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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  As ever, the idea for the acclaimed series had originated with Sam McClure. Returning to the office in late 1901 after several months abroad, McClure encountered Steffens, then serving as managing editor, seated at his desk. “You may be an editor,” McClure huffed dismissively, “but you don’t know how to edit a magazine. . . . You can’t learn to edit a magazine here in this office. . . . Get out of here, travel, go—somewhere. . . . Buy a railroad ticket, get on a train, and there, where it lands you, there you will learn to edit a magazine.”

  With McClure’s support, Steffens embarked on an odyssey. For the better part of three years, he called on people in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, and Madison. “My business is to find subjects and writers, to educate myself in the way the world is wagging, so as to bring the magazine up to date,” he explained to his father. “I feel ready to do something really fine.”

  Following up on McClure’s persistent interest in political corruption, Steffens interviewed city editors, political bosses, crusading district attorneys, and reformist mayors. In each city, he uncovered an invisible web of power linking political bosses to both the criminal world below and the business community above. His investigations convinced him that the misgovernment of American cities would furnish abundant material for a fascinating series, featuring portraits of the bosses and the men who were fighting to expose their corruption. “If I should be entrusted with the work,” he told Tarbell, “I think I could make my name.” His conjecture proved accurate: The Shame of the Cities, the six-part series that began in late 1902, made him an international celebrity.

  Everywhere he went during his first weeks of travel, the same questions stirred conversation. Everyone was speculating on the future of a young district attorney named Joe Folk and the investigations he had undertaken in St. Louis. His curiosity aroused, Steffens took a train to St. Louis and, in a lobby corner of the Planters Hotel, met with the idealistic district attorney who was just beginning to lay bare pervasive corruption within the Democratically controlled city council and Board of Aldermen. Mistakenly assuming Folk would be “safe,” the Democratic bosses had nominated this “smiling, even-tempered man of thirty-three” for the district attorney post.

  The story Folk told fascinated Steffens from the start. An obscure notice in a local newspaper first caught the attorney’s eye: a sizable quantity of cash had been deposited in a respected St. Louis banking house with the intention “of bribing certain assemblymen to secure the passage of a street railway ordinance.” Folk decided to follow up on the report, even though “no names were mentioned.” Suspecting that the legislation in question was a recent bill benefiting the Suburban Railway Company, he pieced their scheme together and issued dozens of subpoenas to assemblymen, councilmen, and the employees and management of Suburban Railway. Evaluating his list to determine who would most likely fold under pressure, he summoned the company president, Charles H. Turner, and the lobbyist rumored to have brokered the deal, Philip Stock.

  Turner and Stock were notified that they had three days to cooperate. Facing indictment for bribery and prosecution “to the full extent of the law,” they both “broke down and confessed.” The ordinance in question, Turner told Folk, would have increased the value of his company by $3 million. To secure its passage, he had first approached Colonel Edward Butler, the longtime boss of St. Louis. When Butler demanded $145,000 to distribute among the assembly members, Turner hired Stock on his promise to get the bill passed for a mere $75,000. As swiftly as that amount was deposited into the bank, the legislation proceeded smoothly. A court decision quickly overturned the franchise ordinance, however, and the Suburban Railway Company refused to turn over the money, claiming it had not secured the franchise. Legislators threatened to sue Turner and Stock, insisting that the money “was theirs because they had done their part.”

  During this contentious interchange, the newspaper leak occurred. The testimony of Turner and Stock led to numerous confessions, along with the convictions of eighteen municipal assembly members. Folk’s investigation eventually revealed that a precise schedule of bribery had been devised, specifying the price of obtaining wharf space, a side track, a switchway, a grain elevator, and so on. “So long has this practice existed,” Steffens was told, the members had “come to regard the receipt of money for action on pending measures as a legitimate perquisite of a legislator.”

  Indefatigable Folk would not be content until he felled “the greatest oak” in this forest of corruption. Colonel Butler, the man who had been saved from indictment in the Suburban scandal simply because he had demanded more money than the company would pay, had controlled nominations and elections in the city for years, becoming a multimillionaire through his schemes. “It was generally understood that he owned Assemblymen before they ever took the oath of office,” Steffens wrote, giving him absolute control of legislation and the power to negotiate with businessmen seeking regulations, rulings, or ordinances. When Folk found two members of the Board of Health willing to testify that Butler had promised each of them $2,500 to sign off on a garbage contract, he put the swaggering boss on trial. Folk uncovered documents proving that once the contract was approved, Butler was due to receive over $200,000. In a dramatic closing statement before the jury, Folk argued that the state itself was on trial: “Missouri, Missouri. I am pleading for thee, pleading for thee.” Colonel Butler was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.

  After hearing Folk’s account, Steffens contacted McClure and Phillips to inform them that he had found an article for the magazine and the person to write it—a local reporter named Claude H. Wetmore. The subject thrilled McClure, but when the first draft arrived, he was displeased that names and places, essential to authenticate and validate the story, had been omitted. Under McClure’s guidance, Steffens drafted a new version of the article so that every statement was a matter of record. The names of legislators who fled the state were accompanied by details of their eventual arrests and confessions. A comical anecdote emerged of one House of Delegates member “so frightened while under the inquisitorial cross-fire that he was seized with a nervous chill; his false teeth fell to the floor, and the rattle so increased his alarm that he rushed from the room without stopping to pick up his teeth, and boarded the next train.” Satisfied with the revision, McClure proposed the evocative title “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” The article, with Wetmore and Steffens listed as co-authors, was a smashing success, prompting the publisher to build an entire series around municipal corruption that would accompany Ida Tarbell’s work on corporate corruption.

  A newspaper article condemning malfeasance in Minneapolis drew McClure’s attention, prompting him to focus Steffens’s next project on the Minnesota city. There, testimony before the grand jury had revealed a system of police corruption similar to that Steffens had witnessed in New York during the days of the Lexow Commission. In return for police protection, a host of illegal establishments that included gambling operations, unlicensed saloons, and opium dens paid regular weekly fees. These spoils were divided between the Democratic mayor, his henchmen, and the police captains, all carefully recorded in ledgers each week. After befriending Hovey C. Clarke, the courageous foreman of the grand jury, Steffens received permission to photograph pages from these ledgers. “Your article is certainly a ‘corker,’ ” McClure enthused after reading the first draft. “We’ll call it ‘The Shame of Minneapolis,’ ” indicating the piece should be framed as a colossal battle between one crusading individual and the corrupt establishment. “You have made a marvelous success of your Minneapolis article,” he assured Steffens. “We fellows are so busy pushing things through that we don’t stop to tell each other how much we think of each other’s work. But I take this moment to tell you.”

  The piece, printed in the famous January 1903 issue, made headlines across the country. “Mr. Steffens’s stirring story should be read everywhere,” advised Outlook magazine, “for it strikes at the v
ery heart of both of the twin stupidities which dull the conscience of American municipalities—the optimism which says that all is so good that nothing need be done, and the pessimism which says that all is so bad that nothing can be done.” The Arizona Republic ardently proclaimed that by exposing corruption in St. Louis and Minneapolis, McClure’s magazine was “doing a public service,” prodding people to conclude that similar corrupt networks were in scores of other cities not yet “overtaken by a wave of reform.”

  Steffens giddily recalled a train ride during which he overheard men in the washroom and dining car exclaiming over his story and his writing. The article was a surpassing success: “The newsstand had exhausted the printed supply; subscriptions were coming in; and the mail was bringing letters of praise.” Citizens across the country invited him to their localities, promising scandals more sordid than those described in Minneapolis and St. Louis. He proudly told his father that as he entered a New York gentleman’s club, members stood and applauded. With lavish promises, a London editor had tried to woo him from McClure’s, while a cigar manufacturer even asked permission to christen a cigar after him, with his portrait on the box lid.

  Flush with success, Steffens was anxious to scientifically test his “dawning theory” that corruption originated from the top, not the bottom, that it “was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social.” He suspected that in every case, the web of corruption radiated out from the captains of industry—the big businessmen running gas and electric companies, street railways, and other public service corporations—who would do anything necessary to acquire lucrative franchises and privileges.

  Wary of “philosophical generalizations,” McClure feared that Steffens would invariably tint his observations or arrange facts to confirm his theory that businessmen were always to blame. He insisted that Steffens present “facts, startling facts” that would involve the reader one step at a time in his detective work. While Steffens chafed to move on to Chicago or Philadelphia, McClure insisted he return to St. Louis to pursue the story in more detail. “The disagreement became acute,” Steffens recalled; “it divided the office.” At moments like this, Ida Tarbell was indispensable. “Sensible, capable, and very affectionate, she knew each one of us and all our idiosyncrasies and troubles,” he noted. She would sit the fractious parties down, “smiling, like a tall, good-looking young mother, to say, ‘Hush, children.’ ” A compromise was reached: Steffens would return to St. Louis, “stick to facts,” and only afterwards proceed to any city he desired.

  McClure’s stipulation that Steffens must follow up in St. Louis proved most fortuitous. In the months since the first article had appeared, a series of events revealed the corruption in Missouri to run far deeper than either Folk or Steffens had suspected. When Colonel Butler’s conviction reached the Missouri Supreme Court on appeal, the decision was reversed. All the aldermen cases were overturned as well. Steffens discovered that over the years Butler had directed the nominations not only of legislators but also of justices on the very bench that heard the graft cases on appeal. Indeed, the presiding justice publicly called for Folk to leave Missouri, implying that his exposures were ruining the reputation of the state. More dispiriting still, when the next election arrived, the citizens of St. Louis blithely kept the Butler ring in power. All the felons were back in the assembly, undaunted by the initial round of convictions.

  Though McClure was again delighted with the substance of Steffens’s article, he was less impressed with its structure. “Your narrative lacks force,” he chided, suggesting that the tale should move forward with inexorable momentum and culminate in the shocking circumstance that Butler and the convicted aldermen remained in office, continuing to enact laws and reap profits. “I am telegraphing you to come East,” McClure added, insisting, “You must be here with me when you are working out the article.” The finished installment, which McClure entitled “The Shamelessness of St. Louis,” once again proved a stunning success. The pride and conscience of St. Louis had finally been kindled; on the city streets, 200,000 people sported “Folk for Reform” buttons. “Your article is bearing fruit,” Folk told Steffens, observing, “Every number of your March edition has been sold here and there is still a great demand for them.” Finally, people rallied to support Folk’s cause. Throughout the city, Folk Clubs were organizing. “The State is commencing to speak,” Folk happily reported. “The permanent remedy is in the hands of the people and someday they will apply it. I believe the public conscience is more alive to the situation today and the cause of civic righteousness brighter than for many years.”

  “I must tell you how tremendously I am pleased with your achievements,” McClure generously reassured Steffens in June 1903. “I know of no young man who has such a splendid opportunity of work in front of him as you have.” Furthermore, the publisher grandly instructed his reporter to inform Folk that he was “the candidate of McClure’s Magazine at the present moment for President in 1908.” McClure’s closing remark revealed his awareness of the massive influence his publication exerted on the American conscience: “I believe,” he flatly told Steffens, “we can do more toward making a President of the United States than any other organ.”

  After St. Louis, Steffens traveled to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, perfecting the interview technique that allowed him to elicit a great deal of information by sharing the little he already knew. He regaled Pittsburgh’s boss with tales of how his counterparts in Minneapolis worked. He delighted reformers in Chicago with stories of how Folk had uncovered corruption in St. Louis. He spent hours “just chew[ing] the rag” with the old boss of Philadelphia, fascinated by his rise to power. In conversations with a couple of “wise guys” in Minneapolis, he described the famous burglars and con men he had known in New York. “Thieves, politicians, business men, reformers, and our magazine readers,” he commented, “all assumed that I had what I was trying to get: knowledge.” His demeanor shrewdly implied that he already knew their secrets, he explained, so “they might as well talk.” Steffens’s gift of drawing out his subjects soon became the stuff of legend. William Randolph Hearst considered Lincoln Steffens “the best interviewer he ever met,” and the New York World’s Herbert Bayard Swope “looked up to him as a demi-god.”

  As Steffens expanded the scope of his inquiry, he became increasingly convinced that corruption in municipal politics was not “a temporary evil” engendered by the need for profitable new transportation and electrical facilities in explosively thriving young cities. Older cities, too, were rife with such dishonesty. Nor could it be attributed to Republicans or Democrats or to the presence of large immigrant populations under the sway of political bosses. Philadelphia, with the largest native population of any major city, suffered an epidemic of corruption. In every city, he now confidently argued, business interests were responsible. He had documented them “buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York.” Corruption, it seemed, was the hallmark of the age—an age in which “public spirit became private spirit, public enterprise became private greed.”

  When the articles were collected into the book entitled The Shame of the Cities, Steffens was hailed as a moral prophet come to save the republic from sin and a worthy descendant of abolitionist agitator William Lloyd Garrison. Across the country, Lincoln Steffens was lionized as “a new kind” of journalist altogether. “Instead of having his news and his editorial on separate pages,” one critic noted, “Steffens welds the two into one so that the fact and the meaning and the portent of it strike you simultaneously.” According to The Outlook, Steffens had “correctly diagnosed the characteristic disease” of the age—“the itch to make a little more money by illegitimate means than can be made by legitimate industry.” Rather than examine the abstract political and legal structures of city charters, William Allen White o
bserved, Steffens had ventured “into the wards and precincts of the towns and townships of this land [in order to] bring in specimens of actual government under actual conditions.” These articles, another critic remarked, “have done more to awaken the American conscience to civic duty than anything else written in many years.”

  Immediately upon completing his series on the cities, Steffens embarked on an equally ambitious study of the states. Wherever he had sought to track “the political corruption of a city ring,” he had found that “the stream of pollution” was part of a statewide watershed. Although he could have chosen “almost any State,” Missouri seemed the logical starting point. As Joe Folk had learned when his cases were overturned, “the System was indeed bigger than St. Louis; it was the System of Missouri.” The state constitution prescribed a governor, a legislature, and a judiciary, he remarked, but “this paper government has been superseded by an actual government”—a network of legislators, bosses, and party leaders answering to the state’s major industries.

  In addition, an investigation in Missouri would bolster Joe Folk’s bid for governor on the Democratic ticket. He would be “appealing his case to the people” on a bold platform “that corruption is treason; that the man, who, elected to maintain the institutions of a government by the people, sells them out, is a traitor; whether he be a constable, a legislator, a judge, or a boss, his act is not alone bribery but treason.”

  Returning a third time to St. Louis, Steffens again joined with Folk to reveal a sweeping bribery scheme that stretched from the president and agent of the Royal Baking Powder Company, to the House and Senate combines, to the lieutenant governor. Published under the title “Enemies of the Republic”—another one of McClure’s “brilliant reductions of a complex situation to slogan size”—the article prompted a new round of vehement editorials across the country. Crediting Folk’s work as district attorney, the New York Times called Steffens’s piece “a striking article” that illuminated the situation “with the utmost plainness,” implicating “prominent men in politics and in business” in “specific instances of bribery, defining the purposes, and stating the amounts, the givers, the takers.” The Times concluded by calling on the public to condemn such pervasive dishonesty. “When Americans really agree that corruption is treason,” the editors argued, “the traitors will be punished, not legally alone, but as [Benedict] Arnold was, by the insufferable and blasting scorn of his fellow-men.”