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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  As an official representative of the president, Archie Butt was among the first to board the Kaiserin. “Oh, Archie, but this is fine,” Roosevelt said, warmly clasping the hand of his former military aide. Archie dutifully delivered Taft’s two letters to Roosevelt, explaining that the first was a duplicate of one previously sent, and the second a note of welcome. Roosevelt said he had received and answered the first letter just before setting sail from England, but opened the second one at once and read it through. “Please say to the President that I greatly appreciate this letter and that I shall answer it later,” he replied. Butt then told Roosevelt about Nellie’s stroke “and how she dreaded to see anyone whom she had known in the past.” He trusted his account would explain why the first lady had not entertained the Roosevelt clan more expansively. Roosevelt said only “that he had heard much that had distressed him.”

  When Edith Roosevelt came in, Archie presented her with Nellie’s letter, which she quickly tucked into her handbag. Distracted by the arrival of Alice and Kermit, Edith seemed to forget the correspondence—an oversight confirmed in a subsequent conversation with Archie Butt. Inviting Archie to Oyster Bay in July, Edith pointedly quipped, “if the master will let you off,” adding, “Remember me to the President although you brought me no word.” Archie reminded her that he had given her a letter; “she looked startled for a minute,” only then recalling the note in her handbag. “Of course I will answer it,” she recovered. “I appreciate it even if it has come a little bit late.”

  Archie caught the midnight train from New York and reached Washington in time for breakfast with Taft, providing a full account of his interactions with the Roosevelts. “I feel it is due largely to you that yesterday has passed off as it has,” Taft said. “I want you to know that I am grateful.” Butt learned that when Taft came back from his trip to Villanova the previous night, he had found Roosevelt’s response to his first letter. In Butt’s judgment, the response was “courteous,” though it lacked the warmth that had characterized the friendship between the two men. “I am of course much concerned about some of the things I see and am told,” Roosevelt wrote, “but what I have felt it best to do was to say absolutely nothing.” Several days later, Taft received a second letter from Roosevelt thanking him for his “kind and friendly words of welcome.” Nonetheless, he still avoided any commitment to a visit with his old friend. “Now, my dear Mr. President,” Roosevelt wrote, “your invitation to the White House touches me greatly, and also what Mrs. Taft wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. But I don’t think it well for an ex-President to go to the White House, or indeed to go to Washington, except when he cannot help it.” Overall, the feel of the letter disheartened both Taft and Butt. Former presidents, of course, frequently returned to the capital.

  TAFT’S DISTRESS OVER ROOSEVELT’S COOLNESS was temporarily dispelled a week later by the nearly complete triumph of his administration’s legislative agenda. Even in the face of intense “factional wrangling,” the 61st Congress produced a splendid record, passing “more general legislation than any preceding session for many years.” There had been many “dark days” during the winter and spring, the New York Tribune remarked, when almost everyone “lost faith” in the president’s “ability to control and lead the dissident forces he had been called upon to command.” Surprising many, the insurgents and the regulars had come together to enact a series of “strongly progressive” laws. “Taft a failure? Taft not effective?” one editorial remarked, aping the rhetoric of skepticism that had plagued Taft early on. “We never had such a towering wood pile of work from the congressional saw mill.”

  A new railroad bill bolstered the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission to initiate action against rate hikes, created a “special Commerce Court” to expedite judgments, and brought telegraph and telephone companies under the authority of the Interstate Commerce Act. These provisions strengthened federal control of railway rates, the historic program Roosevelt had begun. Publicizing campaign contributions both before and after congressional elections was mandated; individual statehood for Arizona and New Mexico granted; a Bureau of Mines created to improve the hazardous conditions in the mining industry; and money appropriated for the Tariff Board “to ascertain the difference in the cost of production, at home and abroad.”

  Passage of the postal savings bank bill, granting people of small means (who had generally hoarded their cash in fear of bank runs) the guarantee of the U.S. Treasury, was considered Taft’s “crowning achievement.” For nearly four decades, the big banks, stirring the specter of socialism, had defeated the idea of post office banks. “I am not in favor of having the government do anything that private citizens can do as well or better,” Taft had repeatedly argued during his transcontinental trip the previous fall, but “the laissez-faire school, which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force,” had long fallen out of favor. When the bill finally passed, Taft declared, “I am as pleased as Punch,” proudly touting it as “one of the great Congressional enactments. It creates an epoch.”

  The insurgents rightly took credit for adding amendments that improved each of these laws, but Taft deserved equal praise for corralling support from “Old Guard” Republicans, who at last fulfilled the promises they had made during the bitter tariff fight to support the rest of his legislative program. “When people come to write history fifty years from now,” a New York Times reporter observed, “they might give credit to the worth of a plain-minded gentleman whose head wasn’t thoroughly filled from the beginning with himself, but who really and honestly tried to enact into legislation the things he himself had written into his party’s platform.” Charley Taft was delighted by his brother’s legislative success, writing to tell him, “I always had faith that it would come out that way, but it is a satisfaction to see it in black and white. . . . The record is immense; the accomplishments are tremendous.”

  Accompanied by Archie Butt and several of his cabinet members, Taft went to the president’s room in the Senate on Sunday night, June 26, to sign the remaining bills before Congress adjourned. Members of both Houses “congratulated him on the fact that the measures on which he had been most insistent had been passed.” He was “in a jovial mood,” the Washington Times reported, “and seemed greatly pleased with the way the session was ending.” Happy for his chief, Archie noted that “the only incident which marred the closing hours” was that not a single insurgent senator “came in to pay his respects or to say good-bye.” Particularly in light of the party’s legislative success, Taft was baffled by their continued hostility over the tariff struggle and the Ballinger-Pinchot episode. When the president had finished signing, he told Butt he was not ready to return to the White House, asking him to prepare the car “to take a joy ride.” Soon, Archie wrote, they were “humming through the Soldiers’ Home and down through the park.” The following day, tired but happy, Taft left for his home in Beverly, where Nellie had settled for the summer.

  UNLIKE TAFT, ROOSEVELT WAS INCAPABLE of extended periods of leisure; he rested at Sagamore Hill for a single day before heading to Manhattan to take up his duties as contributing editor to the weekly public affairs magazine The Outlook. Before leaving for Africa, he had signed a $12,000 annual contract with the publisher, Dr. Lawrence Abbott. The Outlook had appointed a three-room suite for Roosevelt: an office for his secretary, a waiting room for visitors, and a private room for the Colonel. Through a hidden wall, Roosevelt could escape to a side elevator without entering the main hall. Overall, the suite’s “mahogany furniture, polished floors, and rich rugs” provided a “magnificence unusual for an office building.”

  Sorting through the 5,000 letters he had received during his absence, Roosevelt issued a statement expressing his “very real gratitude” to the many letter writers, along with his “real regret” that he could answer only “a small proportion.” Asked by the newspapermen when he would comment on the current political situation, he declared that he would “not make a speech for two m
onths” and that even then, his commentary would be “non-political.” Indeed, he insisted, “I don’t know that I will ever make a political speech again.” Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. “Yes,” Roosevelt laughingly said. “I won’t say never.”

  And indeed, before a week had passed, Roosevelt had broken his resolve in dramatic fashion. Encountering New York governor Charles Evans Hughes at his thirtieth Harvard Reunion, Roosevelt was soon talking animatedly about how he could offer political support. Their discussion, observers noted, was “marked by frequent gestures”; Roosevelt repeatedly “brought his clenched fist down on the palm of his other hand.” Throughout his governorship, Hughes had fought the party bosses, finally deciding to accept Taft’s proffer of a Supreme Court seat rather than run for another term; but before leaving office, he hoped to pass a historic bill shifting the power of nomination from the party machine to the people. After listening to Hughes, Roosevelt impetuously agreed to back the governor’s direct primary bill.

  To substantiate his pledge, Roosevelt sent a telegram to the New York County Committee chair, Lloyd Griscom, roundly endorsing the direct primary bill. “I believe the people demand it,” he maintained, and “I most earnestly hope that it will be enacted into law.” With this action, Roosevelt “plunged into the very thick of the political controversy.” He had taken “the helm and become the State leader in the approaching campaign.” The Colonel’s advocacy, the New York Tribune editorialized, “is likely to prove the most potent factor in determining the fate of that measure.”

  During Roosevelt’s reemergence into the political arena, he carefully limited his contact with William Howard Taft. After spending the night at Henry Cabot Lodge’s summer home in Nahant, Massachusetts, a small town only ten miles from Beverly, Roosevelt, most likely at Lodge’s suggestion, called on the president at the Summer White House. Archie Butt and Secret Service agent Jimmy Sloan were on the porch when the big touring car carrying Roosevelt and Lodge arrived. Hearing the commotion, the president came outside. “Ah Theodore, it is good to see you,” he said. “How are you, Mr. President,” Roosevelt replied. “This is simply bully.” Taking hold of Roosevelt’s shoulders, Taft implored him to drop the formal title, but Roosevelt refused: “You must be Mr. President,” he insisted, “and I am Theodore.” Taft took Roosevelt’s arm and led him to a wicker table on the veranda overlooking the water.

  But despite Taft’s efforts to revive their former cordiality, the atmosphere remained “strained,” Archie Butt lamented. When the butler took drink orders, Roosevelt, who rarely drank anything stronger than wine, blurted out that “he needed rather than wanted a Scotch and soda.” Assuming that the president and the Colonel would wish to talk in private, Butt was informed by Lodge that Roosevelt did not want “to be left alone with the President.” Taft tried to set Roosevelt at ease, assuring him that he would “do all in his power” to help pass the direct primary bill in New York. When Nellie and Helen Taft joined the group, Roosevelt, aware of Nellie’s condition, refrained from directing any questions to her. To alleviate the awkwardness, Taft asked Roosevelt to share stories about his recent encounters with the European kings and queens. Roosevelt happily obliged, regaling the little group with an hour of anecdotes until it was time to leave.

  As Roosevelt and Lodge prepared to depart, Lodge proposed that they agree upon a statement for the swarm of two hundred journalists anxiously waiting for them at the gate. If the president did not object, Roosevelt suggested, he would simply say it had been “a most delightful afternoon.” Taft readily agreed. “With nothing on which to hang a story,” Archie Butt later observed, the reporters used their imaginations to concoct a compelling tale. “From beginning to end it was a love feast,” one account ran; the warmth of their meeting was proof “that their friendship is of the stuff that endures,” said another. “Just Like Old Times,” the New York Times reported, fancifully adding that “for a full minute,” the two old friends stood “with hands upon each other’s shoulders, while evident delight shone in every line of their smile.” The continuing “peals of laughter” and “slaps on the back,” the Times concluded, made it abundantly clear that “rumors of coolness between them” were unfounded. Both men knew that such a convivial encounter was far from the truth. The self-conscious meeting had painfully exposed the widening rupture in their once intimate friendship. The Times did, however, get one detail right: when Roosevelt was asked when he intended to return for a second visit, he replied, “I don’t know that I shall.”

  UNPLEASANT NEWS GREETED ROOSEVELT WHEN he got back to Sagamore Hill. That afternoon, the boss-controlled New York Senate, “in swift and emphatic fashion,” had defeated the direct primary bill. “It is Mr. Roosevelt who is beaten,” declared the New York World, while the New York American exulted that “for the first time in seven years the triumphant career of Theodore Roosevelt has had a serious backset.” The Literary Digest predicted that “those who know the Colonel have little doubt” that such a “slap in the face” would propel him “back into the arena prepared for war.” The prognosticators proved correct. “They made the fight on me,” Roosevelt declared, “and I’ve got to vindicate myself.”

  Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s path to achieving vindication pitted him directly against the Old Guard Republican bosses who controlled the state machine. Fearing that reactionary forces would dominate the state convention that fall, Lloyd Griscom urged Roosevelt to run for the post of temporary convention chair. More powerful than its name suggested, the temporary chairman would deliver the keynote speech, exert influence over the platform, and play an important role in nominating the party’s slate of candidates. A longtime acquaintance of Taft’s, Griscom shortly afterward informed the president that Roosevelt had agreed to run. “It did not occur to me that any one would oppose” Roosevelt’s candidacy, Taft later said. At Griscom’s request, he sent a telegram to Vice President James Sherman the next day. The conservative New Yorker had been the party’s choice, not Taft’s, for the second spot. Taft instructed Sherman by telegram to tell the party bosses that they must avoid division at all costs, urging them to hold “a full conference” with Roosevelt and make “reasonable concessions with reference to platform and candidates.”

  Not until the following day did Taft learn that the Old Guard had decided to run its own candidate. Sherman attempted to enlist Taft’s support behind an alternative candidate, such as Elihu Root. “Don’t you know,” Sherman cautioned, “that [Roosevelt] will make a speech against you and the Administration, and will carry the convention and prevent an endorsement, and take the machinery out of the hands of your friends?” When asked where he would “stand in such a fight,” Taft momentarily wavered. Instead of using his influence to prevent opposition to Roosevelt, he simply said he should not be dragged into the battle. During the formal meeting of the Republican State Committee the next day, the bosses proposed the vice president as their candidate for temporary chair. With this clever move, they insinuated that Sherman had the backing of the administration. Griscom, who had not expected the vote that day, was taken aback. As a result, the panel chose Sherman by a 20–15 vote.

  When Roosevelt received the news at the Outlook office, “he fumed and refused to believe the report.” Later that afternoon, he issued a statement openly aligning himself with the progressive faction against the machine. “He was glad,” he wrote, that the “State leaders had taken the course they did because it showed that he had tried to bring about harmony, and having failed to do so, he was now able to go in and fight for all he was worth.” Indeed, he threatened he would take the fight to the floor of the convention, where the delegates had the power to overturn the committee choice. Bravado notwithstanding, Roosevelt was distressed by the newspaper reports. “Old Guard Is Jubilant,” blared the New York Times. “The prestige of the former President has received several hard knocks” in the weeks since his return, the Times added, but this was “the heaviest blow yet.”

  W
hen reports spread that Taft had conspired with the party bosses to bring about his defeat, Roosevelt was incensed. Apparently, several committee members had changed their votes after being erroneously told that Taft had endorsed Sherman’s candidacy. As word reached the president that Roosevelt was planning to make a statement charging him “with treachery,” Taft was beside himself. Unable to sleep, he would wander downstairs each morning at 5 a.m. to glean the latest from the newspapers. “No one knows just what Mr. Roosevelt is going to do,” Archie Butt observed, “and everyone about Beverly seems to be sitting over a volcano except the news paper men—and they, of course, fatten on what kills other people.”

  Though reluctant to respond to newspaper stories, Taft finally decided to issue a formal statement flatly denying that he had “ever expressed a wish to defeat Mr. Roosevelt” or “taken the slightest step to do so.” On the contrary, he had sent the telegram to the New York leaders urging “the necessity for the fullest conference with Mr. Roosevelt.” He was “indignant” to find that his request had been ignored. The Washington Herald reported that Roosevelt “was very glad to see President Taft’s statement.”

  “As the waters of excitement recede,” Butt reported to his sister-in-law, Clara, “it is evident that the last few days have left their permanent mark on the President. He looks ten years older.” Taft admitted that he was “profoundly grieved” to learn that Roosevelt had thought, even for a moment, that he was capable of such treachery. “His whole attitude toward me since his return has been unfriendly,” he told Archie, complaining that if Roosevelt felt disappointed, “the proper thing for him to have done was to give me the opportunity to explain my position and to thrash it out as we had done many times in the past.” Archie Butt himself was equally disconsolate, fearing that the incident had further diminished the chances for reconciliation. “They are now apart,” he lamented, “and how they will keep from wrecking the country between them I scarcely see.”