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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Theodore Roosevelt was on a whirlwind speaking tour through the West when the tragic news of the disaster reached him. From Lindsberg, Kansas, he “paid tribute” to his former aide. “Major Butt was the highest type of officer and gentleman. He met his end as an officer and gentleman should, giving up his own life that others might be saved. I and my family all loved him sincerely.” For Alice Roosevelt, who was especially close to Archie, the loss was particularly painful. “I can’t believe it,” she repeatedly recorded in her diary. “I can’t believe it.”

  Taft immediately prepared for the journey to Augusta, Georgia, where he would speak at the memorial service in his devoted aide’s hometown. Shops were closed, flags flew at half-mast, and thousands gathered around the Grand Opera House hoping to hear the president speak. “Everybody knew Archie as Archie,” Taft began. “I cannot go into a box at a theater; I cannot turn around in my room; I can’t go anywhere without expecting to see his smiling face or to hear his cheerful voice in greeting. The life of the President is rather isolated, and those appointed to live with him come much closer to him than anyone else.” Before reaching the end of his prepared remarks, he broke down and could not finish.

  HEAVYHEARTED, TAFT ENDEAVORED TO RETURN to “a rush of activities” in preparation for the April 30 Massachusetts primary, which the press had deemed “the Gettysburg of the Republican presidential test.” If the president could not win the Bay State, “the very heart of the section where he is supposed to be the strongest,” commentators noted, “the curtain will ring down on his candidacy.” Fully aware of the stakes, Taft decided to buck the tradition that kept sitting presidents from campaigning on their own behalf, announcing that he would deliver his message “in person” to the people of Massachusetts.

  For weeks, Taft’s campaign advisers had argued that it was “absolutely essential” for him to “open fire” on the former president. Taft had refused, believing it undignified “to get down into the ring of crimination and recrimination.” The walloping he suffered in Illinois and Pennsylvania, however, persuaded him that the time had come to answer Roosevelt’s charges. His campaign announced that Taft would “explode a bomb” that would level Roosevelt’s false accusations. When he finished drafting his speeches, Taft circulated them to his cabinet at an “all night” session. Apparently, one Washington correspondent reported, “the President’s idea of severity was not as strong as that of some of his advisers.” Informed of the proposed attack, Roosevelt laughed. “Frightful,” he mockingly replied.

  The president’s train reached Springfield, Massachusetts, in the early afternoon of April 25. Speaking in a half-dozen small towns en route to Boston, where he would deliver his principal address that evening, Taft revealed acute discomfort at the need to defend himself “against the accusations of an old friend,” whom he “greatly admired and loved,” a man who had helped make him president. “This wrenches my soul,” he admitted. If the fight were purely personal, he would have remained silent, but it was his duty to represent “the cause of constitutionalism,” and he could not allow Roosevelt’s false charges to go unanswered. When he arrived at South Station, he learned that an immense crowd had already filled the new Boston Arena, with thousands more packed into Symphony Hall. Anticipation that he would deliver a fighting speech had revitalized his supporters.

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” Taft began, claims to believe “that every man is entitled to a square deal. I propose to examine the charges he makes against me, and to ask you whether in making them he is giving me a square deal.” With emotion in his voice, “throwing aside official reserve,” Taft proceeded to tell “the cold, naked truth about Theodore Roosevelt,” presenting hard evidence to counter each of his rival’s major accusations. He began by producing a transcript to prove that he had never stated, as Roosevelt repeatedly claimed, that “our Government is and should be a government of all the people by a representative part of the people.” In fact, he had pointed out that major segments of the population remained voiceless, while “the people” included only adult males, since women were not allowed to vote. Nor had he ever been a supporter of the disgraced Senator Lorimer, as Roosevelt well knew. To prove his point, Taft read out the letter to the Colonel in which he had suggested a joint strategy for removing Lorimer from the Senate. Yet another letter revealed Roosevelt’s dishonorable opportunism: while the reciprocity agreement was being hammered out with Canada, Roosevelt had written to tell Taft that it was “admirable from every standpoint.” Yet facing the opposition of angry farmers, the Colonel had hastily revised his position. Taft pushed relentlessly onward, refuting each of eleven accusations Roosevelt had made against him in the course of the campaign.

  Nearly two hours had passed before Taft reached his peroration, which included “a solemn warning to the American people” regarding “the danger of a third presidential term.” Mr. Roosevelt, he stated, “is convinced that the American people think that he is the only one to do the job.” Though Roosevelt had never articulated “exactly” what that job entailed, the ambitious plans outlined in his Columbus platform could not possibly be completed in four years. “We are left to infer, therefore, that ‘the job’ which Mr. Roosevelt is to perform is one that may take a long time, perhaps the rest of his natural life. There is not the slightest reason why, if he secures a third term, and the limitation of the Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson tradition is broken down, he should not have as many terms as his natural life will permit.” Taft concluded with an ominous question, implying the full danger of granting Roosevelt an unprecedented third term: “If he is necessary now to the Government, why not later?”

  The audience, which had “loudly cheered” Taft throughout the entire speech as “each item was submitted to the square deal balance and found wanting,” received his final words “with a storm of endorsement.” As his advisers had urged, William Taft had finally struck back. “He had cause for exhilaration,” his biographer remarked, but “weariness and depression were the only sensations he felt.” Informed that evening that several hundred bodies, recovered from the icy waters near the site where the Titanic went down, were being taken to Halifax, Taft had dispatched an Army official to the city wharf “to scrutinize” every victim, “in the hope of recovering” the body of Archie Butt. After his speech at the Arena, Taft stopped at Symphony Hall to meet the overflow crowd. It was after midnight by the time he returned to his private car. Spent, he “slumped over,” and despite the presence of a journalist, “began to weep.”

  In sharp contrast, Theodore Roosevelt was in great spirits as he prepared his own Boston speech, scheduled for delivery at Mechanics Hall the very next night. “If they are anxious for a fight they can have it,” he blasted, as he flung aside his earlier draft to respond to Taft’s allegations. Incited by his belligerent tone, “the crowd was keyed up” from the start. They stamped in unison, shouting: “Hit him between the eyes! Soak him! Put him over the ropes!” The Colonel did not disappoint, delivering what the New York Times called a “merciless denunciation” of his former friend, “flaying the President in one scathing sentence after another.” With each thrust Roosevelt delivered, the audience “howled with delight,” spurring him onward. Roosevelt dismissed Taft’s square deal comment out of hand. “Taft has not only been disloyal to our past friendship, but he has been disloyal to every canon of decency and fair play,” he countered. “He only discovered I was dangerous to the people when I discovered he was useless to the people.” Insisting that a gentleman’s unpardonable sin is to publish a letter marked “confidential,” the Colonel claimed that the president was guilty of “the crookedest kind of deal.” Categorically, he stated, “I care nothing for Taft’s personal attitude toward me.”

  “This is our first presidential campaign under the preference primary plan,” the New York Times editorialized two days later. “We hope it may be our last. The spectacle presented by the fierce fight for the nomination is one that must be amazing to foreigners, it is one that should bring a
blush of shame to the cheek of every American.” The old system, the Times continued, under which candidates were “content to await the action of the convention” and appeal to the people in a formal acceptance speech, “was a rational, a seemly procedure.” Under this new system, “we are no longer a people, but a mob.”

  On April 30, the Massachusetts voters granted Taft a narrow victory, but six days later, Roosevelt captured Maryland, and the following week California. Then came the battle for Ohio, which brought both men to the Buckeye State for ten days of hard campaigning. Traveling thousands of miles by train from one corner of the state to the other, Taft and Roosevelt sometimes found themselves playing “rival matinees in the same towns.” With each passing day, the tone of the campaign degenerated further. Roosevelt called the president a “puzzlewit” and a “fathead,” while Taft railed against his rival’s egotism. “You’d suppose there was not anybody in the country to do this job he talks about but himself,” the president ridiculed. “It’s I, I, I, all the time with him.” Robert La Follette, having traveled to Ohio after a surprisingly good showing in California, joined in the bitter attacks, focusing most of his ire on Roosevelt. While some people found “the spectacle of a President and ex-President hurling personal abuse at each other” unseemly, “the attacks of one on the other won the loudest applause everywhere.”

  “It is about as painful for me as it possibly could be,” Taft confessed as the contest in Ohio drew near. “At least, if it is settled against me, it will be finally settled,” he told his Aunt Delia. “I have had a long and, I hope, an honorable career, and one in which good fortune has been with me at many crises. If now, fortune is to desert me for a time or permanently, it is my business to stand it, and I hope I have the courage to do so.” Roosevelt, by contrast, found pleasure in every aspect of the campaign. He reveled in the sight of the enormous crowds that greeted him at every stop; he enjoyed going after his rival, bantering with the press, talking with local officials. “He is having a perfectly corking time,” one reporter noted, “and has said so a dozen times.”

  On May 21, a jubilant Roosevelt carried the state of Ohio by a margin of 55 percent to 39 percent of the popular vote. Beating Taft in his own state had “settled the contest,” he predicted. “It will be hopeless to try to beat us” at the convention. A week later, Roosevelt carried both New Jersey and South Dakota, bringing the primary season to an end. In nine of the thirteen states where direct primaries had been held, Roosevelt had won overwhelming victories. Taft had carried only New York and Massachusetts. La Follette had secured North Dakota and Wisconsin. The total popular vote for Roosevelt stood at 1,214,969, while Taft secured 865,835 votes and La Follette 327,357.

  “I have had so many jolts,” the despondent Taft told Horace—bespeaking a battering far beyond the political arena, to intimate his sorrow over the ugly estrangement from Theodore Roosevelt and a profound grief for his lost companion Archie Butt—“that I am not worrying over it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Bosom Friends, Bitter Enemies”

  “His Back to the Wall,” a June 3, 1912, New York World cartoon, dramatizes the tumultuous battle between Taft and Roosevelt for the Republican presidential nomination.

  TO OBSERVERS ACROSS THE NATION and even overseas, it was clear an unprecedented challenge to President Taft was well under way. “A month ago practically every impartial observer believed that Mr. Roosevelt had no chance,” The Times of London noted as the primary season drew to an end. “Now, however, it is admitted on all hands that he has a chance.” As Republicans completed preparations to meet in Chicago in mid-June to choose their nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan predicted that the Republican National Convention of 1912 would be “the most exciting ever held in the history of the country.” Not only were the main contenders “once bosom friends” who had become “bitter enemies,” but the country had “never before” witnessed a fight for the nomination between a president and an ex-president.

  “Each side makes confident assertions,” one correspondent for the New York Tribune remarked, “but each side secretly is scared stiff.” Roosevelt steadfastly maintained that the people had already spoken. The vast majority of primary voters had chosen him, furnishing a significant percentage of the 540 delegates he needed to secure the nomination; the convention, he confidently asserted, would “not dare to oppose the will of the majority,” because to do so “would mean ruin to the Republican Party.” The president, however, had far greater support in states where party organizations retained control of the selection process. Taft believed he had accumulated enough delegates in non-primary states to win at Chicago. In truth, neither campaign arrived in the Windy City with enough votes to take the nomination on the first ballot. “No man in this city, nor any man in this hemisphere,” the Tribune reporter figured, “knows absolutely who will be nominated for President.”

  Before the convention could begin its proceedings, the Republican National Committee had to settle disputes over 254 seats. These contested seats represented more than half the votes necessary for victory and the turbulent nomination fight had generated scores of rival delegations. Meeting in Chicago twelve days before the convention, the committee was charged with determining the legitimacy of the competing claims. Lawyers from both sides were prepared with detailed affidavits, but there, the New York Sun noted, resemblance to a civilized courtroom setting would likely end. Emotions were running high, the paper declared, and “the lawyers and witnesses and contestants are liable to break out into fisticuffs and thump each other around the committee room.” There were “some contests, of course, Roosevelt ought to win,” Taft acknowledged, but he believed the vast majority of the disputes brought by the Colonel’s campaign had been intended merely to generate publicity. Most important, the National Committee comprised loyal Taft supporters whom Roosevelt would not be able to “frighten or bulldoze.”

  To Roosevelt’s detriment, the first contests to be decided were from the South, where Taft had legitimately secured most of the delegates before his opponent even entered the race. The Roosevelt campaign had never expected to win these contests; indeed, they had been instituted simply to keep Taft’s delegate count from appearing insurmountable before the northern primaries commenced. When these early cases came before the committee, even Roosevelt’s men voted to seat the Taft delegates, conceding that in most instances “the contestants had failed to make out a case.”

  In Oyster Bay, Roosevelt followed the hearings with dismay, anxious that decisions in Taft’s favor would begin to sound all too “familiar.” In one Alabama district where Roosevelt had a reasonable case for seating two of his delegates, the committee nonetheless assigned the two places to Taft, confirming his fears. Roosevelt issued a fierce denouncement of the decision, charging that men had “been sent to the penitentiary for less reprehensible election frauds than the theft of that delegation.” The Colonel’s bombastic statement succeeded in riveting public attention on the actions of the National Committee. While the public outcry stiffened the spine of his supporters, it simultaneously hardened the attitudes of the Taft committeemen. On subsequent rulings in critical contests in Washington, Indiana, Texas, and California, the committee divided along straight partisan lines, with thirty-nine members consistently voting for Taft’s delegates, fourteen for Roosevelt’s.

  Even impartial observers agreed that in the cases of Washington and Indiana, the committee’s decisions complied with “neither justice nor logic.” In Washington, the first primaries ever held in Spokane, Tacoma, and Seattle favored Roosevelt by two-to-one and sometimes ten-to-one margins. Overwhelming support in these populous areas should have secured him a majority of the state’s fourteen delegates; but when evidence of fraud and “irregularities” in the city primaries surfaced at the hearings, the National Committee decided it had no choice but to stand by the proceedings of the state party organization, which had selected Taft. In Indiana, the committee “reversed itself,” declining
to examine a series of questionable district primaries in which Taft had emerged the clear victor. Though Roosevelt’s team demonstrated that repeat voting had occurred and that some Indianapolis ballots had not been counted, the committee claimed that it was too late to relitigate the election results.

  The National Committee’s decision to award the majority of the Texas delegates to Taft represented what many considered the most glaring violation of “fair play.” Texas was the sole southern state where the leader of the state party, Cecil Andrew Lyon, was a Roosevelt man. Lyon had accompanied the Colonel on his hunting trip in 1905 and remained a personal friend. At the state convention, Lyon engineered a solid victory for Roosevelt. The committee acknowledged that the Roosevelt delegation had been legally chosen according to party rules but claimed that the rival Taft delegation, selected at a rump convention, had greater popular support. Seating the Taft delegation, the committee argued, was an important step toward eliminating “boss rule” in the state of Texas. California was one of the last contests the committee considered. The hearing should have been simple: the California legislature had passed a primary law calling for delegates to be elected at large. Roosevelt, who had won the state by a margin of 77,000 votes, argued he was entitled to all twenty-six of the state’s delegates. Taft had carried one district—the 4th congressional district of San Francisco. The committee gave the two San Francisco seats to Taft.

  The rhetoric from both campaigns grew more vitriolic with each passing day. Taft’s campaign manager, William McKinley, claimed that the Roosevelt forces were taking “desperate measures” to forestall the inevitability of Taft’s nomination on the first ballot. It was “common knowledge,” McKinley asserted, that several Negro delegates from the South had been “brazenly approached” by Roosevelt men “with offers of money” to switch their allegiance to the Colonel. “I dare them to name any of our men involved in bribery,” Senator Joseph Dixon retorted. “McKinley is like a cuttlefish,” he added, “that muddies the water that its own hideousness may not be seen.”