“Passage of the amended franchise tax bill is a distinct personal triumph for Governor Roosevelt,” the Commercial Advertiser asserted in its lead editorial. “By exercise of tact and by concessions where no sacrifice of principle was involved, the governor achieved his ends. His integrity of motive and his eagerness to prevent party rupture were so apparent that Republican legislators were left no choice but to support him.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1899, following his successful push for the franchise tax, Roosevelt prepared to head west to New Mexico for the first reunion of his beloved Rough Riders. “Would you let me ask a great favor,” he wrote William Allen White several weeks before the trip, “and that is that you should try to join me on the train and ride three or four hours with me. There is very much that I have to talk over with you. As you know, you have got the ideas of Americanism after which I am striving.”
White and Roosevelt had met two years earlier during the reporter’s first journey to the east coast at the invitation of Sam McClure. Before proceeding to New York, White spent a few days in the nation’s capital, where he was informed that “a young fellow named Roosevelt” in the Navy Department had read his famous editorial and book of short stories about Kansas and was eager to meet him. White was deeply impressed by his first glimpse of the man who would become a close friend, confidant, and correspondent: “a tallish, yet stockily built man, physically hard and rugged, obviously fighting down the young moon crescent of his vest; quick speaking, forthright, a dynamo of energy, given to gestures and grimaces, letting his voice run its full gamut from base to falsetto.” Roosevelt seemed, White’s description concluded, “to be dancing in the exuberance of a deep physical joy of life.”
“We walked from the Navy Department under the shade of the young trees that lined the streets that Summer day to the Army and Navy Club, had lunch, talked and talked, and still kept talking,” White recollected. Roosevelt was just then beginning to comprehend “the yearnings” of America’s working poor for social and economic justice, “to see clearly that our problems were no longer problems of production, but problems affecting the distribution of wealth and income.” For White, still adhering to conservative predilections, Roosevelt’s progressive ideas were a revelation. “He sounded in my heart the first trumpet call of the new time that was to be,” White recalled, stressing that such notes represented “youth and the new order” and “the passing of the old into the new.” The young journalist was overcome by “the splendor” of Roosevelt’s personality. “I had never known such a man as he,” White wrote more than a quarter of a century after Roosevelt’s death, “and never shall again.”
Roosevelt for his part felt an immediate kinship with the ebullient writer. Both men were blessed with confidence and energy, both ready to engage in the political and ideological contests that would define their country. While the rotund White had no interest in the physical challenges and trials that Roosevelt adored, preferring to spend his leisure time reading poetry or playing piano, his nimble, perceptive mind perfectly matched Roosevelt’s, and they shared a vigorous style of speaking and writing. Doubtless, Roosevelt also recognized that the celebrated journalist was an influential leader of middle-class opinion. “Between his newspaper editorials, magazine articles and a growing list of books,” one historian suggests, “White could claim one of the largest audiences of any writer in America at the turn of the century.”
Following their initial encounter, the two men had continued to exchange letters, articles, and books. Roosevelt purchased an out-of-town subscription to the Emporia Gazette, and sent his new friend a copy of his recently published work, American Ideals and Other Essays. “I read it with feelings of mingled astonishment and trepidation,” White recalled, confessing that “it shook my foundations, for it questioned things as they are. It challenged a complacent plutocracy.”
By the time Roosevelt’s train steamed through Kansas en route to New Mexico that summer of 1899, White was working “with the zeal of a converted disciple” to help his friend become president in 1904—assuming that McKinley would run again in 1900. Paul Morton, vice president of the Santa Fe Railroad, had offered Roosevelt his private car so the governor and his invited guests (including White and H. H. Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago Times-Herald) could relax and talk. On short notice, White had done his utmost to ensure that reporters and enthusiastic supporters greeted Roosevelt’s train at every stop.
In Topeka, 3,000 people gave the New York governor “a rousing reception.” At the Newton station, “cannon boomed, whistles were blown and the crowd cheered.” In Kansas City, men wore cards in their hatbands promoting Roosevelt in 1904. The largest audience gathered in White’s hometown of Emporia. “No public man who has come into Kansas during the last ten years has stirred as much personal enthusiasm as Roosevelt,” White’s Emporia Gazette proclaimed. Roosevelt made a short fighting speech that roused supporters. “Governor Roosevelt may be said to be an Eastern man with a Western temperament,” the Kansas City Star noted. “His sympathy with the people of the Transmississippi country and the power he has displayed in appealing to their fancy marks him as a person of unusual breadth.” Despite a mere forty-eight hours’ notice of his arrival, White rhapsodized, Roosevelt “had a larger crowd at the Kansas stations than McKinley had with the state central committee back of him. Reporters with both trains concede this. . . . There is no man in America today whose personality is rooted deeper in the hearts of the people than Theodore Roosevelt.”
Kohlsaat, who had never met Roosevelt before, was stunned by the fervor of the crowds. On travels with his close friend McKinley, he had witnessed nothing comparable to the New York governor’s reception. The night the train left Emporia, he and Roosevelt stayed up talking until midnight. Roosevelt was curious to learn about Kohlsaat’s relationship with McKinley. For seven years, Kohlsaat proudly noted, McKinley did not once give a speech to the nation “without either wiring, telephoning, or writing me, and sending me his speeches to read before delivering them.” When Kohlsaat the next day begged pardon for having sounded arrogant, Roosevelt put his mind at ease: “Do you know what I thought after I went to bed?” Roosevelt asked. “I wondered if you would do the same thing for me.”
Delighted to find that Roosevelt welcomed his advice, Kohlsaat suggested that he issue a pledge of support for McKinley’s renomination. McKinley’s friends, he had learned, were irritated by premature talk of the governor’s presidential ambitions. Recognizing the value of Kohlsaat’s counsel, Roosevelt immediately telegraphed the president, “telling of the sentiment he had found in the West for his renomination,” and provided a similar statement to the press for publication. Shortly afterward, Roosevelt received a telegram from President McKinley inviting him to the White House. “Oh mentor!” Roosevelt addressed Kohlsaat. “Was my McKinley interview all right? . . . Didn’t we have a good week together?”
Roosevelt wrote a warm letter to White as well, expressing deep gratitude for their trip together. His absolute trust in White allowed him to share his hopes and intentions unguardedly. Even in that summer of 1899, White recalled, “we were planning for 1904.” Before they parted, White promised to send Roosevelt a map analyzing the strengths of various factions in each western state, helping to determine which political leaders should be approached—and by whom. Meanwhile, he assured the governor that the trip through Kansas was already “bearing great fruit,” as evidenced by laudatory clippings from Kansas newspapers that White enclosed. He recommended that Roosevelt send a personal note to each editor and publisher he met along the way. “All of these men have endorsed you emphatically since your departure, and spoke of you not only as possibility, but as probability for 1904,” White assured him, adding that a personal acknowledgment “would convince those men of their wisdom.”
Increasingly, White began to identify the trajectory of Roosevelt’s success with nothing less than the nation’s prospects. “When the war with Spain broke out, I wanted to go the worst kind [of
way],” White confided to Roosevelt, “but my wife was sick and I felt that my first duty was to her. Then when your regiment had such remarkable success and when you came home and were made governor and acquitted yourself so admirably, I formed a great desire to help you to be president of the United States. It has seemed to me that if I could perform some service for you that would land you in the presidency, I would perform as great a service for my country as I could perform upon the battlefield.”
In the years that followed, the two men exchanged more than three hundred letters. White reacted to Roosevelt’s speeches and Roosevelt religiously read White’s stories and articles as they appeared. “I think the ‘Man on Horseback’ almost your strongest bit of work,” he wrote, in response to White’s tale of an honest man corrupted by wealth as he builds a street railway empire and, in the process, loses his idealistic son. “There is a certain iron grimness about the tragedy with its mixture of the sordid and the sublime that made a very deep impression on me,” Roosevelt told his friend. After finishing another of White’s stories about a populist senator who hammers away at trusts and money power while building his own fortune through shady deals, Roosevelt penned a 2,000-word reply. “You are among the men whose good opinion I crave and desire to earn by my actions,” he frankly avowed. “I rank you with, for instance Judge Taft of Cincinnati and Jim Garfield of Cleveland, and with the men whom I am trying to get around me here, men of high ideals who strive to achieve these ideals in practical ways, men who want to count for decency and not merely to prattle.”
ROOSEVELT WAS PARTICULARLY INTRIGUED BY White’s views on the problem of the trusts, finding himself “in a great quandary what position to advocate about them.” His struggle for the franchise tax had sensitized him to the “growth of popular unrest and popular distrust” over the increasing concentration of power in large corporations. He told Lodge he was “surprised to find” that many workingmen who had supported McKinley and the Republicans in 1896 now insisted that William Jennings Bryan was “the only man who can control the trusts; and that the trusts are crushing the life out of the small men.” He feared that so long as Republicans failed to develop a cogent policy regarding trusts, those workers who suffered “a good deal of misery” would gravitate toward “the quack,” whose dangerous remedies would undo the benefits of the Industrial Revolution.
In the months that followed, Roosevelt consulted a variety of experts to develop a reasonable proposal for regulating the trusts, which he intended to present in his second annual message to the legislature when it reconvened in January. When a draft of the message was completed, he sent it to his old friend Elihu Root, a successful corporate lawyer who had just joined McKinley’s cabinet as war secretary. Root’s vehement opposition to the franchise tax measure had strained their friendship for a time, but he was “such a good fellow,” Roosevelt told Lodge, “that I was sure it would not last, and now I think every shade of it has vanished.” Root read the draft carefully, making a number of changes to tone down the governor’s rhetoric and moderate his condemnation of those who amassed their riches “by means which are utterly inconsistent with the highest rules of morality.” Roosevelt gratefully accepted most of Root’s suggestions. “Oh, Lord! I wish there were more of you,” he wrote; “you have the ideas to work out whereas I have to try to work out what I get from you and men like you.”
The lengthy message, delivered on January 3, 1900, opened with praise for the legislative achievements in the previous year, taking special note of the passage of the franchise tax law. More remained to be done to address the state’s industrial problems. “In our great cities there is plainly in evidence much wealth contrasted with much poverty and some of the wealth has been acquired or is used in a manner for which there is no moral justification,” Roosevelt said. Then, taking heed of Root’s advice, he carefully qualified this indictment, noting that “wealth which is expended in multiplying and elaborating real comforts, or even in pleasures which produce enjoyment at all proportionate to their cost will never excite serious indignation.”
“We do not wish to discourage enterprise,” Roosevelt stressed; “we do not desire to destroy corporations; we do desire to put them fully at the service of the State and the people.” He acknowledged that anti-trust legislation vengefully designed to punish the mere acquisition of wealth would be destructive but insisted that it would be “worse than idle to deny” the existence of abuses “of a very grave character.” Consequently, “we must set about finding out what the real abuses are, with their causes and to what extent remedies can be applied.”
“The first essential,” Roosevelt maintained, “is knowledge of the facts, publicity.” Such exposure would open the trusts to investigation for “misrepresentation or concealment regarding material facts” and reveal a corporation’s involvement in “unscrupulous promotion, overcapitalization, unfair competition, resulting in the crushing out of competitors” or the “raising of prices above fair competitive rates.” He recognized that “care should be taken not to stifle enterprise or disclose any facts of a business that are essentially private” but insisted on the state’s right to protect the public from monopoly and even from the “colossal waste” of resources in “vulgar forms of social advertisement.” With the facts in hand, measures—including taxation—could be devised to regulate the trusts. Most immediately, Roosevelt reiterated, “publicity is the one sure and adequate remedy which we can now invoke.”
Advocating “the adoption of what is reasonable in the demands of reformers” as “the surest way to prevent the adoption of what is unreasonable,” Roosevelt hoped to propel “the party of property” toward a more “enlightened conservatism.” The bosses had no interest in Roosevelt’s musings about a transformed Republican Party. On the contrary, Tom Platt and Benjamin Odell considered the message, even with Root’s modifications, dangerously provocative toward business. Odell warned that Roosevelt’s call to increase publicity surrounding corporate activities would spur manufacturers to leave New York State. Tensions with the party bosses escalated further when the governor threw his support behind a bill that would compel corporations to disclose information on “their structure and finance.”
To Roosevelt’s great disappointment, the public did not rally behind the bill. The danger of the trusts, apparent to farmers and wage earners, had not yet penetrated the consciousness of middle-class America. In three years’ time, Ida Tarbell and her fellow muckrakers would reach that important audience through their narrative abilities, putting faces and names to the giant corporations, shining a bright light on the sordid maneuvers that were crushing independent businessmen in one sector after another, dramatizing the danger in a way the voting population could no longer ignore. In 1900, however, the trusts remained amorphous entities, arousing vague apprehension but insufficient outrage to exert pressure on the political machines operating as their protectors. And in the absence of public demand, it was not difficult for Platt to prevent the legislature from acting on Roosevelt’s proposal.
DISSENSION BETWEEN PLATT AND ROOSEVELT continued to intensify. The three-year term of the state’s superintendent of insurance was coming to a close in February 1900. Lou Payn, the current superintendent, was Platt’s “right-hand” man. His reappointment was a foregone conclusion. Reading newspaper reports of Payn’s cozy relationships with the very companies he was supposed to oversee, Roosevelt issued an announcement that he would seek a new superintendent. Straightaway, the party countered with a statement that Payn would continue at his post “no matter what the opposition to him may try to do.” At a contentious breakfast, Platt “issued an ultimatum” to the governor, warning “that if he chose to fight,” he would most certainly lose, for “under the New York constitution the assent of the Senate was necessary not only to appoint a man to office, but to remove him from office.” There was no need to remind Roosevelt who controlled the senate. “I persistently refused to lose my temper,” he recalled. “I merely explained good-humoredly t
hat I had made up my mind.”
Though he steadfastly refused to consider Payn’s reappointment, Roosevelt moved to conciliate the organization. At the next breakfast meeting, he gave Platt a list of good machine men and told him to select any name on it. Still, Platt refused to compromise. While independent newspapers endorsed Roosevelt’s decision to remove Payn, they criticized his attempt to mollify Platt. “Why does he not fight in the open?” the Evening Post queried. “He could openly say that he found a rogue in office whom all the powers of political corruption in both parties were banded together to keep there, and that he, the people’s Governor, must appeal to the good citizens to sustain him in his fight against the whole confederate crew. That would be real war, and how the people would volunteer for it! That would be raising a standard to which honest men could repair. But what sort of banner is it on which the chief insignia are muffins and coffee devoured by Roosevelt and Platt, sitting cheek by jowl?”
The impasse persisted until Roosevelt, with the help of a newspaper investigation, uncovered a loan of more than $400,000 that Payn had received from a trust company controlled by an insurance firm under the superintendent’s jurisdiction. Unwilling to risk a scandal and extended scrutiny, Platt finally capitulated. He agreed to the nomination of Francis Hendricks, one of the men on Roosevelt’s list, whom the governor considered “thoroughly upright and capable.”
“I have always been fond of the West African proverb: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,’ ” Roosevelt exultantly told a friend. “If I had not carried the big stick the organization would not have gotten behind me.” At the same time, he pointed out, had he “yelled and blustered,” he would not have been able to muster 10 votes in the senate for Hendricks’s nomination. Indeed, following the righteous recommendations of the Evening Post “would have ensured Payn’s retention” and facilitated “a very imposing triumph for rascality.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 37