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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  After Pinchot left the stand, the hearings became “so tedious,” the Arizona Republic editorialized, “that auditors are unable to remain awake.” The public was quickly becoming bored with the complex issue and even with Louis Glavis, “of whom it had never heard before and of whom perhaps it will never hear again.” The “waning interest,” the paper predicted, would soon take the controversy off the front page. “Besides the baseball season is fairly under way,” and “the public eye” is turning toward Reno, Nevada, where “The Battle of the Century” was scheduled to take place: the heavyweight fight between the challenger, African-American Jack Johnson, and the reigning champion, Jim Jeffries.

  Many years later, Louis Brandeis acknowledged that they had not unearthed anything “really decisive” at that point in the investigation. He returned once again to the mountain of documents that the Taft administration had delivered to Congress. The committee had requested the data upon which the president had based his September 13 decision to exonerate Ballinger and dismiss Glavis, and Brandeis focused particularly on the attorney general’s 85-page report, dated September 11. Brandeis read the detailed report “ten, fifteen, twenty times,” and “saw that it was not a hastily thrown together patchwork but a carefully prepared unit,” so meticulously compiled that it seemed unlikely to have been generated in the brief interval after Taft met with Glavis. Brandeis “was certain that something was wrong, but he had to prove it.” In several instances, he finally discovered, the report referenced facts and events that were not known or did not take place until weeks after September 11. The administration was claiming a document that did not exist at the time as the basis for the president’s decision.

  Brandeis revealed his discovery to Collier’s Norman Hapgood and asked the editor to come to the hearings on April 22. On that day, Brandeis called Ballinger’s assistant Edward Finney to the stand. He had designed a line of questioning that would make Finney realize that the predating had been discovered and asked Hapgood to monitor the expression on Finney’s face during the proceedings. At lunch, Hapgood confirmed that Finney had appeared cognizant of his peril; Brandeis sharpened his questions when the session resumed, finally introducing into the record incidents mentioned in the September 11 report that had not yet occurred. He intimated that the document had been prepared after the fact “to make it appear” as if Taft had possessed more substantial documentary evidence when he passed judgment. Prevented by the rules of the investigation from issuing a subpoena to Wickersham, Brandeis leaked the story to the press. Attorney General Wickersham initially refused comment but eventually wrote to Congress that he had, indeed, backdated the report.

  As the National Tribune observed, backdating documents was common practice in government. Had administration officials acknowledged the actual chronology when they sent the documents to the Congress, “there probably would have been no unfavorable comment.” Their failure to do so invited speculation that they had falsified records in a deliberate attempt to deceive Congress and the country. The revelation revived interest in the hearings, accentuating “an attitude of suspicion” toward Ballinger, Wickersham, and Taft himself.

  IF THE LENGTHY WICKERSHAM REPORT had not served as the basis for Taft’s decision, Brandeis queried, what did? It turned out that the lawyer had known the answer for months, though he had bided his time before springing his discovery of the Lawler memo. In February, Brandeis had met with twenty-four-year-old Fred Kerby, one of the two stenographers who had taken Lawler’s dictation. After the publication of Taft’s celebrated letter the previous September, Kerby had “noted the similarities between the two documents,” recognizing sections with identical wording.

  Kerby agreed to meet Garfield and Brandeis at Pinchot’s house, where he recounted the facts about preparing the memo. He recalled that Lawler, “in constant consultation” with various interior officials, including Ballinger, had written and revised the memo a half-dozen times. It was midnight on Saturday when the final version was completed. The rough drafts were “laid in the grate and a match put to the pile.” Lawler placed the final memo “in his brief case” and joined Ballinger in the secretary’s carriage. The two men then drove together to the station, catching the “Owl” to New York, where Wickersham would receive the memo to bring to Beverly. Kerby, still employed at the Interior Department and newly married, “asked that, if possible, they avoid calling [him] to testify.” Brandeis promised that he would try to “get the facts into the record through cross-examination of Ballinger and thus compel production of the Lawler document.”

  In early March, Brandeis sent a letter to the attorney general and the Interior Department, requesting production of “the so-called memorandum prepared by Mr. Lawler at the request of the President.” Department officials claimed they had searched the files, but it could not be found. A second request in April met with a similar response. Brandeis suspected that they were deliberately withholding the memo, aware that it might cast a shadow on the fairness of Taft’s decision to exonerate Ballinger and dismiss Glavis.

  When Ballinger took the stand, Brandeis directed a series of questions designed to extract information about the Lawler memo. Brandeis noted that in Ballinger’s opening statement he had failed to mention that Lawler had accompanied him to Beverly. When Ballinger claimed he did not consider it “of any material moment,” Brandeis pressed him further, asking if it was “not a matter of moment in view of the part that [Lawler] subsequently played?” Ballinger continued his evasive responses as Brandeis turned his questions to the contents of his companion’s briefcase. Under repeated questioning, Ballinger said that Lawler had “a grip with some clothes in it,” but he wasn’t sure what else it contained. Finally, he acknowledged that Lawler had brought the president a memorandum, covering “a sort of resume of the facts.” Ballinger appeared intensely nervous as the cross-examination persisted, his foot beating “a restless tattoo on the floor.” At one point, he turned in anger toward Brandeis, calling his line of questioning “an insult.” Ballinger refused any further questions that bore on the president’s actions.

  Having “exhausted all channels” to introduce the Lawler memo, Brandeis returned to Fred Kerby. Fully aware that he would compromise his career, Kerby agreed to give a public statement describing the preparation of the memo. In his written statement, Kerby explained that he had known of Lawler’s instructions to prepare a memo which Taft could use as a draft for his own opinion. He identified “certain portions” of the president’s published letter that had been drawn from Lawler’s draft, though the passages he cited were not substantial. He never suggested that Lawler had actually dictated the president’s letter. To the contrary, he said that the draft had been “specifically” prepared in triple space to leave room for revision. The headlines accompanying the young stenographer’s statement told a different story, however: “Ballinger Accused of Preparing Taft’s Letter of Exoneration,” announced the Washington Times. “President’s Statement Giving Secretary Clean Bill Almost Identical in Verbiage with Notes in Shorthand Note Book which was Ordered Destroyed.”

  When the story broke on the afternoon of May 14, Taft was on the golf course. Ballinger and Lawler went at once to Wickersham’s office, where they suddenly “found” the missing Lawler memo and sent it to the committee. This unexpected discovery “a few minutes after the Kerby story was printed, will go down in history,” the Washington Times charged, “as one of the most remarkable coincidences of all time.” Few questioned Ballinger’s immediate dismissal of Kerby, but the secretary was widely criticized for his venomous public statement that charged the young stenographer with “treachery” and claimed that he was “unworthy” of public trust.

  On Sunday, Taft finally took up the matter personally. He wrote a public letter to Senator Knute Nelson, chair of the investigating committee, describing in full detail the circumstances under which he had prepared his September 13 letter. He acknowledged that he had, indeed, asked Lawler for a draft statement, but insisted th
at the resulting memo “did not state the case in the way [he] wished it stated.” It was filled with criticisms of both Pinchot and Glavis, which the president “did not think proper or wise to adopt.” In the end, while he found the references to the documents helpful, he incorporated only a few general statements. “The conclusions which I reached were based upon my reading of the record,” Taft maintained, “and were fortified by the oral analysis of the evidence and the conclusions, which the attorney general gave me.” Desiring to have a full record of the circumstances reach the public, he had asked Attorney General Wickersham to incorporate his findings into “a written statement,” backdated to September 11 and filed with the record. Occupied with other matters, Wickersham had not completed his analysis and summary until late October.

  The press praised both the president’s “manly” assumption of responsibility for the predating of the attorney general’s summary and his characteristic candor in narrating “the sequence of events from his meeting with Glavis to his exoneration of Brandeis.” A line-by-line comparison of the Lawler memo and Taft’s letter corroborated the president’s testimony that he had used only a few “unimportant” statements from the memo. “There was absolutely nothing wrong,” the Chicago Record-Herald observed, “in instructing a subordinate to prepare an opinion.” Nor was it questionable to use that opinion as a first draft, as was “done every day in public and private offices.” Nonetheless, the press generally agreed that “the people who had charge of the management of the Ballinger-Pinchot investigation for the administration” had “simply blundered to the limit.” Why did Wickersham wait to acknowledge the predating “until he was cornered?” Why was Ballinger so evasive on the witness stand? Why was the Lawler memo initially withheld from the committee? Why did Wickersham go to such lengths to conceal it? Why, if Kerby simply stated the facts that Taft himself later acknowledged, did Ballinger “fly into a rage” and call him a traitor? Each incident “came as a startling revelation,” observed the San Antonio Light and Gazette; taken together, they “shattered the last vestige of confidence in the good faith” of those involved. Many were also dismayed by the serial dismissals of those who opposed the administration: first Glavis; then Pinchot, Price, and Shaw; and now Kerby.

  When the hearings came to a close in late May, “the puzzled, unsatisfactory verdict” was that Interior Secretary Ballinger had “done nothing illegal.” The Washington Post observed that “not a single fact has been produced to show that he was even derelict in duty, much less corrupt.” Yet, as dozens of editorials pointed out, that finding could not restore the public confidence he had lost. “Rightly or wrongly,” a midwestern newspaper declared, “the great mass of the American people have come to look upon him with deep distrust.”

  Reflecting widespread sentiment, the Indianapolis Star called on Ballinger to resign. “His presence in the cabinet is a drag upon the administration,” the Emporia Gazette concurred. “He cannot be blind to the extraordinary courage which his chief has displayed in standing by him.” He should voluntarily lift “the burden” which the president had “carried long and unflinchingly.” The Outlook asserted that Ballinger could no longer “be regarded as a trustworthy custodian” of the public lands.

  An indignant Ballinger announced that he had no intention of stepping down. He had done nothing wrong and therefore was fully “justified in remaining at the head of his department.” Charley Taft tried to convince his brother to let Ballinger go, but the president refused. “Life is not worth living and office is not worth having,” Taft maintained, “if, for the purpose of acquiring the popular support, we have to do a cruel injustice or acquiesce in it.” The press, he believed, had “unjustly persecuted” a good man. The storm of criticism had “broken” Ballinger’s health. He looked two decades older than when he joined the cabinet. Taft deemed it his presidential duty to stand by his controversial interior secretary until Ballinger himself chose to leave.

  Nine additional months would pass before the secretary decided to resign. During that time, Taft and Ballinger finally succeeded in securing congressional support for a measure granting the president legal authority to withdraw public lands from private development. Backed by the new law, Taft’s withdrawals in four years “almost equaled that of Roosevelt” in seven. Conservationists hailed Taft’s appointment of Walter Fisher, head of the National Conservation League, to replace Ballinger. “His entrance into the Government service will unquestionably meet with strong public approval,” Gifford Pinchot said. “I speak with confidence for we have been working together for years.”

  The damage to the president’s political fortunes had been done, however. While some respected the loyalty the president had shown to his cabinet secretary, progressives believed that Taft should have dismissed Ballinger at the first sign of unfaithfulness to conservation causes. A president had “no right,” they argued, to put his own feelings above “the public welfare.” The bitter struggle had consumed the attention of the country for more than a year. Reformers’ faith in the president, already weakened by the tariff struggle, had plummeted. The split in the Republican Party appeared irreparable.

  “IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY BREAKING Up?”—Ray Baker’s provocative title—headlined the first in a series of influential articles in The American Magazine in the winter and spring of 1910, designed both to chronicle and aid the growing insurgent movement within the party. For nearly three weeks, Baker traveled through what he called “the skirmish lines in the Insurgent territory—Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin and Indiana.” He met with the rebels who had fought against the tariff and criticized Ballinger—Murdock of Kansas, Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, La Follette of Wisconsin, Clapp of Minnesota. Plans were evolving to run insurgent candidates against conservative Republicans in every district, even if the intraparty struggle ended up rewarding Democrats.

  By wresting power from the Old Guard, the progressives aimed to regulate the economy in the interests of the many as opposed to the interests of the few. Although Roosevelt had occasionally “dragooned” the Congress into supporting progressive policies through outside pressure, the party organization remained in conservative hands. Western insurgents intended to finish the job Roosevelt had begun. The conflict within the Republican Party was no longer regional. When Baker traveled to New England, which gave “at first a decided impression of political quietude,” he discovered that insurgency, while less developed in the East than in the West, was “following close behind.”

  From New England, he proceeded to Washington, just in time to witness the insurgents’ unexpected triumph over Speaker Cannon. After failing to unseat Cannon the year before, the insurgents had regrouped around a resolution to divest the Speaker of his autocratic grip on the party. Capitalizing on a moment during a sparsely attended all-night session, George Norris of Nebraska introduced a resolution to rescind the Speaker’s authority to appoint the Rules Committee. Instead, the entire House would elect the members of this most powerful body. The long debate that followed was “tense and dramatic.” Everyone understood that Joseph Cannon was “fighting the fight of his life for his political future and the integrity of the party machinery.” On the afternoon of March 19, Cannon “met his Waterloo.” Forty-three insurgent Republicans cooperated with 150 Democrats to pass the resolution. Though Cannon would retain his position, his reign would never again be absolute.

  “A real revolution is underway,” an emotional Baker told his father, “and it will not stop until government by trusts & special interests is wiped out.” In the months that followed, Baker continued to popularize the progressive cause. In a “case study” of Rochester, New York, home of the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, a towering figure in the Social Gospel movement, Baker “noted with pleasure the existence of a strong religious element working successfully within the reform movement.” This progressive uprising gave John Phillips what he had long been searching for—a central focus for the magazine. “We are naturally the insurgent magazine,” he
told William Allen White, “and we want to make The American Magazine more and more expressive in this movement.” He hoped that White would help sustain the movement for reform by following Baker’s lead with a series of “vigorous, stirring” political articles. He encouraged White to do anything possible to make the magazine “the organ and mouthpiece of the great liberal movement. This seems to me our opportunity.”

  White responded immediately to Phillips’s request. Kansas was host to a dramatic battle for control of the statewide party. As precinct leader and state committeeman, White had been lining up insurgent candidates to run against standpatters at every level. He believed the Republican Party was doomed unless it changed from within. White strove to vividly articulate for readers the insurgents’ vision of what the Republican Party stood for, even as he endeavored to gain control of the political machinery—through the institution of direct primaries, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. Only an informed and empowered populace could truly win the battle to regulate and control capital in the interests of the country as a whole.

  Ida Tarbell, too, lent her “powerful pen” to the insurgent cause. Unlike White, she never engaged directly in politics. Profoundly disappointed by the Payne-Aldrich tariff, which she considered “as hopeless a failure as a tariff could well be,” she embarked on a new series designed to reveal how “the same old circus, the same old gilded chariots, the same old clowns” had managed once again to hoodwink America. Her only solace, she later wrote, came from the “rousing challenge” Republican progressives had issued to the Old Guard. She was thrilled by their new style of debate, which, her colleague Ray Baker noted, replaced “the hazy generalities on the advantages of a protective tariff” with a detailed presentation of facts and evidence akin to the muckrakers’ investigative skills. During the long legislative struggle, Tarbell asserted, these insurgents had “crystallized into one of the most vigorous and intelligent fighting bands that had been seen for many years in Congress.” Their struggle would be fierce, she knew. Political pandering to special interests did not end with the tariff; the same intellect that “argues and fights for a Ballinger” is furious when a railroad rate is questioned and “can be counted on to support anybody’s privilege.” It was against these “ways of thinking,” prevalent in every realm of life, that progressives were fighting.