Once the owners further agreed to expand the commission to include Bishop L. Spalding of Baltimore, Mitchell brought his miners back to work, peacefully concluding the nation’s most serious strike. For three months the commission heard complaints from both sides: the operators presented evidence that strikers had not only threatened but used violence to prevent willing miners from working; the miners spoke of the oppressive hardships of the industry. The Arbitration Commission ultimately awarded the miners a retroactive wage increase of 10 percent as well as a reduction in daily work hours, from ten to nine.
“The American people will not soon forget their debt to Mr. Roosevelt,” the Washington Post editorialized, proclaiming, “More glorious than winning a battle is this triumph of peace.” Both Republican and Democratic journals concurred that the strike “was won by popular sentiment, controlled by the people’s chief.” Acting as “the people’s attorney,” William Allen White summarized, Roosevelt had defined the public interest in the previously private struggle between labor and capital. Understanding that the laissez-faire philosophy retained a powerful appeal, he had patiently waited through five months of the strike until the “steady pressure of public opinion” accompanying the onset of cold weather created space for his unprecedented call to bring the two sides together. And after the failed conference, he wisely allowed outrage over its published transcript to build until the public was primed to sustain radical measures it would have roundly rejected but months earlier. Though he “was all ready to act” if final negotiations failed, Roosevelt was thrilled when a less disruptive solution prevailed. “It is never well to take drastic action,” he later commented, “if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.”
Flush with victory, Roosevelt agreeably shared credit for the successful settlement. “My dear sir,” he addressed J. P. Morgan, “If it had not been for your going into the matter I do not see how the strike could have been settled at this time . . . I thank you and congratulate you with all my heart.” With the coal operators, Roosevelt was less generous. “May Heaven preserve me,” he told Bamie, “from ever again dealing with so wooden-headed a set.”
ROOSEVELT SPENT NOVEMBER 4, 1902, the day of the midterm elections, at Sagamore Hill. “Mother and I took a walk,” he told Kermit, “accompanied by all six dogs, whom we both of us feel are real members of the family.” And the election results that evening brought an invigorating day to a satisfying conclusion. In early October, when his risky intervention appeared “doomed to failure through the obduracy of the capitalists,” there was widespread conviction that “the new Congress would be overwhelmingly Democratic.” But Republicans had defied the midterm curse and retained control of both Houses of Congress. Commentators credited the president’s successful settlement of the coal strike with saving “many thousands of votes.”
Returning to Washington after the midterms, the president was finally able to move back into the renovated White House. All summer long, Edith had worked with the architects, attending to “a steady stream of little problems”—sorting through “fabric swatches by the dozen, samples of wallpaper, and samples of rugs,” selecting sofas, tables, and curtains, poring over detailed plans for every bedroom and bath, designing a garden for the children and a tennis court for her husband. The renovations garnered widespread praise. “If Roosevelt had never done anything else,” a Washington insider remarked, “the metamorphosis of the White House from a gilded barn to a comfortable residence that he has accomplished would entitle him to his country’s gratitude.”
Roosevelt credited Edith’s perseverance and instinct for tasteful comfort. A girlhood marked by relocation from one temporary abode to another as her father’s resources diminished had shaped what one historian shrewdly identifies as a “remarkable coping mechanism,” an ability “to make a home on short notice, then pick up her tent and start again.” She had reappointed the executive mansion with the same aptitude and flair that had once transformed their tiny rented town house in Washington and the cavernous governor’s mansion in Albany.
Edith never sought recognition for her work. “She is an old-fashioned type of woman who feels that no lady should make herself conspicuous,” her secretary Isabella Hagner James explained. “By nature and inclination she should probably have had a life of sheltered seclusion,” Hagner James later observed in her memoir, but when devotion to her husband necessitated a public presence, “never did a woman carry herself with more gentle dignity and charm.” She was “at home” for the cabinet officers’ wives every Tuesday morning in the library, entertained hundreds of governmental officials at afternoon teas, and hosted formal dinner parties with uncommon grace. As Jacob Riis understood, however, “the chief end of her life” lay not in her public duties but in “companionship with husband and children.”
The president deserved credit for at least one aspect of the new West Wing building. “For the first time in history,” reporters gratefully noted, the president had “set apart a room adjoining his own office for the exclusive use of the press.” Formerly crowded together at one end of the general waiting room, journalists now enjoyed immediate access to the president and a room furnished with a large oak table, chairs, and telephones. “The public man who now escapes an interview will have to be a sprinter,” one journalist happily remarked.
Taking stock of his first fifteen months in office, Roosevelt told Maria Longworth Storer in early December that he had achieved as much as he “had any right to hope or expect.” Though occasionally forced to subordinate his own desires to what was possible “under the given conditions,” he found comfort in the knowledge that Abraham Lincoln had often done the same.
With each passing month, the president’s hold on the American people grew stronger. “It is very curious,” Roosevelt told his newspaper friend Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “ever since I have been in the Presidency I have been pictured constantly as a huge creature with enormous clenched teeth, a big spiked club, and a belt full of pistols—a blustering, roaring swashbuckler type of ruffian, and yet all the time I have been growing in popularity. I don’t understand it at all.” To Bishop, the reason was perfectly clear: “All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good-natured.”
Caricatures even transformed his failure during a mid-November bear hunt into a triumph, conjuring an image of the president steadfastly refusing to shoot a small bear furnished for the occasion. As renditions of the original Clifford Berryman cartoon proliferated, the bear dwindled in size until he appeared as a tiny cub, prompting toy store owners to market stuffed bears in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Soon the Teddy bear became one of the most cherished toys of all time.
Roosevelt’s burgeoning public favor augured well for the 1904 presidential race, although no vice president had ever been elected in his own right after succeeding to the presidency as a consequence of his predecessor’s death. “I’d rather be elected to that office than have anything tangible of which I know,” he avowed. Nevertheless, he continued to fear that the Republican establishment would prevent his nomination. “They don’t want it,” he flatly stated, “Hanna and that crowd.” Indeed, each time he riled business interests—as with his anti-trust suit or intervention in the coal strike—Hanna’s name invariably arose. “I do not think Mr. Roosevelt can win,” Alabama senator John Morgan predicted in late November. “I do not believe the wiser heads of the Republican Party want him as the nominee. The trouble is they cannot keep him where they can rely on him. Every now and then he bucks and runs off. They have to lasso him and haul him back.” Newspapers reported that “the monied interests” were determined to prevent his election, even if it meant contributing “liberally” to the opposition party.
Delegations pledged to Mark Hanna were considered especially likely in the South, where Roosevelt’s quiet attempt to include blacks in party councils had stirred fierce opposition. In addition
, southern Republicans had never forgiven Roosevelt for the unprecedented dinner invitation extended the previous fall to the black educator Booker T. Washington. At the time, the vehement reaction in the South had stunned and saddened Roosevelt. Newspaper editorials throughout the region decried the president’s attempt to make a black man the social equal of a white man by sharing the same dinner table. “Social equality with the Negro means decadence and damnation,” announced one southern official. “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place,” declared South Carolina’s Ben Tillman. For disaffected Republicans in both North and South, Mark Hanna promised deliverance from Roosevelt’s wrongheadedness.
All these factors weighed on the president’s mind as he prepared his second annual address. Delivered on December 2, 1902, the message reiterated his call for Congress to create a Department of Commerce with broad powers of supervision over the big corporations. The tone of his message, “not nearly so strong as it was expected to be,” proved a great disappointment to reformers. “The plain people,” Roosevelt insisted, “are better off than they have ever been before.” The majority of the great fortunes were “won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.” Although abuse and misconduct were undeniable, he urged, “let us not in fixing our gaze upon the lesser evil forget the greater good.” Those who sought removal of the protective tariff “as a punitive measure directed against the trusts,” he argued, put the entire nation’s productivity in jeopardy.
“It appears that the vested interests of the country have succeeded in scaring the President,” one Washington correspondent asserted, “preventing him from expressing in his usual forcible style his convictions.” The Cincinnati Enquirer deemed it “a very lame message for a president who is chiefly celebrated for his strenuosity,” and further lamented that it read “like a surrender to the party leaders who control the senate and house.” Other commentators were equally unimpressed. “A milk and water communication,” charged the Indiana Democrat, “from a man whose chief aim is the presidential nomination two years hence.”
Even the more moderate reviews were not optimistic that Roosevelt’s message heralded any fundamental progress. “We are bound to believe that Mr. Roosevelt’s heart is in his policy of regulating the trusts, yet even here he is singularly vague and inconclusive,” editorialized the New York Evening Post, predicting that “the result of such an uncertain trumpet can not lead to any serious preparation for battle.”
IN THE CLAMOR FOLLOWING THE president’s message, few perceived that Roosevelt’s ideals were always moderated by his pragmatism. Until the Republican establishment felt threatened by an aroused and targeted public opinion, he knew there was little chance of securing legislation to regulate the trusts. His tepid message revealed a conviction that popular outrage was not yet sufficient to threaten the Big Four, those powerful senators who continued to block his path to significant reform.
More than any president since Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt was able to shrewdly calculate popular sentiment. He read daily excerpts from scores of newspapers, probed the eclectic assemblage of visitors and guests frequenting the White House, and tested his ideas on reporters. Over time, he developed an uncanny ability to gauge the changeable pulse of the American public. His experience in bringing the suit against Northern Securities and mediating the Pennsylvania coal strike had evinced the signal role that the press could play in rallying the public support essential to achieve substantial reform—just as Ray Baker’s series on J. P. Morgan’s “monarchical powers” and Stephen Crane’s description of the inhumane, abusive practices of the coal barons had proven pivotal in alerting the public to the menace of increasingly concentrated monopolies.
In order to aggressively pursue redress for the abuses and inequity of the industrial age, the president would need to ride a seismic shift in national consciousness. He would need an instrument capable of reaching into the homes of workers, teachers, shopkeepers, and small business people across the country—an instrument that would not just explain but vividly illustrate the human and economic costs of unchecked industrial growth and combination. The complex and sometimes contentious partnerships that Roosevelt had forged with investigative journalists would soon illuminate corruption, as if by heat lightning, and clarify at last a progressive vision for the entire nation.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“The Most Famous Woman in America”
Ida M. Tarbell, in her office at McClure’s, 1904.
ROOSEVELT’S FLAGGING HOPES OF CONFRONTING the trusts, purging corrupt political machines, and checking abuses by both capital and labor were rekindled by the January 1903 publication of McClure’s magazine. In this celebrated issue, the “groundbreaking trio” of Tarbell, Steffens, and Baker produced three exhaustive, hard-hitting investigative pieces that ushered in the distinctive new period of journalism that would later be christened “the muckraking era.” First off, Ida Tarbell revealed the predatory, illegal practices of Standard Oil; Lincoln Steffens then exposed the corrupt dealings of Minneapolis mayor Albert “Doc” Ames; and finally, Ray Baker described the complicity of union members manipulating and deceiving their own fellow workers.
The convergence of these three powerful exposés prompted S. S. McClure to attach an unusual editorial postscript to his January issue, exhorting readers to take action against corruption in every phase of industrial life. “Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken,” McClure accused, sparing no one in his sweeping denunciation:
Who is left to uphold it? The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in this country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some “error” or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one [Trinity Church in Manhattan], an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand. There is no one left; none but all of us.
“A lesser editor might have hesitated . . . to print three such contentious papers—arraignments of industry, labor, and government—all in one issue,” observes Peter Lyon, McClure’s biographer, but McClure was resolute. His exceptional sensitivity to the interests of the American public convinced him that people would not shrink from the truth, however dispiriting. He believed, as Steffens later observed, that “shameful facts, spread out in all their shame,” would “set fire to the American pride,” that when people fully realized the corrosive national affliction wrought by unchecked industrialism, they would seek remedies. Yet even the remarkably prescient McClure could not have predicted the extraordinary response his exposés would soon receive from readers across the country.
The January 1903 issue sold out within days, faster than any previous issue. The revelatory articles became a leading topic of conversation in cities and towns across the country. With such incriminating information in the hands of McClure’s vast middle-class audience, one historian observes, “for the first time considerable numbers of small businessmen and white-collar workers were joining factory hands and farmers in a restless questioning.” Elated, McClure considered the January issue “the greatest success we have ever had.” Editorials in one newspaper after another praised the quality of the research, the dramatic structure of the narratives, the careful documentation. “Of course, every magazine from time to time had published able articles dealing with some phase of wrong and suggesting some needed reform,” the New York World noted. “What Mr. McClure did was to make this work systematic and persistent, to describe realities with absolute frankness, to avoid preaching, and to let the facts produce their
own impression upon the public conscience.”
In the months that followed, the circulation of McClure’s continued to climb as the three writers pursued their investigations. Tarbell’s Standard Oil series eventually stretched over a three-year period; Steffens’s studies of corrupt political machines in a dozen cities and states generated fourteen articles and two books; and Baker produced more than a dozen seminal articles on labor and capital. Baker later attributed the tremendous impact of these meticulously researched exposés to the fact that they finally verified years of “prophets crying in the wilderness, and political campaigns based upon charges of corruption and privilege which everyone believed or suspected had some basis of truth, but which were largely unsubstantiated.” The solid reputation of McClure’s and its gifted stable of writers assured millions of Americans they could trust what they were reading.
The success at McClure’s persuaded editors and publishers at a dozen leading magazines—including Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Everybody’s, Leslie’s, Pearson’s, and Hampton’s—to launch similar forays into investigative journalism. Like McClure, these publishers began to funnel substantial resources into the extensive research necessary for such in-depth studies, promoting a new breed of investigative reporter dedicated to extensive fact-finding and analysis. Their disclosures of the corrupt linkages between business, labor, and government educated and aroused the public, spearheading the Progressive movement that would define the early years of the twentieth century. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind, and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer,” historian Richard Hofstadter observed. “Before there could be action, there must be information and exhortation. Grievances had to be given specific objects, and these the muckraker supplied. It was muckraking that brought the diffuse malaise of the public into focus.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 47
