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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  By 1908, Lincoln Steffens had arrived at very different conclusions. Steffens no longer trusted that the Square Deal could solve the nation’s gross inequities of wealth and power, believing that more radical measures were necessary, including public ownership of corrupt railroads and trusts. “I certainly am socialistic,” he told his sister, “but I’m not a Socialist.” In the June issue of Everybody’s, he published an article comparing the leadership styles of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and La Follette. Although he praised Roosevelt for galvanizing the public and predicted that Taft would faithfully follow his predecessor’s regulatory course, he argued that La Follette alone was fighting against the system itself.

  Roosevelt responded to Steffens with a 2,000-word rebuttal. “You contend,” he began, “that Taft and I are good people of limited vision who fight against specific evils with no idea of fighting against the fundamental evil.” After a quarter of a century in politics, Roosevelt observed, he had found that change was realized by “men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.” He pointed out that “it was Lincoln,” not Wendell Phillips, who “saved the Union and abolished slavery.” Indeed, history suggested that those, like La Follette, who fought “the system in the abstract,” accomplished “mighty little good.” Roosevelt closed by suggesting that Steffens visit the White House to continue their dialogue. Steffens replied that they had always argued about politics with such “mutual understanding” and “genuine affection” that he now felt closer to the president than to many who shared his own views.

  By the final year of Roosevelt’s presidency, Ray Baker too had come to question his leadership style, though he still continued to regard him as “the most interesting personality” in the country. In a 1908 article for The American Magazine, Baker located the source of the president’s strength in what the philosopher William James termed “the art of energizing”—the ability to command ordinary talents to an extraordinary degree. Whereas most people never tapped their “vast stores of hidden energies,” Baker contended that Roosevelt succeeded through “the simple device of self-control and self-discipline, of using every power he possesses to its utmost limit—a dazzling, even appalling spectacle of a human engine driven at full speed.” Despite being an “ordinary shot,” he had practiced methodically to become a world-class hunter. Lacking the succinct poetic clarity of Lincoln’s literary genius, he had nonetheless produced an astonishingly versatile body of work. While preaching simple homilies and banal maxims, he had nonetheless reached the hearts of his countrymen and given the people voice.

  After a decade of observation, however, Baker had reached a less flattering assessment of the president: “Roosevelt never leads; he always follows. He acts, but he acts only when he thinks the crowd is behind him. . . . Upon all the great issues which he has championed, the country was prepared before he entered the arena.” Though he had pushed his agenda “valiantly and fearlessly,” Baker argued, the times now demanded a thinker—someone who could deal with the unjust tariff structure and the underlying conflict between the rich and the poor, who could formulate a “European system of comprehensive social insurance to protect the injured, the sick and the aged.”

  Baker’s musings provoked a lively correspondence with Roosevelt. “I think you lay altogether too much stress,” Roosevelt told the reporter, “upon your theory that everywhere and at all times political thought divides itself into two opposing forces,” driving what Baker had called “the fundamental conflict between the few and the many.” In the South, Roosevelt pointed out, the tension between the races reached “immeasurably farther” into the souls of men than any struggle between the poor and the rich. Although he believed in “equal opportunities for all,” he decried the inflammatory and unprofitable language of class warfare, which impeded the moral struggle to improve “man as a man.”

  “I wish as much as you do that we had reached the stage in our civilization where we could avoid the hatred and demagogy of ignorance and class strife,” Baker promptly replied. In the present situation, he maintained, class action by unions and parties seemed indispensable. Would “any amount of effort to improve the Russian Jewish tailor of the East-side—as a man—make much headway,” he wondered, “unless there is a determined effort to change his environment and the institutions which help to make him poor, downtrodden, outcast?”

  One evening, less than a week after this exchange of letters, the two men talked at the White House until midnight, and for the first time in their long acquaintance, the ever exuberant president struck Baker as a weary man. Roosevelt disclosed his plans to spend a year big game hunting in “the wilds of Africa” when his term ended. “The best thing I can do is to go entirely away,” he told Baker, “out of reach of everything here.” He admitted that he believed his time had come and gone; that he was “through.” When Baker suggested that “the people might not be through with him,” the president responded “with a curious finality, a sort of sadness” unlike anything Baker had heard from him. “New issues are coming up,” Roosevelt acknowledged. “People are going to discuss economic questions more and more; the tariff, currency, banks. They are hard questions, and I am not deeply interested in them; my problems are moral problems, and my teaching has been plain morality.” Never, Baker later reflected, had he seen the president “in a more human mood.”

  ROOSEVELT’S WISTFUL DEMEANOR ON THE eve of the Republican National Convention in June 1908 in Chicago revealed residual misgivings about his ironclad pledge to forgo a third term. “When you see me quoted in the press as welcoming the rest I will have after March the 3d take no stock in it,” he informed his military aide Archie Butt. “I have enjoyed every moment of this so-called arduous and exacting task.” For all seven years of his tenure, he proudly told George Trevelyan, he had “been President, emphatically,” utilizing “every ounce of power there was in the office.” At times, he was plagued by “ugly qualms” about “abandoning great work” simply to be true to his word. Yet, if he did answer the call to run again, he feared that even those who had spurred him on would suffer a shock of “disappointment” at an unseemly quest to hold the office “longer than it was deemed wise that Washington should hold it.”

  Roosevelt was not the only one preoccupied by the tantalizing prospect of a third term. As Chicago began “to throb with the confusion and excitement of arriving throngs” in preparation for the convention, “a stampede” for Roosevelt remained a distinct possibility. “Taft has nothing to fear from any combination of opponents,” The Washington Post remarked. “The only man who can defeat him is Pres. Roosevelt.” In journalistic circles, the odds of a stampede to nominate Roosevelt at the first mention of his name proved “an unfailing topic for conjecture, and the explosive possibility of its injection at the psychological moment” was widely anticipated. Any large political gathering, the San Francisco Chronicle observed, can easily become “a mob, ready to accept what psychologists call ‘suggestion.’ ”

  As expectations began to mount, two antithetical factions enhanced the likelihood of a Roosevelt stampede. For progressive and moderate Republicans who “in their heart of hearts” preferred Roosevelt to anyone else, hope remained that if actually nominated, the president would feel compelled to accept the honor despite his repeated refusals. The agenda of the second group was far more calculating; for Taft’s reactionary opponents, known as “the Allies,” “a stampede” would be the “last card” in their effort to break Taft’s majority on the first ballot. By pushing for a third term, they hoped “to create a diversion against Taft and weaken him as a candidate.” If the president then refused to accept the nomination—as they anticipated—the door would open for a second or third ballot to nominate one of their own: Cannon, Knox, or Fairbanks.

  The sky was “full of sunshine” on June 16, the first day of the convention. The band played patriotic airs as delegates found their seats on the floor and spectators piled into the galleries. Barely audible above the din, the presi
ding officer’s tribute to “the glories of the party” did not seem designed “to set the blood tingling.” Toledo mayor Brand Whitlock observed a restlessness in the gallery reminiscent of “that expectant interest in which multitudes view an animal trainer at work; down in their hearts the secret human wish, or half-wish, that the animals may turn and eat the trainer.” The analogy, he said, served only to point out that “the spectators longed for something to happen. But nothing happened.”

  The agenda for the second day of the convention promised to sate the crowd’s desire for excitement. Though Will and Nellie remained in Washington with their seventeen-year-old daughter Helen and ten-year-old son Charlie, the rest of the Taft clan descended upon Chicago. Two hours before the convention proceedings opened at 10 a.m., William Howard Taft arrived at his War Department office. His quarters at the Old Executive Building included a large reception room for visitors, an adjoining space for his secretary and two clerks, and a private office with a desk, couch, and several comfortable chairs. Electricians equipped the office to receive telegraph messages directly from the convention hall, and a long-distance telephone line allowed Frank Hitchcock, Taft’s national campaign manager, to reach him from the floor of the Coliseum. To relieve his anxiety, Taft “plunged into the business of the day,” reviewing routine matters with his secretary. When a photographer arrived and suggested that he pose expectantly by the telephone, Taft balked. “I do not sit at the telephone,” he laughed, explaining that “telephone messages are taken by somebody else. I’ll not do anything unnatural.” Nellie arrived at noon, taking a seat at her husband’s desk, while young Charlie stationed himself in the anteroom with the telegraph operator, ready to carry incoming messages to his mother. She read each dispatch aloud to the assembled gathering of associates and friends as Taft paced restlessly in and out of the office, intermittently occupying an easy chair by the window. Dozens of newspapermen and clerks gathered in the outer reception room.

  At 1:30 p.m., the convention chairman Senator Henry Cabot Lodge approached the podium to deliver the keynote address. For half an hour, the senator held the 14,000 attendees rapt with a powerful critique of the Democrats and a stirring defense of Republican policies, carefully avoiding any mention of Theodore Roosevelt. When he finally introduced “the magic name,” Lodge unleashed “a wild, frenzied uncontrollable stampede for Roosevelt.” The point of Lodge’s speech that touched a “burning fuse to dry powder” was the simple observation that to the great dismay of “vested abuses and profitable wrongs,” the president had “fearlessly enforced the laws,” becoming “the best abused and most popular man in the United States today.” Delegates and spectators “exploded with a roar,” clapping, whistling, stamping their feet. “Hats, fans, umbrellas, flags, newspapers, arms, coats were waved, flapped, brandished, jiggled” while the audience chanted: “Four Years More. Four Years More.”

  When Lodge attempted to continue, his words were drowned in “volleys of cheers” that echoed from floor to ceiling. “It seemed,” one journalist remarked, “as if the roof would blow off.” This disruption was merely “a trifle compared with what followed.” After someone threw a four-foot Teddy bear into the air, delegates began tossing it from one state to another. “Each time it appeared above the heads of the delegates,” The Washington Post reported, “it was a signal for another outburst.” The convention was “on the verge of a good natured riot” when a national committeeman from Oklahoma captured and sat on the bear, successfully resisting all attempts to snatch it away.

  Bulletins describing these outbursts on the convention floor understandably produced anxiety for the little group assembled in Taft’s office. Fortunately, Taft had departed to meet with Secretary Root about an official matter just before the pandemonium erupted, but Nellie was unnerved. Her anxiety was somewhat mollified when Frank Hitchcock called from the floor assuring everyone that he was “not at all alarmed.” The Taft delegates would remain firm.

  Back in Chicago, the wild ovation persisted for a record forty-nine minutes, ceasing only when Lodge returned to the podium, wresting the crowd’s attention “by the force of his personality” and the impact of his words. “That man is no friend to Theodore Roosevelt,” he proclaimed, “who now, from any motive, seeks to urge him as a candidate for the great office which he has finally declined. The President has refused what his countrymen would gladly have given him; he says what he means and means what he says, and his party and his country will respect his wishes as they honor his high character and great public service.” Aware that Lodge was the president’s designated spokesman—and that he carried a letter confirming Roosevelt’s refusal in case of his nomination—the gathering accepted the senator’s words “as the voice of the President.” The convention quieted; the possibility of the stampede, feared by some and desired by many, had come and gone.

  Nellie was still seated at the desk receiving bulletins when Taft returned to the office. After learning of the excitement, he walked over to the White House, where the president and first lady were preparing for a horseback ride through Rock Creek Park. William Loeb, Roosevelt’s secretary, remarked that the convention had simply needed “to blow off steam” before moving forward. Archie Butt had never seen Roosevelt more ebullient. Flattered by the emotional outpouring, the president recognized that the convention had paid him the highest possible compliment without forcing a decision that threatened both his party’s prospects and the credibility of his word. Taft, too, was smiling. A reassuring telegram had arrived from Frank Hitchcock: “The cheers for Roosevelt today, will be for Taft tomorrow.”

  When the convention opened the following day, Nellie resumed her customary position at her husband’s desk. Charlie happily continued serving as messenger, and Miss Helen Taft, scheduled to attend Bryn Mawr College in the fall, joined the group as the nominating speeches for favorite sons were set to begin. Journalists remarked on the solidarity of the Taft family, particularly noting Nellie’s unusual role as one of her husband’s “best advisers” in every aspect of the campaign. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter described the atmosphere in the room as “electric with excitement [and] suppressed nervous tension.”

  Nellie strove to remain calm as she relayed reports of the enthusiastic cheering that greeted Ohio congressman Theodore Burton’s nominating speech for Taft. Delegates stood on their chairs as a large banner bearing Taft’s picture was carried through the aisles, waving their hats and flags to a chorus of “Taft, Taft, Taft.” A burst of good-natured laughter greeted a pair of ample trousers adorning a flagpole brandished by a member of the Texas delegation: “As pants the hart for cooling streams,” they intoned, “so Texas pants for Taft!” To better view the animated demonstration, Charles Taft climbed a stepladder on the edge of the Ohio delegation. His “beaming smile” revealed pride and pleasure in the accomplishments of a younger brother whom he had mentored and supported since the death of their father. Though less protracted than the frenzy unleashed by Roosevelt’s name on the previous day, the exuberant response buoyed the spirits of Taft’s supporters.

  By late afternoon, visitors inundated Taft’s inner office, with reporters streaming in and out. Just before the balloting was set to begin, Nellie was handed a bulletin causing her to turn “white as marble.” A large lithograph of Roosevelt had been carried onto the stage, she relayed to the gathering, and once again the audience had erupted into a frenzy that made it impossible for Chairman Lodge to restore order. “Scarcely a word was spoken,” one correspondent noted. “Men who ordinarily are not affected by nervousness hung over the telegraph instrument as though their lives depended upon the words which the stolid telegrapher was ticking out.” Silence prevailed for nearly fifteen minutes, until the next bulletin announced that twenty-six Massachusetts delegates had voted for Taft. No one could fathom how the roll call had reached Massachusetts until it was discovered that even as the demonstration continued unabated, Lodge had somehow proceeded with the vote. “Pay no attention to the crowd,” h
e shouted to the clerk, declaring, “I shall not have the president made by a Chicago mob.” Seven states managed to cast their votes before the mayhem finally subsided. “The scene was absolutely unique in American history,” one correspondent noted, “the voting being taken during a terrific uproar in behalf of a man whose name was not before the convention.”

  Shortly before five-thirty, a telegram arrived declaring that the press associations had “flashed” the nomination of William Howard Taft. Her eyes “aglow with excitement,” Nellie read the news to the assembled throng. “Bubbling over with happiness,” she rose to embrace her husband, who “laughed with the joy of a boy.” A “football rush” followed as Taft’s colleagues in the War Department arrived en masse to extend their congratulations. Moments later, a bulletin confirmed that the nomination was declared unanimous, and Secretary of State Root appeared to accompany Taft to an appointment at the War College. “You know how happy I feel over this,” Root told the new nominee. “I do,” Taft replied, giving the secretary “a resounding whack on the back.” The nominee warned Root that they would face a delay as he shook hands with the assembled reporters. “It will be a long time before you will be able to shake the newspapermen,” Root quipped. Taft cordially greeted “the boys” in turn but declined to make a statement. “Words don’t frame themselves for me now,” he humbly insisted, “but I don’t deny that I am very happy.”