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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  the accomplishments of his boys: Charles P. Taft to WHT, May 21, 1890, WHTP.

  “Can you not”: Alphonso Taft to WHT, Jan. 10, 1891, WHTP.

  “His vitality”: WHT to HHT, May 18, 1891, WHTP.

  “He seems to trust me”: WHT to HHT, May 10, 1891, WHTP.

  “noble boy . . . avoided this by suicide”: WHT to HHT, May 29, 1891, WHTP.

  did not want the general public to be inconvenienced: Sandusky [OH] Daily Register, June 4, 1891.

  “I trust you”: Charles Taft to WHT, April 4, 1891, WHTP.

  a “ludicrous . . . rapidity of movement”: WHT to HHT, June 1, 1891, WHTP.

  “Springy and I”: TR to ARC, June 20, 1891, in TR, Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, p. 118.

  “We are just as”: TR to HCL, July 1, 1891, in LTR, Vol. 1, p. 255.

  “I see that I got ahead”: Pringle, Life and Times, Vol. 1, p. 120.

  “nervous and fidgety” assistance: TR to HCL, June 19, 1891, in LTR, Vol. 1, p. 253.

  “Can you dine”: TR to WHT, Aug. 19, 1891, in ibid., p. 258.

  “It is a perfect nightmare”: TR to ARC, Jan. 24, 1890, TRC.

  “Elliott must be put”: TR to ARC, May 2, 1890, TRC.

  “He is evidently”: TR to ARC, June 17, 1891, TRC.

  ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT: Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884–1933 (New York: Viking, 1992), p. 67.

  “emphatically . . . adjudge him one”: Cited in Washington Post, Aug. 22, 1891.

  “The horror”: TR to ARC, Sept. 1, 1891, TRC.

  “jumped out of the”: CRR to ARC, Aug. 15, 1894, ARC Papers.

  “the sunniest” child: Henry Taft to Alphonso Taft, June 3, 1889, WHTP.

  “great comfort . . . whom everyone loved”: TR to CRR, Aug. 29, 1894, in LTR, Vol. 1, p. 397.

  “of whom we are really fond”: TR to ARC, Jan. 7, 1894, in ibid., p. 345.

  “merry blue eyes”: WAW, “Taft, A Hewer of Wood,” American Magazine (April 1908), p. 24.

  “in the line of promotion”: WHT to Alphonso Taft, Mar. 18, 1891, WHTP.

  “have stirred up”: Ibid.

  “the man whom . . . years of hard work”: WHT to Howard Hollister [n.d.], WHTP.

  “would be very glad”: Ibid.

  “entirely philosophical . . . legion”: WHT to Alphonso Taft, Mar. 18, 1891, WHTP.

  “settled for good”: HHT, Recollections of Full Years, p. 22.

  “fixed in a groove”: Ibid., p. 30.

  “very much opposed”: WHT to Alphonso Taft, Mar. 7, 1891, WHTP.

  “It seems to me now”: WHT to HHT, June 1, 1891, WHTP.

  “If you get your heart’s”: HHT to WHT, July 18, 1891, WHTP.

  “hardly a soul”: WHT to HHT, July 18, 1891, WHTP.

  “You will regard my failure”: WHT to HHT, May 10, 1891, WHTP.

  “I hate that”: HHT to WHT, July 14, 1891, WHTP.

  “It would be very easy”: Ibid.

  “I am not a bit happy”: HHT to WHT, Aug. 18, 1890, WHTP.

  “I love you ever”: HHT to WHT, Aug. 27, 1890, WHTP.

  “when we were first married”: HHT to WHT, May 23, 1893, WHTP.

  “simply crazy about”: HHT to WHT, Sept. 7, 1890, WHTP.

  “the dearest child”: HHT to WHT, Sept. 1, 1891, WHTP.

  His eating habits: HHT to WHT, Aug. 18, 1890, WHTP.

  “I seem to care much more”: HHT to WHT, July 13, 1891, WHTP.

  “Don’t make your brief”: HHT to WHT, Sept. 21, 1891, WHTP.

  “The press notices”: Henry W. Taft to WHT, Dec. 18, 1891, WHTP.

  “one of the most popular”: Washington Post, Dec. 17, 1891.

  “no man could have been”: Washington Post, Dec. 20, 1891.

  “Aside from”: Horace Taft to WHT, Jan. 12, 1892, WHTP.

  “One of the sweetest things”: WHT to Howard Hollister, Dec. 21, 1891, WHTP.

  “I feel so good”: WHT to HHT, Mar. 17, 1892, WHTP.

  “The two years”: WHT to William Miller, March [n.d.], 1892, WHTP.

  relinquish the “pleasant life”: EKR to Emily Carow, Mar. 7, 1893, TRC.

  “Our places are still”: EKR to Emily Carow, Mar. 7, 1893, TRC.

  “elected by the people” to Congress: EKR to Emily Carow, Nov. 14, 1893, TRC.

  “a dream never to be realized”: EKR to Emily Carow, Oct. 16, 1892, TRC.

  “He is now”: Ibid.

  “nonsense” . . . his true concerns: Ibid.

  “could do most . . . success awaits me”: TR to ARC, Aug. 16, 1893, TRC.

  “the moving spirit . . . to deal with Democrats”: New York Evening Post, May 5, 1893, Clipping Scrapbook, TRC.

  “It was practically”: EKR to ARC, Feb. 3, 1894, Derby Papers, TRC.

  “hope of going on”: TR to HCL, Oct. 24, 1894, in TR and H. W. Brands, eds., The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), p. 96.

  “they simply could not . . . lost the election?”: Lilian Rixey, Bamie: Theodore Roosevelt’s Remarkable Sister (New York: David McKay Co., 1963), p. 81.

  “big, bustling New York”: EKR to HCL, Oct. 27, 1895, Lodge-Roosevelt Correspondence, Massachusetts Hist. Soc.

  “into one of her reserved”: Rixey, Bamie, p. 81.

  “The last four weeks”: TR to HCL, Oct. 24, 1894, in The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 96.

  “I cannot begin”: EKR to ARC, Sept. 28, 1894, Derby Papers, TRC.

  his “one golden chance”: TR to HCL, Oct. 24, 1894, in The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 96.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Invention of McClure’s

  “We plow new fields . . . becoming harder”: Cited in Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 32.

  “the steamship . . . with their hand-looms”: Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), p. 7.

  “the gulf between”: Cited in Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 33.

  in a seminal paper: Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Annual Report of the Amer. Hist. Assoc. for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1894), pp. 199–227.

  “It was a time”: Frank B. Latham, The Panic of 1893: A Time of Strikes, Riots, Hobo Camps, Coxey’s “Army,” Starvation, Withering Droughts and Fears of “Revolution” (New York: F. Watts, 1971), p. 4.

  “My men here”: TR to ARC, May 15, 1886, in LTR, Vol. 1, pp. 100–101.

  “foulest of criminals”: TR, “The Menace of the Demagogue,” speech before the American Republican College League, Oct. 15, 1896, in Hagedorn, ed., Campaigns and Controversies, WTR, Vol. 14, p. 265.

  “wild and illogical doctrines”: TR, “The City in Modern Life,” Atlantic Monthly (April 1895), p. 556.

  “that at this stage”: TR, “The Menace of the Demagogue,” in Hagedorn, ed., Campaigns and Controversies, WTR, Vol. 14, pp. 264–65.

  more than 4 million jobs: Latham, The Panic of 1893, p. 4.

  This acclaimed muckraking journal: John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), p. 128.

  “genius . . . of excitable energy”: RSB, American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), p. 95.

  “a vibrant, eager”: Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 119.

  “a bundle of tensions”: Peter Lyon, Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), p. 11.

  “a stream of words”: Ibid., p. 14.

  “like a caged lion”: Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 107.

  “lasted some twelve”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 123.

  “That was the first”: Willa Cather and S. S. McClure, The Autobiography of S. S. McClure (Lincoln: Universi
ty of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 9.

  “For a long while”: Ibid., p. 17.

  the Bible . . . Book of Martyrs: Lyon, Success Story, p. 5.

  “opening those boxes”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 19.

  “seemed to die down”: Ibid., p. 18.

  “began for the first time”: Ibid., p. 27.

  “a kind of ‘arithmetic’ . . . no text-book”: Ibid., pp. 40–41.

  “I used to waken”: Ibid., p. 28.

  “attacks of restlessness . . . all my life”: Ibid., pp. 57, 59.

  “I was seventeen . . . felt complete self-reliance”: Ibid., p. 62.

  had “never seen so”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 13.

  “Everything went well . . . blank stretch”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 18.

  “the most beautiful”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 17.

  A brilliant student . . . top of her class: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 88.

  “Don’t cry for the moon”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 17.

  “My feeling for her”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 96.

  “You mustn’t write”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 23.

  “was easily the best”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 134.

  At Phillips’s house . . . William Dean Howells: Harold S. Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 19.

  “close acquaintance”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 130.

  “He works by”: Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, p. 19.

  “The three together”: RSB, American Chronicle, p. 95.

  “My present”: McClure to Harriet Hurd, Dec. 23, 1881, McClure MSS.

  “Mr. McClure”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 32.

  “would never receive”: Ibid., p. 39.

  “his personal appearance . . . his acquaintance”: Albert Hurd to Harriet Hurd, April 29, 1883, McClure MSS.

  “I do not love you”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 33.

  “This dismissal”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 143.

  “weave the bicycle”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 36.

  “You are the surest”: Ibid., p. 37.

  “among the most attractive”: Ibid., p. 38.

  McClure took to the road: Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, p. 35.

  “I was in the big game”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, pp. 150–51.

  “When I have passed . . . identity with that boy”: Ibid., p. 151.

  “could not . . . love you still”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 39.

  “I saw it”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 164.

  “a month’s vacation”: Jeanette L. Gilder, “When McClure’s Began,” McClure’s (August 1912), p. 70.

  “a handsome profit”: Ibid.

  “a dozen, or twenty”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 57.

  “distributing fifty thousand”: Ibid., p. 74.

  “much better fitted . . . as Mr. Phillips had”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 181.

  “from one end of the country . . . in his teeth”: Gilder, “When McClure’s Began,” McClure’s (August 1912), p. 71.

  “McClure was a Columbus”: Ibid.

  “dignified and conservative”: Theodore P. Greene, America’s Heroes: The Changing Models of Success in American Magazines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 63.

  “My qualifications”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 94.

  “He secured the best”: “Mr. McClure and His Magazine,” American Monthly Review of Reviews (July 1893), p. 99.

  “before the name”: J. L. French, “The Story of McClure’s,” Profitable Advertising, Oct. 5, 1897, p. 140.

  purchased a dozen Sherlock Holmes: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 204.

  “To find the best authors”: French, “The Story of McClure’s,” Profitable Advertising, Oct. 5, 1897, p. 140.

  “I propose to down . . . like champagne”: Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, p. 55.

  “I would rather edit”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 109.

  “a reasonable profit”: Trenton [NJ] Times, June 14, 1894.

  “moneyed and well-educated . . . the upper classes”: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 4: 1885–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 2.

  “within reach of”: Reno [NV] Evening Gazette, July 6, 1893.

  “The impregnability”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, pp. 207–08.

  “to make pictures”: Ibid., p. 208.

  “There was certainly”: Ibid., p. 211.

  “the good will of thousands”: Gilder, “When McClure’s Began,” McClure’s (August 1912), p. 72.

  Conan Doyle invested $5,000: Lyon, Success Story, p. 133.

  “It is not often . . . among the winners”: “Mr. McClure and His Magazine,” American Monthly Review of Reviews (July 1893), p. 99.

  “no little of a”: Providence [RI] Journal, June 4, 1893, in McClure’s (August 1893), p. 6.

  the “front rank at once”: Philadelphia Public Ledger, June 13, 1893, in ibid.

  “unusually brilliant”: Atlanta Constitution, May 1, 1893.

  “the first issue”: TR to McClure, May 29, 1893, McClure MSS.

  “a unity”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 129.

  “almost invented” it: John E. Semonche, Ray Stannard Baker: A Quest for Democracy in Modern America, 1870–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 76.

  “in line with”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 130.

  “to deal with important”: S. S. McClure, “The Making of a Magazine,” McClure’s (May 1924), p. 9.

  “a power . . . for good”: William Archer, “The American Cheap Magazine,” Fortnightly Review (May 1910), p. 922.

  the “mother hen”: Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, p. 96.

  “This girl can write . . . exactly the qualities”: Cather and McClure, The Autobiography, p. 218.

  “unknown to half . . . enthusiasm and confidence”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, pp. 118–19.

  “more than he could ever”: Ibid., p. 19.

  “confident of . . . we had never heard of”: Ibid., p. 22.

  “nothing they did not . . . throttle their future”: IMT and David M. Chalmers, The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 21.

  railroads arbitrarily doubled: Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), p. 21.

  His “big scheme”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 23.

  “started the Standard Oil”: Ibid., p. 219.

  “There were nightly . . . during the day”: Ibid., pp. 23–24.

  “all pretty hazy . . . privilege of any sort”: Ibid., pp. 25–26.

  “readjustment of her status . . . sternest of problems”: Ibid., p. 31.

  “would never marry” . . . entreated God to prevent her ever marrying: Ibid., p. 36.

  “classifying them”: Ibid., p. 81.

  “luminous eyes”: Brady, Ida Tarbell, p. 29.

  “an invader”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 40.

  “the companionship”: Ibid., pp. 39–40.

  “shy and immature . . . reverence for Nature”: Ibid., p. 41.

  “She would arise . . . interested in people”: Brady, Ida Tarbell, p. 28.

  “go abroad and study”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 40.

  “My early absorption . . . as of botany”: Ibid., pp. 80–81.

  “ardent supporters . . . laundries and bakeshops”: Ibid., p. 82.

  “a trilogy of . . . natural resources”: Robert C. Kochersberger, More Than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), p. xlvi.

  “My life was busy”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, pp. 78–79.

  “disorderly fashion”: Ibid., p. 73.

  “secretly, very secret
ly”: Ibid., p. 78.

  “How will you support . . . You’ll starve”: Ibid., p. 87.

  “There were a multitude”: Ibid., p. 92.

  “There were few mornings”: Ibid., p. 103.

  “It was not much”: Ida M. Tarbell to [Tarbell family], Nov. 13, 1891, IMTC.

  “bohemian poverty”: Brady, Ida Tarbell, p. 51.

  “a good dinner”: IMT to [Tarbell family], Dec. 20, 1891, IMTC.

  “happy evenings”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 105.

  “Think of us”: IMT to [Tarbell family], October [n.d.], 1891, IMTC.

  “not a morsel more”: IMT to [Tarbell family], Aug. 25, 1891, IMTC.

  “a single egg”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, pp. 90–91.

  “It is the most heartless”: IMT to [Tarbell family], November [n.d.], 1891, IMTC.

  At night she wore everything: IMT to [Tarbell family], Dec. 20, 1891, IMTC.

  “It isn’t money”: IMT to [Tarbell family], Dec. 27, 1891, IMTC.

  “I think after . . . heart and hope”: IMT to [Tarbell family], Dec. 7, 1891, IMTC.

  Scribner’s paid . . . first months in Paris: IMT to [Tarbell family], Sept. 21, 1891, IMTC.

  “What excitement”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 98.

  “Writing $5 . . . one’s living”: IMT to [Tarbell family], May 2, 1892, IMTC.

  “I must go . . . never think of it again”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, pp. 119–20.

  “We all hope”: McClure to IMT, Mar. 2, 1894, IMTC.

  “All of the articles”: McClure to IMT, Jan. 6, 1894, IMTC.

  “actually starving . . . by force, if it must be”: Esther Tarbell to IMT, Aug. 6, 1893, in Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, p. 67.

  “on the ragged edge . . . as a cricket”: IMT to [Tarbell family], Mar. 16, 1894, IMTC.

  “The little magazine”: IMT to [Tarbell family], [n.d.], 1893, IMTC.

  “so contemptuously anti-Napoleon”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 147.

  “biography on the gallop”: Ibid., p. 151.

  “the best short life”: Brady, Ida Tarbell, p. 91.

  “I have often wished”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 152.

  “His insight told him”: Ibid., p. 161.

  “could think of nothing”: Gilder, “When McClure’s Began,” McClure’s (August 1912), p. 75.

  “Out with you”: Lyon, Success Story, p. 134.

  “all there was worth . . . so hopeless an assignment”: IMT, All in the Day’s Work, p. 163.