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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  The next morning, the Tafts relocated their household to the historic Malacañan Palace. “In some ways we regretted that the move was necessary,” Nellie recalled, “for we were very comfortable in our ‘chalet.’ ” Until they occupied the palace where MacArthur had presided the Filipinos would not “be convinced that civil government was actually established.” Despite her reservations, “the idea of living in a palace . . . appealed to my imagination,” Nellie acknowledged. Set on twenty beautifully landscaped acres of trees, flowers, and fountains, the palace stood on a bend in the Pasig River, with windows open all around. There were about twenty rooms on the first floor, “all of them good sized and some of them enormous, and it took a great many servants to keep the place in order,” Nellie noted, recollecting the impressive space in detail: “The great living-rooms open one into another, giving a fine perspective, and they lead, through a dozen different doorways, on to a splendid, white-tiled verandah which runs out to the bank of the Pasig.” There were a half-dozen houses on the grounds for secretaries and assistants.

  Barely established at the palace, Nellie placed an immediate announcement in the newspapers stating that she would hold a reception every Wednesday, open to everyone on an equal basis. Her receptions were soon thronged with “Army and Navy people, civilians of every occupation,” and “American school teachers.” Never before had the military mixed socially with the islanders, so Nellie had to cajole the Filipinos to attend “by asking many of them personally and persistently.” In short order, she proudly remarked, “there began to be as many brown faces as white among our guests.” But Nellie refused to confine herself to the company at the palace and was eager to explore the native culture: she attended local parties and dances, often accompanied by a group of young Army officers, including Archie Butt. Stationed in the Quartermaster Department, Captain Butt was “a great society beau in Washington, and was said to be the handsomest man there,” Nellie told her mother. “You would be amused to see Maria and me frisking around with youths years younger than we are, and dancing cotillions with the best of them,” she boasted. “Of course the position gives us a great deal of attention which I for one would never have otherwise,” she added, “and of course we feel we might as well make the best of it while we have the opportunity.”

  When news of the triumphant inauguration reached the United States, Roosevelt wrote a long letter to Taft. “It seems idle to keep repeating to you what a lively appreciation not only I but all the rest of us here have of what you are doing. But when you are so far away. . . . I do want you to understand that you are constantly in the thoughts of very many people, and that I have never seen a more widespread recognition of service among men of character than the recognition of the debt we owe you.”

  Though he rejoiced in his friend’s success, Roosevelt was less sanguine about his own prospects. “Here everything is at slack water politically,” he continued, addressing Taft’s expressed hope for a Roosevelt presidency in 1904. “I should like to be President, and feel I could do the work well,” he acknowledged, but “it would be simply foolish for me to think seriously of my chances of getting the office, when the only certain feature of the situation is that my own State will be against me. . . . If the convention were held now, my hold is still so strong both in the west and in New England that I might very well get the nomination without regard to New York. But my present position is one in which I can do absolutely nothing to shape policies, and so looked at dispassionately, I cannot see that there is any but the very smallest chance of my keeping enough hold even to make me seriously spoken of as a candidate.” Considering the circumstances, he told Taft, “you are of all the men in this country the one best fitted to give the nation the highest possible service as president. . . . Sometime I want to get the chance to say this in public.”

  Utterly frustrated and increasingly dispirited, Roosevelt even made plans to begin law school again in the fall, figuring that two additional years of coursework would enable him to pass the bar examinations and launch a legal practice. He also inquired about the possibility of becoming a professor of history at a university. “Of course, I may go on in public life,” he reckoned, “but equally of course it is unlikely, and what I have seen of the careers of public men has given me an absolute horror of the condition of the politician whose day has passed; who by some turn of the kaleidoscope is thrown into the background; and who then haunts the fields of his former activity as a pale shadow of what he once was.”

  On September 6, 1901, that kaleidoscope shifted in a way Roosevelt never anticipated. A young anarchist walked up to shake hands with President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Removing a revolver screened by a handkerchief, the assassin fired two shots into McKinley’s chest. Eight days later, the wounds proved fatal. Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two years of age, became the youngest president in the history of the country.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “That Damned Cowboy Is President”

  “1902 Finds the Helm in Safe Hands,” an illustration in Puck magazine, Jan. 1, 1902.

  THE SHIP OF STATE IS on its way to unknown ports,” the Nation declared portentously, warning that the assassination of President McKinley had “violently altered the natural course of events.” When Roosevelt took the oath of office on September 14, 1901, questions abounded, unsettling conservatives and reformers alike. “What changes will he make?” “What does the future hold in store?” “Will he continue the policy mapped out by his predecessor?”

  Conservatives, who had utterly dominated the Republican Party for three decades, feared the impulsive young president would prove a “bucking bronco,” upsetting the alliance between business and government that had delivered unparalleled prosperity at the turn of the century. Reformers hoped Roosevelt’s vigorous leadership would refashion the Republican Party into the progressive force it had been under Abraham Lincoln, endeavoring to spread prosperity beyond the wealthy few to the common man.

  Comforting themselves that Roosevelt remained a loyal Republican despite occasional fights with the party bosses, conservatives maintained that his “first great duty” was to carry on the policies of the slain president. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, presidents had been captive to their parties: not only did nominations require the approval of party machines, but party platforms also dictated policy preferences. Furthermore, the partisan press became the central organ for mobilizing voters. Recognizing this longstanding subordination of any personal agenda, the New York Sun predicted that the new president’s actions would “not depend on the possible vagaries of an individual judgment.” The Wall Street tycoon Henry Clews made a similar assumption. “The conservative policy of Mr. McKinley has become so settled in the minds of the people,” he pronounced, “that it matters not who becomes his immediate successor. . . . No one will dare to experiment or to deviate from such a course of administration.”

  Throughout his career, Roosevelt had struggled to reconcile party allegiance with the drive to address social problems, a balancing act that became more difficult as the troubling aspects of industrialization intensified. While he considered himself conservative in relation to the Populists, he believed that his party was in thrall to reactionaries who so “dreaded radicalism” that they “distrusted anything that was progressive.” Precisely such men dominated both chambers of Congress, Roosevelt lamented. He would work to “push” them forward but recognized that genuine progress would require a direct appeal to the people, “the masters of both of us.” To reach the general public, he would enlist the new breed of independent journalists, without whose “active support,” he later acknowledged, he “would have been powerless.”

  Initially he understood the necessity of caution. Warned that the stock market might crash unless he reassured Wall Street that he and his predecessor were “one in purpose,” Roosevelt issued a solemn pledge: “In this hour of deep and terrible bereavement, I wish to state that I shall continue absolutely unbr
oken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and the honor of the country.”

  Even as he publicly vowed to preserve a comfortable conservative agenda, Roosevelt signaled journalists that a new political era was imminent. On his very first day in the White House, he invited managers of the Associated Press, the Scripps-McRae Press Association (now the United Press), and the New York Sun to his office. It was “an unusual request,” one historian noted, “for in those days, presidents rarely convened journalists to discuss public matters.” He proposed an unprecedented accessibility, agreeing to “keep them posted” on each evolving plan and policy if they, in return, promised never to “violate a confidence or publish news that the President thought ought not to be published.” These parameters established, Roosevelt informed them that despite his public endorsement of the status quo, the Constitution had provided for his succession. “I am President,” he bluntly maintained, “and shall act in every word and deed precisely as if I and not McKinley had been the candidate for whom the electors cast the vote for President.”

  That evening, presiding over his first dinner party as president, Roosevelt openly avowed his intention to differentiate himself from McKinley. A small party had gathered in the modest N Street residence of his sister Bamie and her husband, Will Cowles, where Roosevelt boarded during his first week to allow the grieving Ida McKinley a measure of time to move out of the executive mansion. Two guests, William Allen White and the young president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, joined the family. White vividly recalled sitting “pop-eyed with wonder” at the edge of his chair while Roosevelt spoke “with a kind of dynamic, burning candor” about his plans. Though accustomed to Roosevelt’s indiscreet talk, White had assumed he would “be different” in his new office, only to find that “he was absolutely unchanged.”

  The president worried openly that his pledge to follow in McKinley’s footsteps, compelled by dire economic predictions, would “embarrass him sorely in the future.” He might have forestalled a stock market crash, but if he pursued McKinley’s policies to the letter, would it not “give the lie to all he had stood for?” During a “cataract solo of talk” that left White astonished, Roosevelt’s thoughts turned to his political future. Should he secure a second term, he would be only fifty years old when it came to a close. “Imagine me as an ex-President, dedicating buildings and making commencement speeches,” he mused. The prospect of being “the old cannon loose on the deck in the storm” terrified him. Of more immediate concern, he would likely face Republican Committee chair Mark Hanna in 1904. A powerful adversary much like Boss Platt, Hanna threatened to derail Roosevelt’s aspiration for a second term.

  White was delighted when conversation turned to Platt, on whom he was gathering material for a long profile in McClure’s. Roosevelt had promised his assistance, and the two men had planned to meet at Oyster Bay before McKinley’s assassination brought them both to Washington. The profile of the New York boss was part of a series White had projected for the magazine. Roosevelt had read White’s two earlier pieces on William Jennings Bryan and Tammany boss Richard Croker with great enthusiasm. “Here you are living in a small town out in Kansas, not accustomed to the conditions of life in a seething great city, pay a somewhat hurried visit to New York,” he marveled, “and yet you sketch Croker as no one in New York, so far as I know, could sketch him. . . . I immensely admired your Bryan; but then I can entirely understand how you knew Bryan. When it comes to Croker it almost seems as if you must have divined it.”

  White had interviewed Boss Platt in his downtown office, “a frowzy little cubbyhole that had not been tidied up for years.” He had talked with his lieutenants, searched out his rivals, and scoured newspaper files. He believed his study of the Platt machine would have national resonance because its “story of intrigue, corruption and the sordid amalgamation of plutocratic self-interest and political power was typical of American politics in the North at that time.” In White’s mind, Roosevelt was to be commended for wanting a tough story “about his own party printed” and for believing that “the more people knew” about the corrupt alliance binding big business and elected officials, “the sooner they would wreck the machines.” By this time, White was convinced the “untrammeled” greed of the great industrial captains must be checked. He left the dinner that night loaded with ammunition for his profile on Platt.

  Lincoln Steffens, who joined William Allen White in Washington the following day, recounted his own exhilaration on learning that Roosevelt would assume the presidency. “We reformers went up in the air when President McKinley was shot, took our bearings, and flew straight to our first president, T.R. And he understood, he shared, our joy.” The White House offices, Steffens recalled, “were crowded with people, mostly reformers,” amid whom the president “strode triumphant.” Despite Roosevelt’s attempts to mute his ebullience while Washington and the nation mourned, “his joy showed in every word and movement.” When the day’s work was done, he grabbed White and Steffens: “Let’s get out,” he exclaimed, propelling the two men into the streets. “For better than an hour, he allowed his gladness to explode. With his feet, his fists, his face and with free words he laughed at his luck. He laughed at the rage of Boss Platt and at the tragic disappointment of Mark Hanna; these two had not only lost their President McKinley but had been given as a substitute the man they had thought to bury in the vice-presidency. T.R. yelped at their downfall. And he laughed with glee at the power and place that had come to him.”

  By the time White returned to Emporia to write his profile, he had thoroughly imbibed Roosevelt’s resentment toward Platt. “Unconsciously, or perhaps consciously, I used my best and most burning adjectives in that article expressing my scorn of Senator Platt and his machine, and contempt for the things it represented,” White later recalled. “It was a bitter piece.” Although he warned the editors at McClure’s that he was afraid it might be “too scorching,” they were proud to publish it.

  The piece vividly delineated the origin of the Platt machine. Twenty years earlier, every business had maintained its own lobby in Albany, an expensive and often inefficient way of influencing the state legislature. Platt made it his business “to bring order out of confusion,” centralizing power in his own hands. He first persuaded corporations to contribute generously to the state central committee rather than field individual lobbyists, and then allocated the money to elect the machine’s slate of candidates. Over time, Platt built up a majority of legislators absolutely beholden to his organization. Corporations thrived under the Platt regime; it cost less to support the state committee than to keep individual lobbies. Furthermore, since Platt took none of the money for himself, “there were no longer stories of individual corruption, of bribes and scandals.” But the people of New York bore the cost of the system that worked so seamlessly for both the corporations and the politicians. “What we call popular government,” White concluded, “is abrogated by purchase of privileges.”

  White’s analysis of the workings of the machine was unsparing but deadly accurate; his portrait of Platt, however, was gratuitously savage. He described the New York boss as an earthworm, “boring beneath the roots of local self-government by cities and States, burrowing silently yet with incalculable power, loosening the soil, sagging foundations.” He portrayed a soulless man devoid of any “moral nature,” loyal only to his machine and its corporate sponsors; a man transformed into “a machine himself—hard, impulseless, cunning, cute but witless, immovable, inexorable, grinding.”

  Enraged, Platt immediately declared his intention “to haul both author and publisher into court to answer the charge of criminal libel,” threatening that his lawyers had already begun preparing their complaint. “I will get that fellow’s scalp if it is the last thing I ever do,” he seethed, vowing to employ all his resources “to bring about the punishment of this man.” Moreover, White and McClure’s would not be his only targets. Through depositions, he promised to unearth ev
ery one of White’s sources, exposing those “who told him the lies,” and proceeding equally against them. Suspecting that Roosevelt himself was one of White’s sources, he stormed into the president’s office, demanding that the journalist be forever barred from the White House. “No friend of mine,” Platt insisted, “can be a friend of that man.” Wisely, Roosevelt denied having read the article but promised to do so.

  “I am perfectly heartbroken at the whole business,” White revealed to Roosevelt, “not for myself, but for the embarrassment to you. I thought I was doing a service to good government in the United States by writing the article. I still believe that I was right, but I seem to have been right at a terrible cost to you.” The distraught journalist queried how he might “straighten this business out” but forwarded a second letter to the president’s secretary without waiting for an answer. The second letter was to be shown to Senator Platt or made public, as Roosevelt saw fit. “Not one syllable, hint, or inference escaped President Roosevelt’s lips while I was a guest in the White House, which might have been used in any way to the discredit of Senator Platt,” White asserted. “My opinion of Senator Platt was formed, not by President Roosevelt, but by careful study of conditions in New York politics. Many of my conclusions are probably foreign to those, which everyone knows are held by the president.”

  Roosevelt thanked White for the potentially mollifying letter, nevertheless insisting he had no intention of letting Platt’s indignation dictate his friendships. He sought to ease White’s anxiety over their relationship by insisting, “The only damage that could come to me through such articles would be if you refused to continue to champion me!”