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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Roosevelt was engaged in a tennis game with Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon when he received word of Taft’s nomination. He had prepared a formal statement, which he directed his secretary to release straightaway to the press. “The country is indeed to be congratulated upon the nomination of Mr. Taft. I have known him intimately for many years and I have a peculiar feeling for him, because throughout that time we have worked for the same object with the same purposes and ideals. I do not believe there can be found in the whole country a man so well fitted to be president.”

  That evening, against a backdrop of music and fireworks, Taft addressed hundreds of his neighbors and friends from his doorstep. “A great honor has fallen upon me today to lead a great political party in the contest that is to come,” he solemnly acknowledged. He then turned to Nellie, “the real ruler of the family,” acknowledging that “no greater need of approval could be desired.” Reminded that his nine o’clock reception at the White House would begin in two minutes, he hastened off on foot in that direction. But when the crowd thwarted his progress, he was forced to recruit the Army Band’s wagon. “Does this outfit belong to any one?” he inquired. “Everything belongs to you to-night,” he was assured. He promptly jumped into the wagon and proceeded to the White House, where his old friend, the proud kingmaker, awaited.

  The convention completed its business the following day, nominating the conservative New York congressman James Sherman for vice president. Neither Roosevelt nor Taft was particularly happy with the choice of “Sunny Jim.” They had hoped to add a progressive from the West to the ticket, but when Albert Beveridge, Herbert Hadley, Jonathan Dolliver, and A. B. Cummins all refused, they had left the decision to the delegates. The platform approved by the delegates was equally unsatisfying. At Taft’s insistence, it called for a special session to revise the tariff and create a postal savings bank system, but it diluted an anti-injunction plank and blamed Democrats for the failure to act on progressive measures, exonerating the Republican majority. While Senators La Follette and Beveridge expressed “disappointment,” William Allen White defended the convention’s work in an editorial. “We can’t get all we desire,” he maintained. “A party is no place for a crank. If he cannot compromise and go forward he should flock alone.”

  “THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS ARE going to be kind of a nightmare for me,” Taft confessed to a friend shortly after the convention. Each morning he awakened “with a certain degree of nervous uneasiness of what may appear in the newspaper,” he explained, and though he could handle attacks “manufactured out of whole cloth,” those blending truth and falsehood were more troubling.

  To fortify himself, Taft planned to spend July and August at the Homestead, a celebrated resort hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, where he could work, relax, and replenish his energies for the fall campaign. Situated atop the Blue Ridge Mountains, a short horseback ride from waterfalls and ancient woodlands, the Homestead boasted a majestic high-ceilinged lobby, a wide veranda surrounding the entire building, and an eighteen-hole golf course. Nellie, Will, and Charlie occupied the Presidential Suite, with a private balcony overlooking the grassy links. In addition, a five-room office suite had been configured, providing two private chambers for the nominee, along with a reception area and workspace for his secretary and clerk. In the days that followed, dozens of senators, congressmen, cabinet officials, and members of the Republican National Committee made the train trip to Hot Springs. Overnight, the little town became the focus of national attention, just as Oyster Bay had been seven years earlier.

  Despite the many diversions offered by the luxurious Homestead, Taft kept to a rigorous schedule. Typically awakened at seven by his Filipino valet, he favored a spare breakfast of dry toast and a single soft-boiled egg. By 8:30 a.m., he was bathed, shaved, and settled in his office, where he read and signed responses to more than 1,500 congratulatory notes in addition to general correspondence of nearly 150 letters every day. By ten, he was out on the eighteen-hole golf course with one or two invited guests. By 2 p.m., he had returned to his office, meeting with party leaders to determine strategy for each region of the country. In the late afternoon, he would devote several hours to working on his acceptance speech, scheduled for late July. At seven thirty, he and Nellie went to dinner in the public dining room with their visitors, before settling on the wide veranda that served as the “favorite promenade” for hotel guests.

  The week after the Tafts arrived in Hot Springs, the Democratic Party held its convention in Denver. After the defeat of their previous nominee, conservative Judge Alton Parker, the party once again turned to the progressive hero William Jennings Bryan. Their platform demanded the passage of bills Roosevelt had failed to push through the Republican Congress—an eight-hour day, a general employers’ liability act, a progressive income tax, and a child labor law. They further advocated the direct election of senators, a public record of campaign contributions, a federal guarantee of bank deposits, and a law removing tariff protection for the products of any corporation with a market share over 50 percent.

  The Democratic platform, Taft confided to Roosevelt, left him in a quandary over his own acceptance speech, for while he disagreed vehemently with some of their pledges, he approved many of them. “We will be able to riddle it,” Roosevelt assured him in reply. A few days later, the president forwarded specific suggestions on how to “slash savagely” at Bryan and his platform. After working steadily for another week, Taft sent his first draft to Roosevelt. “Both of the first two paragraphs should certainly be omitted,” Roosevelt replied, but aside from a weak section on bank deposits, he found the remainder of the address “admirable.” He added in closing: “I think that the number of times my name is used should be cut down. You are now the leader.”

  While Taft’s continued desire for the counsel of the country’s “most accomplished politician” was understandable, his “extraordinarily frank announcement” that he intended to bring his final draft to Oyster Bay for Roosevelt to review provoked scorn and concern. “I have the highest regard for the president’s judgment,” he told the press, justifying his apparent deference to Roosevelt’s opinion, “and a keen appreciation of his wonderful ability for forceful expression.” Editorial writers universally lambasted “the spectacle of Candidate Taft hurrying to Oyster Bay to submit his speech of acceptance.” The New York Times likened his action to that of “a schoolboy about to submit his composition to the teacher before he read it in school,” and observed that despite great admiration for Roosevelt, people would like their next president to demonstrate “an existence independent of his late chief.” The New York Sun described the visit as a “humiliating pilgrimage,” further evidence that Taft was “but the puppet of the White House Punch and Judy manipulator.” Although the copy of the speech that Taft’s secretary released to the press after Roosevelt’s review revealed few substantial changes, the episode was “not calculated to inspire confidence in Republican breasts.”

  From New York, Taft traveled to his brother Charley’s Cincinnati home, where the official notification ceremony and acceptance address would take place. The stately colonial mansion, with its white pillars and sweeping green lawns, provided a perfect setting for the festivities. Workers had constructed a platform and two temporary porches flanking the imposing entrance to accommodate members of the notification committee and distinguished visitors. A flagpole erected on the south lawn flew a silk flag which the local citizens had donated to honor Taft’s visits to Cincinnati. The spacious grounds afforded standing room for nearly 1,500 spectators. “What we thought originally would be merely a formal affair, attended by a few people,” Charley explained to a relative, “has developed into a big demonstration.” Thousands streamed into Cincinnati from neighboring states to attend the open-air concerts, fire-works, receptions, and marching band performances that accompanied the main event. A large, enthusiastic crowd greeted Taft at the Cincinnati train station with an enormous banner bearing the words NO PLACE LIKE H
OME. Charles was first to grasp his brother’s hand, and they proceeded “arm in arm” to a waiting carriage. On the drive to the Pike Street home where he intended to spend a quiet weekend with Nellie before Tuesday’s big event, Taft appreciated the city’s “holiday attire”—flags waving, houses draped with bunting, streets adorned with colorful streamers.

  On July 28, the designated Notification Day, “the booming of cannon” announced a two-hour parade through the city. From the reviewing stand, Taft was gratified to observe Democrats marching side by side with Republicans in a show of bipartisanship for their favorite son. The formal ceremony began at noon, with the head of the notification committee delivering the official announcement that the Republican Party had selected William Howard Taft “as its candidate for president—the highest honor that can be conferred by this constitutional republic.” Taft “smiled cordially and looked as much astonished as he could be.” And when his turn came to speak, the audience erupted in warm applause.

  Disregarding Roosevelt’s admonishment, Taft opened with a tribute to the president’s “movement for practical reform,” touting his leadership in securing long-overdue regulatory legislation over corporate behavior, the railroads, the food and drug industry, and the conservation of natural resources. These laws, Taft argued, offered a far more constructive avenue for curbing corporate abuses than Democratic proposals to dismantle large corporations simply because they were big. The Republican approach “would compel the trusts to conduct their business in a lawful manner,” while Bryan and the Democrats would simply “destroy the entire business in order to stamp out the evils which they have practiced.”

  Having commended the high standard of morality set by Roosevelt’s agenda, Taft was careful to delineate a policy of his own. “The chief function of the next Administration,” he pledged, “is distinct from, and a progressive development of, that which has been performed by President Roosevelt. The chief function of the next Administration is to complete and perfect the machinery by which these standards may be maintained, by which the lawbreakers may be promptly restrained and punished, but which shall operate with sufficient accuracy and dispatch to interfere with legitimate business as little as possible. Such machinery is not now adequate.” Furthermore, he expressed his personal support for two issues that conservative delegates had refused to sanction in the Republican Party platform: a progressive income tax and the direct election of senators.

  After the official hour-long address, Taft spoke informally to friends and fellow citizens, expressing the gratitude and wonder he and Nellie felt at the spectacular reception. “Popular elections are uncertain,” he concluded, “but whatever betide me as a candidate, we can never be deprived of the joy we feel at this welcome home.” An elated Nellie added her own remarks: “Hasn’t it been glorious!” she exclaimed. “I love public life. To me this is better than when Mr. Taft was at the bar and at the bench, for the things before him now and in which he takes part are live subjects.”

  After a luncheon party at the Country Club, the Tafts ended their long day on the Island Queen, escorted up the Ohio River by more than 150 smaller boats, “all ablaze with illumination.” From the steamer’s deck, Will and Nellie witnessed a magnificent display of fireworks. Three days later, the glow of his home city’s “tremendous outpouring” remained with Taft. “No matter what may happen,” he reflected to Roosevelt, “the joy we felt at our reception in Cincinnati was unalloyed.”

  “I congratulate you most heartily,” the president wrote. “The speech is a great success and has achieved exactly the purposes you sought to obtain. Of course, the Sun, Times, and Evening Post are dreadfully pained at your having praised me,” he gleefully observed, “or rather, as they phrase it, having submitted to my insistence that you should praise me. I am glad they did not see your speech before I got at it.” In its revised form, Taft’s speech garnered a positive response. The Wall Street Journal called it “an exceedingly able and shrewd political document.” Though “not brilliant in the Roosevelt and Bryan sense,” nor studded with “telling phrases,” the Journal declared, it increased “the popular faith in Mr. Taft’s fitness for the high office” and perfectly positioned him “in the middle of the road, avoiding alike the extreme of eastern conservatism and the extreme of western radicalism.”

  Relieved that his acceptance speech was behind him, Taft returned to Hot Springs for the month of August, intending to focus on a rigorous regime of dieting and exercise. By limiting his food consumption and walking three or four hours each day over the formidable fairways of the golf course, he hoped to shed the 50 pounds he had gained during the previous year. “I play golf just as I would take medicine,” he conceded to reporters, and after a brief stint of this hiking and golfing regimen under the hot sun, he proudly reported to Roosevelt that he had already lost inches in his waist. Taft’s other planned activity, trail riding, had to be abandoned after the ankles of his saddle horse proved too weak to carry his weight. “No man weighing 300 pounds has any business on a horse’s back,” declared the president of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals upon reading of the animal’s collapse, callously griping, “if he must ride let him use an automobile or an elephant.” One Taft supporter offered to donate a 3,500-pound workhorse, one so large that “a special stall” would be built to accommodate the massive creature. Undeterred, Taft continued his daily exertions on the links.

  With little hard news to report, correspondents resorted to detailed accounts of Taft’s golf game, creating the unfortunate impression that the candidate engaged in little beyond recreation. The Tribune reporter, at least, observed that he played golf as he did “everything else, with the same steadiness and poise, and same equable temper, never becoming discouraged by any obstacle and never losing his temper or his nerve as a result of a bad play.”

  The rash of golfing anecdotes vexed Roosevelt. “It would seem incredible that anyone would care one way or the other about your playing golf,” the president complained to Taft, but he had “received literally hundreds of letters from the West protesting about it.” Because the working class looked upon golf as a “rich man’s game,” Roosevelt cautioned his friend to suppress future reports about his golf game. Nor should he even permit himself to be photographed on the golf course, for “the American people regard the campaign as a very serious business.” Taft insisted that he was working “very hard” but acknowledged that appearances could be misleading.

  As the general election drew near, Roosevelt continued to hover about Taft “like a hen over her chickens.” Early on, Taft had pledged to make public all campaign contributions as soon as the election was over. Realizing such transparency might paralyze large donors, Taft told the president that he was “willing to undergo the disadvantage in order to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics.” Republican fund-raising did, in fact, suffer. “I must tell you plainly,” Taft’s treasurer George Sheldon protested, that your pledge has “tied my hands and at least one of my legs and I am well nigh helpless.” The nominee caused further consternation when he refused a $50,000 check from William Cromwell, a friend who had donated despite the knowledge that his contribution would be on public record. Taft told Cromwell he could not accept such a large sum from anyone outside his own family. Though he realized the gift was prompted by “nothing but the purest friendship,” he feared its size would be “misunderstood.” Roosevelt disagreed. “I have always said you would be the greatest President,” he chided Taft, “but really I think you are altogether oversensitive. If I were in your place I should accept that contribution of Cromwell’s with real gratitude.” Taft finally agreed to accept a $10,000 check, with the understanding that the amount could be increased if necessary.

  Facing a host of difficulties even before the traditional Labor Day opening for the fall campaign, Taft confessed to Roosevelt that he felt somewhat chagrined about his chances. “Don’t get one particle discouraged,” Roosevelt as
sured him; “you have exactly the right attitude of mind in the matter. In 1904 I never permitted myself to regard the election as anything but doubtful.” In truth, Taft had reason to worry. Williams Jennings Bryan had become a far more formidable candidate since his previous runs in 1896 and 1900. In those earlier campaigns, the Chicago journalist Walter Wellman noted, many had viewed Bryan as “a dangerous man—revolutionary, socialist, and by some, almost an anarchist.” But with the rise of Theodore Roosevelt and the progressive wing of the Republican Party, many policies championed by the Democratic candidate had become law. “No longer an outcast,” Bryan pronounced himself a more legitimate heir to Roosevelt than Taft, promising that a Democratic majority would break the stranglehold of Republican conservatives on Congress.

  Taft’s political strategists were initially reluctant to send their candidate on a speaking tour, preferring to run a front-porch campaign from his brother’s home in Cincinnati. They feared that Taft “would be placed at a disadvantage appearing on the stump against the gifted Nebraskan.” Once again, Taft’s principles collided with their strategy. “If the candidate does not go out and work himself,” he told Roosevelt, “the subordinates in the ranks are not liable to tear their shirts, whereas the personal presence of the man at the head will have an encouraging and stimulating effect.” At Taft’s direction, party strategists designed a strenuous tour, focused mainly in the West and Midwest, where Bryan was gaining substantial momentum.

  Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. “Do not answer Bryan; attack him!” he counseled in early September, adding, “Don’t let him make the issues.” A week later, the president resumed. “Hit them hard, old man,” he encouraged, offering a slew of new suggestions: “Let the audience see you smile always, because I feel that your nature shines out so transparently when you do smile—you big, generous, high-minded fellow. Moreover let them realize the truth, which is that for all your gentleness and kindliness and generous good nature, there never existed a man who was a better fighter when the need arose.” Taft promised to confront Bryan directly, but he remained reluctant to launch an uncharacteristic, dramatic offensive. “I cannot be more aggressive than my nature makes me,” he told a concerned supporter. “That is the advantage and the disadvantage of having been on the Bench. I can’t call names and I can’t use adjectives when I don’t think the case calls for them, so you will have to get along with that kind of a candidate.”