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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Of the true severity of Nellie’s illness and disability, the public remained uninformed. In his initial diagnosis, Dr. Delaney had failed to discern the serious stroke she had suffered. A blood vessel had burst in the area of her brain that controlled language and speech, producing what Taft later described as aphasia—the loss or partial loss of the ability to speak. While she remained alert and clearly comprehended verbal communication, she was unable to express her thoughts and ideas in words. Two weeks after her stroke, Nellie could venture hesitantly out of her bedroom and walk around the second floor. “She only comes into the corridor,” observed Butt, “when she can do so without running any danger of seeing anyone.” At the end of May, she remained unable to project her own thoughts into language, though she could “repeat almost anything” said to her. Nevertheless, the doctor remained optimistic, predicting it “merely a question of time and rest and practice until she regains her speech entirely.”

  Taft mobilized the entire family to help with Nellie’s rehabilitation. Helen came home from Bryn Mawr to be with her mother, and Nellie’s sisters—Eleanor More, Lucy Laughlin, and Jennie Anderson—took turns living in the White House. The stroke had not destroyed Nellie’s ability to read or listen, so Helen spent hours reading aloud to her mother, then encouraging her to repeat the same passages. Very gradually, Nellie began to speak on her own, though her words were often jumbled and indistinct. At times, she tended “to say the opposite of what she meant” or speak with undue emphasis. “She gets pretty depressed about talking,” Helen reported to her brother Robert in mid-June. “She tries very hard but it seems to be such an effort that I hate to make her.” Eventually, the first lady learned to deliver stock phrases such as “Glad to see you,” but complex expressions remained difficult and enunciation was a struggle. Consonants at the beginning of words presented a particular impediment. The housekeeper, Elizabeth Jaffray, recalled “scores of times” when Taft sat with Nellie, “his hands over hers, saying over and over again: ‘Now, please, darling, try and say “the”—that’s it, “the.” That’s pretty good, but now try it again.’ ”

  “No one knows how [the president] suffers over his wife’s illness,” Butt lamented. “As the weeks go by and there does not seem to be any permanent improvement, his hope sinks pretty low.” Despite an outward show of optimism, Taft slowly began to acknowledge “the tragedy” which had befallen his marriage, his family, and his presidency. In Nellie’s presence, he remained resolutely cheerful, determined to buoy her spirits and make her laugh. But beneath this bright veneer, Butt detected “a world of misery in his mind.” Whenever he was left alone, Taft would sit by the window, “simply looking into the distance.”

  Before her illness, Nellie had discovered an ideal summer home for the family in Beverly, Massachusetts. On July 3, the president and first lady, accompanied by Nellie’s sister Eleanor, Dr. Delaney, and Captain Butt, boarded the Colonial Express to “take up their residence” in the seaside community. The grand house stood amid “parklike lawns, shrubs, trees and flower-beds” that lent “an English beauty to its surroundings.” One porch faced the sea; the other looked to Beverly Cove. The three children could walk to the Montserrat Club to play tennis, swim, and enjoy all manner of social activities, and two excellent golf courses were close by—the Myopia Club and the Essex Club. But what should have been a relaxing retreat for the first family became a period of enforced inactivity for Nellie. Although the doctor now conceded that it would “take quite a time” for her to recover, he believed she would be immeasurably strengthened by “two months of entire rest.” Newspapers reported that the first lady would be kept “in seclusion,” that no visitors would be entertained, and that the Secret Service would “keep intruders away.”

  The president himself was able to stay in Beverly for only twenty-two hours, just long enough to get Nellie settled. He was needed in Washington, where the special session of Congress called to revise the tariff was culminating in a nasty battle. “The great tug will begin,” he remarked as he returned to the White House, “and one of the crises of my life will be on.” The tariff struggle would indeed become a defining event in Taft’s young presidency, but the true crisis had already transpired. His eloquent and independent wife, the partner who had attended to every detail in the opening days of his administration, was permanently incapacitated. The fierce and loving voice that had counseled and prodded Taft to every achievement and consoled him through every insecurity and difficulty was silent.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Self-Inflicted Wound

  President William Howard Taft.

  PRESIDENT TAFT WELL UNDERSTOOD THE political hazards of his pledge to pursue tariff reform. For more than a decade, the Republican establishment had trumpeted the reigning tariff structure as the engine of American prosperity, the key to the nation’s burgeoning industry. Protectionism had become a central tenet of conservative Republican ideology. While Theodore Roosevelt had sympathized with progressive claims that high tariffs strengthened monopolies and artificially inflated prices, he had persistently evaded the issue, aware that a tariff battle would create a dangerous schism within the Republican Party, pitting western farmers against eastern manufacturers. During the final years of his administration, however, newly elected western progressives had passionately assailed the unjust advantages that the tariff granted the industrial East at the expense of their agrarian region.

  As Taft took office, the battle could no longer be postponed. Sensitized to the inequities of the tariff system by his long and futile efforts to reduce the Philippine tariff, the new president was prepared to take the lead. Of all the members of Roosevelt’s cabinet, Taft had espoused the most consistently progressive views on the tariff, tenaciously advocating for revision. Duties, he argued, should be levied simply to “equal the difference between the cost of production abroad and at home.” When excessive duties were built into the tariff structure through the influence of powerful corporations, the system served only to spur monopoly, guarantee disproportionate profits, and raise prices for consumers. At Taft’s insistence, the Republican platform “unequivocally” called for a “special session of Congress” to revise the tariff.

  With the Old Guard still entrenched in both Houses, the president faced formidable opposition. Genuine downward revision, reporters predicted, would only be achieved by an “uprising and demonstration of popular opinion” similar to that which had propelled railroad regulation, meat inspection, and the Pure Food and Drug Act. To prompt them to take action, conservative Republican leaders would have to conclude that nothing short of “cataclysm” would result if they failed to alter their policy.

  As the tariff struggle began in earnest in the spring of 1909, no journalist was better positioned to clarify the convoluted tariff system for the public—and expose the economic disparities and suffering wrought by that system—than Ida Tarbell. Two years of research and writing had convinced her that the tariff represented “the greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege, and unequal distribution of wealth.” She launched a passionate crusade “to humanize” the issue by dramatizing the tariff’s role in consolidating wealth and imposing serious hardships on working Americans.

  That spring, Tarbell published two influential articles in The American Magazine that framed the arcane tariff schedule as a simple moral issue. In “Where Every Penny Counts” and “Where the Shoe Is Pinched,” she demonstrated how manufacturers’ profits had ballooned under the protective tariff even as the wages of ordinary Americans failed to keep pace with the rising cost of living. Protectionists claimed it hardly mattered if “this or that duty made an article cost a cent or two more at retail,” she observed; in fact, a cent or two clearly did make “a material difference” in the lives of “the vast majority of American families,” who subsisted “on $500 or less a year.” To support a family on an average wage of six or eight dollars a week, Tarbell pointed out, a man “must think before he buys a penny
newspaper and he must save or plan for months to get a yearly holiday for the family at Coney Island.” Faced with such limited choices, she continued, “there is practically no possibility of a nest egg, or of schooling for the children beyond fourteen years of age.” Illness inevitably resulted in “debt or charity” for those in such dire circumstances, and “the accumulation of those things which make for comfort and beauty in a home is out of the question.” For working-class families, “every penny added to the cost of food, of coal, of common articles of clothing means simply less food, less warmth, less covering.”

  Tarbell trenchantly illustrated this reality in her second article on the “vital importance” of shoes. For the average working-class family, she explained, the cost of buying and mending shoes made up more than a quarter of their total outlay for clothing. One could do without a hat, extra trousers, or a dress, she maintained, but not without footwear. “It was hard enough for the poor to buy shoes ten years ago before the Dingley tariff,” she argued, “but with every year since it has been harder.” In the last decade, the price of ordinary shoes and boots had risen 25 percent. “Why should shoes increase in cost?” she asked, pointing out that “they ought to decrease, such has been the extraordinary advance in shoe machinery and in methods.” The answer, Tarbell demonstrated, lay in the duties on hides and thread—fees that benefited the Beef Trust, the United Shoe Company, and the Leather Trust at the expense of the consumer. For years, legislators had acquiesced to these duties in return for campaign contributions and support for their local machines.

  “At a time when wealth is rolling up as never before,” Tarbell concluded, “a vast number of hard-working people in this country are really having a more difficult time making ends meet than they have ever had before.” Because wage increases were not keeping pace with the escalating cost of living, the workingman was left to feel that “no matter how much he earns he will still have to spend it all in the same hard struggle to get on, that there is no such thing for him as getting ahead.” By focusing on workaday living and highlighting the immediate rather than dwelling on the abstract, Tarbell’s articles proved a revelation for many. “I never knew what the tariff meant before,” the pioneering social reformer Jane Addams told her.

  DESPITE THE HEIGHTENED AWARENESS SPURRED by Ida Tarbell’s thoughtful explications, President Taft still struggled to transform that growing public sentiment into political capital. The first skirmish in the tariff battle followed immediately upon his election. During the campaign, western proponents of reform had focused their ire on Speaker Joseph Cannon, high priest of protectionism and special interests in the House. The seventy-two-year-old Speaker held the House in an autocratic grasp: no bill could reach the floor without his approval; no member could be recognized to speak without his consent. Deploying his power to appoint all Republican committee members and their chairs, he routinely rewarded conservatives and punished progressives. Conceding Cannon’s strength, Roosevelt had repeatedly bargained with him, pledging to preserve the protective tariff in return for Cannon’s cooperation in allowing anti-trust and regulatory legislation to reach the floor. During the 1908 presidential campaign, however, the tariff issue had caught fire. “Cannonism” had become a successful rallying cry in western districts, prompting the ouster of a half-dozen Old Guard supporters. After the election, a rebellious group of thirty progressive Republicans initiated a revolt, hoping to assemble a majority capable of unseating the Speaker, or at least curtailing his powers when Congress convened in mid-March 1909.

  Taft seriously considered backing these “insurgents,” as Cannon’s foes became known. He had “never liked” the Speaker, considering him a vulgar reactionary who consistently opposed “all legislation of a progressive character.” Writing to Roosevelt immediately after his victory, Taft spoke of the movement to defeat Cannon’s nomination. “If by helping it I could bring it about I would do so,” he explained, “but I want to take no false step in the matter.” Roosevelt cautioned against hasty action: “I do not believe it would be well to have [Cannon] in the position of the sullen and hostile floor leader bound to bring your administration to grief, even tho you were able to put someone else in as Speaker.” Elihu Root was even more vehemently opposed to any intervention by Taft, counseling that “it would be very unfortunate to have the idea get about that you wanted to beat Cannon and are not able to do it.”

  Nonetheless, Taft remained “very much disposed to fight.” Replying to Root, he cited a speech Cannon had recently delivered in Cleveland that seemed to repudiate the Republican platform’s pledge to revise the tariff. “In our anxiety to get votes,” Cannon had reportedly stated, “we sometimes put in our platform things that are not orthodox.” Such “cynical references” to platform promises could prove “enough to damn the party if they are not protested against,” Taft told Root: “I am willing to have it understood that my attitude is one of hostility to Cannon and the whole crowd unless they are coming in to do the square thing. If they don’t do it, and I acquiesce, we are going to be beaten; and I had rather be beaten by not acquiescing than by acquiescing. You know me well enough to know that I do not hunt a fight just for the fun of it, but Cannon’s speech at Cleveland was of a character that ought to disgust everybody who believes in honesty in politics and dealing with people squarely.”

  To better gauge the odds of defeating Cannon, Taft consulted leading Republican editors and state officials across the country, asking them how their local congressmen would likely vote on the issue. “A new irrepressible conflict has begun in earnest,” the New York Times reported, “a conflict which has been threatening every session of Congress for the last four years, but which Mr. Roosevelt has never been able to make up his mind to undertake.” The Times predicted “a desperate fight in all probability, for Speaker Cannon and the close friends around him are not quitters. It will leave deep scars and ensure a warfare that probably will endure throughout the Taft administration.”

  Roosevelt continued to caution against alienating Cannon. In a barrage of “urgent telegrams and letters,” he informed Taft that Minnesota congressman James Tawney was “very anxious” to arrange a direct conversation between the president-elect and the Speaker. Roosevelt stressed the importance of the interview, adding that he would provide “a full statement of the facts” on Cannon as soon as Taft returned to Washington from Hot Springs.

  As speculation in the press intensified, a delegation of Cannon’s friends made a pilgrimage to Hot Springs to assure Taft that Cannon would “support genuine tariff revision” and “not stand in the way of carrying forward” the new president’s legislative program. He was shown a full text of Cannon’s Cleveland speech, which gave an “entirely different impression” from the troubling excerpt he had read. In fact, the Speaker had promised that within “a hundred days,” Congress would pass a new tariff law. This new law would not be “perfect,” Cannon explained, but it would be “the best revenue law ever written.”

  Meanwhile, Taft had received disheartening responses to his inquiries regarding the insurgents’ prospects. On the east coast, Cannon’s support was unshakable; even in Kansas, a center of progressivism, five of eight congressmen stood with the Speaker. Taft was forced to concede that unless he personally went after Cannon “hammer and tongs,” using all the powers of his presidency to fashion a majority, Cannon would be reelected. And even if he prevailed, he would be left with the “factious and ugly Republican minority” that Roosevelt had warned of. In the end, Taft resolved to work through the existing party machinery to accomplish the passage of his legislative proposals.

  In itself, Taft’s decision to relinquish the effort to oust the Speaker would have aroused little criticism; the mistake that would haunt his presidency, however, was his public declaration of surrender from Hot Springs, which immediately eliminated any advantage over Cannon. Moreover, as Taft’s biographer Henry Pringle observes, the public concession “sent a chill of discouragement over the valiant but futile band o
f House insurgents.” After a subsequent meeting with Cannon and Republican members of the Ways and Means Committee, Taft had further dispirited reformers by expressing full confidence in the conservative leadership’s promise “to prepare an honest and thorough revision of the present tariff.” All hope of unseating Cannon vanished. When Congress convened on March 15, 1909, the Speaker easily won reelection.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that Taft’s temperament—his aversion to dissension and preference for personal persuasion—would ultimately lead him to work within the system rather than mobilize external pressure from his bully pulpit. But his conciliatory approach left his administration and the American people at the mercy of Joseph Cannon, “the most sophisticated” politician in the country, “the most familiar with every subterranean channel of politics, the most cunning in its devious ways, the most artful in the tricks of the craft.”

  PROGRESSIVES NEVERTHELESS REMAINED HOPEFUL THAT the new president would provide vital leadership to combat the special interests controlling the congressional tariff-making process. On March 16, 1909, they waited expectantly for the president’s message, which would signal the start of the special session. Theodore Roosevelt had used this forum as a powerful tool to focus public attention on his legislative agenda, spending weeks preparing each message. He had dictated “page after page, taking a theme and working it up, his mind glowing with the delight of expression.” Though no one anticipated such a definitive or provocative communication from William Howard Taft, his decision to speak about the tariff in his first presidential message augured well. “The Senate and House were crowded,” Robert La Follette recalled. “The attention was keen everywhere. The clerk began to read. At the end of two minutes he stopped. There was a hush, an expectation that he would resume. But he laid aside the paper.”