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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Although police never determined who threw the bomb, they promptly arrested eight anarchists, several of whom had not even attended the demonstration. At their trial, the judge ruled that the anarchists’ belief in violence made them as guilty as the murderous bomb thrower. Four were put to death by hanging, the others sentenced to jail. Citing an unprecedented miscarriage of justice, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining prisoners. History has vindicated Altgeld, but the pardon was widely condemned at the time.

  News of the Haymarket riot reached Roosevelt at his ranch in Medora. Drawing no distinction between the strikers and the anarchist protestors, Roosevelt railed against the breakdown of law and order. “My men here are hardworking, laboring men, who work longer hours for no greater wages than many of the strikers; but they are Americans through and through,” he told Bamie. “I believe nothing would give them greater pleasure than a chance with their rifles at one of the mobs. When we get the papers, especially in relation to the dynamite business they become more furiously angry and excited than I do. I wish I had them with me, and a fair show at ten times our number of rioters; my men shoot well and fear very little.”

  While some union supporters regarded the condemned anarchists as heroes, Roosevelt judged them the “foulest of criminals, the men whose crimes take the form of assassination.” He denounced Governor Altgeld, along with all those who followed Leo Tolstoy’s collectivist longings, Edward Bellamy’s Utopian socialism, and Henry George’s “wild and illogical doctrines,” men who mistakenly believed “that at this stage of the world’s progress it is possible to make every one happy by an immense social revolution, just as other enthusiasts of similar mental caliber believe in the possibility of constructing a perpetual-motion machine.”

  In 1893, the most serious depression the nation had yet experienced settled over the land. The downturn began when the railroads, having borrowed heavily from banks, rashly expanded their operations beyond current demand. More than seventy overbuilt railroads fell into bankruptcy, compromising banks unable to recoup their loans. Scrambling to shore up capital, these institutions called in the loans of all their borrowers. Small businesses and heavily mortgaged farmers unable to cover their notes followed railroads into bankruptcy. As the economic situation deteriorated, frightened depositors rushed to withdraw funds and hundreds of insolvent banks were forced to close their doors. Within twelve months, more than 4 million jobs had been lost. At the nadir of this collapse, nearly one in four workers was unemployed. Jobless men begged for food; homeless families slept on streets; farmers burned their crops rather than send them to market at a loss. Millions feared that in the wreckage of the Gilded Age, democracy itself would crumble.

  AMID SUCH PANGS OF RAMPANT anxiety and latent insurrection, McClure’s magazine was born. This acclaimed muckraking journal would play a signal role in rousing the country to the need for political and economic reform, animating the Progressive movement with which Theodore Roosevelt’s name would forever be linked.

  The descriptions of thirty-six-year-old Samuel S. McClure, the magazine’s founder, bear an uncanny resemblance to accounts of Theodore Roosevelt himself. McClure was termed a “genius,” with “a highly creative mind, and a great deal of excitable energy.” He impressed all who knew him as a prodigious character, “a vibrant, eager, indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and the cynical.” His frenetic style, though, made him often appear “a bundle of tensions, keyed up, impetuous, impatient, impulsive.” While Roosevelt’s tumultuous energy elicited comparison to that force and marvel of nature, Niagara Falls, McClure, ever threatening to erupt in “a stream of words,” was likened to a volcano. Indeed, McClure cut such a compelling figure that novelists as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, William Dean Howells, and Alice Hegan Rice all incorporated him as a character in their fiction.

  McClure was capable of wild bursts of creative productivity, episodes during which his mind tumbled from one idea to the next while he prowled the room “like a caged lion.” Rudyard Kipling later recalled that his first conversation with McClure “lasted some twelve—or it may have been seventeen—hours.” But such euphoria was often punctuated by periods of exhaustion and depression when he could not bring himself to eat, sleep, or concentrate. For months at a time, he was forced into sanitariums, where he was kept in total isolation, on continuous bed rest.

  Born the same year as Taft, on a struggling farm in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, Sam McClure faced obstacles unimaginable to Roosevelt or Taft. The first of four sons, he was raised in a stone house with a dirt floor and a straw-covered roof. His father, Thomas, was a rough carpenter; his mother, Elizabeth, worked the fields of their farm. While the coddled childhoods enjoyed by Roosevelt and Taft were calculated to launch them on the road to achievement, the pain and penury of McClure’s early life make his convoluted journey to success more unexpected and striking.

  Even as a toddler, Sam displayed unusual curiosity, a fierce precocity that convinced his parents to send him to school when he was only four years of age. “That was the first important event in my life,” he later wrote. “It was then that I first felt myself a human entity.” Teachers recognized his astonishing aptitude and were soon furnishing materials suited for boys twice his age. “For a long while,” he recalled, “I was convinced that long division was the most exciting exercise a boy could find.” Several times each year, a large box of new books was delivered to his school. For a child whose family possessed a scant three works—the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—the experience of “opening those boxes and looking into the fresh books that still had the smell of the press, was about the most delightful thing that happened during the year.” Weekends often found the boy depressed; the excitement of his studies “seemed to die down” the moment he returned home.

  Sam was seven when his father fell through an open ship’s deck where he worked and suffered a fatal head injury. His death left the family destitute, bereft of the small wages his carpentry work had provided. Sam “began for the first time to be conscious of the pressure of poverty.” His mother returned temporarily to her father’s home as the family debated how to divide the four boys among relatives. Determined to keep her sons together, Elizabeth used her remaining funds to purchase steerage passage across the Atlantic. From Quebec, she shepherded her children to Indiana, where two of her brothers and a married sister with six children had settled. For a time, she stayed with her sister, but the home proved too small to accommodate four additional children. In desperation, she moved with her boys into an empty room in a commercial building undergoing repairs. Before long, the owner evicted them; twice more, they were forced to move until, finally, she found a home for her children by marrying a struggling local farmer, Thomas Simpson.

  Sam and his brothers spent so many hours toiling from planting until harvest on his stepfather’s farm that they could attend school only during the winter months. Furthermore, the county school was unable to accommodate Sam’s searching intellect. Hearing of “a kind of ‘arithmetic’ in which letters were used instead of figures,” the avid pupil asked his teacher to tutor him in algebra. The teacher “had never studied it and had no text-book.” The years passed slowly for Sam until, at fourteen, he learned of a new high school opened in Valparaiso. Straightaway, his mother decided that to have a chance in life, he must venture out on his own. If he could find work to pay for room and board, Sam had her blessing to leave. He departed that very day with one dollar in his pocket.

  Learning that Dr. Levi Cass was Valparaiso’s wealthiest citizen, Sam knocked on his door and inquired if he could exchange work for room and board. Cass accepted the enterprising young man, but his terms were not especially generous: in return for food and a basement room, Sam was expected to build up the fires before dawn, feed the livestock, and do the household laundry. Once the school day was over, a second round of arduous chores left him only a few hours
late in the evening to study. In his cellar room, he recalled, “I used to waken up in the night and cry from the sense of my loss.” It was in these straitened circumstances that Sam initially suffered “attacks of restlessness,” when he “simply had to run away for a day, for half a day, for two days,” a compulsion he “seemed to have no control over.” Indeed, he acknowledged forty years later, “I have had to reckon with it all my life.” Sam persevered in his schooling for two years, until his stepfather’s death from typhoid fever forced his return home to help his mother manage the farm.

  Sam and his brothers worked the farm well, producing a profit for the first time in years. Still, his mother wanted her eldest son to continue his education. Her brother Joseph Gaston was studying at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, about two hundred miles away. In September 1874, as Taft traveled east to Yale, McClure headed west to Galesburg. Upon his arrival, he was informed that his prior fragmentary schooling would require the completion of three full years at Knox Academy before he could even begin college. The news did not deter him. “I was seventeen,” he recalled, “and it was a seven years’ job that I was starting upon, with fifteen cents in my pocket.” Finally realizing the opportunity to pursue a serious education, he “felt complete self-reliance.” Once again, he had to work hard for room and board but managed to keep up with his studies, moving toward the day when he would become a freshman at the college.

  At seventeen, a shock of blond hair over his forehead and blue eyes bright and clear, the painfully thin Sam had reached his full height of five feet six inches. One classmate remarked that he had “never seen so much enthusiasm and life in such a small carcass.” All his subjects interested him, Greek and mathematics most of all. “Everything went well with me until Friday night,” he recalled, when the “blank stretch” of the weekend rendered him disconsolate. Without the focal point of classes, he felt lonely and isolated.

  During his second preparatory year, Sam fell in love with eighteen-year-old Harriet Hurd, considered by many “the most beautiful and gifted girl in town.” The willowy, blue-eyed daughter of Knox College’s star professor, Albert Hurd, Hattie, as she was called, was then a sophomore in the college. A brilliant student, she would graduate at the top of her class with the highest academic record ever obtained at Knox. “Don’t cry for the moon,” the kindly wife of the town’s minister told Sam. Hattie had been her father’s assistant since childhood, working by his side as he gathered geological specimens and prepared materials for his classes in science, religion, and Latin. Professor Hurd, a graduate of Middlebury College, had studied under Louis Agassiz at Harvard before embarking upon a long and distinguished career at Knox. A commanding figure in Hattie’s life, Professor Hurd adamantly opposed his daughter’s relationship with an impoverished immigrant. The professor’s opposition seemed to embolden rather than discourage Sam. “My feeling for her,” he later recalled, “became a despairing obsession, as fixed as my longing to get an education had been.”

  From the start, Hattie was drawn to Sam’s peculiar intensity. After a series of furtive meetings and a surreptitious exchange of romantic letters, she agreed to a secret engagement. Torn between her father’s implacable disapproval and her adoration for Sam, she repeatedly broke the engagement, only to realize that she couldn’t resist the magnetism of Sam’s personality. But when she graduated from Knox and prepared for graduate school in Canada, her father forbade Hattie to disclose her destination to Sam. Secrecy was the price for her continued education. “You mustn’t write to me or expect to hear from me, as long as I am dependent on my father,” she told Sam. “If I should bring his displeasure on me it would kill me. Oh, Sam, it is very hard to bear.” For nearly four years, all communication in this odd and fervent relationship ceased.

  Sam immersed himself in his studies, eventually graduating second in his college class. More important, he developed lifelong friendships with two classmates, John S. Phillips and Albert Brady, that one day would be instrumental to the success of McClure’s magazine. Sam was closer to John Phillips, the quiet, steady, and intellectual son of a respected local physician and a relative of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Phillips, McClure proudly noted, “was easily the best read student in the college, a boy with a great natural aptitude for letters.” At Phillips’s house, McClure first encountered a copy of Scribner’s, the sophisticated literary magazine that would soon become the Century. Returning numerous times to his friend’s home, he was thrilled to read the new serialized novel by William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance, from start to finish.

  Sam McClure’s enterprising spirit and unique knack for finding partners with complementary abilities was already evident. In the summer between his junior and senior years, the young man canvassed the Great Lakes region, peddling microscopes with Albert Brady, the son of the editor of the Davenport (Iowa) Daily Times. Enabled by Brady’s shrewdness, the two Knox students bought microscopes wholesale at $25 each and turned them at a profit. McClure would later credit this experience of traveling through villages and knocking on doors with fostering a “close acquaintance with the people of the small towns and the farming communities, the people who afterward bought McClure’s Magazine.”

  In his senior year, McClure was chosen as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. His unconventional working style both troubled and amazed his colleagues on the paper. “He works by fits and starts,” a fellow student noted; “weeks, almost months go by, and he does no work to amount to anything and then crowds all into a few days and nights.” With Phillips providing daily editorial support and Brady as the advertising virtuoso, the publication produced quality articles and successfully solicited an abundance of advertising from local businesses. In the years ahead, observed the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, this same triumvirate would be responsible for the triumph of McClure’s. While McClure provided the foundation work of creative genius, the magazine would never have realized its historic status without the insightful editing of Phillips and the business acumen of Albert Brady. “The three together,” Baker marveled, “who had been friends since their college days—made the perfect publishing organization.”

  After an absence of four years, Hattie returned briefly to Galesburg in 1881. She had completed her graduate training and was preparing to depart for Massachusetts, where she had accepted a teaching position at Abbott Academy in Andover. A chance encounter with Sam apparently summoned old feelings, and the young couple recommitted themselves to one another. “My present and future are completely changed,” Sam told her. “My soul is filled with love and peace and joy.” Although she soon left for Massachusetts, they revived their secret correspondence. Sam filled his letters with grandiose intentions, entertaining various careers as diplomat, philosopher, and writer/ publisher. As the date of his June graduation approached, however, Hattie’s letters stopped coming. Sensing that something was wrong, Sam consulted Phillips, who recommended that he head for Massachusetts the moment his graduation ceremonies ended. A letter from Hattie arrived just after Sam left Galesburg. “Mr. McClure,” it formally declared, “I have come to the unalterable conclusion that I have not and never can have any respect or affection for you . . . I wish never to meet you again.”

  Once again, Hattie had succumbed to pressure from her father, who vowed that he “would never receive [McClure] as his son-in law,” and that if Hattie chose to marry him, he would never be allowed into the house. Everything about McClure was anathema to Professor Hurd, who objected to “his personal appearance, his bearing, his address,” adding for good measure that he found Sam “conceited, impertinent, meddlesome.” In sum, he concluded, “I regard it as a misfortune that you ever made his acquaintance.” Forced to choose between her father and Sam, Hattie could not betray her father. Unaware of the reception that awaited him, McClure knocked on the door where Hattie was staying. Told that she did not wish to see him, he refused to leave the parlor until she finally came down. “I do not love you,” she said flatly, adding icily, “a
nd I never can. Please be good enough to return to me any of my letters that you may still have.”

  “This dismissal,” McClure recounted later, “I accepted as final.” With no definite plans and no place to stay, he took a train to Boston, where the offices of the Pope Manufacturing Company were located. This company had recently produced a newfangled sensation with the Columbia Roadster, America’s first bicycle. The owner, Colonel Albert Pope, had purchased advertising space in Sam’s student publication, furnishing him with an opening to meet the entrepreneur. Finding McClure’s enthusiasm and determination irresistible, Pope put him in charge of the bicycle rink where beginners came to learn how to ride. Although McClure himself had never ridden a bicycle, he was soon teaching others to operate the unwieldy contraption with a high front wheel nearly twice the size of the rear wheel.

  When Pope revealed to McClure his determination to publish a magazine devoted to bicycling, fire was touched to kindling. On the basis of his experience at the Knox Student, McClure convinced Pope that he could edit the magazine Pope envisioned, to “weave the bicycle into the best in literature and art.” Just at this time, McClure received a fortuitous letter from his friend John Phillips, who was struggling to plot his own future career. “You are the surest fellow I ever saw,” Phillips wrote McClure. “You always alight on your feet. I wish I had one half your push and business ability. Great Heavens, I wish I was with you. If you think I can make a living . . . I’ll come.” So Phillips joined McClure as co-editor of the Wheelman, as the surprisingly professional, illustrated monthly magazine was titled.