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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  In the year and a half since Roosevelt had failed to secure legislation to regulate the trusts in New York State, corporate consolidation had produced more than a thousand new mergers, including the creation of the world’s most colossal trust, United States Steel. And every passing week heralded new combinations, stirring fear in small businessmen and consumers alike. Across the country, mergers brought absentee ownership, disregard for working conditions, higher prices, and lower wages.

  Roosevelt believed the future of the Republican Party would be determined by its willingness to confront this malignancy. “I intend to work with my party and to make it strong by making it worthy of popular support,” he told Joseph Bucklin Bishop. Despite this resolve, he saw clearly that an open denunciation of the Republican alliance with big business would set the bosses against him. They would deny him the presidential nomination in 1904, just as they had prevented his run for a second term as governor. Moreover, without the support of Republican leadership in Congress, he had no chance of passing even the mildest legislation to regulate the trusts.

  The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform. Because senators at the time were elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, the majority of senators owed their positions to their state machines. These organizations, William Allen White observed, were in thrall to the business interests that filled their coffers through campaign contributions or blatant bribery. In a number of states, the bosses made themselves senators; in others, wealthy individuals purchased their seats outright.

  In a scathing editorial, the New York Times suggested that a millionaire could buy a Senate seat “just as he would buy an opera box, or a yacht, or any other luxury in which he can afford to indulge himself.” In some instances, the Times reported, “the sale takes the form of open bribery of the legislators”; more often, the Senate seat was “simply the satisfaction of a ‘claim’ acknowledged by the leaders of the party and created by large contributions to the Party treasury.” A widespread biting anecdote captured the popular view of the Senate: One night, Frances Cleveland, wife of the president, was awakened by a noise in the house. “Wake up,” she nudged her husband. “There are robbers in the house.” President Cleveland set her mind at ease. “There are no robbers in the House,” he reassured her, “but there are lots in the Senate.”

  Five men comprised the inner circle in the Republican-controlled Senate. Sixty-four-year-old Mark Hanna had only recently joined the Senate after a long and successful business career dealing in coal, iron ore, shipping, and street railways. Architect of McKinley’s two victorious campaigns, Hanna had earned the title of “national boss” of the Republican Party. Cartoons and editorials depicted a bloated capitalist, a tool of Wall Street, and a representative of the trusts; though more sympathetic to labor than most capitalists, Hanna had become an emblem of “the liaison between big business and government.” Under his influence, not a single anti-trust suit had been prosecuted in two years, even as consolidation escalated beyond anything previously imagined. “In the final analysis,” Lincoln Steffens succinctly charged, Hanna’s methods “amount to the management of the American people in the interest of the American businessman for the profit of American business and politics.”

  Much like Platt, Hanna viewed Roosevelt as fundamentally unstable, a political hazard. “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia. I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die,” Hanna fumed. “Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States!” Early on, Roosevelt was convinced that he would eventually have to wrest party control from Hanna, but if an open break occurred, he told Steffens, “it would be a great calamity to the party and therefore to the public.” To assail the powerful Hanna machine, the New York World noted, “would be as foolhardy as for a mill hand to fling himself upon a whirling buzz-saw.”

  Accordingly, Roosevelt reached out to the older man, expressing hope that they might one day share an intimacy similar to the one Hanna had enjoyed with McKinley. In addition, he requested a conference to solicit Hanna’s counsel on political strategy and the upcoming message. “Go slow,” Hanna cautioned. “It would not be possible to get wiser advice,” Roosevelt graciously responded. Such patience would not cost Roosevelt, Mark Sullivan noted, for “his was the rising star; Hanna’s was falling.”

  In addition, Roosevelt sought out the “Big Four,” a group of veteran senators who commanded the power to pass, block, or kill any legislation: Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, John C. Spooner of Wisconsin, William B. Allison of Iowa, and Orville Platt (no relation to the New York boss) of Connecticut. Aldrich, the leader of the group, had become a multimillionaire through investments in street railways, banking, oil, gas, electricity, and rubber. Elected to the Senate in 1881 after two terms in the House, he was considered the most influential Republican legislator on the Hill. As chairman of the Finance Committee, he wielded absolute control over legislation on tariffs and trusts. Furthermore, Aldrich’s only daughter, Abby, had married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., only son of the Standard Oil tycoon.

  To each of these influential conservative leaders, Roosevelt made an expansive overture, similar in tone to his September 30 note to Senator Spooner: “I hope to keep in closest touch with you and to profit by your advice in the future as I have profited by it in the past.” At regular intervals, he solicited their suggestions, inviting them to the White House for confidential conversations. As he drafted sections of his message, Roosevelt read them aloud to Hanna and the Big Four, appealing to them as valued mentors. He also included members of his cabinet in these sessions, inviting a frank discussion. The press described “a very pretty scene, this young president sincerely and earnestly placing his thoughts before his older counselors and begging them to criticize wherein they thought he was wrong.”

  Journalists noted in early November that Roosevelt had “made more progress in the preparation of his message to Congress than any of his predecessors ever did so far in advance.” This lengthy process allowed him to write the entire message personally rather than simply compile sections submitted by various department heads, as was customary. As page after page accumulated, curiosity about the contents escalated. No subject attracted more interest than the trusts. “Many scribes with many minds, writing for many papers, are guessing and philosophizing as to what the president’s message will and will not contain,” one newspaper commented, concluding that “the only real thing anybody can guess or predict about with an approximation to truth is that it will be Roosevelt’s message and nobody else’s.”

  From the start, Roosevelt determined that he would not retreat “one hair’s breadth” from the position on the trusts that he had established in his gubernatorial message, his vice-presidential acceptance speech, and the address he had delivered at the Minnesota State Fair five days before McKinley was shot. “More and more it is evident,” he had declared that day in Minneapolis, “that the State, and if necessary, the Nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations.” He had repeatedly emphasized the need for corporations to deliver public reports to the government on their capitalization, profits, and financial structures. Now, he intended to highlight that recommendation in his annual message by calling for a cabinet-level Department of Commerce and Industries, an agency empowered to examine the workings of the big corporations.

  Orville Platt warned Roosevelt that if Congress passed a law “going so far as to force corporations doing an interstate business to make reports to United States officials,” it would likely be ruled unconstitutional. Hanna insisted that the proposition would only “furnish ammunition to the enemy in a political contest” and that “even the labor unions were not greatly interested in corporate control.”

  Roosevelt held his ground, even after a contentious session with his friends George Perkins and Harvard classmate Robert Bacon, both of whom were partners in J. P. Morgan’s fi
rm. While he remained “very fond” of both men, Roosevelt confided to a relative that they argued “like attorneys for a bad case, and at the bottom of their hearts each would know this . . . if he were not the representative of a man so strong and dominant a character as Pierpont Morgan.” Not only did they encourage the president “to go back on” his previous demands for disclosure, but Perkins apparently suggested that he “do nothing at all, and say nothing except platitudes; accept the publication of what some particular company chooses to publish, as a favor, instead of demanding what we think ought to be published from all companies as a right.” As the historian Eric Goldman observes, the practice of “not prying into business affairs was accepted as part of a prevailing laissez-faire.”

  Just as Abraham Lincoln would exorcise his frustrations in “hot letters” he would put aside unsent, Roosevelt confined his rancor to private diatribe and followed it with a public letter for Douglas Robinson (Corinne’s husband) to share with the two men. “I much enjoyed the visit from Perkins,” he amiably wrote. “I am particularly desirous to see him and Bacon as often as possible.”

  To Paul Dana, conservative editor of the New York Sun, Roosevelt spoke more directly. In mid-November, Dana wrote a long, critical letter to Roosevelt admonishing that “the proposition that the Federal Government shall lay its hand on business corporations is revolutionary. . . . It would open the door to an unlimited increase of the powers of the Federal Government.” Adding to his argument, Dana insisted that “there is no authority of public opinion for the demand for trust legislation. . . . I deny the political right of the Republican successor of President McKinley to undertake it.” Roosevelt acknowledged Dana’s warnings but had no intention of altering his course. “Your letter causes me concern,” he replied, “to ask me to alter my convictions as to the proper course to be pursued about these big corporations is much like asking me to alter my convictions about the Monroe Doctrine and the need of building a navy. . . . You have no conception of the revolt that would be caused if I did nothing.”

  On the morning of December 3, 1901, Roosevelt’s completed message, totaling more than 20,000 words, was carried to the House and the Senate to be read out by a clerk, as had been the custom since Thomas Jefferson sent the message in writing. “A hush immediately fell over the body as the clerk began in clear, firm, and distinct tones to read the opening paragraphs,” the Washington Times reported, observing that “he did not read in the usual singsong monotone, but with emphasis and expression.” The recitation took about two hours, but “there was interest in every line, and members of both houses listened with unusual attention.” The assembled legislators generally received such messages “with scant courtesy,” the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Record-Herald noted, retiring to the “allurement of the smoking-room or restaurant. To-day they sat still.”

  The message opened with an emotional denunciation of McKinley’s assassin, “a professed anarchist, inflamed by the teachings of professed anarchists.” Such men, “who object to all governments, good and bad alike,” only sabotaged progress, Roosevelt declared. This impassioned opening introduced Roosevelt’s agenda of moderate, reasoned reform. His tempered approach toward curbing the abuses of industrialism, he asserted, would prove the surest way to combat the alarming rise in anarchism, socialism, and demagoguery.

  In the long sentences of the president’s message, semicolons followed by “yet” or “but” separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt’s characteristic “on the one hand, on the other” style of crediting antagonistic views. “The captains of industry who have driven the railway system across the continent, who have built up our commerce, who have developed our manufactures, have on the whole done great good to our people,” he proclaimed, “yet it remains true . . . there have been abuses connected with the accumulation of wealth.” Repeatedly, he employed this rhetorical display of evenhandedness: “To strike with ignorant violence” at the great trusts “endangers the interests of all . . . and yet it is also true that practical efforts must be made to correct those evils.” If he had no patience for those who resorted “to hatred and fear” to denounce the trusts, Roosevelt made it clear that he shared the “wide-spread conviction” that certain invidious practices were “hurtful to the general welfare.” While he stopped short of advocating prohibition of the trusts, he demanded that they be “supervised and within reasonable limits controlled.”

  Roosevelt’s strategic deliberations provoked a stinging parody from Finley Dunne’s Mr. Dooley: “Th’ trusts, says [Roosevelt], are heejoous monsthers built up be th’ inlightened intherprise iv th’ men that have done so much to advance progress in our beloved counthry. On wan hand I wud stamp thim undher fut; on th’ other hand not so fast.”

  Although Roosevelt’s carefully balanced propositions invited accusations of equivocation, the rhetoric of his message allowed him to set the stage for reform without immediately alienating corporate interests. Conservative critics, soothed by language touting the benefits of capitalism and condemning the populist call for the total destruction of the trusts, missed the true implications of Roosevelt’s central argument concerning the federal government’s responsibility to regulate corporations in the public interest. “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract,” he noted, “to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form,” they assume an obligation to the public. Through the creation of a new Department of Commerce, the government would merely exercise its duty “to inspect and examine” corporate finances as a means to determine whether regulation or taxation was necessary. Should Congress determine that “it lacks the constitutional power to pass such an act,” Roosevelt recommended that an amendment to the Constitution “be submitted to confer that power.”

  Public attention immediately following his message focused on the trusts. Yet Roosevelt had also outlined his plans for the welfare of wageworkers, reciprocity agreements, railway rebates, forest preserves, irrigation of arid lands, and the isthmian canal—as well as his ideas for reorganizing the Army and expanding the Navy. At the close of his address, he returned to the tragedy of McKinley’s death, acknowledging the expressions of sympathy and grief “from every quarter of the civilized world” that had touched “the hearts” of every American.

  Generally, both the public and the press received Roosevelt’s address well. “No other message in ten years past has been read by so many American citizens,” claimed The Independent. The tenor of the State of the Union was viewed as “characteristic of the man; self-assertive, determined, honest, patriotic, permeated with the spirit of progress.” Despite widespread approbation, newspapers remained “skeptical of any important outcome from the president’s recommendations regarding trusts,” convinced that Roosevelt’s primary goal at this juncture was his own nomination and election. “He knows very well that no man can secure the Republican nomination over the trusts,” one Indiana paper editorialized. The trusts understood the proposals as mere theatre to satisfy reformers. While it was “refreshing” to see “a bold man struggling with the devil-fish of party intrigue,” until the middle-class confusion about corporate consolidation galvanized a demand for positive action, the conservative powers in Congress would have no trouble in preventing Roosevelt’s proposals from even reaching the floor.

  THE FINANCIAL WORLD WAS STAGGERED on February 19, 1902 when Roosevelt announced the government’s intention to bring an anti-trust suit against the Northern Securities Company. This giant holding company had recently merged the rail and shipping lines of James Hill, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt in the Northwest with those of E. H. Harriman, the Rockefellers, and the Goulds in the Southwest. Consummated during Roosevelt’s watch, this vast new combination, first reported on at length by Ray Baker, touched a nerve in the president.

  Baker, who had worked for months on a series of articles profiling the nation’s tycoons, was well positioned to cov
er the spectacular merger. He had returned to New York from his sojourn in Arizona reenergized and eager to tackle the unsettling issues of labor and capital that had preoccupied him since his college days. He felt that he “had come to see and know the workers’ side” as he covered the Pullman strike for the Chicago Record, conversing at length with Eugene Debs and spending long weeks with a number of other labor leaders. “I knew, or thought I knew, the powerful incentives for organization behind their movements,” he wrote, “and their demands for more wages and more freedom.” Realizing he must also develop an understanding of “the business and financial side,” Baker was thrilled when McClure suggested a series focused on the captains of industry. While he did not consider these articles to be “revolutionary” or “crusading,” his research shaped an evolving conception of capitalism’s dazzling strengths and troubling weaknesses.

  Baker’s first article, on J. P. Morgan, published in October 1901, portrayed a Wall Street giant who controlled “a yearly income and expenditure nearly as great as that of Imperial Germany, paid taxes on a debt greater than that of many of the lesser nations of Europe, and by employing 250,000 men, supported a population of over one million souls, almost a nation in itself.” While Baker acknowledged that the powerful private banker was “an expert financial doctor,” who had rescued the American economy from panic on three separate occasions, he withheld judgment on whether Morgan had employed that “unquestioned genius to the highest purpose.”

  The alarming dimensions of Morgan’s empire were delineated in a second, follow-up article that analyzed the structure of the United States Steel Corporation. This immense enterprise, the first billion-dollar corporation in the world, had been conceived the previous April when J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and the leaders of nine other steel companies merged to avoid a ruinous, competitive war. Many of these men, Baker concluded, “were unquestionably forced” into consolidation “against their will.” The resulting corporation produced “more than a quarter of the entire [steel] production of the world” and dictated “the destinies of a population nearly as large as that of Maryland or Nebraska.” To enumerate its corporate possessions glazes the mind: more than 18,000 coke ovens, 80 blast furnaces, six giant railroad companies, and 115 steamships. “It is difficult to convey any adequate idea of the magnitude of the Steel Corporation,” Baker concluded. “Nothing like this has ever been seen before.”