Any resentment either man might have harbored swiftly dissipated in the first days of the Spanish-American War. No public figure of the time understood better than Roosevelt the importance of cultivating reporters. As with Steffens and Riis, Roosevelt granted Davis unusual access. Writing from the headquarters of the Rough Riders, Davis assured his brother that his situation was “absolutely the very best . . . nothing they have they deny us.” Davis realized from the start that the Rough Riders were likely to provide the most picturesque story of the war. “This is the best crowd to be with—they are so well educated and so interesting,” he reported to his father. “To-day a sentry on post was reading ‘As You Like It,’ and whenever I go down the line half the men want to know who won the boat race.” Indeed, he concluded, “being with such a fine lot of fellows is a great pleasure.”
Roosevelt also forged a relationship with the New York Journal’s best known correspondent, Edward Marshall. The two men had met in New York when Roosevelt was police commissioner and Marshall was Sunday editor of the New York Press. In 1893, Marshall served as the secretary of the Tenement House Commission, which brought him into close contact with Roosevelt. Like Davis, Marshall managed to write successful novels, short stories, and plays in his spare time. For a time, he edited the Sunday World, but when the war broke out, William Randolph Hearst engaged him as a war correspondent.
Both Davis and Marshall accompanied the Rough Riders during their first engagement at Las Guásimas, a confusing ninety-minute battle conducted in a dense tangle of tall grass and twisted brush. Las Guásimas was situated at the intersection of two trails on the way to Santiago de Cuba, an inland town where the Spaniards were known to be concentrated. As the Rough Riders made their way along the steep trail, they encountered fierce fire from an enemy they could not see. Within minutes, a half-dozen men were killed and nearly three dozen wounded. Marshall recorded a defining moment as Roosevelt “jumped up and down,” his “emotions evidently divided between joy and a tendency to run,” as he awaited Wood’s order to lead his troops across a cut wire fence and into a thicket on the right.
Marshall’s description continues to recount Roosevelt’s pivotal transformation from idealistic, romantic warmonger to composed, levelheaded soldier: “Ushering a dozen men before him, Roosevelt stepped across the wire himself, and from that instant, became the most magnificent soldier I have ever seen. It was as if that barbed-wire strand had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he stepped across it he left behind him . . . all those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often caused him to be justly criticized in civic life, and found on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness, the calm judgment, the towering heroism, which made him, perhaps, the most admired and best beloved of all Americans in Cuba.”
Before long, a bullet tore through Marshall’s spine. “He was suffering the most terrible agonies,” Davis recalled, yet he “was so much a soldier to duty that he continued writing his account of the fight until the fight was ended.” Doctors doubted Marshall would live. He suffered permanent paralysis and the amputation of one leg but survived to write the regimental history of the Rough Riders and to be presented with a medal for valor by Theodore Roosevelt. Davis, too, was honored with a medal for bravery under fire. In the midst of the ambush, the intrepid reporter had picked up a carbine and begun firing at the Spaniards. “If the men had been regulars I would have sat in the rear,” Davis explained to his family, “but I knew every other one of them, had played football, and all that sort of thing, with them, so I thought as an American I ought to help.” When the Spanish finally retreated, Roosevelt promised to make Davis a captain in his unit, informing the Associated Press that “no officer in his regiment . . . had ‘been of more help or shown more courage’ ” than Richard Harding Davis.
The Las Guásimas skirmish prepared Roosevelt for the decisive battle of the conflict the following week. Large Spanish forces were massed along the ridgeline of two large hills. The Rough Riders were ordered to march on Kettle Hill, while the regulars attacked San Juan Hill. With Roosevelt in the colonel’s customary position at the back of the column, the troops advanced slowly under a hail of bullets. Mounted on horseback, Roosevelt suddenly charged toward the front, rallying his men and propelling them onward. When he reached the head of the regiment, he was a short distance from the Spanish rifles. “No one who saw Roosevelt take that ride expected he would finish it alive,” Davis reported. “As the only mounted man, he was the most conspicuous object in the range of the rifle-pits. . . . It looked like foolhardiness, but, as a matter of fact, he set the pace with his horse and inspired his men.”
Watching Roosevelt “charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone,” Davis marveled, “made you feel that you would like to cheer. He wore on his sombrero a blue polka-dot handkerchief . . . which, as he advanced, floated out straight behind his head, like a guidon.” Roosevelt’s dauntless leadership, and the unit’s remarkable esprit de corps, galvanized the men to storm the hill with near-reckless abandon. The Spaniards were forced to retreat.
Jacob Riis was at his Long Island home when the morning paper blared the Rough Riders’ triumph. For days, he and his wife had rushed to get the paper, eager to confirm that their friend Roosevelt was alive and well. At last, on the Fourth of July, the anxiously awaited report arrived, detailing the successful charge under a hail of Spanish fire. “Up, up they went in the face of death,” the story read, “men dropping from the ranks at every step. The Rough Riders acted like veterans. It was an inspiring sight and an awful one. . . . Roosevelt sat erect on his horse, holding his sword and shouting for his men to follow him” until they gained the summit at last.
“In how many American homes was that splendid story read that morning with a thrill never quite to be got over,” mused Riis. Taking their cue from Davis’s account, the newspapers portrayed a battle in which Roosevelt “had single-handedly crushed the foe.” He quickly found himself the most popular man in the nation. The war burnished Davis’s reputation as well; critics reckoned his writings among the very best of the war. “Except for Roosevelt,” Davis’s biographer Arthur Lubow observes, “no one had a better war.” The Spanish surrendered thirteen days later. By the middle of August, four months after the war began, Roosevelt and his Rough Riders were on their way to a triumphal homecoming.
Jacob Riis was with Edith Roosevelt in Montauk, Long Island, when the ship bearing the Rough Riders came into shore. Although Edith had fully recovered from her operation, she had lived in constant anxiety, steeling herself against possible loss. “These dreadful days must be lived,” she told Corinne in June, “and whatever comes Theodore and I have had more happiness in eleven years than most people in long lives.” She understood that she must show strength “for the sake of the children,” resolutely assuring her husband, “I do not want you to miss me or think of me for it is all in a day’s work.” Never again, after her unfortunate efforts to dissuade him from an 1894 mayoral run, would Edith interfere in her husband’s career decisions. Only with his safe return could she acknowledge the terror she had suffered.
As the bedraggled troops marched down the pier—some limping, others on stretchers, a number stricken with yellow fever—reporters noted that Roosevelt “looked the picture of health,” the only man disembarking who “gave no evidence of having passed through the tortures of the Cuban campaign.” He “bubbled over with spirits,” the World observed. Asked how he felt, Roosevelt responded with characteristic verve: “I’m in a disgracefully healthy condition. I feel ashamed of myself when I look at the poor fellows I brought with me.” He momentarily fell silent, then added: “I’ve had a bully time and a bully fight. I feel as big and strong as a bull moose. I wish you all could have been with us.”
S. S. MCCLURE, WHO HAD identified Roosevelt as a man to watch more than a year before the battle at San Juan heights, was now especially eager to pursue an extended biographical piece on the returning hero. The first edi
tor to commission an in-depth profile, McClure chose Ray Baker for the task.
Like Ida Tarbell, Baker had felt misgivings about the war, initially remaining hopeful that “the sober judgment” of the people would prevail over the yellow journals “to keep the nation from any bloodshed.” Before long he found himself swept up in the adventure of the war. “War excitement here runs a great deal higher than it does at any other place I’ve seen,” he reported to his father from New York. “Bulletins are displayed all over the city and the street before them is always filled with jostling crowds.” He clearly recollected “the thrill” when he was asked to write a series of war articles, including the character sketch of Theodore Roosevelt.
Baker had met Roosevelt briefly twice before, at the Hamilton Club in Chicago and again at Roosevelt’s Mulberry Street office in New York. “It was the personality of the man that chiefly attracted me,” he recalled. Never before had he encountered such vitality or such inimitable “concentration of purpose.” Entering Roosevelt’s large office in the police department as a previous visitor departed, Baker noted with astonishment that “in the few seconds that I took to reach his desk,” Roosevelt had picked up a book about the culture of Sioux Indian tribes and appeared totally engrossed in the work. “It is surprising,” Roosevelt explained, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.”
Researching the Roosevelt piece, Baker spent substantial time with his subject. Roosevelt invited him to the “roomy, comfortable house” at Sagamore Hill, where the host’s “prowess as a hunter” was abundantly evident “in the skins of bears and bison, and the splendid antlers of elk and deer.” More impressive to a man of Baker’s scholarly and artistic bent, the library was “rich” with works of history and literature, and the wide front veranda afforded “a view unsurpassed anywhere on Long Island Sound.” The two men spoke at length about Roosevelt’s childhood, his days in the legislature, his experiences in the Wild West, and the challenges he faced in the Civil Service Commission and police department. Roosevelt expressed his growing disgust for the predatory rich, “the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune.”
From Oyster Bay, Baker journeyed with Roosevelt to Camp Wikoff in Montauk, where the Rough Riders were still in quarantine to prevent a further outbreak of yellow fever. “I talked with a number of officers and troopers in Mr. Roosevelt’s regiment,” Baker wrote, “and I found their admiration for their colonel to be boundless. ‘Why, he knows every man in the regiment by name,’ said one. ‘He spent $5,000 of his own money at Santiago to give us better food and medicine.’ ”
The finished article profiled “a magnificent example of the American citizen of social position, means, and culture devoting himself to public affairs.” In every phase of Roosevelt’s life, Baker detected a “rugged, old-fashioned sense of duty,” the legacy of a civic-minded father who “had great strength and nobility of character, combined with a certain easy joyousness of disposition.” In Roosevelt, Baker discerned a “rare power of personal attraction,” a man possessed of “immense vitality and nervously active strength.” Writing to his father as he completed the piece, the journalist predicted that Roosevelt could well be “president of the United States within ten years.”
“I want to thank you for the article in ‘McClure’s,’ ” Roosevelt wrote Baker. “It has pleased me more than any other sketch of my life that has been written, and especially because of the way in which you speak of my father.” In the years ahead, the friendship between the politician and reporter would have significant consequences for progressive policy. “I was to write about him many times afterward,” Baker later reflected, “not always so uncritically.” Nevertheless, Roosevelt generally took the reporter’s criticisms in good stride. Personal loyalty was “one of his finest characteristics,” Baker observed. “Once a friend with him, always a friend, and a warm friend, too.”
In the months that followed, Baker was commissioned to write on a staggering array of subjects. McClure had an intuitive feel for “what was really interesting to people,” Baker recalled. And nothing fascinated the reading public more at the end of the nineteenth century than the spectacular “outpouring of marvelous new inventions and scientific wonders”—the automobile, the incandescent lightbulb, the moving picture, the radio, the phonograph. His peregrinations even took Baker on a voyage to the bottom of the sea, in the most amazing invention “since the days of Jonah”—a submarine boat. He visited automobile manufacturers to assess two competing vehicles: the electric car and the gasoline-powered car. The electric vehicle, Baker concluded, was much quieter, “simpler in construction and more easily managed.” Acknowledging that it “could run only a limited distance without recharging,” he envisioned a string of festive roadhouses where car owners could relax as their batteries charged.
McClure’s uncanny sense for “the new,” Baker believed, bordered on genius. No sooner had he got wind of an Italian inventor experimenting with wireless telegraphy than he dispatched Baker to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. There, Baker was among the first to witness Guglielmo Marconi’s historic reception of signals from across the Atlantic. Straightaway, Baker produced “the first fully verified account of the new invention and its revolutionary possibilities.” Informed that the world’s largest steamship was under construction by the Hamburg-American line, McClure sent Baker to Germany. There he remained for six months and completed twelve additional articles, including a long interview with the illustrious German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who was “one of the few thinkers of Europe who supported the theories set forth in ‘that extravagant book,’ the Origin of Species.”
Yet, although Baker continued to invest great effort in crafting thorough and polished articles, he was becoming unraveled and despondent. “My life was being ordered,” he felt, “not by myself, but by other people; not for my purposes, but for theirs.” His reputation was steadily growing, but the focus that gave meaning and clarity to his work had begun to elude him. “I have been spreading too much, trying to do the impossible,” he explained. “It seemed to me that I was no longer doing anything of any account. I was not more than half alive.” Broken in health and profoundly depressed, Baker decided to resign from McClure’s and move with his family to the countryside. There, he hoped to commence work on a serious novel that would tackle the struggle between capital and labor, an issue of vital interest since his first days as a reporter.
Baker’s colleagues at McClure’s fought hard to prevent his departure. Ida Tarbell repeatedly reminded him of McClure’s “affectionate interest” and warm feelings. “I cannot think for a moment of your severing your connection with our house,” John Phillips told him. “I believe that you can do better than you have ever done and I believe that we can help you to that end.” McClure raised his salary by a large margin, made the increase retroactive, and proposed that he take a long break with his wife and young family at the magazine’s expense. He encouraged Baker to recover himself fully, urging, “Do only what you yourself want to do, get well physically, and we’ll talk it over when you get back.” The generosity “quite bowled me over,” Baker wrote. “What good friends they were.”
Intent on getting “as far away as possible from New York,” Baker withdrew to the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona. “At first,” he recalled, “the desert wastes, the great bare mountains, the wild and rocky arroyos seemed forbidding and even hostile.” In time the rugged beauty of the desert exerted a restorative power. Riding for hours in the warm winter sun “across bare ridges and open spaces,” Baker enjoyed a “sense of freedom” unknown since his childhood. He delighted in the sight of jackrabbits bounding before him, small desert creatures darting into their holes, birds sheltering under the cacti. For the first few weeks, he deliberately refrained from writing, opting for more physical pursuits. “I rode or tramped to weariness every day. I ate prodigiously. I slept soundly.”
As his mind cleared and his
strength returned, Baker tried to make sense of his breakdown. “I began again to write in my neglected notebooks, trying to understand what all the things I saw and thought and felt might really mean,” he recorded. There could be no return, he realized, to the pioneer days of his youth. The frontier had vanished in a teeming urban landscape marked by a fierce battle for survival, voracious competition, and a hurried pace of life. “This being true, what am I to do about it?” he mused. “What is my function as a writer in a crowded world,” he wondered, endeavoring to reconcile his artistic inclinations with popular demands—“that is, a writer not wishing merely to amuse people, but in the practice of his art, to make them see and think.”
Reviewing his own inclinations and abilities, Baker determined that he was “not a leader, not an organizer, not a preacher, not a businessman,” and probably not a novelist. “I was a reporter,” he reflected. “I had certain definite gifts for seeing, hearing, understanding, and of reporting afterward what I had seen and heard and, so far as might be, what I understood.” This realization hastened his return to McClure’s, where he focused his journalistic skills on the economic issues that interested him most intensely, employing his gifts “to help people understand more clearly and completely” how they might “live together peaceably.” True to his ambition, in the years that followed, Ray Baker would produce a series of landmark articles on labor and capital that would play a pivotal role in shaping public sentiment toward the development of a progressive public policy.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 34