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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  The company at lunch included members of the Roosevelt family and the president’s old friend Jacob Riis. Theodore Roosevelt, Baker observed, “takes an extraordinary interest in life, gets pleasure out of everything. His mind seems to leap upon every question with boundless enthusiasm.” The president first addressed the alleged postal corruption, assuring Bonaparte that he desired an exhaustive investigation. “I don’t care whom it hurts,” he assured Baker; “we must get to the bottom of these scandals.” Shifting the conversation to Arizona, he reiterated that his irrigation development must benefit the individual settler rather than the wealthy landowner or speculator. Baker understood the difficulty of realizing this intention, but a recently promulgated regulation promised to guide the project in that direction. The government had announced that landowners possessing more than 160 acres must put their extra acreage “on the market at reasonable prices” or receive no water from the reservoir.

  Unaware of these developments, Roosevelt suddenly turned to Baker: “Who is the chief devil down there in the Salt River valley?” Baker was momentarily unsure how to respond to such a query. When he hesitated, “the President burst into a vigorous, picturesque, and somewhat vitriolic description of the situation, implying that if he could catch the rascals who were causing the trouble he would execute them on the spot.” Baker was taken aback by Roosevelt’s simplistic diatribe, “but when I tried to break into the conversation—boiling inside with my undelivered articles and memoranda (one of which I tried to draw from my pocket)—the President put one fist on the table beside him, looked at me earnestly, and said: ‘Baker, you and I will have to get together on these subjects.’ ”

  Startled by Roosevelt’s pugnacity, Baker and the guests adjourned to the library after lunch. “As the time drew near for leaving,” Baker recollected, “I began to wonder when the President would ask me for the information upon which I had spent so much time and hard work. I had my heavy brief case in hand when I went up to say good-bye—and my grand plans for enlightening the Government of the United States vanished in a handshake.”

  Despite the self-deprecatory tone of this account, Baker’s meticulous research, later passed on to Gifford Pinchot, eventually proved invaluable. His conclusion that government agents were doing everything possible to carry out the president’s purposes in a complex situation cleared Charles Walcott of suspicion. In a letter to Baker, Pinchot expressed great satisfaction that Baker had arrived at his vindicating assessment despite his initial suspicions.

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, THEODORE ROOSEVELT received an advance copy of Baker’s exposé on the corrupt relationship between Sam Parks, the powerful boss of New York’s builders’ union, and the Fuller Company, the leading contractor in the city. The president quickly penned a long note to the reporter: “I am immensely impressed by your article. While I had known in rather a vague way that there was such a condition as you describe, I had not known its extent, and as far as I am aware the facts have never before been brought before the public in such striking fashion.”

  Lincoln Steffens had provided Baker with the basis for this first extended study of the role labor racketeering played in the rise of the trusts. Investigating municipal corruption in Chicago and New York, Steffens had unearthed evidence that large building contractors were colluding with corrupt labor bosses to force smaller contractors out of business to eliminate competition. When he shared this material with his colleague, Baker spent months pursuing his own investigation. This research culminated in the stunning charge that the Fuller Construction Company was providing a regular salary to the union leader.

  In “The Trust’s New Tool—The Labor Boss,” Baker focused on one disturbing question: While the great building strike of 1903 paralyzed construction through all of Manhattan, why did one firm, the Fuller Construction Company, keep on building? In answer, Baker laid out evidence that for years, the Fuller Company had paid Sam Parks to look after its interests.

  Baker traced Parks’s ascent from railroad brakeman to bridge-builder, from “walking delegate” of the Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union to un-disputed boss of the Board of Building Trades. The board, comprised of the walking delegates who represented workmen in each of three dozen unions affiliated with the building industry, was designed to protect the interests of its members. In theory, Sam Parks was simply a paid agent for his union, receiving the same salary as an ordinary workman in his trade. In reality, Baker tracked him “riding about in his cab, wearing diamonds, appearing on the street with his blooded bulldog, supporting his fast horses, ‘treating’ his friends.” How reminiscent, Baker grimly observed, “of the familiar, affluent aldermen or police captains of our cities building $50,000 residences on salaries of $1500 or less.” Indeed, the more he studied the situation, the more parallels emerged between Sam Parks and the Tammany chief Richard Croker.

  A half-decade earlier, the Fuller Construction Company had arrived in New York from Chicago; “starting with no business at all,” it had swiftly risen to become the “greatest construction company in the world, with the largest single building business in New York, and important branches in Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.” Behind the Fuller Company, Baker found a familiar cast of characters—Charles Schwab represented the steel industry; Cornelius Vanderbilt the railroad industry; and James Stillman, president of Rockefeller’s bank, the financial industry. “A gigantic hand had reached into New York,” Baker observed, echoing Tarbell’s description of Standard Oil’s stranglehold on the oil region, “the hand of the Trust.”

  Baker’s article also detailed the events ultimately leading to Parks’s arrest. “Curiously enough,” he remarked, “the Fuller Company brought Sam Parks from Chicago when it came.” The flamboyant labor boss proved helpful in a variety of ways. Offering no explanation to fellow union members, he unilaterally called strikes designed to cripple Fuller’s independent competitors. “Worse still,” Baker observed, “strikes were often accompanied by a demand for money” before they could be settled. Rumors of blackmail, bribes, and pocketed spoils had circulated for years before District Attorney William Travers Jerome finally indicted Parks. In discovery, Jerome learned that Parks had approached the Hecla Iron Works, threatening to call a strike unless he was paid $1,000. After the company balked, the ensuing strike lasted for several weeks, costing the company $50,000 and keeping over a thousand men out of work. Only when Hecla agreed to Parks’s extortion—paying double the amount originally demanded—did the walkout end. When the $2,000 check surfaced, endorsed by Parks and cashed by the Fuller Company, the district attorney finally had sufficient grounds to arrest the labor boss.

  Roosevelt told Baker that his exposé illustrated with graphic urgency “the need of drawing the line on conduct, among labor unions, among corporations, among politicians, and among private individuals alike!” The president noted sardonically that “the organs of Wall Street men of a certain type are bitter in their denunciations of the labor unions, and have not a word to say against the iniquity of the corporations. The labor leaders of a certain type howl against the corporations, but do not admit that there is any wrong ever perpetrated by labor men.” Baker’s even-handed investigation and subsequent critique of both labor and capital dovetailed with Roosevelt’s own approach. The president invited Baker to the White House to discuss the matter further. “When I get back East again,” Baker replied, “I shall be more than pleased to accept your invitation.” Roosevelt’s commendation, he continued, made him “feel more strongly than ever that there is here a great duty to perform; to bring out these conditions clearly and fairly and above all, truthfully.” Furthermore, he added, “Mr. McClure is giving me the best medium in this country to do so.”

  McClure and Phillips were delighted with the widespread commentary engendered by Baker’s labor pieces. The Wall Street Journal printed a fierce editorial condemning corporate corruption and demanding change: “When the corporations have their paid agents in the trade unions as they have their paid
agents in the legislatures, and in the executive councils of great parties, the necessity for reform in corporate management is clear. . . . The only way the trusts and the labor unions can hope to stand long without harsh restrictive legislation is to play square with the people.” And when Harvard professor John Brooks publicly endorsed Baker’s analysis, college students across the country flocked to hear the man considered “the greatest reporter” in the country.

  “You have gone into a splendid field of material and you are getting the mastery of it,” Phillips wrote to his rising star, claiming that “before you are through with this you will know more than any one else about labor questions in America.” Steffens congratulated Baker on the greatest triumph “a man can have with a pen,” maintaining that the Parks piece had “made both sides see themselves as they are.” He confessed his own difficulty in writing after reading Baker’s article, finding himself oppressed by a “yellow streak” of jealousy that left him “burning with shame.” He finished with a question at once rueful and admiring: “Ever catch yourself at mean thinking? I guess not. I envy you your perfect honesty.”

  Baker followed up this success with “The Lone Fighter,” a biographical piece on the union leader Robert Neidig, who had worked for years to combat Parks’s pernicious influence. Initially, his struggle seemed futile; just as the political bosses kept their power because only a small minority of the public attended party primaries, so despotic union leadership endured when but a small percentage of union members attended meetings. The majority, Baker explained, “were tired at night and wanted to go home and play with their babies.” Neidig, a steel builder with a wife and children, decided early on to take his union responsibilities in earnest. He never missed a meeting and gradually built up a following. At election time, however, Parks exercised the full power of his corrupt machine. “We hear of repeaters and purchased votes,” Baker reported, “even of fraudulent ballots and fraudulent counts.” Neidig was “threatened with personal violence, with loss of his job, and even with expulsion from the union.” Nothing, it seemed, could break the labor boss’s hold on the union, not even his indictment.

  Nevertheless, Neidig refused to abandon his efforts to build an honest union, and Baker’s detailed revelations about Parks helped turn the tide. “The ‘lone fighter’ is not alone,” one correspondent observed, “when there are other lone fighters to act at the same time with him.” One union member confessed to Baker that before reading the article, he had considered Parks “a true and faithful officer of our Union” and repeatedly supported him in elections. He considered Baker’s piece “by far the best exposition of the causes of the present Labor troubles” and recommended that it “be placed in the hands of working-men” everywhere.

  Robert Neidig gratefully assured Baker that his “splendid” exposé had “done more to weaken Parks and Parksism than any article that has been published.” Within the union itself, its impact had been tremendous. Members finally understood “the wrong that had been done them” and were ready to take action. “To you belongs a large part of the credit,” Neidig commended, concluding that “an excellent prospect” now existed of overthrowing Parks and reorganizing “the Union on a sound and honest basis.”

  “My present work interests me very deeply,” Baker reported to his father. “It seems almost as if I had a mission to perform—to talk straight out on a difficult subject.” With justifiable pride, he noted that between his own work and that of Tarbell and Steffens, his magazine was “probably doing more now in stirring up the American people than any other publication ever did before.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Toppling Old Bosses

  The 1904 Puck cartoon “More Rough Riding” shows President Roosevelt galloping the GOP elephant through a crowd of opponents.

  ROOSEVELT TRIED TO PROLONG HIS 1903 summer vacation, recognizing that once he returned to the capital, there would be “mighty little letup to the strain.” It was “as lovely a summer as we have ever passed,” he told Corinne, “the happiest, healthiest, most old-fashioned kind of a summer.”

  Of all the Roosevelt children, only nineteen-year-old Alice was absent, choosing to spend most of July and August with her fashionable friends in Newport, Rhode Island. This decision rankled her father, who expressed distaste for her wealthy companions at the exclusive resort community. “I suppose young girls and even young men naturally like a year or two of such a life as the Four Hundred lead,” he fretted to a friend, perhaps mindful of his own youthful snobbery in preferring to associate only with other gentlemen at Harvard. “But I do not think anyone can permanently lead his or her life amid such surroundings and with such objects, save at the cost of degeneration in character,” he added, revealing how far his attitudes had changed. “I have not a doubt that they would mortally object to associating with me—but they could not possibly object one one-hundredth part as much as I should to associating with them. . . . For mere enjoyment, I would a great deal rather hold my own in any congenial political society—even in Tammany.”

  The rest of the children blissfully entertained themselves, their siblings, and their cousins with picnics, hikes, and sailboat rides. Fifteen-year-old Ted Junior and thirteen-year-old Kermit were delighted to be home from boarding school at Groton. Eleven-year-old Ethel, who had boarded during the week at the National Cathedral School, happily assumed the role of “little mother” to her younger brothers, Archie and Quentin. “She is a great comfort to them,” Roosevelt contentedly remarked, “and they are great comforts to her.”

  Nothing Edith accomplished as first lady compared with the uncomplicated joy of long summer days with her husband at their family home. Edith “looks so young and pretty,” Theodore beamed to Emily Carow. Both relished this time alone, riding horses together through the woods, carrying lunches and books with them on picnic excursions, and rowing to the end of Lloyd’s Neck, where they “watched the white sails of coasters passing up and down the Sound.”

  Their tranquil family escape came to an end with the season. As soon as Roosevelt returned to Washington, he was bombarded by delegations of party officials, senators, and congressmen. Only thirteen months remained until the presidential election. “Whether I shall be re-elected, I have not the slightest idea,” he admitted. “I know there is bitter opposition to me from many different sources. Whether I shall have enough support to overcome this opposition, I cannot tell.” While large and enthusiastic crowds at every stop of his summer tour confirmed the president’s unprecedented popularity, the American people did not control the nomination process in these days before the direct primary. Machine politicians and party bosses—the very men Roosevelt had opposed throughout his career—determined the candidates, and their selections were then endorsed by the very same financial interests he had antagonized during his two years as president. The public might applaud his anti-trust policies and his intervention in the coal strike, but the big businessmen whose contributions sustained the Republican Party had become, in Roosevelt’s words, “determined foes.”

  “The whole country breathed freer, and felt as if a nightmare had been lifted when I settled the anthracite coal strike,” Roosevelt explained to the British historian George Otto Trevelyan, but although public memory of the crisis quickly dissipated, “the interests to which I gave mortal offense will make their weight felt as of real moment.” Roosevelt had not forgotten how the same web of political and financial interests had stymied his hope for a second gubernatorial term after he had defied the party with his franchise tax bill and his stubborn refusal to retain Boss Platt’s corrupt friend, Lou Payn, as superintendent of insurance. Then, Republican bosses had retaliated by attempting to bury him in the vice presidency; now, he feared, they would deny him the nomination for president.

  Roosevelt understood perfectly that party leaders would vastly prefer the Republican Party chairman Mark Hanna, “flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone,” who had cemented the party’s alliance with the corporations. Hanna had o
nly to “pass the word along,” William Allen White observed, and within ten days “the politicians in the Republican party would leave the president.” While Roosevelt had successfully established some of his own men in various state positions, the national organization remained firmly in Hanna’s control.

  The president’s best hope lay in the fact that “reform was in the air.” All over the country, White noted, “little Roosevelts were appearing in city halls, county courthouses, statehouses and occasionally were bobbing up in Congress.” In Toledo, Republican reformer Samuel Jones had been elected mayor over the determined opposition of the Hanna machine. In Cleveland, Hanna’s nemesis, reform Democrat Tom Johnson, was serving a second term as mayor. A newly formed Municipal Voters’ League in Chicago, led by Republicans William Kent and George Cole, was engaged in a bitter fight against the entrenched corruption fostered by Charles T. Yerkes, the tycoon whose life Theodore Dreiser later fictionalized in his Trilogy of Desire. Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging “war on the railroads that ruled his state.”

  THESE ROUSING STORIES WERE DRAMATICALLY told in Lincoln Steffens’s spectacular series on municipal and state corruption: “Shame of the Cities” and “Enemies of the Republic.” Focusing national attention on these local battles, Steffens inspired reformers in other cities to address the corruption that plagued every level of government. His series played a significant role in toppling old bosses, bringing a new generation of Roosevelt-type reformers to positions of power in cities and states across the nation.