbell remembered. Her genial temperament allowed her to get on “capitally” with the br
illiant but volatile art director, August Jaccaci, whose towering fits of anger “came and went like terrible summer thundershowers.” She developed a lifelong friendship with Viola Roseboro, the cigarette-smoking, wisecracking former actress in charge of reading the thousands of unsolicited manuscripts that arrived month after month. Without doubt, Ida was enamored with McClure himself. Years later, she remembered how his blue eyes “glowed and sparkled” when the peripatetic publisher prowled the newsroom spouting a tumult of thoughts and projects, any one of which might harbor “a stroke of genius.”

  For Ida Tarbell, the most alluring aspect of McClure’s was “the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement,” the feeling of “being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship” with an extraordinary group of people. They perched on one another’s desks, they lunched together at the Ashland House, they drank together after hours. Each was an integral component of a team that was creating what would soon become the most exciting and influential magazine the country had ever seen.

  THE NEXT “PERMANENT ACQUISITION” TO join Ida Tarbell on McClure’s writing staff was Ray Stannard Baker. Baker had spent six years reporting for the Chicago Record, a publication he proudly called “an honest paper” that played “no ‘inside game,’ but wanted to tell the truth, whatever it might be.” His distinguished work at the Record included an extensive and memorable series on the growing tension between labor and capital. Baker had always enjoyed talking with “farmers, tinkers, blacksmiths, newsdealers, bootblacks, and the like,” and firmly believed that “every human being has a story in him—how he has come to be what he is, how he manages, after all, to live, just to live.”