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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  If “an exhilarating sense of excitement and adventure” permeated the revivified magazine in the early months, it was not long before McClure’s mercurial temperament produced unbearable tensions within the newly organized staff. As managing editor, Will Irwin found it impossible to deal with the endless intrigues McClure manufactured. “As a curb on genius,” he acknowledged, “I was not a success.” Sedgwick reported that “the staff worked under some natural law of desperation. The chief was forever interrupting, cutting every sequence into a dozen parts.” The dynamic had become frustrating: “A week in the McClure office was the precise reversal of the six busy days described in the first chapter of Genesis. It seemed to end in a world without form and void. From Order came forth Chaos.” In fifteen months, both Sedgwick and Irwin were fired.

  McClure soldiered on. For years, the fiction and poetry that he scouted and commissioned would continue to set the literary standard for American magazines. He published early stories by Damon Runyan and Joseph Conrad, introduced A. E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad to the American public, and provided a forum for the new work of William Butler Yeats and Moira O’Neill. The company eventually foundered, hampered by the costs of buying out the departing writers and constructing a new printing plant on Long Island. Forced to economize, McClure could no longer continue his penchant for liberal spending to attract the most gifted writers. Nor could he afford to keep his book publishing arm, which he sold to Doubleday, Page & Company. The magazine never recovered the strength or influence it had exerted during its heyday.

  Public disenchantment with sensationalist journalism and Theodore Roosevelt’s dramatic caricature of the muckrakers may have conspired to diminish the stature and power of McClure’s. The real corrosion of the magazine’s intensive energy happened from within, however, precipitated by the same force that had made the enterprise great: the outsized personality and manic power of S. S. McClure himself.

  THE SHIFTING PUBLIC MOOD ALSO presented difficulties for Phillips and the rest of the departing team. They had initially planned to launch their own venture, but when The American Magazine, a monthly “of good reputation,” was offered for sale, they pooled their resources to meet the $400,000 price tag. At the time, The American was “just about holding its own, financially.” By re-creating the publication as a writer’s magazine, built upon their own good names, they hoped to raise the circulation and “make it profitable within a comparatively short time.”

  “All of us had plunged into the enterprise with astonishingly little regard for the future,” Baker recalled. “No one of us had much money: we put into the common fund all we had and more.” In addition, the friends decided to heavily cut their own paychecks until they turned a profit. If the magazine failed, Baker acknowledged, he stood “to lose everything.” Still, he told his father, there was nothing “so dizzily stimulating” as building a new enterprise, “resting in complete confidence upon one’s friends, devoted to what one considers high purposes, each sacrificing to the limit for the common cause.”

  For Steffens, too, trepidation mingled with excitement. “I feel as if I were at the crisis of my life,” he wrote. “We are buying an old magazine which we propose to make the greatest thing of the kind that was ever made in this world—sincere, but good-natured; honest, but humorous; aggressive, but not unkind; a straight, hard fighter, but cheerful.” Though Ida Tarbell seemed to Baker “the most dauntless of the adventurers,” she fully recognized what was at stake. Each of them had “seen something in which they deeply believed go to pieces,” she recalled. All of them “had been too cruelly bruised to take anything lightly.”

  William Allen White followed his friends to The American Magazine. Though not party to the bitter final months in the McClure’s office, White had nevertheless determined long before that despite Sam McClure’s “spark of genius,” the magazine’s stability and success had always relied upon the ballast of John Phillips. White chose to help finance the The American but maintained that he bore absolutely no ill will toward McClure or his magazine, where he had received “nothing but the kindest treatment.” Indeed, even as he cast his lot with the new venture, he reached out to McClure. “You may draw on me whenever you will for whatever you will,” he assured the editor.

  Everyone recognized that creating cohesion, building a trusting yet playful atmosphere, would foster the success of The American. When Phillips and Tarbell persuaded Finley Peter Dunne to join the group, Baker was thrilled: “Everything amused him! We were youthful and dead in earnest—and he was wise.” Dunne proved himself a great companion, who “loved so much to talk” that he could entertain his office mates for hours. “He had a wide knowledge of men and their ways,” Tarbell recalled. Whenever conflict arose within the team, “Mr. Dooley” could be relied upon to lighten the heavy mood. As managing editor, Albert Boyden “made it his business” to foster camaraderie among his writers and contributors at the new magazine. At his fourth-floor walk-up on Stuyvesant Square, he hosted regular dinners for a revolving group of novelists, artists, politicians, and scientists. “What talk went on in that high-up living room!” Tarbell recalled. “What wonderful tales we heard!”

  The press assumed that with “all the muckrakers muckraking under one tent,” The American Magazine would provide “a helpful experiment” to determine whether the public appetite for exposure journalism had truly atrophied. “Their muck-raking has been of the convincing rather than the frenzied variety and they have reputations for literary honesty to be maintained,” the Omaha Evening World-Herald observed. “This is undoubtedly the most notable combination that has ever launched any publication.” The Boston Journal of Education expressed certitude that the pioneers of authentic investigative journalism would produce an outstanding magazine.

  Although the new publishing team proudly proclaimed that they would “not be deterred by adjectives or phrases,” their first public announcement nevertheless reflected anxiety about the shift in popular sentiment: “We shall not only make this new American Magazine interesting and important in a public way, but we shall make it the most stirring and delightful monthly book of fiction, humor, sentiment and joyous reading that is anywhere published. It will reflect a happy, struggling, fighting world, in which, as we believe, good people are coming out on top. There is no field of human activity in which we are not interested. Our magazine will be wholesome, hopeful, stimulating, uplifting, and above all, it will have a human interest on every page.”

  The statement provoked a wave of positive commentary in the press, accompanied by pointed advice. “Reformers need relaxation,” The Outlook observed, “and it has sometimes seemed of late as if, in his endeavor to secure greatly needed righteousness, the ardent and patriotic American might lose his ability to be at ease in a world in which there are so many sources of pleasure as well as of pain.” William Allen White, whose cheerful temperament had never really suited him for muckraking, offered similar counsel. “It seems to me the great danger,” he told Phillips, “is that of being too Purposeful. People will expect the pale drawn face; the set lips and a general line of emotional insanity. You should fool ’em.”

  In the end, the new enterprise suffered not from a surfeit of purpose but from a lack of direction. Pressure to fill pages in the early months led to a publication without the focused passion and clear vision of the old McClure’s. “We are editing in a very funny way,” Boyden acknowledged. “We rush in every good thing every month and trust to the Lord to send more.” Phillips implored each writer “to look into his literary cupboard” for half-finished work and send it pell-mell to New York. Consequently, those early issues comprised a miscellany: Tarbell submitted articles on Abraham Lincoln and John D. Rockefeller as she began a long series on the tariff; White contrasted Emporia and New York in one article, and the altruistic and egoistic spirit of man in another; Steffens profiled William Randolph Hearst and produced admiring portraits of several prominent progressives or “Upbuilders,” including the timber fraud pro
secutor Francis Heney and the idealistic millionaire Rudolph Spreckels; and Baker, while investigating the problem of race in America, contributed a long series of articles on the pastoral joys to be found outside the nation’s growing cities.

  The country life series proved a much-needed tonic for Ray Baker’s life and career. “Utterly beaten down with weariness” following the disintegration of McClure’s, he had returned to the “safe haven” of his country home in East Lansing, still a small village surrounded by farmhouses and “stretches of wilderness.” Just as the rugged Arizona landscape had once provided solace during an earlier period of depression, so Michigan’s “natural beauties” now absorbed his attention. For hours each day, he split cordwood, mulched fruit trees, and planted shrubs. Such “hard physical work” began to restore his body and mind.

  When he received Phillips’s request to rummage his literary cupboard, Baker turned to the private journals he had been keeping for nearly a decade. In these pages, he had recorded not only his thoughts on politics and economics but daily observations of rural life. Reading over these entries, he conceived the idea of a fictional alter ego: an educated, successful man who had abandoned his frenetic city life for the rigors and simple pleasures of life on a farm. When Baker sat down to organize his thoughts, memories of his childhood in the frontier town of St. Croix and winters working as a schoolteacher in small Michigan farming communities mingled with his recent experiences in East Lansing. Writing “more easily” than ever before, Baker completed six potential installments for the magazine in three weeks. Anxious that the portrait of country life would confound readers accustomed to his hard-hitting investigative journalism, he chose to solicit an opinion of his new work using the pen name “David Grayson.” Swearing Phillips and the staff to secrecy, he mailed out the manuscript with a note: “Take care of my child.” Though he later acknowledged how “ridiculous” his request must have appeared, this more intimate mode of writing was “something utterly different” from his previous successful work. Finally, after restless days spent rambling through the countryside, the editorial judgment from Phillips arrived by telegraph: “Manuscript a delight. Bully boy. Send more chapters.”

  The David Grayson stories instantly resonated with the reading public. Fan letters arrived by the thousands. “You have sublimated the real but commonplace experiences of life that we all enjoy,” one admirer wrote, “but never take the time or have the talent to write about.” David Grayson clubs sprang up in all sections of the country. Women dreamed of marrying a gentleman like David Grayson, a philosopher-farmer with a well-stocked library who had found happiness and peace in growing things, farm auctions, country fairs, schoolhouse meetings, and neighborly conversations. “David Grayson is a great man,” Lincoln Steffens told Baker. “I never had realized there was in you such a sense of beauty, so much fine, philosophic wisdom and, most wonderful of all—serenity.” Under such titles as Adventures in Contentment and Adventures in Friendship, the collected Grayson stories continued for decades, filling six books that sold over 2 million copies. Not until years later, when he discovered that imposters were presenting lectures and readings across the country under the name of David Grayson, did Baker finally claim Grayson’s work as his own.

  While Phillips delighted in the acclaim given the Grayson stories, he had advised Baker even before the series began that “people will be expecting something from you over your own name—something that is timely and notable and distinguished.” The industrious Baker had no sooner completed his first Grayson installments than he embarked for San Francisco in early August 1906. There, he documented the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and fire of the previous spring before embarking on what critics considered his best magazine journalism, a “pioneer” study of “the Negro in American life.”

  His interest had been awakened by two previous articles on lynching he had produced for McClure’s. Baker traveled extensively throughout the South and the North, talking with people, gathering statistics, reading local papers, and assembling data. Everywhere, he worked “to get at the facts,” to create a dispassionate portrait of African-American life, of racial prejudice and Jim Crow, of southern moderates and northern philanthropists. Three decades later, in preparing An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal relied on Baker’s twelve-part series as “a major source.” Still, this new work could not match the concrete impact of his earlier series on labor and the railroads. “The Riddle of the Negro” provided only the nebulous hope that “a clear statement of the case” would nudge Americans toward substituting “understanding and sympathy for blind repulsion and hatred.” One Pennsylvania newspaper observed matter-of-factly that The American was “reporting the negro problem with no effort to solve it.” The issue of race in America, the Bedford Gazette agreed, was simply “too complex to solve.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, a fair-minded discussion of the racial problem represented a significant step forward. The issues containing Baker’s series sold throughout the country. “Your work has been a wonderful thing for us,” Tarbell assured Baker, “and I am proud of you.” Phillips appreciatively told Baker that people everywhere were talking about his articles on race, with the consensus that they were “the best things running now in any magazine.”

  If Baker contributed disproportionately to the first issues of the new magazine, Lincoln Steffens seriously disappointed his colleagues. Initially inspired by the idea of a writer’s magazine, Steffens soon chafed at the “consensus editing,” allocation of space, demand for proof against libel, and hurried deadlines. “It does not matter,” Phillips told Steffens, “how hard you work and write, if we don’t get the material into the magazine when it needs it.” The new magazine simply did not have the working capital McClure’s had enjoyed to cover false starts or years of travel and research. Frayed by the production schedule, Boyden had little patience with Steffens’s constant complaints that his articles were given less space in The American than they had been granted in McClure’s. “You are crazy, Stef,” Boyden testily replied, enclosing a comparison to show the griping was unfounded. Meanwhile, Boyden reminded Steffens, he had failed to answer a request for pictures to accompany one of his articles. “We don’t need any sleeping partners in this concern,” Peter Dunne grumbled.

  Steffens shot off a resentful letter to Phillips, enumerating his grievances. “It is very difficult for me to write calmly after receiving a letter such as yours,” Phillips responded. “It seems to me not only unsympathetic but unmanly. It repudiates all the terms of our association in its tone and its temper. It seems to me that you cannot stand on the threshold and speak spitefully through the door: that you should either come in or go out. . . . I could very easily by comparison show that you have had more out of this magazine than anybody else in proportion to what you have put in.” Indeed, he pointed out, the magazine was covering not only Steffens’s traveling expenses but those of his wife and her elderly mother. Most disappointing of all, Phillips rebuked his longtime friend and colleague, “you haven’t confidence in us, and that is everything!”

  Steffens remained oblivious to the vexation of the other staff members. He had money, celebrity, lecture invitations, and a new seaside estate near Cos Cob, Connecticut. “My husband has become famous,” Josephine Steffens reflected sadly, “but at a high price.” Steffens had issued a sanctimonious ultimatum to his partners: “Either I am to write as I please without being edited; or I quit.” Six months later, he resigned from the magazine. At the time of his departure, Steffens argued that he must sell his stock in order to meet expenses while he sought a new position. His partners agreed to buy him out, further diminishing the working capital of the new enterprise.

  Through all the hurly-burly at The American, Ida Tarbell remained the same stabilizing force she had always been at McClure’s. Only later did she acknowledge how disorienting the transition had been. “I know now I should not have taken it as well as I did (and inwardly that was nothing to boast of) if it had not been cus
hioned by an engrossing personal interest,” she recalled. Although her New York apartment had served as her “writing headquarters” for years, Ida had yearned for a country home. During the turbulent spring of 1906, she finally purchased an old farmhouse situated on forty acres of land in Redding Ridge, Connecticut. Initially, she planned to use the abandoned property as a retreat, doing only the most necessary maintenance. But soon she was tempted to start “borrowing and mortgaging” to fix the roof and wallpaper the rooms, taking on extra freelance work to pay for furniture, rugs, and antiques. Before long, Tarbell turned her energies to the land: she pruned apple trees, planted crops, created a new orchard, and bought chickens, a cow, a pig, and two horses. Ever practical, she reallocated money set aside for an evening gown to purchase some much-needed fertilizer for the garden. Encouraged by the warmth and camaraderie of her rural neighbors, she learned what Baker had already discovered—that “the most genuine of human dramas” could be found in the trials and triumphs of the surrounding countryside.

  “All this was good for me,” Ida reflected of her rural homemaking, “but while it was good for me it was not so good for my work on the magazine.” Preoccupied with the engaging task of furnishing her new home, she found her research on the tariff increasingly tedious. By pursuing the subject in her first big series for The American, she had hoped to expose the special interests that lay behind the complicated schedules for wool, iron ore, coal, sugar, or flax. She loathed protectionism and intended to “get into the fight” for revision. Nevertheless, after months in Washington studying every issue of the Congressional Record since the Civil War, Tarbell could not render the subject engaging or alive. Though she talked with senators and congressmen who had taken part in earlier tariff struggles, the debates that appeared “so important” to her were “a dead issue to them.”