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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  On August 5, accompanied by the sound of booming guns, the peace envoys from Russia and Japan met with the president aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower, anchored in Oyster Bay. After a buffet lunch served with cold white wine, the envoys proceeded to the U.S. Naval Base at Portsmouth. In the days that followed, agreements on Korea, Port Arthur, and Manchuria were reached with relative ease. Japan’s insistence on some form of compensation from Russia threatened to torpedo the conference. The Russian envoys took the position that Russia had neither been conquered nor could be considered “prostrate in the enemy’s hands.” Therefore, they argued, Japan had no right to extract an “indemnity.” Increasingly frustrated with mediating the dispute, Roosevelt confided to Kermit, “I am having my hair turned gray by dealing with the Russian and Japanese negotiators.” In the end, the president persuaded the Japanese that prolonging the war simply to secure money would lose international support. A peace treaty was finally signed on September 5, 1905, earning Roosevelt praise at home and abroad, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

  DESPITE SUCH INTERNATIONAL TRIUMPHS, PRESSING and complex domestic issues threatened the solidarity of the Republican Party. Once again, Taft had barely returned when he was recruited to suture the wound. Taft’s three-month odyssey ended at 3:27 p.m. on October 2, 1905, when he stepped onto the platform at Union Station, appearing “hearty and vigorous” as he greeted colleagues with a big smile and a warm handshake. That evening, he dined with the president and first lady, along with Root, Garfield, and a few family friends. “We had a most interesting dinner,” Garfield told his wife. “Mr. Taft is full of interesting accounts of the Orient.”

  Taft had little time to reacquaint himself with affairs in his department before he was called upon to deal with a troubling situation in Ohio. Factional disputes there threatened the reelection of Republican governor Myron Herrick. Earlier that summer, Lincoln Steffens had published his electrifying report contrasting Democrat Tom Johnson’s principled governance of Cleveland with the venal mismanagement of Cincinnati’s Republican boss Tom Cox. The piece revealed how Cox had become a millionaire twice over through corrupt alliances with traction companies, banks, and railroads. “The city is all one great graft,” Steffens charged. “The reign of Cox is a reign of fear.”

  The exposé had created a sensation in Ohio. Although Cox claimed it was “full of falsehoods,” the tale sparked public outrage and engendered bitter conflict within the Republican Party. Those beholden to the old machines dominated by corporations and political bosses inevitably opposed the progressive drive toward popular rule and governmental regulation. The growing split within the Republicans opened the door to Democrats, who successfully likened Governor Herrick’s management of the state to Cox’s grip on the city. In fact, they intimated that the governor had become “subservient” to Cox and his crowd, a participant in the systemic graft. “The stampede from Herrick is growing like a wild fire,” one Ohio paper reported, “and so consuming is the anti-Cox, anti-bossism flame, that the disaffected thousands say they will vote the democratic ticket from top to bottom this year.”

  Believing that Ohio’s gubernatorial race could influence the fortunes of the entire Republican Party, Roosevelt dispatched Taft to deliver a speech on Herrick’s behalf. When Steffens learned of this step, he wrote an impassioned letter to the president, imploring him not to help the governor. “Governor Herrick is not a bad man,” conceded Steffens, “he is simply weak. He is one of those men who can do dishonest things honestly.” State politics could not be separated from Cincinnati’s municipal situation, he insisted, arguing that the growing effort to vanquish Cox—whose candidates were on local ballots that accompanied the gubernatorial election—would be thwarted by the president’s push to keep Republicans “in line” behind Herrick.

  Caught in this hazardous political knot, Taft devised what newspapers called “a most adroit and ingenuous” speech. Voicing support for Herrick, whom he believed to be a decent man, he leveled a fierce barrage of criticism at the Cox regime. Public condemnation of Cox was “not pleasant” for Taft, particularly given that his brother Charley owned and edited the Cincinnati-Times, “the official organ” of the Cox regime. “Any pain you feel at the expressed difference of opinion between us finds a corresponding deep regret in my heart,” Taft told Charley on the eve of his speech, “for I love you Charley as I love no one except my wife and children.” Nevertheless, he felt bound to declare his opposition to Cox and his corrupt lieutenants.

  Delivered before an overflowing audience in Akron, Ohio, the speech was termed “the most severe rebuke” ever suffered by the powerful boss. Accustomed to criticism leveled by his Democratic opponents and the progressive press, Cox now faced censure “from so prominent a Republican, a member of the president’s cabinet.” In straightforward language, Taft likened “Cox and Coxism” to “a curse” upon the people of Hamilton County, “a local despotism” designed for the financial benefit of the boss, his cronies, and the big corporations. He described the political machine’s “distressing effect” on aspiring young Republicans, who were forced to submit “to the tyranny of the boss” or abandon public service altogether. If he were to vote in the upcoming race, Taft acknowledged, he would “vote against the municipal ticket nominated by the Republican organization.”

  Despite his condemnation, Taft “made clear the difference between Herrick—the clean-living, trusted and honored businessman and efficient executive of the State—and the foul boss of Cincinnati.” While he refused to endorse the Republican ticket in Hamilton County, Taft declared that he would happily vote for Governor Herrick and hoped others would do the same. If he believed his visit to Ohio would perpetuate the Cox machine, Taft assured his listeners, he would never have come. But it would be unfair to abandon “a governor who has done well by his State and his party.”

  Although Taft had sought to rally support for Herrick, newspapers focused on his “scathing denunciation” of Cox, which fell upon the city and state “like the explosion of a bomb.” Excerpts from the speech were carried in more than six hundred papers. Dozens of editorials and letters commended Taft for his honesty and courage. “We had about come to the conclusion that there wasn’t a man in Ohio who dared call his soul his own without the permission of George Cox,” one Ohio citizen wrote. “You are the only man who can lead this city out of the slough of despond,” another remarked. “You have done more good for your own town by that speech than you have any idea of,” Taft’s close friend Howard Hollister wrote. “The weakness and cowardice of a great many of our principal men have been a chief trouble here, and now they are encouraged to come out and talk and act like men. I hear it everywhere.”

  The elections that fall brought a crushing defeat for the Cox machine. But Taft’s hope that voters would split their tickets, voting Democratic in the local election and Republican in the gubernatorial race, proved vain: John Pattison, the Democratic candidate for the governorship, defeated Myron Herrick by a wide margin. “Do not concern yourself about the stories that are afloat that you caused my defeat,” Herrick graciously told Taft. “I know my friends and know you to be one whom I love and respect.”

  Buoyed by the demise of the Cox machine, young Republicans in Cincinnati formed a new Republican Club with a progressive agenda. Led by Howard Hollister, they called on members to stand unequivocally against bossism and machine politics and advocate a platform that included national regulation of railroads and tariff revision. At Hollister’s request, both Taft and Roosevelt accepted honorary memberships in the “Roosevelt Republican Club.” Only such clear dissociation from corrupt and self-serving elements of the Republican Party, Hollister argued, could “disabuse the public mind of the growing feeling of domination of the party by the corporations and money making commercial politicians.”

  AS THEODORE ROOSEVELT HAD SURMISED, the struggle against corruption and consolidation in Ohio reflected a burgeoning movement across the country. And the president was acutely aware o
f the difficult balance he would have to strike in order to realign his party without compromising the nation’s prosperity. In the winter of 1905, a dramatic “Oil War” in the state of Kansas illuminated this intensifying conflict, captivating the interest of the entire country. “Kansas is in the clutches of the Standard Oil Company,” the Hutchinson News reported, “and is howling for relief.”

  A year earlier, spectacular deposits that surpassed the total volume of the Pennsylvania oil fields had been discovered in Kansas and the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. “On the instant,” Ida Tarbell recalled, “Kansas went oil-mad, practically every farmer in the state dreamed of flowing wells.” The Standard Oil Company immediately began furnishing tanks, building refineries, and constructing pipelines. Independent producers were placated with the promise that they would receive market price for their oil. Only when Standard had a total lock on refining and transportation, William Allen White explained, did the company “put on the screws.” A barrel of oil that had yielded a dollar and eighteen cents in 1904 had dropped to thirty-seven cents a year later. With control of both in-state refineries and all the pipelines, Standard Oil had effectively become “the only transporter and buyer” of the region’s crude oil, with power to set whatever price it chose.

  Popular anger fueled the successful gubernatorial campaign of Kansas Republican Edward Hoch, who challenged the Republican machine with a platform calling for construction of “a first-class” state refinery that would force Standard “to be reasonable.” In his inaugural address, Hoch proposed a series of additional measures to regulate the oil trade, including one to make pipelines common carriers, rendering them subject to the same state supervision as railroads. When the upper house passed the bill for the state refinery, Standard retaliated by boycotting Kansas oil entirely, leaving the producers “without a market” and throwing “a large number of men out of work.” Standard’s despotic tactics backfired when public recognition that the giant company “was punishing Kansas” generated such outrage that the refinery bill sailed through the lower chamber. Borne on a wave of defiance, the legislation even garnered support from conservatives, who felt the measure smacked of socialism. “Scare Kansas! Well, we’ll see about that!”

  At the White House, telegrams poured in, urging the president to protect the state “from oppression of the Standard Oil trust.” Congressman Philip Campbell of southeast Kansas introduced a resolution requesting an investigation into “the unusually large margin” between the price of Kansas crude oil and the market price of refined products. It was “hardly a secret,” one Kansas newspaper suggested, that the situation in Kansas presented President Roosevelt with the opening he was seeking to move against “the mother of all trusts.” Indeed, some observers speculated that the resolution was instigated by the administration.

  After discussing the situation with the Kansas representative, Roosevelt in February 1905 announced that he had directed Bureau of Corporations director James Garfield to undertake “a rigid and comprehensive review” of Standard Oil’s methods of operation, “especially in the Kansas field.” Garfield planned to travel to Kansas the following month to oversee a team of fifty special agents, ensuring a thorough investigation of the trust’s practices. The president clearly understood, Campbell maintained, that this was the “most important investigation of the kind which has been undertaken.” Although passage of the House resolution brought Standard’s boycott in Kansas to an end, the fundamental problem of monopoly lingered.

  Two days after the president’s announcement, Ida Tarbell wrote to John Phillips: “What would you think of an article on Kansas & the Standard Oil Company?” Having spent nearly four years studying Standard Oil, Tarbell remained vitally interested in the company’s activities. Her twenty-four-part magazine series had been republished as a two-volume book the previous November to great acclaim. One critic predicted it would “rank as one of the most complete and authoritative contributions to economic history written in the last quarter century.” Miss Tarbell’s study, another wrote, “is to the present time the most remarkable book of its kind ever written in this country.” The oil war in Kansas promised to furnish a new and vital postscript.

  When she wrote her proposal, Tarbell had returned home to Titusville to be with her father, who was suffering from stomach cancer. His death on March 1 had suddenly “darkened” her world, for he had “built himself into every crook and cranny” of her childhood home—indeed, of the entire town. Her family at the magazine did their best to console her. “I have thought a great deal of you in your sorrow,” S. S. McClure wrote from Switzerland when the news reached him. “There are times when your face expresses a singular pathos & sense of suffering & I know how sad & heartbroken you have been.” He hoped she found some solace in the fact that her father had seen “with his own eyes” how she had used her substantial gifts to dignify the Tarbell name.

  Not long after the funeral, Ida left for Kansas, exhibiting what McClure termed her “pathetic & characteristic” impulse relentlessly to immerse herself in work. Though she set out “with a heavy heart,” the monthlong journey proved to be “as exciting” as any she had undertaken. Independent oilmen hailed her arrival as the coming of “a prophet,” certain that she would reveal Standard’s “unfair and illegal methods” in Kansas to “all the world.” Local journalists trailed her throughout the state, taking her picture and printing her remarks. Embarrassed by her celebrity, she told Albert Boyden she hoped “to Heaven . . . all the foolishness” published about her would not be taken seriously in the office. “Believe nothing,” she entreated them, “until I have a hearing!”

  Straightaway, Tarbell called on the governor. Initially skeptical about his plan for a state refinery, she came away convinced that the project would be “a good thing,” and serve “as a measuring stick” for the public to determine the real costs of refining. In the long run, however, Standard’s control over oil transport had to be addressed. “Build your own pipe line,” she urged the oil producers; “build it to the seas.” In addition, she recommended that they pressure Congress to pass a law “making all pipelines common carriers,” subject to regulations that would ensure fair play.

  Soon afterward, Tarbell joined Governor Hoch and Congressman Campbell at “the biggest mass meeting of oil producers ever known.” Diffident when asked to speak before 3,000 people, she composed a letter to be delivered at the convention. She challenged Kansas “to play the oil game as well as the Standard Company plays it,” but “with due regards for the rights of men, something the Standard has never done.”

  Next, Tarbell embarked on a ten-day field trip through the countryside to gauge for herself the extent of the new oil fields. Traveling by a two-horse open carriage over primitive roads, she encountered the worst dust storm in many years. Her driver, bellowing to be heard over the rising wind, roared: “Jehoshaphat! Wrap your head up.” Even after the storm passed, Ida was unable to bathe for ten days because dust had seeped into the water supply, producing “a muddy liquid quite impossible to drink and hopeless for cleansing.” Undeterred, she continued her mission. “The wonder is that discomfort doesn’t count out here,” she explained to John Phillips. All hardships were eclipsed by the contagious excitement of the farmers, by the promise that every little town would become “a world’s center,” every well “a gusher.” One weekend, Tarbell crossed the Oklahoma border to see the oil fields in the Indian Territory. Everywhere she went, crowds gathered, bands serenaded her, and people gave her flowers and candy. In the “new town of Tulsa,” she was “paraded up and down” the main thoroughfare. At the request of a local citizen in Muskogee, she “submitted to five sittings for her picture.” From early morning until midnight, she was called upon to make little speeches.

  Needful of respite, Tarbell spent a leisurely weekend in Emporia with William and Mary White. She had taken the “city-shy” boy “by the hand” when he first ventured into New York and had always appreciated “his affection and loyalty for his sta
te.” She was delighted now to see his home, his place of work, and his beloved town. In Emporia, Tarbell agreed to address a group of students at a chapel. “The new thing which Kansas has put in the fight against the evils of Standard monopoly,” she told them, “is an ethical question. Here people say they oppose Standard’s methods because they are wrong.” Kansas was not merely motivated by the monopoly’s impact on business—“Standard had never met with this spirit in any of its previous fights.” After her departure, White wrote an editorial echoing her conviction that the problem with Standard Oil was “as much a moral issue as it is a financial one.” The machinations Standard employed—bribing legislatures, tampering with juries, purchasing judges—constituted “the real danger to the country.” Yet, he concluded, “because it is a corporation and has neither soul nor body,” Standard had largely managed “to escape the vengeance which the law . . . would surely have visited upon natural persons guilty of similar practices.”

  As Tarbell passed through Kansas City on her way to New York, she stopped for a brief visit to express her gratitude and admiration for the state’s spirit. She found that spirit so compelling that she extended her visit. “I stayed and stayed, and even now I am reluctant to return to the east,” she later explained, describing how the nature of this fight set it apart: “The Kansans are not fighting now for the money they can make. They are not fighting because their oil doesn’t market well. They’re fighting because a monopoly, a trust, has sought to come into their state and dictate to them where their products shall go and what shall be paid for their products. It’s the fight for justice and right.”