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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Concerned that the “epidemic of Congress-baiting” would jeopardize his regulatory program, Roosevelt devised a clever counterstroke. On March 17, 1906, at the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, an informal assembly of reporters, editors, cabinet officials, and leaders in business and academia, Roosevelt delivered his own piece of propaganda. After a series of humorous skits, the president spoke without notes for forty-five minutes, railing against “muckrakers,” who saturated magazines and newspapers “with sensational articles,” dredging all that was bleak and corrupt while “ignoring at the same time the good in the world.” He had initially planned to indict David Graham Phillips, but Elihu Root persuaded him that a personal attack would only fuel the writer’s celebrity. By avoiding a direct condemnation of the “Treason” series, however, Roosevelt inadvertently left the audience speculating about his intended targets.

  In truth, the president’s attack on the muckrakers reflected more than momentary anger at Hearst and David Graham Phillips. His exasperation with the proliferation of increasingly sensational and shoddily investigated exposure journalism had been slowly building. Although “the masters” at McClure’s typically invested months and even years of careful research in their studies, a host of less meticulous and principled “imitators” had followed in their wake. In the competition for “hot stuff,” politicians and businessmen were being “tried and found guilty in magazine counting rooms before the investigation is begun.” The carefully documented quest for truth had been supplanted by slapdash, often slanderous accusations. Even when the articles rested on solid documentary evidence, Roosevelt feared that an incessant fixation on corruption had begun “to produce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the public mind,” leading to an “enormous increase in socialistic propaganda.”

  As usual, Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley trenchantly captured public agitation. There once was a time, the Irish bartender opined, when reading popular magazines calmed the mind. Readers came away feeling that life was a “glad, sweet song.” Indeed, one could drape his “watch on the knob” on an unlocked door, confident it would be there in the morning. Now, however, a reader turning the pages of any magazine would discover that “everything has gone wrong.” Corruption and double-dealing today were so rampant that “the world is little better,” Dooley concluded, “than a convict’s camp.” Roosevelt “immensely” enjoyed Mr. Dooley’s outlook. “I get sick of people who are always insisting upon nothing but the dark side of life,” he told Dunne. “There are a lot of things that need correction in this country; but there is not the slightest use of feeling over-pessimistic about it.”

  National fatigue with the ubiquitous literature of exposure had already set in when Roosevelt spoke to the Gridiron Club. “The public cannot stand at attention with its eyes fixed on one spot indefinitely,” the literary critic Edwin E. Slosson shrewdly observed. “It is bound to get restive, and seek diversion in other interests.” A Wisconsin municipal court judge expressed the resentment of many: “It is getting so nowadays that the man or corporation that accumulates property to any extent is made the subject of these attacks.” Nor, a fellow Wisconsin citizen observed, should a man be considered “a criminal simply because he holds a public office.”

  THE MORNING AFTER THE GRIDIRON speech, Lincoln Steffens called on the president. “Well,” Steffens reproached, “you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you.” Roosevelt insisted that he had not intended a general indictment of legitimate reporters like Steffens. He was simply defending “poor old Chauncey Depew” against a terribly unfair portrait in the Hearst press. Steffens remained unconvinced, correctly sensing the president’s growing impatience with the never-ending exposés—even as he relied on them to mobilize public opinion.

  In fact, on several occasions the previous year, Roosevelt had directly criticized Steffens for his tendency to “repeat as true unfounded gossip of a malicious or semimalicious character.” It was “an absurdity,” he had scolded Steffens, to claim that Senator Aldrich was “the boss of the United States.” Such a preposterous claim carried “a sinister significance,” for “[we] suffer quite as much from exaggerated, hysterical, and untruthful statements in the press as from any wrongdoing by businessmen or politicians.” Roosevelt had also decried Steffens’s characterization of Postmaster General Henry C. Payne as the ringleader of a corrupt effort to fix legislators and thereby destroy Governor La Follette’s legislative program. “Poor Payne is sick either unto death or nigh unto death,” Roosevelt had complained to Lodge, two days before Payne died. “This attack on him in McClure’s Magazine by Steffens was, I think, the immediate cause of breaking him down; and I am convinced that it is an infamously false attack.”

  Nevertheless, Steffens had continued to enjoy unusual access to the White House. When he arrived in Washington to investigate whether the corruption uncovered in city and state governments extended to the federal level, Roosevelt offered to help. The president provided the celebrated journalist with a card inscribed: “To any officer or employee of the Government, Please tell Mr. Lincoln Steffens anything whatever about the running of the government that you know (not incompatible with the public interest) and provided only that you tell him the truth—no matter what it may be—I will see that you are not hurt. T. Roosevelt.”

  The resultant syndicated series, however, nettled Roosevelt. To Steffens, the signal question America faced could not be answered with the passage of railroad regulation or food and drug laws, but only with fundamental change to the corrupt system that invested special interests with undue power at the expense of the people. “I’d rather make our government represent us than dig the canal; the President would rather dig the canal and regulate railway rates. So he makes his ‘deal’ with the speaker and I condemn it.”

  Roosevelt was especially angered by reformers’ accusations that he was too compromising in his efforts to remedy the abuses of capitalism. “In stating your disapproval of my efforts to get results,” he wrote Steffens, “which of course must be gotten by trying to come to a working agreement with the Senate and House and therefore by making mutual concessions, you have often said or implied that I ought to refuse to make any concessions, but stand uncompromisingly for my beliefs, and let the people decide. As a matter of fact I have come a great deal nearer getting what I wanted than, for instance, Governor La Follette.”

  Roosevelt grumbled that Steffens and his friends failed to understand the requisites of practical leadership—a sense of when to move forward, when to hold back, when to mobilize the public, when to negotiate behind closed doors. Leadership that led to genuine progress depended upon an acute sense of timing, a feel for both the public and the congressional pulse. Yet in recent months it had seemed that crusading writers were intent on usurping his authority, creating the intolerable impression that rather than “summoning,” Roosevelt “was being dragged.”

  All these frustrations had informed Roosevelt’s decision to castigate the “new journalism” at the Gridiron Club Dinner. Remarks at the informal club meeting were traditionally off the record, but word of the president’s dramatic condemnation “spread like wildfire,” along with speculation that he was referencing progressive writers such as Lincoln Steffens, Ray Baker, David Phillips, and Upton Sinclair. When Roosevelt announced his intention to reiterate his Gridiron message in a public address, Baker was dumbfounded, concerned that “such an attack might greatly injure the work which we were trying honestly to do.” He finally decided to write a frank letter to the president. “I have been much disturbed at the report of your proposed address,” Baker began. “Even admitting that some of the so-called ‘exposures’ have been extreme, have they not, as a whole, been honest and useful? and would not a speech, backed by all of your great authority, attacking the magazines, tend to give aid and comfort to these very rascals” whose activities were being exposed by hardworking journalists? Moreover, he warned, “the first to stop the work of letting in the li
ght and air will be those who have been trying honestly to tell the whole truth, good and bad, and leave the field to the outright ranters and inciters.”

  Roosevelt was undeterred. “One reason I want to make that address,” he replied the next day, “is because people so persistently misunderstand what I said.” The president confided in Baker that “Hearst’s papers and magazines” were his intended target and promised his speech would clarify that he abhorred “the whitewash brush quite as much as of mud slinging.”

  Roosevelt delivered his formal “Muckrake Man” address on April 14, 1906. That he seriously considered Baker’s concerns is evident in his carefully measured speech. He cautioned that his words must not be distorted, insisting “at the risk of repetition” that the fight against corruption and exploitation must continue. Every word of reproach against the crusading journalists was counterbalanced with a word of commendation. He termed their investigations “indispensable,” yet explained that when muckrakers penned “sensational, lurid and untruthful” articles, they became “potent forces for evil.” In the end, however, Roosevelt’s vivid portrait of the muckraker eclipsed his positive remarks about investigative journalism. His speech was widely received as an indiscriminate attack on all reform journalists.

  Commentators reflected that the president could not publicly speak “upon a question which is shaking the country from center to circumference without exercising a powerful influence upon one side of the other.” And despite his “almost nervous dread” of misinterpretation, Roosevelt had “put into the hands of every trust magnate, every insurance thief, and every political corruptionist a handy weapon which will be used unconscionably for their defense.” All such interests, one journal predicted, would “now plead not guilty, point to the ‘muck rake’ and seek shelter behind the portly figure of the President.”

  Baker read the speech as a profound betrayal. He noted sadly that while Roosevelt had indeed employed his “familiar balance of approval and disapproval,” he had failed to distinguish between the sensationalist yellow press and the responsible journalists. “He did not ‘think it worthwhile’ to acknowledge the service of those men who had been striving to tell the truth, honestly and completely, whose work he had repeatedly approved, and for whose help he had again and again expressed his appreciation,” Baker later wrote. Instead, the indelible image of the muckraker “classed all of us together.”

  Baker’s alarm proved well founded: McClure’s magazine, the most illustrious journal, was “singled out” for a devastating satire in Life magazine. Each of the writers of “McSure’s” magazine—Ida Tarbarrell, Ray Standard Fakir, Sinkem Beffens—was viciously mocked in turn. “I’m giving my whole life to breaking the butterfly of a John Rockefeller upon the wheel of my ponderous articles,” Tarbell/Tarbarrell was quoted as saying. ‘’He’s got too much money. If that isn’t a shame, I’d like to know what a shame is!” In another scathing send-up, Steffens/Beffens humbly submitted to a supposed interview: “I’m not really great. I’m only eminent, unparalleled, superlatively remarkable.” Pondering such achievement, the interviewer highlighted Steffens’s process: “With only his suit-case and his gold rake studded with diamonds, he can take the morning train for an unknown city, rake off in a few hours the thick slime of municipal corruption and have a shame-shrieking article ready for McSure’s by night.”

  “These satirical jabs cut [Baker] deeply,” his biographer claims. “The bubble of devoted public service that had developed around his work had been irreparably punctured.” Deeply demoralized to find his name among those “cast into outer darkness,” Baker would never forgive Roosevelt. “I met the President many times afterward and there were numerous exchanges of letters,” he recalled, “but while I could wonder at his remarkable versatility of mind, and admire his many robust human qualities, I could never again give him my full confidence, nor follow his leadership.”

  In the wake of the president’s speech, morale among conservatives and corporate interests rallied. The New York Sun proclaimed that the muckrakers’ era of exposure had come to an end: “It was a great day while it lasted, but it became too hot. The Muck-rakers worked merrily for a time in their own bright sunshine, and an unthinking populace applauded their performance. Now there are few to do them reverence.” It was said, only partly in jest, that “rebaters and bribers” were “beginning to walk abroad with the old smile,” sensing that “the tidal wave of magazine reform” was finally abating.

  Progressives mounted an impassioned defense of the magazine crusaders. One supporter argued that these journalists numbered among “the loftiest and purest of living patriots, who have taken their professional and political lives in their hands that they might serve as ‘soldiers of the common good.’ ” Their “long, laborious work” had initiated the “inspiring movement” for honest government; no fair-minded citizen could deny the “astonishingly great” influence of Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, or Ray Baker. “The day will come,” one sympathetic commentator correctly predicted, “when the ‘muck rake’ will be borne through the streets as a triumphant emblem of reform,” when the epithet “muckraker” would become “a badge of honor.”

  ON MAY 11, 1906, FOUR weeks after the president’s speech, the New York Times confirmed that Phillips, Tarbell, Steffens, Baker, and Boyden were leaving McClure’s. Furthermore, it was understood that the five journalists were “quietly planning to start a magazine venture of their own.” After weeks of turmoil, McClure had finally agreed to buy out Phillips and Tarbell, whose combined stock was worth $187,000. He also promised each of them six months salary at full pay. “I am certain that it is not in my power at the present time adequately to reward them for their services, which no money could pay for,” McClure told a business associate. “They leave me retaining my deepest love and affection and esteem and confidence. I think I may say that it is the greatest tragedy thus far of my life to lose them.” With Baker and Steffens, he was equally generous, continuing their salaries while they completed work on already contracted projects. “I wish you all good fortune,” he told Baker. “I have always enjoyed working with you and your work has been very successful in the magazine, and I am very sorry to lose you.” Moved by his publisher’s remarkable magnanimity, Steffens observed: “There was nothing mean about S. S. McClure.”

  In the aftermath of the schism, McClure lost not only his star writers but his partner, managing editor, and three top business executives as well. While some in the publishing world wondered if he could survive the loss of the inimitable team that had given the magazine “its chief features of life and popularity,” Sam McClure proved surprisingly resilient in the face of catastrophe. Necessity compelled him to abandon his “colossal scheme” and focus all his energies on rebuilding the magazine. “I have really to look after almost every department,” he told Hattie, “and am getting up material for the fall prospectus. I am standing it splendidly; I rarely get tired.” Without Phillips to maintain daily operations, he could no longer escape responsibility and found himself “working harder” than ever before. In the office by 8 a.m., McClure remained at his desk long past midnight, sustaining himself on “three or four quarts of milk a day.” After midnight, he retired to an apartment on a floor above the magazine’s offices to read “masses of manuscripts,” including portions of an autobiography by Mark Twain which his syndicate had agreed to publish.

  In a matter of weeks, McClure managed to assemble an almost completely new roster of talent. Of the original team, only the poetry editor Witter Bynner, the manuscript reader Viola Roseboro, and Albert Brady’s younger brothers—Curtis, Oscar, and Ed—remained. To replace Ida Tarbell, he relied upon Willa Cather, a little known fiction writer who would become a world-class novelist. He hired Will Irwin, a distinguished reporter from the New York Sun, as managing editor. Two first-rate investigative reporters, George Kibbe Turner and Burton Hendrick, joined the staff full time, along with Ellery Sedgwick, the future editor of the Atlantic Monthly. “The very n
ame, McClure’s Magazine, had an irresistible attraction for any young man,” Sedgwick explained. Much as Tarbell, Baker, and Steffens had described their Chief in happier years, Sedgwick was mesmerized by McClure’s “burning force,” explaining how “everyone about him caught fire and he would inflame the intelligence of his staff into molten excitement.”

  Though his eager new writers lacked the renown of the original team, McClure reasoned that before long he would “be able to repeat the process” that had made Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker household names. The newly constituted group did indeed produce a number of significant investigations in the months that followed; but the tenor of the magazine, reflecting the temper of the nation, had changed. Even before Roosevelt delivered his “Muckrake Man” speech, McClure had sensed that public interest in the parade of public and private misbehavior was waning. “To go on now with the heavy exposure articles,” he told his stockholders, “would not convert those who disagree with us, and those who agree with us don’t need conversion.”

  Furthermore, the new staff members brought differing sensibilities and strategies to McClure’s. Although Ellery Sedgwick had applauded the early efforts of the crusading journalists, he believed the time had come “to halt and to think soberly.” Too many editors, he charged, had lost “all sense of responsibility” in the race for circulation. Ida Tarbell’s replacement, Willa Cather, also had a profound influence on the magazine’s direction. She edited a superb series on the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy; but Cather’s real genius lay in literature, in historical narratives rather than accounts of present-day political struggles and economic analyses. Consequently, while the quality of fiction and poetry in McClure’s remained high, the impact of the investigative pieces diminished. McClure’s was not alone; a similar shift took place in popular publications across the country, a literature “of distraction” gradually replacing the literature of “inquiry.”