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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  To that end, Roosevelt launched a private campaign of persuasion, engineering a boom of support for Taft’s candidacy. In personal letters and meetings, he repeatedly insisted that he would “do all in his power” for Taft, though he could say nothing in public. To visitors, he extolled Taft’s “boundless courage,” emphasizing his absolute freedom from “any possible corrupting or beguiling influence.” In off-the-record conversations with journalist friends, he swore that “he would crawl on his hands and knees from the White House to the Capitol” to secure Taft’s election, but if they quoted him, he warned, he would disavow any such statement. A ditty in the Kansas City Times compressed the president’s stance perfectly:

  IMPARTIAL MR. ROOSEVELT

  Says Roosevelt: “I announce no choice,

  To no man will I lend my voice,

  I have no private candidate,

  I care not whom you nominate—

  Just so it’s Taft.”

  Indeed, the ferocity of Roosevelt’s desire for a Taft presidency far exceeded the candidate’s own. Taft’s declaration of his candidacy was so tepid, so lacking in conviction that it sounded as if he had decided not to run: “I wish to say,” he began, “that my ambition is not political; that I am not seeking the presidential nomination, that I do not expect to be the Republican candidate.” Still, he avowed, “I am not foolish enough to say that in the improbable event that the opportunity to run for the great office of President were to come to me, I should decline it, for this would not be true.” This tentative announcement prompted speculation that an unwilling Taft had “been drawn into the maelstrom of Presidential politics,” finally yielding to “the persistent pleading of the President and strong personal friends.” Even after announcing his candidacy, Taft indicated a preference for working “behind the scenes” and pursuing his duties “irrespective of politics.” He found the prospect of soliciting support repugnant and “was very much averse” to burdening his friends with requests for assistance. William Taft, observed a Chicago Tribune reporter, seemed to have “an almost morbid fear of being placed in the attitude of struggling for the Presidency.”

  Initially, Taft’s reluctance appeared a winning quality, evidence that the office should seek the man rather than the man the office. “Taft is not a politician in the sense that he is a wire-puller and a seeker of power,” commended The Washington Post, “but as a natural statesman and leader, he draws all men to him. Let him appear at a public reception, let him make a speech before a large audience, let him attend a private gathering and when he leaves, at least fifty percent of the people will be his friends.” The New York Times too observed that while Taft might be ignorant of “the little details of politics, the methods of juggling a ward primary, and of playing horse with a caucus,” he nevertheless commanded “a bigger, broader kind of politics . . . the kind that is frank and open.”

  Taft’s peculiar diffidence over his presidential hopes also freed him to take a principled stand when faced with trouble brewing in Ohio. In late March 1907, Roosevelt’s nemesis, the reactionary senator Joseph Foraker, openly assailed Taft’s candidacy, declaring his intention to challenge Taft for the endorsement of the Republican State Committee. The press predicted that a state committee endorsement of Foraker for president could prove crippling to Taft’s candidacy. Foraker “may cause trouble,” Roosevelt acknowledged to Kermit, adding that in Ohio, the senator was already mustering “the fight against Taft, and incidentally against me.”

  When Foraker issued his statement, Taft was in the middle of a three-week trip to Panama, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Speaking on his brother’s behalf, Charles Taft accepted Foraker’s challenge, suggesting that the question of Ohio’s endorsement be put before the voters in a primary. “This is a direct contest between the friends of the Administration of President Roosevelt and his opponents,” he argued, relaying Taft’s readiness to let the voters decide: “We are willing to submit it to the Republican voters of Ohio and the sooner the better.” Nellie found the confrontation unsettling and concurred with the president that Taft “had nothing to gain” from heeding Foraker’s challenge and “much possibly to lose.”

  The decision to call Foraker’s bluff, however, soon proved wise. Foraker understood that Roosevelt and Taft enjoyed more support among Ohio’s voters and realized that if he manipulated an endorsement from the state committee and subsequently lost to Taft in an open primary or convention, he might jeopardize his Senate seat. Through intermediaries, he therefore offered to endorse Taft for president in exchange for his support in the approaching senatorial contest. Taft flatly refused. “I don’t care for the Presidency if it has to come by compromise with Senator Foraker,” Taft told Arthur Vorys, his Ohio campaign manager. As “a question of political principle,” declared Taft, he could never strike a bargain to endorse a man who had consistently opposed the policies and programs of the Roosevelt administration. Furious, Foraker warned that henceforth, Taft should meet him in the political arena “with a drawn sword in his hand.”

  In a long letter to Roosevelt, Taft acknowledged that affairs in Ohio had “become somewhat acute.” The state committee was scheduled to meet in late July, and Foraker might have sufficient votes to defeat a resolution endorsing Taft’s nomination. Still, Taft insisted, he had no regrets. “Rather than compromise with Foraker, I would give up all hope for the Presidency,” he stated. “I must explain to you that the Ohio brand of politics the last twenty years has been harmony and concession on the subject of principle to the last degree, provided it secured personal preferment and division of the spoil in a satisfactory way.” If Foraker hoped to win, Taft concluded, the senator would have to engage in “a stand-up fight.”

  Roosevelt’s reply demonstrated an admiration for his friend’s character that far eclipsed any misgivings over his political acuity. “While under no circumstances,” Roosevelt wrote, “would I have advised you to take the position you have taken in refusing to compromise with Foraker on the lines that the local politicians want, yet, now that you have taken it, I wish to say that I count it as just one of those fine and manly things which I would naturally expect from you, and I believe you are emphatically right.”

  Steeled for defeat when the state committee met to select candidates at the end of July, Taft enjoyed a stunning victory. The committee not only voted 15 to 6 to endorse Taft for president; they also refused to back Foraker in the Senate race. “I am hopeful that it will have a very good effect in other states,” a relieved Taft told Howard Hollister. Foraker’s political career came to an unceremonious end the following September, when William Randolph Hearst released letters suggesting he had received bribes from Standard Oil. Foraker later argued that the money was simply compensation for legal services, but the damage was done; he withdrew from the Senate race and never served in public office again.

  DESPITE HIS VICTORY IN OHIO, Taft found the bitter struggle dispiriting. While Roosevelt reveled in the fight, urging his chosen successor to deliver a “mauling” to Foraker, Taft possessed no such bellicose spirit and could never forget that his “first substantial start in public life” was due to the early kindness of the now disgraced senator. The politics of personal destruction held no relish for a man “born with an instinct to be personally agreeable.” Reporters described Will Taft as “the kindest man they [had] ever known in public life.” Perhaps better than any other, Louise Taft understood the strengths and weaknesses of her favorite child. Asked what she thought of her son’s presidential candidacy, she confessed that she shared Will’s reluctance. “A place on the Supreme bench, where my boy would administer justice, is my ambition for him,” she admitted. “His is a judicial mind, you know, and he loves the law.” Though Taft had proven himself in the Philippines, Cuba, and Panama, the mother knew her son’s disposition and the toll that political discord exacted. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” she warned him when he declared his candidacy, shrewdly discerning that “Roosevelt is a good fighter and enjoys it, but the
malice of the politicians would make you miserable.”

  As the months passed, public enchantment with Taft as the reluctant politician began to wane. “He wins the hearts of individuals, but he does not fire the heart of the sovereign multitude,” observed reporter James Creelman of the weakening Taft boom. Taft’s reluctance to passionately embrace his political ambition began to shift from a sign of moral strength to an indication of weakness: “The country respects and trusts his ability and integrity, but its attitude is that of passive recognition and approval, not the head-long affection that brings power to a political leader of the first rank.” Why this “statesman of stainless name, unshakeable independence and creative and administrative abilities” had stirred “so little enthusiasm in the American people” had initially seemed a mystery to Creelman. The explanation, he finally suggested, lay in “the fact that the Secretary of War is not dowered with a political order of mind and is almost wholly devoid of political ambitions.” The New York Times concurred, adding that people will not flock to a candidate who “can scarcely be said to have waved his standard and asked people to flock to it.”

  Though Taft had robustly stumped for Roosevelt, he did little in his own behalf to invigorate his popularity. As a candidate in his own right, Taft was expected to emerge as more than the genial defender and chief spokesman for the administration. Correspondents covering the campaign inevitably demanded the headline-generating phrasemaking and charismatic demeanor they had come to expect from Roosevelt. When Taft was criticized as not “fitted to say things that attract attention,” his campaign manager urged him to include anecdotes and striking figures of speech in his oratory. “I am not sure that I can make the epigrams that you are hunting for,” Taft responded disconsolately, turning to his habitual self-deprecating humor as he continued. “The truth is you have a pretty old horse to run and you’ve got to take me as I am.” Before each address, he was beset by grave misgivings, acutely aware that his drafts remained “infernally long” despite all efforts to prune his words. “Never mind if you cannot get off fireworks,” Nellie consoled him. “It must be known by this time that that is not your style, and there is no use in trying to force it. If people don’t want you as you are they can leave you, and we shall both be able to survive it.”

  More problematic to critics than Taft’s speaking style was his failure to present a political figure independent from Theodore Roosevelt. On tariff reduction, the sole issue on which he had publicly been at odds with Roosevelt’s policy, he now softened his stance and repeated the president’s view that “revision must wait until after the election.” Though he did not echo Roosevelt’s “ferocious denunciation” of business, Taft positioned himself squarely behind the anti-trust and regulatory policies designed to prevent corporate abuses and deflate “swollen fortunes.” He passionately defended the railroad rate bill, the food and drug legislation, and the recent conservation measures. He called for a strengthened employer’s liability law, a progressive income tax, and an inheritance tax. With only a few “minor exceptions,” Taft proclaimed his “complete, thorough, and sincere sympathy” with Roosevelt’s policies. The New York Sun carped that “there is not an original note” in any of Taft’s speeches, jeering that “his ample corporeal capacity receives and contains all that Roosevelt has been, and is, and hopes to be.”

  Taft expressed bafflement at the press’s surprise concerning his sympathy with Roosevelt’s policies. “I am much amused at the attitude of the New York papers,” he told Horace. “Did they suppose I was coming out to attack Roosevelt’s policies? Did they suppose I had stayed in the Cabinet thus long and disapproved of them?” But even some of Taft’s ardent backers wished that he would endeavor to set himself apart. “Is it possible,” Taft asked one concerned supporter, “that a man shows lack of originality, shows slavish imitation because he happens to concur in the views of another who has the power to enforce those views? Mr. Roosevelt’s views were mine long before I knew Mr. Roosevelt at all.” He would not, he insisted, “be driven from adherence to those views” by unjust, nonsensical criticism.

  Nonetheless, by midsummer of 1907, Taft’s candidacy had stalled. A lingering problem, one supporter admitted, lay in “the feeling of uncertainty as to the President’s real intentions.” So long as the merest possibility remained that Roosevelt might rescind his pledge and run for a third term, many Republicans would not commit to anyone else. “The President is a hero in the eyes of the people,” as a friend expressed this concern to Taft, “and they will not surrender his leadership unless they are compelled to.” Particularly in the western states, a “well defined movement” had emerged “to force the nomination of Roosevelt.” Straw votes taken in the Nebraska and South Dakota legislatures revealed “an almost unanimous sentiment for Roosevelt,” and Kansas was reportedly poised to send a Roosevelt delegation to the convention whether he agreed to run or not. “It’s hard to write snappy Taft stuff when every damned man I meet gives three cheers for Roosevelt and refuses to talk of any other candidate,” another frustrated advocate acknowledged. “Nearly every man who says a good word for Taft doesn’t want his name used for fear he may offend Roosevelt. . . . It’s a plain, unabridged truth that 90 percent of the Taft sentiment I have found is second-hand or remnant Roosevelt sentiment.”

  Nellie Taft had never been able to shake her intuitive apprehension that Roosevelt would change his mind about his own candidacy. As calls for a third term gathered steam and newspapers began to suggest circumstances under which the president might enter the race, her concern escalated. While running would be an “almost grotesque” betrayal of his friendship with Taft, the New York Sun speculated, the president would doubtless “welcome a situation in which his candidacy might seem inevitable, demanded by the patriotic and imperative clamor of the entire nation.” With sardonic, incisive humor, the editorial inquired: “May not the imaginative mind assemble conditions and considerations under which Mr. Taft will seem the victim of it all and also the appointed sacrifice to an illustrious Necessity?” The Sun’s piece further unsettled Nellie, who expressed her misgivings to Will: “How they hate him & they go farther than I in insinuating that this is all part of his scheme to get himself nominated as the only man,” she wrote, anxiously explaining how easily her husband could be labeled “a martyr and a scapegoat.”

  In all likelihood, had Roosevelt not declared against a third term on the eve of his overwhelming victory in 1904, he would have pursued a third term. His White House years had been the most fulfilling of his life. Only forty-nine years old and in splendid health, Roosevelt was proud of his work and eager to expand his legacy. He reportedly boasted that he “could get the nomination by simply holding up [his] little finger.” Even as he warmed to the popular clamor for a third term, Roosevelt suspected that many of those who called for his reelection “would feel very much disappointed” if he actually ran, and would conclude that he had fallen “short of the ideal they had formed” as to the integrity of his character and the credibility of his word.

  Roosevelt told one Cincinnati reporter, Gus Karger, that his decision not to run was an unregrettable “personal sacrifice” so long as Taft secured the nomination. “But I do not wish to have made it in vain,” he clarified, “by paving the way to the selection of a successor not in sympathy with the policies of this administration.” In case Taft’s canvass failed to take off, however, he would not foreclose the possibility of his candidacy. Moreover, Roosevelt argued, while a public reiteration of his vow not to run would rally support for Taft in the West, it might damage his cause in the East, and particularly in New York. Once he irrevocably stated that he would not join the race, he could no longer keep the party organization there from openly backing Governor Hughes. At least “for the moment,” Roosevelt convinced himself—and Taft—that saying nothing was “the wisest course.” Meanwhile, third-term proponents continued their vocal campaign; by late August, the odds in favor of Roosevelt’s renomination had grown “shorter.”<
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  “Political affairs are kaleidoscopic,” Roosevelt warned his secretary of war on September 3, 1907. Though he still claimed that Taft was “the man upon whom it was most desirable to unite,” he acknowledged that his assessment might alter as the race evolved. Support for New York governor Hughes was growing; Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou was still hoping to run; Cannon and Fairbanks remained live possibilities. This unsettled situation made him “a little nervous,” Roosevelt admitted to Taft, adding that it was “a matter of real difficulty to prevent certain people declaring for [him].” Taft of all people, he assumed, would appreciate “that the first thing to be considered was the good of the nation and the next thing the good of the party.” After that, “any personal preference,” he portentously concluded, “must come in the third place.”

  Just as Roosevelt’s support for Taft showed distinct signs of faltering, Taft, ironically, began to feel more sanguine about his campaign. A three-week swing through the heartland and the Far West had gone surprisingly well. “So far as I am able to judge,” he reported to Charles, “the trip I have made through the west has helped me.” On a sweltering summer day in Columbus, more than 20,000 people had gathered to hear him speak. “It was as great a meeting as they ever had in Ohio,” Taft happily noted. In Kentucky, he had spoken to “a fine audience of 4000 people”; in Oklahoma, an immense hall “was filled to suffocation”; and in Denver, he was greeted by “every politician in the state and every state officer.” Not only had Taft’s formal speeches gone more smoothly, but he had also become increasingly comfortable waving and making brief remarks to the crowds clustered at train stations along his route. “Personal contact,” he acknowledged, “does a great deal.” His clear blue eyes and famous smile, the New York Times reported, made all who met the man “feel glad and sociable and sincere.”