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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “My Hat Is in the Ring”

  In this Feb. 1912 cartoon, Roosevelt’s hat dwarfs all the others tossed in the “Presidential Ring.”

  THE COLONEL IS MUSSING UP the whole Progressive situation with his ‘To be or not to be,’ ” fretted Lincoln Steffens in January 1912. “He won’t make a statement. He talks to us privately, but not convincingly; at least not to all of us,” he wrote to a friend, resolving that in all probability, Roosevelt “simply isn’t clear himself. He’s undecided; wabbles and, of course, the Taft side makes the most of it. La Follette is bully. He is for the cause, not himself, and wants to act, at once, and in the best interest of ultimate results.” In truth, Roosevelt was far closer to a decision than Steffens realized. Continuing to insist that he would neither “seek the nomination” nor take a single step to secure it, Roosevelt softened his tone and told supporters that if “a genuine popular demand” for his nomination indicated conviction that he was “the man to do the job,” he would “of course” accept.

  “Events have been moving fast,” Roosevelt told Michigan governor Chase Osborn in mid-January, noting that “it is impossible for me much longer to remain silent.” Osborn was among more than half a dozen governors who were strongly urging him to run. In response, Roosevelt told Osborn he had come up with a plan: If the governors who had privately encouraged him would sign a joint public letter declaring their desire for him to run, he would answer their demand with an announcement of his candidacy. Roosevelt delegated the task of drafting the letter to Frank Knox, chairman of Michigan’s state central committee; after the Colonel added several lines emphasizing that the governors were acting “not for his sake, but for the sake of the country,” Knox was dispatched to secure the signatures.

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s friends began working surreptitiously to undermine La Follette’s campaign. A convention of Ohio progressives, expected to endorse La Follette, decided on a last-minute substitute resolution that pronounced the Wisconsin senator “the living embodiment of progressive principles,” but declined to express a preference “for a single candidate.” La Follette was furious at his campaign manager for agreeing to the compromise.

  On the night of January 22, La Follette spoke at Carnegie Hall before an overflow audience; crowds lining the streets had waited hours for the doors to open. “Carnegie Hall never held a bigger nor a more enthusiastic audience,” the New York Times reported. Seated on the platform were more than two hundred Insurgents’ Club members, including Gifford and Amos Pinchot, Ray Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Francis Heney. The passionate orator “got on good terms with the audience at once and never lost it,” the New York World observed. Afterward, a group of La Follette’s friends gathered at the Plaza Hotel for dinner. The celebratory mood quickly dissipated when the conversation turned to Theodore Roosevelt. Earlier that day, the Pinchot brothers had gone to see the former president and were now convinced that the Colonel would run. They worried that if La Follette remained in the race, the two men would divide the progressive vote. William Allen White had already switched his allegiance to Roosevelt, arguing in the Emporia Gazette that only the former president could save the Republicans from massive defeat. “Roosevelt or bust!” he proclaimed. Perhaps the time had come, La Follette’s friends suggested, for him to withdraw.

  The senator could no longer suppress his rage that Roosevelt had been using him as “a stalking horse” all along, testing President Taft’s political strength. “When Roosevelt left the White House,” La Follette charged, “he had 1916 firmly in his mind.” Yet the wild reception as the Colonel toured the country had “fired his blood. There were the old-time crowds, the music, the cheers. He began to think of 1912 for himself. It was four years better than 1916.” Regardless of Roosevelt’s ambitions, La Follette insisted, he would continue his own campaign.

  A week later, during a “painful” conference at the senator’s Washington home, the Pinchots redoubled their efforts to persuade La Follette to end his candidacy. The Pinchot brothers were among his most fervent supporters before Roosevelt’s name surfaced, and La Follette viewed their entreaties as a bitter betrayal. He told them he would persevere, even if he had to “fight alone,” even if he carried only Wisconsin. “When I gave my ultimatum, refusing to abandon the field,” La Follette later said, “Gifford Pinchot left my house and never crossed the threshold again.” The next morning, La Follette ordered his manager to release a statement: “Senator La Follette never has been and is not now a quitter,” the communiqué read, concluding, “He will be there until the gavel falls in the convention announcing the nominee.”

  For La Follette, trouble soon piled on trouble. Although mentally and physically exhausted, he was scheduled to speak on February 2 in Philadelphia at the annual banquet of the Periodical Publishers’ Association. There, he would join an impressive roster of speakers, including New Jersey’s new governor Woodrow Wilson, California governor Hiram Johnson, and Philadelphia mayor Rudolph Blankenburg. But five days before the event, doctors diagnosed his thirteen-year-old daughter with tuberculosis in three glands near her jugular vein. An operation to cut off the affected tissue was scheduled for the morning after the banquet. La Follette considered withdrawing from the engagement but feared his failure to show would signal an intention to withdraw from the race.

  La Follette arrived late, set to give the banquet’s closing speech. Wilson had earlier delivered the evening’s best speech, humorous, charming, and short. Before taking the stage at ten o’clock that night, La Follette “took a great gobletful of whiskey and swallowed it neat, as a stimulant.” He had prepared a provocative message for the magazine publishers—a warning that the same “money power” that had gained domination over the newspaper industry in recent decades was now threatening to corrupt independent periodicals through “the centralization of advertising.” After their staunch efforts to illuminate corruption, he trusted they would “not be found wanting” before this “final test.” They alone promised “to hold aloft the lamp of truth, lighting the way for the preservation of representative government.”

  Had La Follette focused his speech solely on this challenge to magazine journalists, he might have found an appreciative audience; instead, he began with a long historical lecture on how corporate interests had seized control of the newspapers, reducing journalists to hirelings “who no longer express honest judgments and sincere conviction,” writing only “what they are told to write.” La Follette encountered a response significantly less sympathetic than he might have hoped. In the enervating days preceding the banquet, he had neglected to inquire about the composition of the audience of eight hundred people. This particular annual dinner had been specifically calculated “to bring together the newspaper and magazine publishers.” For the first time, newspapermen made up a significant portion of the guests.

  La Follette immediately alienated his listeners by announcing that he would read his speech and give it out for publication, since he was “frankly sick of being eternally misquoted.” His voice grew “acid and raucous” as he berated the newspapermen as instruments of the “predatory interests.” Dumbfounded at first, the audience quickly grew angry. Scores of newspapermen simply rose and left. La Follette “shook his fist at them,” roaring: “There go some of the fellows I’m hitting. They don’t want to hear about themselves.” When another guest leaned over to whisper a comment to his neighbor, the senator pointed “his dagger-like forefinger” at the man, accusing him of accepting bribes from the trust, and hollered: “You’ve got to listen to me and hear the facts for once!” Attempting to return to his text after each of these fiery outbursts, La Follette repeatedly lost his place, rereading long passages he had already read. During the first two hours, he repeated one section seven times.

  As midnight approached, La Follette’s secretary, seated directly behind him, desperately tried to get him to stop. Increasing numbers left the room, and those who remained began to applaud with contemp
t, in hopes of bringing the interminable harangue to an end. “You can’t drown me out!” he defiantly shouted, threatening with renewed belligerence, “If you don’t shut up and listen I’ll talk all night!” By the end of the ordeal, the New York Times reporter sardonically noted, he “was denouncing the empty chairs” and “calling the abandoned cups and cigar stubs minions of the trust.” At twelve-thirty he collapsed in his chair, “with closed eyes and his chin sunk on his chest.”

  This humiliating episode was heartbreaking to Baker. He had expected La Follette to deliver “the greatest speech of his career—the speech with which he hoped to win the East.” Instead, the gifted orator had utterly lost control of himself and his emotions. “To those of us who were there and who were La Follette’s friends,” Baker grimly recalled, “it was a tragedy beyond tears.”

  Rumors circulated that La Follette had suffered a nervous breakdown and headed for a sanitarium. Dispirited and exhausted, he was nevertheless not only able to attend his daughter’s operation the following morning but also, after “a short rest,” return to the Senate. The damage to his campaign, however, proved irreparable. As he later acknowledged, his supposedly “shattered health” provided a pretext for hundreds of his supporters who wanted to “switch to Roosevelt” but would have felt guilty doing so. In a dramatic statement that captured headlines, Gifford Pinchot announced that he was abandoning La Follette, whose “ill health” compromised the progressive cause. “I shall,” he declared, “hereafter advocate the nomination of Colonel Roosevelt, whose duty I believe it is to take up the leadership of the progressive movement.”

  As La Follette and his wife, Belle, endured the gloomy days that followed, a gracious letter from Sam McClure provided a singular bright spot. “I want to let you know how much I sympathize with you and the Senator,” McClure assured Belle, adding that he had “listened with eager interest to all that he said.” Indeed, McClure’s had recently published a seven-part series, the “last great series” Sam McClure would publish, exploring the increasing “concentration of capital in the hands of a few men” on Wall Street—the very “money power” theme at the center of La Follette’s botched address.

  The senator’s speech, McClure told Mrs. La Follette, had simply started too late and lasted too long, preventing the crowd from giving it the “justice” it deserved. “Your letter,” Belle replied, “was very helpful to me, and to Mr. La Follette.” At its core, the speech had a powerful message, but her husband had been unable to deliver it due to his overwrought emotions. “I think in his state of over strain and exhaustion,” she explained, “the hostility he felt in his audience must have caused him to lose all self possession. Of course, he realizes what it means and suffers accordingly . . . I shall always remember your kindness and think of you as a friend.”

  “POOR SENATOR LA FOLLETTE,” ROOSEVELT wrote to his publicity chief, newspaperman John Callan O’Laughlin, after the debacle, attempting to justify his own late entrance into the race. “It is perfectly silly of him to feel hurt at me, and I wish you could bring out the fact that I have done absolutely nothing, that if ever there was a perfectly spontaneous and genuinely popular movement, this has been one . . . each and every one of [the governors] wrote to me out of a clear sky, saying that he was for me. Between ourselves, in more than one case I did not even know the Governor’s name until he wrote me.” Roosevelt’s protest was somewhat disingenuous. While the movement for his candidacy may have begun spontaneously, the Colonel was orchestrating every detail of how and when to respond publicly to the round-robin letter he himself had initiated. Having received an invitation to speak before the Ohio Constitutional Convention in Columbus two months earlier, he decided to use the occasion to present his platform before giving a formal answer to the governors’ request.

  By delaying his entry into the race, Roosevelt had similarly destabilized Taft’s position. “The trouble with the Colonel” had long overshadowed the White House “like a big, black cloud.” Throughout the early winter, Taft continued to hope that Roosevelt would ultimately decide against running. Otto Bannard, a friend to both men, believed that “the whole plan” was to effect Taft’s voluntary withdrawal, that if Roosevelt had to face the “handicap” of taking the nomination from a sitting president, he would not run. Indeed, Taft had not been happy in the presidency and seriously dreaded the prospect of open conflict with his old friend. Moreover, if he deferred to Roosevelt, he might have another shot at the Supreme Court. But the dignity of the presidency—and his duty to the people who elected him—ultimately prevented such a move. “I hate to be at odds with Theodore Roosevelt, who made me President,” he told Horace, to which he made an important addendum: “of course, he made me President and not deputy, and I have to be President; and I do not recognize any obligation growing out of my previous relations to step aside and let him become a candidate for a third term when he specifically declined a third term.”

  The period of uncertainty weighed with particular gravity on Archie Butt. “My devotion to the Colonel is as strong as it was the day he left,” he told Clara, but “I would not ask to be relieved from the President now if my whole life was at stake.” Day in and day out, Butt had been a constant companion to the president. Taft “is so honest, so big, and tries to be so just,” Butt said of his boss, “that it is hard for the people to get a proper perspective of him.” The affection, even love between the two men was mutual. “A President sees but very few people continuously in a confidential way,” Taft explained, “and his Aide has to be with him all the time.” For three years, Archie Butt had shared moments of sadness, anxiety, and joy. “I very much doubt whether I have ever known a man,” Taft declared, with such an empathetic gift “to put himself in the place of another, and suffer and enjoy with that other, as Archie Butt.”

  A few weeks after the mysterious warning from Alice Roosevelt that he should leave the White House soon, Archie received an open invitation from Edith Roosevelt to join the family at Oyster Bay. He wrote back to propose a visit the last Sunday in January, when he would be in New York with the president. “Delighted,” Edith responded by telegram. “Will expect you to lunch.” Despite the tensions of the upcoming election, Archie did not conceal such correspondence from Taft, telling the president he would like to accept the invitation. “Go by all means,” Taft replied. “It will cheer them, and I know will make you happy.”

  The visit, Archie recorded with delight, was “like a leaf out of an old book.” Logs were “glowing” in every fireplace; dogs were running “all over the house,” and the Colonel and Mrs. Roosevelt “were just the same dear people.” Archie sat with Edith by the fire for some time before the Colonel arrived. “We settled down to an old-time gossip,” Butt recalled, “Mrs. Roosevelt asking a hundred questions and I tripping up myself in my haste” to tell the latest stories of her Washington friends. Hearing their laughter, Roosevelt charged into the room, urging them to repeat their entertaining conversation. At lunch, Butt angled for some indication of Roosevelt’s plans, but the Colonel never “mentioned the president” nor “even asked about him,” leaping instead “from subject to subject with the agility of a flying squirrel.”

  “It is all a mystery to me,” Archie told Taft later that night, “but the fact that he would not send a message to you by me was significant.” No longer hopeful that Roosevelt would not run, Taft grew “more bitter every hour” about his former friend. “The clash which must follow between these two men is tragic,” Archie lamented. “It is moving now from day to day with the irresistible force of the Greek drama, and I see no way for anything save divine Providence to interpose to save the reputation of either should they hurl themselves at each other.”

  WHEN ROOSEVELT ARRIVED IN COLUMBUS, Ohio, on February 21, 1912, to deliver the speech heralded as his platform should he run for president, an enormous crowd of “cheering spectators” provided “a boisterous reception.” Sustained applause greeted his entrance to the rotunda and continued as he took his sea
t. His face, the president of the constitutional convention declared by way of introduction, was “more familiar than the face of the man in the moon.”

  “We Progressives believe,” Roosevelt began, “that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master, of the people.” All those who sought reform were engaged in an epic battle “on behalf of the common welfare,” a fight to ensure that the people’s wishes, rather than the special interests, propelled governmental decisions. “Unless representative government does absolutely represent the people it is not representative government at all,” he proclaimed. An advocate of “pure democracy,” he fully embraced the campaign to put additional “weapons in the hands of the people,” including direct primaries, the initiative, and the referendum.

  To the dismay of the Pinchot brothers, Roosevelt then proceeded to deploy his characteristic “balanced statements”: progressives must treat capital with the same justice as labor; they must “encourage legitimate and honest business,” even as they attacked “injustice and unfairness and tyranny in the business world,” and above all, he maintained, they must understand that “methods for the proper distribution of prosperity” were worthless “unless the prosperity is there to distribute.” He renewed his call for federal laws to regulate child labor and women’s working conditions, establish an income tax, and secure workmen’s compensation—all measures that many moderate Republicans could support.