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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  “THE BULL MOOSE PARTY HAS attained more strength & following than I thought possible at first,” Ray Baker recorded in his journal not long after Roosevelt’s powerfully emotional speech. “It includes no small number of high idealistic sincere men. Its platform is excellent. I can accept the planks nearly every one. A great figure in it is Miss Addams. It has aroused in some quarters almost a fanatical interest.” Despite—or perhaps because of—his allegiance to the new party’s principles, Baker could not shake a sense of disenchantment with its presidential nominee. “It is odd to me—as though the scales had suddenly fallen from my eyes,” he reflected, “to see how different I regard T.R. from what I did a few years ago. There was no more enthusiastic & earnest admirer of him than I was. I felt that he was doing a great work—as I still believe he did do—the work of a great moral revivalist.” But at this juncture, Baker believed, the Progressive movement needed a steadier hand, a leader “great enough to forget himself” in service of the cause. Roosevelt’s titanic persona, the reporter lamented, “obscures everything,” reducing the campaign to a referendum on his personal popularity rather than a discussion of vital reform issues.

  In the end, Baker’s concern over Roosevelt’s distracting cult of personality was strong enough to shift his political allegiance. “As for me,” Baker declared that August, “I shall vote for Wilson. I distrust the old party behind him & some of the things it stands for, but I have great confidence in the man and in the faction of the party (the progressive-Bryan faction) which he represents. And I like his clear, calm way of putting things.” Baker had first encountered Woodrow Wilson two years earlier as he prepared an article on the forerunners of the 1912 campaign. “I left Princeton,” he recalled years later, “convinced that I had met the finest mind in the field of statesmanship to be found in American public life.” After that striking first impression, Baker followed Wilson’s “meteoric career” with great interest; “overjoyed” by Wilson’s subsequent nomination for the presidency, Baker “even dared to make speeches” on the Democratic nominee’s behalf.

  William Allen White had initially shared Baker’s concerns, believing that the Progressive Party would be diminished if conceived as “a personal party.” He had advised Roosevelt against bolting from the Republicans, preferring that he remain an “ace” for the future, when the new party had developed more fully. On a personal level, White found Wilson “a cold fish,” with “a highty tighty way.” The hand Wilson extended when the two men first met felt “like a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper—irresponsive and lifeless.” Nevertheless, White recognized that Wilson “had done a fine liberal job” as governor of New Jersey and would most likely make a good president.

  Once Roosevelt mortgaged his own future to the new party, however, White never looked back. He quit his post as Republican national committeeman, joined the Progressive Party, and resolved to do everything possible for his hero and the Progressive cause. Playing a central role on the platform committee, White spent “four days and the better part of three nights” at the Congress Hotel in the week prior to the convention, drafting and reworking every section of the document before the delegates arrived. “Our social philosophy,” he proudly remarked, could be “simmered down” to a single phrase—“using government as an agency of human welfare!”

  Witnessing Roosevelt during the heady days of the Bull Moose Convention, White was impressed anew with his old friend’s remarkable vitality—“He seemed full of animal spirits, exhaustless at all hours, exuding cheer and confidence.” The rage that had consumed the Colonel during the Republican National Convention seemed transformed into ebullience with the birth of the new party: “What if he was a little obvious now and then as he grabbed the steering wheel of events and guided that convention not too shyly?” White later reflected, explaining, “I felt the joy and delight of his presence and, knowing his weakness, still gave him my loyalty—the great rumbling, roaring, jocund tornado of a man.”

  While White was transfixed by Roosevelt’s performance during the Bull Moose Convention, his colleague Ida Tarbell was stuck in Europe. “It makes me crazy to get back,” she wrote to Bert Boyden. “Of course T.R. is a wonder. But what about those Negro delegates? It looks to us here like a suicidal operation. But of course nothing he does counts.” Though Tarbell had long been ambivalent about Roosevelt, she believed the financial and industrial powers arrayed against him were “a thousand times more dangerous than he.” Months earlier, she had written to John Phillips suggesting that the magazine ought to address the widespread fearmongering that equated Roosevelt’s pursuit of a third term with a slide into absolute monarchy. “Why stop with a third term?” opponents repeatedly warned. “The same reasons will apply for a fourth term, or for any number of terms.” Without term limits, they argued, Roosevelt would simply stay in power for life. “We’ve got a King now,” Tarbell parried, “this Wall Street—petty boss—Tammany—High Protection crowd. It’s a real king—not a possible one like T.R. It’s not one man; it’s a tight combine of men. It’s not impulsive, generous, full of human faults, but always for the human right.” The priority, implored Tarbell, must be to destroy “this very able alliance that’s got us all in its grip . . . that must be made clear. Then if T.R. needs to be batted a bit—we can do it.” The American Magazine never ran a specific piece to counter criticism of “King Roosevelt,” but John Phillips, Albert Boyden, John Siddall, and Finley Peter Dunne all finally supported Roosevelt and the Progressive Party.

  Another of McClure’s old team, Lincoln Steffens, was less well disposed toward Theodore Roosevelt when the campaign season opened. Months earlier, the two men had crossed swords over the sensational trial of two union leaders, the brothers John and James McNamara, who had been accused of setting off a bomb at the Los Angeles Times building. The blast, directed at the anti-union newspaper publisher Harrison Gray Otis, killed twenty-one workingmen and injured one hundred others. Labor leaders across the country rose to the defense of the two union men. Steffens publicly defended the brothers, labeling the bombing an act of “social revolution” rather than a crime. Roosevelt was disgusted by such a justification. “It seems to me that Steffens made an utter fool of himself,” he told a California friend. “Murder is murder,” he proclaimed in an Outlook editorial, “and the foolish sentimentalists or sinister wrong-doers who try to apologize for it as ‘an incident of labor warfare’ are not only morally culpable but are enemies of the American people, and, above all, are enemies of American wage-workers.”

  But even fierce disagreement with Roosevelt over the culpability of the McNamara brothers did not prevent Steffens from sympathizing with both the Progressive Party and the Colonel’s continuing struggle against the titans of Wall Street. “It looks like Wilson out here,” the journalist reported to his brother-in-law after canvassing a wide range of opinion; “all the interests are determined to beat T.R. at any rate. They have given up Taft, and they don’t care for Wilson, but the man they hate is the Bull Moose and they are bound to beat him if they can. It’s personal, you see.”

  EARLY ON, WILLIAM TAFT MADE it clear that he had no plans to engage in “a whirlwind campaign.” Though he planned to deliver a few prepared speeches in Washington or Beverly, he would observe the time-honored precedent that “a President who is a candidate for reelection should remain at home and leave it to the judgment of the people to decide whether or not his record of achievement” deserved a second term. He believed “in his heart” that he had executed his office with dignity and fairness, endeavoring in a judicial manner to decide all issues on their merits without regard to personal advantage. He had revitalized an aging Supreme Court by appointing a staggering six justices to the bench—all distinguished lawyers, half of them Democrats. Most important, Taft’s countrymen had enjoyed four years of peace and prosperity under his administration. While the federal government could not bid “the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow,” Taft remarked, it could, by pursuing wrongh
eaded policies, “halt enterprise, paralyze investment,” or cause “hundreds of thousands of workingmen” to lose their jobs. William Taft trusted that “the negative virtue of having taken no step to interfere with the coming of prosperity and the comfort of the people is one that ought highly to commend an administration, and the party responsible for it, as worthy of further continuance of power.”

  Taft’s campaign managers accepted his refusal to go on the stump, but worried that both Roosevelt and Wilson would dominate the headlines while their candidate seemed detached from the battle. Without active leadership from the White House, RNC chairman Charles Hilles found it difficult to raise funds, engage surrogate speakers, or keep the public’s attention on the president. “It always makes me impatient,” Taft confided in Nellie, “as if I were running a P. T. Barnum show, with two or three shows across the street, as if I ought to have as much advertising as the rest.” When advisers suggested that he replicate the aggressive demeanor of the Bull Moose, he circuitously declared: “I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”

  Clearly, the campaign had savagely exacerbated existing tensions between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. “As the campaign goes on,” Taft told Nellie, “it is hard for me to realize that we are talking about the same man as that man whom we knew in the Presidency.” As for his “personal relations” with his erstwhile friend, Taft bluntly added, “they don’t exist.” Seriously hurt by the rift, Taft preferred to recall his old friend and mentor as almost a separate person from the belligerent, insult-hurling foe against whom he currently contended. He now looked upon Roosevelt simply “as an historical character of a most peculiar type in whom are embodied elements of real greatness, together with certain traits that have now shown themselves in unfitting him for any trust or confidence.” Taft was particularly incensed by the open contempt Roosevelt displayed both toward him personally and for the nation’s highest office. When an audience member solicited comment on the president, Roosevelt mockingly replied: “I never discuss dead issues.” Before another audience, he repeated a variation of this jest, observing that all the old Republican bosses were shifting allegiance to Wilson, recognizing that the president “was a dead cock in the pit.” Nor, Roosevelt elaborated, was the Republican platform even “worthy of serious discussion,” given that it was adopted at a convention “organized by theft.”

  The fall campaign was already in full swing before the president yielded to his supporters’ pleas. Standing before an audience of 2,500 cheering Republicans on the lawn of his summer home in Beverly, he delivered a spirited attack on Roosevelt’s third party. One issue stood above all others, he declared, eclipsing the traditional partisan wrangling between Republicans and Democrats over the tariff and the trusts—the issue of “the preservation of the institutions of civil liberty as they were handed down to us by our forefathers.” Splitting away from the Republican Party, a third party had been created “merely to gratify personal ambition and vengeance.” In the pursuit of votes, this new party had employed “every new fad and theory, some of them good, some of them utterly preposterous and impracticable, some of them as Socialistic as anything that has been proposed in the countries of Europe”; all had been stuffed into the Progressive platform. Taken together, the president warned, these reforms suggested “an entire willingness to destroy every limitation of constitutional representative government.” So long as Republicans remained true to their heritage, he predicted, this radical movement would surely fail. “The great bulk of our people are not emotional, undiscriminating, superficially minded, non-thinking, or hero worshipping,” he asserted; “they have the virtue of second sober thought.”

  Expanding on the same theme two days later at the Beverly Republican Club, Taft predicted that the secession of the third party would prompt a “new vitality” among traditional Republicans. “We know that we are a better set of men than we are now called by those who were very glad at one time to be known as leading Republicans. No student of history can deny that the grandeur of this Nation, and the height that it has reached among the Nations during the last sixty years, has been due to the guidance, and the force, and the energy, and the enterprise of the Republican Party.”

  WELL AWARE FROM THE OUTSET that the Republican split made victory in November “very improbable,” Roosevelt nevertheless resolved to give every ounce of his energy to the campaign. He embarked upon an unprecedented speaking tour, covering forty states in every region of the country, including the solid Democratic South. He planned to travel by train, making whistle-stops at hundreds of small towns along the way. Although he anticipated a “deluge of travel and dust and howling and irritated fatigue,” he would willingly invest “a tremendous amount of very hard work” so long as there was “a chance” of victory. In addition to three or four prepared addresses each day, he agreed to appear on the train’s rear platform wherever a crowd assembled, to ride in parades, attend banquets, and meet with local committeemen. “I am perfectly happy,” he told his British friend Arthur Hamilton Lee, “for I have never in my life been in a movement into which I could enter as heartily as into this.”

  The Colonel opened his campaign in Providence, Rhode Island. Journalists noted with amazement that even in this “boss-ridden” and “rock-ribbed” Republican state, immense crowds welcomed him. The 7,000 cheering people who thronged the streets, mostly workers from the textile mills and nearby shops, were markedly different from the usual Republican crowds. Speaking that evening to an overflow audience at Infantry Hall, Roosevelt decried the “rule of the bosses,” beseeching his listeners to help establish “the rule of the people” in its place. Echoing the crusading spirit of the Progressive Convention, the audience launched into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” A massive banner above the speaker’s rostrum bore the legend: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.” Buoyed by his enthusiastic reception, Roosevelt predicted that Progressives could triumph anywhere “if they could get the people to realize what they were trying to accomplish.”

  Governor Wilson had initially hoped to confine his campaign appearances to a few well-prepared speeches. “My private judgment,” he told a Washington Times correspondent, “is that extended stumping tours are not the most effective method of conducting a campaign. You must remember that I am governor of New Jersey and that I must keep in touch with the business of the State.” He hoped to reach the public through a reasoned discussion of the issues and a clear explication of his political philosophy. He had no appetite for the kind of whistle-stop tour that would require him to stand on a train platform and shout extemporaneous remarks to a boisterous crowd.

  Convinced from the beginning that Taft would run third, Woodrow Wilson viewed Roosevelt as his chief adversary. “I am by no means confident,” he admitted to a friend. “He appeals to their imagination; I do not. He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.” The Colonel’s headlong campaign would demand sustained exertion. “I haven’t a Bull Moose’s strength,” Wilson reflected, “as Roosevelt seems to have.”

  Despite his reservations, Wilson eventually agreed to make an extensive tour of the Midwest during the month of September, followed by a second trip “as far west as Colorado” in October. The governor “had, in reality, only one speech to make,” Baker observed, and “he made it again and again.” He urged listeners to envision a more expansive future for themselves and their country. He delivered his words with “such consummate skill as an orator” that each audience came away convinced that the candidate had spoken directly to their hopes and needs. “Wilson was a new personality in American public life,” Ray Baker explained. “He profited by antithesis. He had the unfamiliar glamour, to the popular eye, of the scholar, the thinker, the historian. There had been enough heat in politics; what was ne
eded now was light. Wilson was expository rather than denunciatory. He was asking the country to look at its problems: he was not offering panaceas.” With disarming honesty, the candidate repeatedly stated: “I do not want to promise heaven unless I can bring it to you. I can only see a little distance up the road.”

  Positive responses from both audiences and the traveling press corps bolstered the governor’s confidence. Speaking at Boston’s Tremont Temple on September 27, he relaxed enough to offer a playful barb at Roosevelt’s expense: “Suppose you choose the leader of the third party as President. Don’t you think he will be pretty lonely? Not that he’ll mind it, because I believe he finds himself rather good company.” Wilson’s lighthearted ribbing of Roosevelt’s majestic ego underscored a serious point—without a majority party behind him in Congress, the Colonel would likely find it difficult to get anything done.

  RETIRING TO THE COPLEY PLAZA Hotel after his speech, Wilson discovered that President Taft was in the banquet hall for a dinner address to the International Congress of Chambers of Commerce. The governor sent word that he would be “very glad of the opportunity” to meet with the president before the evening ended. Shortly before midnight, a meeting was arranged in a private suite on the fifth floor. “I hope the campaigning has not worn you out,” Taft remarked. “It has been quite a hard week,” the governor acknowledged. Indeed, his voice had gotten “a bit husky” from overuse. “Well,” Taft cordially responded, “there are three men that can sympathize with you, Mr. Bryan, Mr. Roosevelt, and myself.” The mutual regard between Taft and Wilson was evident as the conversation continued. “It was a very delightful meeting,” Wilson told reporters waiting in the corridor. “I am very fond of President Taft.”