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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Only when grave illness hospitalized Roosevelt in early February 1918 did the possibility open for a genuine reconciliation. Learning that the Colonel was enduring an operation to remove a fistula much like the ordeal he had suffered through when he was governor general, Taft sent him a sympathetic telegram. “I know something of the pain and discomfort he is passing through,” Taft wrote to Nellie, adding that from “the tone of the dispatches,” he suspected that Roosevelt’s condition was far more serious than his own had been. In fact, the Colonel had never recovered from malaria contracted during his expedition to the River of Doubt, leaving him prone to fever and infection. During this most recent bout of fever, a rectal abscess had developed, along with abscesses in both ears. The surgery to remedy these conditions proved successful, but persistent fever and severe nausea required him to remain in the hospital for almost a month. His first communication was a telegram to Taft. “Am rather rocky, but worth several dear Men,” he jested. “Greatly touched and Pleased by Your Message.”

  This written exchange, the first in six years, led Roosevelt to send Taft a draft of a speech he would deliver in late March. An indictment of Wilson’s handling of America’s participation in World War I, the piece was entitled “Speed up the War and Take Thought for After the War.” It criticized the administration for “sluggishness in making war,” and called “for longer hours of work in war plants” as well as for “universal military training—to be continued after the war.” Taft wholeheartedly concurred with Roosevelt’s critique of Wilson’s wartime leadership. He carefully read the draft and made two recommendations. “I have embodied both of those suggestions,” Roosevelt wrote in response. “I think them capital. I am rather ashamed I never thought of them myself, and I am malevolently pleased that neither Root nor Lodge thought of them!”

  These cordial exchanges renewed Taft’s optimism that Roosevelt might finally be ready to reconcile. Hurrying across the Blackstone’s dining room, which was bustling with nearly a hundred diners, he spotted the Colonel at a small table by the corner window. “Theodore!” he exclaimed. “I am glad to see you!” Roosevelt rose from his seat and grasped Taft’s shoulders. “Well, I am indeed delighted to see you. Won’t you sit down?” All across the room, customers rose from their dinners and waitstaff paused, “recognizing the significance of the meeting.” Suddenly, the chamber erupted into applause. New York Tribune reporter John Leary, who was traveling with Roosevelt, heard the loud ovation from the lobby. Joined by curious members of the hotel staff, he started up the stairs leading to the dining room. Encountering a patron who had witnessed the hoopla, he asked what had incited the outburst. “T.R. and Taft’s got together,” the man explained. “They’re holding an old-home week.”

  “By Godfrey, I never was so surprised in my life,” Roosevelt later told Leary. “I no more thought of him being in Chicago than in Timbuctoo. But wasn’t it a gracious thing for him to do?” There was so much commotion when they first greeted each other, he explained, that he could hardly hear what Taft was saying. “I don’t mind telling you how delighted I am,” Roosevelt added. “I never felt happier over anything in my life. It was splendid of Taft.”

  The two men talked together “like a pair of happy schoolboys” until Roosevelt had to depart to catch the night train to Des Moines. “Taft was beaming,” one witness reported, “and Colonel Roosevelt, leaning half across the table, was expressing himself very earnestly.” Meeting Leary on the way out, Taft could not disguise his elation. “Isn’t he looking splendid?” he said. “I never saw him looking much better.” Asked about the nature of their conversation, Taft simply replied that they “discussed patriotism and the state and welfare of the Nation.” His smile suggested that a far more important exchange had occurred. Describing the meeting a week later to Henry Stimson, Roosevelt confided that at long last they had “completely renewed the old friendly relations.”

  SEVEN MONTHS LATER, ON CHRISTMAS Day, 1918, after a six-week hospital stay for a severe attack of inflammatory rheumatism, Theodore Roosevelt returned to convalesce at Sagamore Hill. Though delighted to be back in his beloved home, he was still in considerable pain. Doctors predicted a full recovery, but Edith hired a nurse to attend to his medical needs and contacted James Amos, the black valet who had served Roosevelt in the White House. Her husband, she explained to Amos, would not allow “anyone else” to help, but they understood that it might be difficult for him to come. Amos never hesitated. He packed a suitcase and made arrangements to remain by Roosevelt’s side as long as he was needed.

  By the following Sunday morning, January 5, 1919, Roosevelt “seemed better again.” Comfortably situated in “the warmest room in the house,” the large bedroom that had once been the children’s nursery, he dictated letters and proofread an editorial for Metropolitan magazine, calling on the country to give women the right to vote. “There should be no further delay,” he emphatically stated. The war was over. The time had come to focus on domestic issues. “It is an absurdity to longer higgle about the matter.”

  Together, Edith and Theodore passed “a happy and wonderful day,” she later recalled. He had long treasured the view of the water from that corner room, and “as it got dusk, he watched the dancing of waves & spoke with happiness of being home and made little plans for me. I think he had made up his mind,” she wrote, “that he would have to suffer for some time to come and with his high courage had adjusted himself to bear it. He was very sweet all day.”

  At around ten o’clock that night, Theodore told Edith he felt a curious “sensation of depression about the chest,” almost as though his heart were preparing to stop. “I know it is not going to happen,” he assured her, “but it is such a strange feeling.” Edith called their family physician, Dr. George Faller, who “examined him carefully, found no indication of anything wrong with heart and lungs, and after giving him a slight stimulant, left him.” While Edith prepared to retire, Amos helped Roosevelt get settled for the night. The Colonel remained for a short time on the sofa before turning to his valet. “James, don’t you think I might go to bed now?” Amos took off Roosevelt’s robe and “had almost to lift him into bed.” Edith returned to give her husband a good night kiss, after which Roosevelt said, “James, will you please put out the light?”

  Edith came to check on her husband shortly after midnight, and again two hours later. Finding him in a “peaceful slumber,” she departed for her room. Amos rested in a chair not far from the bed. Shortly before four o’clock, the valet was alarmed by the sound of “irregular breathing.” Roosevelt’s respiration “seemed to stop,” he later said. “Then it resumed again and paused again.” Amos rushed to summon the nurse and alerted Mrs. Roosevelt. By the time Edith reached his room, Theodore was dead. Doctors later confirmed that Roosevelt had died in his sleep from a coronary embolism. “Death had to take him sleeping,” Vice President Thomas Marshall cabled from Washington, “for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”

  RAY BAKER, IDA TARBELL, AND William Allen White were all in Paris on separate assignments covering the Armistice and the Versailles Peace Conference when news of Roosevelt’s death reached Europe. Their “brave little adventure” in creating a writer’s magazine dedicated to serious public issues had failed. Relentless money troubles had forced John Phillips to sell The American Magazine to a big publishing house, which pressured the writers to satisfy advertisers’ demands for popular pieces. “The test of the stories,” Baker lamented, became not whether they were “good literature” or important contributions to national discourse, but whether they would attract 600,000 readers. Prize contests were introduced, along with stories of romance and marriage. Baker had been tempted to leave in 1912, when the new publishers demanded that he remove a sentence critical of the business community. Loyalty to his colleagues had kept him on board for three additional years until he could no longer abide the way his literary ambitions were continuously “strangled by commercial considerations” and finally resign
ed. In short order, Tarbell, Phillips, and White also resigned.

  White and Tarbell had been sent to Paris by the Red Cross Magazine, where John Phillips was now the editor. Ray Baker was serving President Wilson as press liaison, assigned to give daily briefings to over one hundred American correspondents who had journeyed overseas to report on the peace conference. Tarbell observed that Baker managed his demanding job with such “absolute fairness” that even “the tongues of some of the most bumptious” journalists were “silenced.” The three old colleagues had taken rooms in the Hôtel de Vouillemont, located just off the Place de la Concorde not far from the headquarters of the American Peace Commission. “There were hours when it seemed like a gathering in the office of the old American Magazine,” Tarbell recalled, “so natural and intimate it was.”

  White was at breakfast when he read of Theodore Roosevelt’s death in the Paris Herald’s morning edition. “Again and again I looked at the headlines to be sure that I was reading them correctly,” he recalled. Just then, Ray Baker arrived, carrying the same paper. “Ray, Ray, the Colonel is dead—Roosevelt!” White cried. “Yes, Will,” Baker responded, sadly embracing him. “It’s a great blow. We are all sorry.” Soon Ida Tarbell joined them, White recalled, and the three “sat down to talk it all over, and get used to a world without Roosevelt in it.”

  WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT WAS AMONG the five hundred guests invited to attend Roosevelt’s private funeral service, held in the modest Episcopal church in Oyster Bay. “It was my father’s wish,” Archie Roosevelt explained, “that the funeral service be conducted entirely by those friends among whom he had lived so long and happily.” After their fortuitous meeting at the Blackstone Hotel, Roosevelt and Taft had resumed their old habit of intimate, friendly correspondence, sending each other drafts of speeches, commenting on articles, sharing thoughts on the central issues of the day. Visiting Roosevelt in the hospital in late November, Taft had discovered with delight that they were in essential accord on the need for a league of nations to enforce the postwar peace. Snow had fallen the morning that Theodore Roosevelt was laid to rest, but the sun had come out by the time Taft arrived at the church. “You’re a dear personal friend,” Archie said, taking him by the hand and directing him to a pew in the front. Though the half-hour service had “no pomp, no ceremony,” no singing or music, its very simplicity, one mourner observed, made it “profoundly impressive.”

  The village bells tolled as mourners followed the casket up the hill to the gravesite where “a mound of flowers hid the freshly-turned earth.” According to an old “widow’s custom,” Edith Roosevelt attended neither funeral nor burial. Though she would live to the age of eighty-seven, she had lost the only man she would ever love, the man, she had told Theodore, she loved “with all the passion of a girl who had never loved before.”

  As Theodore Roosevelt’s casket was lowered into the ground, “an isolated figure” stood “quite apart from the others,” William Howard Taft, softly crying. “I want to say to you,” Taft later told Roosevelt’s sister Bamie, “how glad I am that Theodore and I came together after that long painful interval. Had he died in a hostile state of mind toward me, I would have mourned the fact all my life. I loved him always and cherish his memory.”

  AT NOON ON OCTOBER 3, 1921, sixty-four-year-old William Howard Taft finally secured the position he had long desired “as strongly as a man can ever want anything.” The death of Chief Justice Edward White the previous May had created a vacancy that President Warren Harding was happy to fill with the former chief executive. In a ceremony witnessed by Nellie and dozens of old friends, Taft took the judicial oath “to administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” Reporters noted that “the famous Taft Smile” was irresistible as friends and colleagues “rushed up to congratulate him.” After the ceremony, Taft and Nellie joined the other justices and their families at a White House reception. “This is the greatest day of my life,” the new chief justice of the United States declared.

  “The people of the United States greet Mr. Taft in his new role,” The Washington Post editorialized the following day. “Their good wishes will not be inspired solely by their abiding faith in his wisdom and justice, but also by the fact that they like him personally. His popularity throughout the country has grown from the day, nearly ten years ago, when the fortunes of political warfare went overwhelmingly against him and, instead of permitting defeat to sour his nature or crush his spirit, he accepted his lot philosophically and with a smile.”

  The public trust was not misplaced. Under Taft’s able leadership, “antiquated” court procedure was streamlined, “speeding up” and greatly improving the delivery of justice throughout “the whole system of federal courts.” And through his “great skill and patience,” Taft finally secured from Congress the funds to construct a separate building for the Supreme Court, allowing the justices to move from the “old Senate chamber” to the classic marble structure that graces Washington today. As Taft had always suspected, the position of chief justice was more suited to his mind and temperament than the presidency had ever been. Fulfilled at work and happy at home, he embarked upon a successful regime of diet and exercise, bringing his weight down to less than 250 pounds, a reasonable weight for a man of his stature and proportions. Years of obesity, however, had already damaged his health. On February 3, 1930, escalating heart trouble forced his resignation from the job he had loved more than any other. “We call you Chief Justice still,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a week later on behalf of his colleagues, “for we cannot give up the title by which we have known you all these later years and which you have made so dear to us . . . you showed us in new form your voluminous capacity for getting work done, your humor that smoothed the tough places, your golden heart that brought you love from every side and most of all from your brethren whose tasks you have made happy and light.”

  Just over a month after he left the bench, on March 8, 1930, William Howard Taft was dead. Nellie Taft, whose catastrophic illness had left her husband bereft of his most valuable ally and altered his presidency in ways the public never comprehended, would live thirteen years more, dying just short of her eighty-second birthday.

  DURING THE 1920S AND THE 1930s, the members of the original McClure’s magazine staff continued to celebrate each other’s birthdays. Such was the “unbreakable quality in friendship,” Ida Tarbell marveled, that despite the bitter 1906 split, the core group could not be permanently alienated. “You pick up at the day when the friendship was—not broken but interrupted,” she observed. Year after year, the “old Crowd” would convene, reviving “a hundred, yes a thousand memories” of the days that had proved the most fulfilling of their lives—the idealistic time when they genuinely believed, in Ray Baker’s words, that they were “saving the world.” Sustained by passion and optimism, they “muck-raked never to destroy, but with utter faith in reason and progress”; they “criticized in full confidence that, once understood, evils would be speedily corrected.” None of them had truly realized, Baker later acknowledged to Lincoln Steffens, how “hard-boiled” the world really was.

  At each of these collective birthday celebrations, Sam McClure, then in his seventies and eighties, was “the star of the evening.” He would recount his personal history with such charm—his impoverished youth, his marriage to Hattie when his weekly salary was only twelve dollars, his eventual triumph “storming the sacred citadels in the publishing business”—that his listeners were riveted as if the tale were novel. His “old fire” flared up, Tarbell was happy to see. “We sat enthralled,” she wrote, as McClure “enlarged on his latest enthusiasm, marveling as always at the eternal youthfulness in the man, the failure of life to quench him.”

  After John Phillips was unable to attend one of these gatherings, Tarbell wrote to tell him how much he had been missed, how they all realized that he was the one, during all those years, who had kept the McClure’s “flame steady and lasting.” R
evisiting “that wonderful adventure we all had together,” Phillips confessed to Ray Baker, was “almost like a physical pain—not because of you and me and so on. But because of this country, and because those sincere attempts, to do something in reporting and interpretation of what was good and sound and progressive, seemed lost and forgotten.” Still, he hoped that other “times of awakening” lay ahead, that a new generation of journalists would be drawn to the work that “seemed once almost a mission and a call.”

  1. Theodore Roosevelt as a Harvard sophomore in 1878. Never content to sit still and listen, he constantly posed questions in class until one professor cut him short: “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk. I’m running this course.”

  2. Known to his admiring Yale classmates as “Big Bill,” Taft’s affable disposition made him one of the most popular men on campus. His fellow students elected him class orator in 1877, an honor considered “the greatest prize in college.”

  3. Young Will Taft, perched on a gatepost in the foreground, grew up with four brothers and one sister in this substantial, two-story yellow brick house in a fashionable neighborhood of Cincinnati.

  4. When the Roosevelt family returned from a yearlong tour of Europe and the Mediterranean in 1873, they moved into a stately mansion on West 57th Street in Manhattan that boasted a magnificent library, pictured, and a fully equipped gymnasium.

  5. Intimate childhood friendships flourished between Edith Carow (seated on the ground) and the Roosevelt siblings Teedie, Corinne, and Elliott (top left to right) during their vacations at Tranquillity, a beloved summer retreat on Long Island.