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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Honoring his promise to regularly consult organization leaders, Roosevelt soon announced that he would visit New York City every weekend during the legislative session to meet with Boss Platt and Benjamin Odell, chairman of the Republican State Committee, an announcement that incensed staunch reformers. The New York Evening Post, an influential independent paper which had supported Roosevelt’s bitter fight against Tammany Hall as police commissioner, now decried his willingness to “touch Platt both politically and socially.” Never had a governor “so belittled the dignity of the office,” opined the Albany Argus: “Imagine for a moment William Seward, Samuel Tilden or Grover Cleveland running down to New York, like a capitol district messenger boy, to bring back the orders of some party boss.”

  While Roosevelt absorbed attacks from Democratic papers with equanimity, he could barely contain his fury at “the irrational independents and the malignant make-believe independents” who remained aloof, never engaging genuine political issues for fear of sullying themselves. These “solemn reformers of the tom-fool variety,” Roosevelt complained, stridently assumed that any contact with the bosses indicated some “sinister” collusion. “I have met many politicians whom I distrust and dislike,” he told a friend, “yet there are none whom I regard as morally worse than the editors of the Post.” His indignation was aggravated by a conviction that the Post’s denunciation might cause some of his friends, the sincere reformers as opposed to the lunatic fringe, to misconstrue his actions.

  Once again Roosevelt reached out to Steffens, proffering what the reporter termed “an understanding.” Steffens would meet the governor each Friday afternoon when he arrived in Manhattan for his weekly consultation with the bosses, keeping “in close touch with him all the time he was there,” and escorting him to the train station for his return to Albany on Sunday evening. “I was to know all the political acts he was contemplating, with his reasons for them,” Steffens recounted. By sharing the full context of each decision and appointment before it became public, Roosevelt trusted that Steffens would credit and document the complex, pragmatic maneuvering behind an ethical and effective approach to leadership. Roosevelt’s trust was well placed. Steffens kept the governor’s confidences until he determined a course of action, providing an authoritative account of the decision-making process for the Commercial Advertiser. “T.R. was a very practical politician,” Steffens recalled, “and it was partly from watching him sympathetically that I lost some of my contempt for politicians and practical men generally.”

  Steffens was not the sole journalist to whom Roosevelt granted such inside access. The governor understood that however courteously he might handle Platt and the organization, he would inevitably clash with them on a range of salient issues. When the battles began, he would need the persuasive power of the press to marshal public sentiment for his reformist agenda. Only by “appealing directly to the people,” by “going over the heads” of party leaders, did he have any chance of pushing significant reform through the legislature.

  To that end, Roosevelt soon declared that he would hold two press conferences each day he was in town. His unprecedented announcement thrilled the twenty-five statehouse correspondents, who quickly labeled the morning session “the séance” and the afternoon session “the pink tea.” The governor generally opened these informal conferences “with a smile and nearly always with a joke, generally at his own expense.” In the course of fifteen minutes, one reporter marveled, he would explain his objectives and the rationale behind them. He outlined his “future movements” and intentions regarding various controversial issues, clearly indicating which statements were on the record and which were simply shared confidences, not meant for publication. These lively forums impressed the journalists with “the wonderful mental activity of the man.” With his “marvelous fund of general information to draw upon,” Roosevelt never haltingly answered or appeared at a loss.

  One of Roosevelt’s first acts as governor was to convene a meeting with Jacob Riis and three leading trade unionists to determine the most constructive labor legislation to sponsor. The labor leaders agreed that while some new laws were in order, workers would most benefit from the application of laws that already had been enacted to cover maximum hours of work, sweatshop conditions, prevailing wages, and safety requirements. In too many instances, such laws had been put on the books simply to satisfy public demand; as soon as publicity and interest faded, they became dead letters, and companies did as they pleased.

  To dramatize these flagrant violations, Roosevelt requested that Riis accompany him one day on a series of surprise visits to tenement sweatshops, ostensibly under the supervision of state inspectors. “I think that perhaps if I looked through the sweatshops myself,” Roosevelt told Riis, “we might be in a condition to put things on a new basis, just as they were put on a new basis in the police department after you and I began our midnight tours.”

  Riis never forgot the appalling conditions they unearthed during their inspection tour. “It was on one of the hottest days of early summer,” he recalled. “I had picked twenty five-story tenements, and we went through them from cellar to roof, examining every room and the people we found there.” In building after building, the minimum requirements for licensing home work—“no bed in the room where the work was done, no outsider employed, no contagious disease, and only one family living in the rooms”—were found wanting or neglected entirely. As soon as the tour concluded, Roosevelt proceeded to the factory inspector’s office. “I do not think you quite understand what I mean by enforcing a law,” he admonished, insisting that inspectors “make owners of the tenements understand that old, badly built, uncleanly houses shall not be used for manufacturing in any shape.” Day’s end found Riis spent but Roosevelt percolating with new ideas and eager for extended discussion over a good meal. Immediately, he would increase the number of tenement inspectors, and when the legislature convened the following winter, he would successfully introduce a bill to revise the code of tenement house laws.

  Years later, Roosevelt recalled his labor record as governor with satisfaction. Although his effort to pass an employers’ liability act failed, he did manage to obtain “the grudging and querulous assent” of the bosses for legislation establishing an eight-hour day for state employees, limiting the maximum hours women and children could work in private industry, improving working conditions for children, hiring more factory inspectors, and mandating air brakes on freight trains. At a time when laissez-faire attitudes reigned, even such limited measures represented considerable progress.

  Roosevelt also took pride in a remarkably innovative conservation record. Within weeks of taking office, he invited an old friend, the architect Grant La Farge, along with the head of the U.S. Forestry Division, Gifford Pinchot, to spend the night at the governor’s mansion. Pinchot, like Roosevelt, had been born into a moneyed New York mercantile family but had chosen to dedicate his life to public service. A devoted naturalist and wilderness enthusiast, he had studied forestry conservation in France after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College. The tall, confident thirty-three-year-old brought great originality and ambition to his position when McKinley appointed him to head the Forestry Division.

  Pinchot’s visit with Roosevelt was unforgettable from the outset: “We arrived just as the Executive Mansion was under ferocious attack from a band of invisible Indians,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and the Governor of the Empire State was helping a household of children to escape by lowering them out of a second-story window on a rope.” After rescuing his young pioneers, Roosevelt settled down to a long evening of food, drink, and conversation, punctuated by a spirited boxing match in which Pinchot “had the honor of knocking the future President of the United States off his very solid pins,” though the governor emerged victorious from the wrestling contest that concluded their visit. The alliance established that night would play a central role in future conservation policy.

  In the months that follow
ed, Roosevelt convinced the state legislature to preserve tens of thousands of forested acres in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. He appointed a single superintendent to replace the five-man Fisheries, Game and Forest Commission, which had become a haven for machine spoilsmen. He created the Palisades Park and used his bully pulpit to promote awareness of the state’s unique natural resources and the pressing need to conserve them. Roosevelt’s second annual message, the historian Douglas Brinkley argues, “was the most important speech about conservation ever delivered by a serious American politician up to that time.” Pinchot committed whole passages to memory “as if it were the Gettysburg Address,” while ornithologists considered its call for the protection of endangered birds “the tipping point for the Audubon Movement.”

  “I need hardly say how heartily I sympathize with the purposes of the Audubon Society,” Roosevelt maintained, expressing his profound emotional investment in the matter. “When the bluebirds were so nearly destroyed by the severe winter a few seasons ago, the loss was like the loss of an old friend, or at least like the burning down of a familiar and dearly loved house. . . . When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished; as if we had lost all instead of only part of Polybius or Livy.” This lifelong sympathy proved instrumental in preserving natural lands and wildlife habitat in his state and would become a driving force to protect the entire nation’s wilderness.

  THE GOVERNOR WAS INITIALLY SURPRISED that on many issues, even those involving labor and conservation, he “got on fairly well with the machine.” Indeed, his endeavors to placate Platt through weekly pilgrimages to the city seemed so successful that he was unprepared for “the storm of protest” when he came out in favor of a new franchise tax on corporations. Until this moment, Roosevelt acknowledged, he had “only imperfectly understood” the intricate web linking the Platt machine to the corporate world. Unlike other political bosses, Senator Platt “did not use his political position to advance his private fortunes.” He lived simply and had few interests beyond the powerful network he had meticulously constructed and nurtured over the decades. To keep control of the political organization he required regular revenue from the corporate world “in the guise of contributions for campaign purposes” and donations for “the good of the party.” These sums were distributed to his select candidates for the state legislature with the “gentlemen’s understanding” that they could be counted upon for important votes, particularly when an issue touched upon the corporations that fueled the machine. The public had small awareness and less understanding of this threat that Roosevelt labeled the “invisible empire.”

  For decades, the state of New York had granted exclusive franchises to corporations to operate immensely lucrative electric street railways, telephone networks, and telegraph lines. These franchises, often secured by outright bribery, had been awarded with no attempt to obtain tax revenues from the corporations in return. After investigating the issue, Roosevelt concluded “that it was a matter of plain decency” for these corporations to pay their share of taxes for privileges worth tens or even hundreds of millions. In fact, a bill to tax such franchises had previously been introduced by John Ford, a Democratic state senator from New York City. The measure “had been suffered to slumber undisturbed” in the machine-dominated assembly until the governor’s surprise announcement brought the issue “into sudden prominence.”

  At their next breakfast meeting, Platt furiously warned Roosevelt that the Ford bill would never be permitted to pass. If he persisted in pushing it forward, the governor risked an open break with the machine. This “radical legislation,” Platt argued, had no serious public support “until you sprang forward as its champion.” In its stead, Platt suggested that a joint legislative committee “consider the whole question of taxation,” with the obligation to report back the following year. Realizing that the tax bill had dim prospects for success without Platt’s support, Roosevelt agreed to postpone consideration until the commission issued its report. Reformers recognized the commission as a cynical effort to kill the bill and roundly derided the governor for bending to the subterfuge of the machine. “The time to tax franchises is now, not next year,” goaded the Tribune. “Roosevelt Stops Franchise Tax,” the Herald blared.

  Stung by the swarm of criticism from reformers, Roosevelt altered his approach, explaining to reporters that despite his reservations about the Ford bill, he would like to see it become law. Well aware of the blackmailing power Tammany Hall would gain, he was particularly concerned by the provision allowing cities to determine tax assessments instead of the state. Nevertheless, a flawed bill was better than none, and Roosevelt concluded that if he “could get a show in the Legislature the bill would pass, because the people had become interested and the representatives would scarcely dare to vote the wrong way.” Through a complicated series of maneuvers, the bill was finally brought to a vote in both chambers just before the legislative session ended. While many Republicans in the lower chamber heeded Platt’s directive to vote against the measure, Roosevelt secured enough Republican support that, combined with a heavy Democratic vote, he was able to produce a majority.

  “It was said to-day,” Steffens declared in the Commercial Advertiser, “that many of the men who supported the measure have been threatened with political destruction by the party leaders for their action in the matter. These men may rest assured,” Steffens knowingly asserted, “that they will have the sympathy and support of the governor for their courage in openly declaring themselves. He appreciates courage.”

  Asked how the tax would affect his company, the counsel for one affected corporation was blunt: “Right in the solar plexus,” he replied. In the days that followed, the stock market suffered a significant drop. “You will make the mistake of your life if you allow that bill to become a law,” Platt warned Roosevelt at the close of a bitter letter. He promised the governor that an ugly confrontation was imminent unless Roosevelt summoned that “very rare and difficult quality of moral courage not to sign” the bill after endeavoring to pass it. “When the subject of your nomination was under consideration, there was one matter that gave me real anxiety,” Platt noted. “I had heard from a good many sources that you were a little loose on the relations of capital and labor, on trusts and combinations, and indeed, on those numerous questions which have arisen in politics affecting the security of earnings and the right of a man to run his own business in his own way, with due respect of course to the Ten Commandments and the Penal Code. Or, to get at it even more clearly, I understood from a number of business men, and among them many of your own personal friends, that you entertained various altruistic ideas.” In Platt’s lexicon, Roosevelt clearly understood, altruistic meant “Communistic or Socialistic.” The governor, Platt acknowledged, had lately adjourned a legislative session that “created a good opinion throughout the State.” Then, “at the last minute and to my very great surprise, you did a thing which has caused the business community of New York to wonder how far the notions of Populism, as laid down in Kansas and Nebraska, have taken hold upon the Republican party of the State of New York.”

  “I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected,” Roosevelt countered. “It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing that, whereas the populists, socialists and others really do not correct the evils at all, or else only do so at the expense of producing others in aggravated form, that we Republicans hold the just balance and set our faces as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.” Their disagreement on this salient issue troubled him, he confessed to Platt, especially since “you have treated me so well and shown such entire willingness to meet me halfway.” Nevertheless, he firmly believed that the Republican Party “should be beaten, and badly beaten, if we took the attitude of saying that corporation
s should not, when they receive great benefits and make a great deal of money, pay their share of the public burdens.”

  Corporate representatives descended on Roosevelt, warning that if he signed the bill, “under no circumstances could [he] ever again be nominated for any public office, as no corporation would subscribe to a campaign fund if [he] was on the ticket.” Refusing to be bullied, yet well aware that a break with the organization would be fatal, Roosevelt made one concession. Before signing the bill, he told Platt, he would call a special legislative session and try to pass an amendment that would substitute a state board of assessors for local authorities. He also agreed to hold a hearing with corporate representatives and solicit suggestions for additional improvements in the bill. In the event the extra session produced amendments that would weaken the tax, however, he would simply sign the Ford bill in its present form.

  “Some of the morning newspapers repeat the expression of astonishment that Governor Roosevelt has consulted the attorneys of corporations,” Steffens reported in the Commercial Advertiser. “Some yellow minds cannot seem to understand that the governor is willing to fight the corporations to make them do right and yet be ready to negotiate just terms of peace—nay to fight for the corporations against wrong.” In fact, when Roosevelt learned that corporations in some communities had already paid local taxes, he agreed to an amendment providing that “any taxes already payable for public rights could be deducted from the franchise valuation.”

  The passage of this amendment, along with the shift to state assessors, allowed Platt to make the best of a difficult situation when Roosevelt signed the bill. “Persistent efforts have been made by the Democratic newspapers,” the boss told reporters, “to have it appear that there are serious divisions in the Republican Party.” Such claims he blithely dismissed: “All agreed,” he now maintained, “that franchises were a proper and necessary subject of taxation.” While the original bill had been “carelessly drawn and thoughtlessly enacted,” these “just and reasonable” amendments enabled Platt and his organization to save face and support the bill.