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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  After failing for years both as governor and president to pass legislation regulating corporations, Roosevelt had finally succeeded because “a great many people had been thinking and talking” about the problem of the trusts, and “a certain consensus of opinion” had been reached. Ida Tarbell’s series had helped foment and articulate a conscious desire for reform in every village, township, and city. In John D. Rockefeller, she had furnished a human face for the bewilderingly intricate and multifaceted problem of the trusts—thereby giving the president an identifiable target that he brilliantly exploited to mobilize public sentiment behind his legislative program.

  With the passage of the rebate bill and the expedition bill and the establishment of the Department of Commerce, Roosevelt was convinced that he had “gotten the trust legislation all right,” that Democrats could no longer wield the trust issue against his party. Although some charged that even these measures combined were “not sufficiently far-reaching,” even these critics acknowledged that Congress had exceeded expectations. Moreover, this trio of bills would provide the basis to determine what further action might be necessary.

  Perhaps no forum better illustrated the progressive direction of public opinion than William Allen White’s scorecard for the 57th Congress. The country editor who had ridiculed calls for governmental intervention only a few years earlier now heralded Roosevelt’s three anti-trust measures as a major step toward rectifying laissez-faire economic policy. He predicted that “no single legislative act since the Missouri Compromise” would impact American business as much as the Department of Commerce and Labor. “Thousands of interests that have known no Federal regulation and control,” he wrote, “will be welded to the Government hereafter, and can only grow and develop under the hands of Congress and the President.” Some might fear that the country was taking “a step toward socialism,” he concluded, but “if so, well and good; the step will not be retracted.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “A Mission to Perform”

  “Bigger Than His Party,” a Roosevelt cartoon in Puck magazine, May 7, 1902.

  ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 1, 1903, Roosevelt embarked in high spirits upon the longest tour ever taken by a president—a nine-week transcontinental journey by train that would cover 14,000 miles across twenty-four states and territories. Freed from the vexations of dealing with Congress, he jauntily doffed his hat and waved to the hundreds of cheering well-wishers gathered at the Sixth Street station to see him off. As he boarded the train, he turned to offer parting advice to George Cortelyou, whom he had appointed head of the new Department of Commerce and Labor. “Look out for the trusts,” he chuckled. “I hate to leave you here alone with those dreadful corporations, but I can’t very well help it. Be careful of them and don’t let them hurt you while I am away.”

  The specially equipped train, reportedly among “the handsomest ever placed on the tracks by the Pullman Company,” consisted of six cars. The lush, mahogany-finished Elysian would be the president’s home throughout the trip. This “traveling palace” boasted three state rooms, a kitchen staffed by expert chefs, a private dining room, an observation parlor, quarters for the servants, and a rear platform from which to address crowds gathered at little stations along the way. The remaining cars included spacious quarters for the president’s guests, stenographers, and Secret Service crew, a sleeping car housing reporters and photographers, and a dining car.

  Invited to accompany the presidential party, the naturalist John Burroughs described the train’s progress north and west through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and Montana. The president “gave himself very freely and heartily to the people,” he noted, his arrival sparking a festive spirit in each village and town. Whenever Roosevelt spotted a group of men or women waving from a distance, he raced out to lift his hat and return the greeting. He never saw such exchanges with the public as inconvenient or intrusive. Burroughs recalled an occasion when the president was lunching as the train passed by a small schoolhouse where the teacher had ushered her students outside. Clutching his napkin, Roosevelt raced to the platform. “Those children,” he said, “wanted to see the President of the United States, and I could not disappoint them. They may never have another chance.”

  Recognizing that people would come “to see the President much as they would come in to see a circus,” Roosevelt also surmised that in many small towns the train—rather than the president—was the marquee attraction: “The whole population of the plains now looks upon the Pullman sleepers and dining cars,” he told John Hay, “just as Mark Twain describes the people along the banks of the Mississippi as formerly looking at the Mississippi steamers.” Nonetheless, he was convinced that “besides the mere curiosity there was a good feeling behind it all, a feeling that the President was their man and symbolized their government and that they had a proprietary interest in him.”

  Jostled by frantic crowds as he made his way to crude bandstands erected along the route, Roosevelt never betrayed impatience or irritation. Since active campaigning by a presidential candidate was still considered distasteful, this extended tour represented his best chance to gain “the people’s trust” before the coming election. Determined to connect with the people, Roosevelt radiated nothing but delight as he accepted an array of bizarre gifts that included an infant badger, a lizard, a horned toad, a copper vase, an Indian basket, two bears, a horse, and a gold inlaid saddle. Through it all, Roosevelt maintained good humor and gratitude. In Butte, Montana, when presented with a foot-high three-handled silver loving cup capable of holding sixteen pints of beer, he graciously exclaimed, “Great heavens and earth!”

  Before embarking on the tour, Roosevelt had prepared a half-dozen policy speeches, each addressing a specific issue—the trusts, the tariff, the Navy, the Philippines, and the Monroe Doctrine. “These were not epoch-making addresses,” William White explained. Neither “particularly original” nor profound, they were structured with two simple goals in mind: to outline his policies in straightforward language and to establish an emotional rapport with his audiences.

  The further he moved from “the thick of civilization,” the more expansive and at ease the president appeared. When he talked informally to “rough-coated, hard-headed, gaunt, sinewy farmers and hired hands,” Roosevelt proudly told John Hay, he was “always sure of reaching them” with simple language that his Harvard friends would judge “not only homely, but commonplace.” Despite “all the superficial differences,” he remarked, “down at bottom these men and I think a good deal alike, or least have the same ideals.”

  Newspapermen began to compile the aphorisms they termed “Roosevelt Gems”—pithy sayings about citizenship, character, and ordinary virtues that he repeated time and again to the great pleasure of his audiences: farmers in Aberdeen, South Dakota, whistled approval when he declared that no law could ever be framed to “make a fool wise or a weakling strong, or a coward brave.” They cheered when he compared the qualities desired in the best kind of public servant to those displayed by a good neighbor or a trustworthy friend—“a man who keep[s] his word and never promise[s] . . . what he knows cannot be done.” Oregonians nodded in approval when he affirmed, “I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.” Indianans cheered the now familiar Roosevelt adage “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Such “sudsy metaphors,” which reportedly dripped “like water from a clothesline,” reached the hearts of citizens at every stop along the way.

  It was during this western tour that Roosevelt began to test the phrase “a square deal”—the slogan that would come to characterize his entire domestic program. In a speech the previous summer he had called for “a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor.” Now, he began to flesh out what this really meant for particular segments of the populace. In Arizona, he spoke of the Indians in his regiment: “They were good enough to fight and to die, and they are good enough to have me treat them exactly as square as any white man
. . . . All I ask is a square deal for every man.” In Montana, he expressed a similar sentiment about the black troops who fought beside him in Santiago. Still later, he elaborated on the concept, applying it to his policy regarding labor and capital. The appeal of the slogan was immediately evident; even advertisers along the president’s route appropriated his phrase, headlining “A Square Deal” in their copy. A real estate company in Butte, Montana, began its pitch with Roosevelt’s words: “We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.”

  Reaching Yellowstone, Roosevelt bid a temporary farewell to the news-papermen, who were instructed to stay behind. Accompanied by John Burroughs, he intended to relax for two weeks, to watch birds and simply observe rather than hunt game—the herds of elk, antelope, and black-tailed deer. Roosevelt had stayed with the older man in his log cabin three years earlier, striking Burroughs then as “a great boy,” filled with inexhaustible energy. “He climbed everything on the place,” the naturalist recalled with mixed awe and dread. “He shinned up tree after tree, running his arms into every high-hole’s and woodpecker’s nest, while I stood on the ground below shuddering and waiting for him to fall.” Their stay at Yellowstone convinced Burroughs that the presidency had altered Roosevelt little: he remained “a man of such abounding energy and ceaseless activity that he sets everything in motion around him wherever he goes. . . . Nothing escaped him, from bears to mice, from wild geese to chickadees, from elk to red squirrels; he took it all in, and he took it in as only an alert, vigorous mind can take it in.”

  These invigorating days in Yellowstone and a subsequent camping trip in the magnificent forests of Yosemite with the founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, deeply impressed Roosevelt and informed the tone of his speeches during the remainder of the trip. Turning from trusts and the tariff, he increasingly focused on the importance of preserving the country’s national heritage from exploitation. He arrived at the Grand Canyon as a great contest was raging over whether to preserve the landmark as a national monument or open it up to mining for precious metals. “Leave it as it is,” he urged his countrymen. “The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. . . . Keep it for your children, your children’s children and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American . . . should see.” Deeply moved by this “great wonder of nature,” the president resolved to ensure the designation of the Grand Canyon as a national park. “If Roosevelt had done nothing else as president,” Douglas Brinkley has observed, “his advocacy on behalf of preserving the canyon might well have put him in the top ranks of American presidents.”

  When the presidential party reached the California coast, Roosevelt took a special detour on a narrow-gauge road into the San Lorenzo Valley, home to a majestic grove of giant sequoias. “I am, oh, so glad to be here,” he exclaimed. “This is the first glimpse I have ever had of the big trees.” At Stanford University the next day, he exhorted his audience “to protect these mighty trees, these wonderful monuments of beauty.” It seemed a desecration to turn “a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates” into house siding or decks or porches. While many would hold that practical progress should trump aesthetic value, Roosevelt argued, “there is nothing more practical, in the end, than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions in mankind.”

  The vital role of these massive redwoods, “the great monarchs of the woods,” was confined neither to their commercial value nor to their natural beauty. The primary object of his overall forest policy, Roosevelt insisted, was “not to preserve forests because they are beautiful—though that is a good in itself—not to preserve them because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness—though that too is a good in itself,” but rather, to conserve them in order to guarantee “a steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, water” that would foster the growth of prosperous communities. Contrary to the prevailing view, Roosevelt foresaw that our natural resources were not inexhaustible. Destructive lumbering practices had already “seriously depleted” the forests. In clear language, he delineated the causal connection between forest protection and water conservation: forests absorb water and slow the melting of snow in the spring; they prevent the rain from “rushing away in uncontrollable torrents”; they “regulate the flow of streams.” In every watershed, forests help determine the amount of available water that can transform a wasteland into “a veritable garden of Eden.”

  In speech after speech, Roosevelt lauded the passage of the 1902 Reclamation Act, which, for the first time, made substantial federal funds available to construct dams, reservoirs, and other irrigation projects in the West. Intended to open “small irrigated farms to actual settlers, to actual home-makers,” the legislation stipulated that tracts of land larger than 160 acres would be ineligible for federally sponsored irrigation. In this way, the government sought to ensure that speculators would not commandeer the program’s benefits. “We do not ever want to let our land policy be shaped so as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to others,” Roosevelt asserted. America’s forests and waters must “come into the hands, not of a few men of great wealth, or into the hands of a few men who speculate in them, but be distributed among many men, each of whom intends to make him a home on the land.”

  Of the five irrigation projects under way in the spring of 1903—in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona—the most prominent was a huge masonry arch dam in Arizona’s Salt River Valley. When Charles Walcott, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, announced on April 18 that the government had selected the Salt River Valley for its first big enterprise, a banner headline in the Arizona Republican hailed the decision: THE DAY OF DELIVERANCE IS AT HAND. The reservoir created by the project, later christened the Roosevelt Dam, would be, excepting the work being done on the Nile, “the greatest in the world.” Designed to irrigate 200,000 acres, the dam promised to “make the community near Phoenix [with a population then of 25,000] one of the most prosperous in the country.”

  The estimated cost of the five projects would total $7 million, which settlers would then repay to the government over a ten-year period. Once completed, Roosevelt predicted, these irrigation projects would more profoundly impact the entire western region over the next half century than “any other material movement whatsoever.” He could already envision “a new type” of settler throughout the West who could build homes, roads, businesses, schools, and places of amusement, populating bustling towns and cities that might one day contain “a million inhabitants.” Moreover, an arable, enticing West could alleviate some of the social evils caused by overcrowding in the East.

  Century magazine suggested that Roosevelt’s decision to highlight issues of conservation, irrigation, and preservation would have an “educational effect upon the people,” fostering a new determination to protect “the western wonderlands,” expand national parks, and institute a sustainable, scientific approach to managing the nation’s wilderness areas. Any action to safeguard forest lands was usually delayed until the end of a president’s term, the journalist noted, but Roosevelt would not hesitate “to throw the full force of his influence” behind legislation that would halt “the ruinous waste of the great national forests.”

  From California, the president’s train headed north to Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, before veering east for the long trip home. Roosevelt had delivered 265 speeches, once addressing nine crowds in a single day. He had participated in countless parades, endured long banquets (and gained 11 pounds), met with all manner of local officials, dedicated monuments, and attended military reviews. Sustained by the enthusiastic reception all along his travel route, he returned, according to Edith, “as fresh and unworn as when he left.”

  Roosevelt had scarcely settled into the White House when reports surfac
ed of possible governmental corruption over the Salt River reservoir. Objections and accusations swirled around the choice of Salt River for the government’s inaugural project. During congressional debates over the Reclamation Act, talk of making desert lands in the public domain “blossom like a rose” abounded; ultimately, the government hoped to open these revitalized lands to individual settlers at a small cost under the Homestead Act. Yet given that almost all the land in the Salt River Valley was already in private hands, such settlements represented a glaring problem. For twenty years, private funds had irrigated the valley; unlike the four smaller projects, this reservoir would “irrigate no public lands, but only those in private ownership, vastly increasing, of course, their value.” Indeed, the irrigated lands would likely quadruple in value when the government completed its work. To further complicate matters, some of the tracts—undoubtedly held by speculators—covered upward of 10,000 acres, many times the established limit of 160 acres. Opportunities for corruption seemed boundless.

  AS ROOSEVELT STRUGGLED TO ADDRESS the complex situation in Arizona, he turned to Ray Baker for insight and counsel. Ever since Baker’s early biographical sketch had caught his attention, Roosevelt had followed the reporter’s career, occasionally sending him short notes commending his “excellent” work. He had read Baker’s now famous January 1903 article on the brutality between union men and the scabs who had continued to work during the coal strike, and gauged the public reaction to Baker’s gripping investigative piece. Despite his firm support of trade unions, Roosevelt strongly believed that members who engaged in violent acts such as Baker described should be held accountable. “We intend to do absolute justice to every man,” he repeatedly proclaimed, “whether he be capitalist or wageworker, union man or nonunion man.”