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

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  The natural warmth President Taft showed to Governor Wilson reflected an odd tranquility about the election. While Taft occasionally detected “currents of air” that seemed to be “blowing in the right direction,” he acknowledged to friends that he would “probably be defeated.” Winning the nomination had been the all-important victory—and not simply because he had bested Roosevelt. He had long believed that a loss at the convention would have been regarded as a personal rejection, whereas defeat in the fall election reflected a more general reverse for the party. “I seem to think that we have won what there was to fight about, and that what follows is less important,” he told Nellie without a trace of defensive rationalization.

  Nellie shared her husband’s equanimity. “I wanted him to be re-elected, naturally,” she later wrote, “but I never entertained the slightest expectation of it and only longed for the end of the turmoil when he could rest his weary mind and get back into association with the pleasant things of life.” In the aftermath of Nellie’s stroke, her close family circle had sustained her. Her children were thriving: Robert was an editor of the Harvard Law Review; Helen would soon be returning to Bryn Mawr; and irrepressible Charlie was getting excellent grades at the Taft School in Connecticut, where Horace kept a watchful eye over him. As the election approached, Nellie remained in Beverly, content to be removed from the political fray. “She is in a condition where defeat will not disappoint her, if at all,” Taft reported to Horace. “I am glad to say she is in a happy frame of mind.”

  AS THE BULL MOOSE CANDIDATE headed west through Iowa and North Dakota to Oregon and California, he continued to attract huge crowds; nonetheless, his managers fretted that he “was going stale,” repeating tired arguments about the Republican Convention, the collusion of business and politics, and the dangers of vesting too much power in the courts. Instead of “rehashing” these matters, they pressed him to engage Woodrow Wilson directly. To prepare for such a confrontation, Roosevelt commenced to study the governor’s record, receiving daily briefings on his speeches and closely following his rival’s campaign. A select group at Roosevelt’s headquarters prepared a lengthy report that outlined Wilson’s positions on every question—from the minimum wage and woman suffrage to labor and the trusts. From that point forward, remarked Roosevelt’s publicity chief, Oscar King Davis, “it was Wilson, Wilson, Wilson, all the time in the private car, and nothing but Wilson and his record in the Colonel’s talks.”

  Roosevelt launched the “first direct assault” on his Democratic opponent in San Francisco, with what the New York Times deemed the “most important speech of his campaign since his ‘Confession of Faith.’ ” His criticism addressed the fundamental role of the government in a democratic society. “Mr. Wilson is fond of asserting his platonic devotion to the purposes of the Progressive Party,” Roosevelt began, “but such platonic devotion is utterly worthless from a political standpoint because he antagonizes the only means by which those purposes can be made effective.” Roosevelt claimed that “the key to Mr. Wilson’s position” could be found in a single line he had recently voiced in New York: “The history of liberty,” Wilson had stated, “is the history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” Such an understanding, Roosevelt charged, was a reincarnation of the old “laissez faire doctrine,” which, if restored, would mean “the undoing of every particle of social and industrial advance we have made.” Under Wilson’s theory of limited governmental power, Roosevelt charged, “every railroad must be left unchecked, every great industrial concern can do as it chooses with its employees and with the general public; women must be permitted to work as many hours a day as their taskmasters bid them.” By contrast, his own party would build on laws recently established to protect the nation’s consumers and workers. His “New Nationalism” proposed “to use the whole power of the Government to protect all those who, under Mr. Wilson’s laissez-faire system, are trodden down in the ferocious, scrambling rush of an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism.”

  Of course, the single line excerpted from Wilson’s address did not represent the full measure of the candidate’s thinking about governmental power. In other speeches, Wilson articulated his conviction that “freedom to-day is something more than being let alone.” In the modern industrial world, he explained, laws were needed to ensure “fair play.” In keeping with the traditional Democratic philosophy Wilson insisted that these laws should emanate from state capitals, not Washington. He understood that the expansion of federal power was anathema to the southern base of the Democratic Party, where states’ rights safeguarded segregation. Despite his more progressive personal views, Wilson could not abandon his party’s historic commitment to the Jeffersonian ideal of a smaller, less expansive federal government.

  Roosevelt’s “declaration of war” against his opponent’s concept of limited national government prompted Wilson to articulate a more positive strategy to expand the nation’s prosperity. In a speech at Indianapolis, he called upon his countrymen to “open again the fields of competition, so that new men with brains, new men with capital, new men with energy in their veins, may build up enterprises in America.” While Roosevelt accepted trusts as inevitable and strove, through centralized federal power, to regulate them in the interests of the public, Wilson argued that the very size of the corporations posed a problem. He called upon the American people “to organize the forces of liberty in our time to make conquest of a new freedom.”

  Wilson’s “New Freedom” slogan caught on, providing a counterpoint to Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.” Expanding on his theme as the campaign progressed, Wilson argued that “the wealth of America” lay in its small businesses, its towns and villages. “Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago,” he asserted; “it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the borders of the town.” By reinforcing the anti-trust law and by “abolishing tariff favors” and “credit denials,” he would return genuine free enterprise to America.

  Never one to shy from a fight, Roosevelt delighted in the escalating policy debate with Wilson, vigorously defending his regulatory approach and claiming that Wilson’s proposal to break up big corporations defied the realities of modern life. Drawing on his own experience, he pointed out that when the Supreme Court dissolved Standard Oil, the company simply “split up into a lot of smaller companies,” which continued to operate “in such close alliance” that they remained, in effect, under Standard’s control. The result was higher prices for the consumer and even lower wages for the workers. Only the owners had benefited: “The price of the stock has gone up over 100 percent,” Roosevelt observed, “so that Mr. Rockefeller and his associates have actually seen their fortunes doubled by the policy which Mr. Wilson advocates and which Mr. Taft defends.” Little wonder, the Colonel sardonically concluded, that Wall Street prayed for either Wilson or Taft’s policies in preference to his own commitment to put all these companies under a powerful Federal Commission.

  By early October, it was “becoming more and more plain that the fight was between Wilson and Roosevelt,” Oscar Davis remarked. “Taft was steadily fading into the background.” The Republican Party receded as both front-runners directed their energies to the task of distinguishing the New Freedom from the New Nationalism. The two doctrines “were as close as fraternal twins” compared with the platform embraced by the Socialist Party candidate, Eugene Debs. On the presidential ballot for a fourth time, Debs maintained that the capitalist system was “utterly incapable” of dealing with the problems of the industrial age. His Socialist Party platform called for “the collective ownership” of transportation and communication, of land (wherever it was practical), and of the banking system. To ensure more direct democracy, the Socialist platform proposed the abolition of the U.S. Senate,
the elimination of the president’s veto power, and the removal of the Supreme Court’s power to declare laws passed by Congress unconstitutional.

  ON THE NIGHT OF MONDAY, October 14, Roosevelt was scheduled to deliver a speech to a large Milwaukee audience. Two days earlier, as a bitter wind blew through the open flaps of “a mammoth tent” on Chicago’s west side, he had shouted himself so hoarse that he could barely speak beyond a whisper. But over the emphatic resistance of Dr. Scurry Terrell, his throat specialist, Roosevelt insisted on honoring his commitment to the people of Milwaukee—which included participating in a parade through the city streets, a banquet at the Gilpatrick Hotel, and a public address. “I want to be a good Indian,” he declared.

  An open touring car stood in front of the hotel, waiting to convey the Roosevelt party to the Auditorium after dinner. Roosevelt entered first, followed by Henry Cochems, head of the Progressive Party’s speaker’s bureau. Gathered on the opposite curb, the crowd started clapping and cheering. Roosevelt acknowledged the ovation by standing and doffing his hat. At that moment, a man at the front of the crowd raised a large pistol and fired. “It was point-blank range,” Oscar Davis observed, “and almost impossible to miss.” As the bullet hit the right side of the Colonel’s chest, he lurched and collapsed on the seat. Just as the man with the pistol prepared to fire a second shot, Roosevelt’s stenographer, Elbert Martin, leapt on the assailant. A former football player, Martin quickly disarmed the man and began to strangle him. “I wasn’t trying to take him prisoner,” Martin later admitted, “I was trying to kill him.” The inflamed crowd spurred him on, shouting, “Lynch him,” “Kill him.” In the midst of the chaos, Roosevelt struggled to his feet and called out to Martin, “Bring him here,” he ordered, “don’t hurt him.” The stenographer grudgingly obeyed, dragging the man toward the car. Roosevelt lifted his would-be assassin’s head to look directly at his face. “What did you do it for?” he asked, but marking the dead expression in the man’s eyes, he added, “Oh, what’s the use. Turn him over to the police.”

  Falling back on his seat once again, Roosevelt ordered the chauffeur to go straight to the Auditorium, against the insistence of Dr. Terrell, who demanded that they stop first at the emergency room of the hospital to have him examined. “You get me to that speech,” Roosevelt shouted. Only when they reached the green room in the Auditorium did Roosevelt allow the doctor to look closely at the wound, which was located just under his right nipple. “It was bleeding slightly,” Oscar Davis noted, “the blood-spot on his white shirt being about the size of a man’s hand.” Unable to determine where the bullet had lodged, Dr. Terrell again demanded a thorough hospital examination. “It’s all right,” Roosevelt said, inhaling deeply several times. “I don’t get any pain from this breathing.” And with a handkerchief secured to his chest as a bandage, he headed for the stage.

  When told of the shooting, the audience cried out in shock, but Roosevelt quieted them down. “It’s true,” he informed them, “but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He withdrew his spectacles and his speech from the inside pocket of his coat. The speech had been typed on fifty heavy sheets of paper folded in half to fit into his breast pocket. Seeing the hole the bullet had ripped through the pages, and the dented spectacle case, Roosevelt suddenly understood “how narrowly he had escaped.” Indeed, the bullet would have gone “straight into his heart” if it had not been deflected upward by the buffering combination of his thick manuscript and metal eyeglass case; instead, it struck the fourth rib on the right side, fracturing the bone but coming to a halt.

  Roosevelt had spoken for about half an hour when Oscar Davis, standing at the side of the stage, noticed that the color had drained from his face and he was “laboring very hard to go on.” He approached, suggesting that the Colonel bring the speech to a close. “No, sir,” Roosevelt replied, with a ferocious expression. “I will not stop until I have finished.” Though “his heart was racing,” he ignored the “knifelike pain in his ribs” and continued to speak for an additional hour. Finally reaching the last page of the script, he turned to Dr. Terrell and murmured, “Now I am ready to go with you and do what you want.”

  While Roosevelt was being examined at Milwaukee Hospital, police interrogated the attacker, John F. Schrank. A thirty-six-year-old former saloonkeeper from the East Side of Manhattan, Schrank produced a written manifesto that described a dream in which President McKinley had risen from his coffin and indicted Roosevelt as his murderer. He told police that he had first begun “to think seriously” of Roosevelt “as a menace to his country” when he heard the Colonel shout “Thief” at the Republican Convention and announce his decision to run for a third term on a new party. “Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot,” Schrank declared. He was fully persuaded, he added, “that if Colonel Roosevelt was defeated at the fall election he would again cry ‘Thief!’ and that his action would plunge the country into a bloody civil war.” Schrank confessed that he had followed Roosevelt to Charleston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Chattanooga with the intention of shooting him, but the right opportunity had never presented itself.

  At Milwaukee Hospital, Roosevelt was in good spirits, joking with doctors as they examined the wound and took X-rays to reveal the location of the bullet. The decision was made to transfer him to Mercy Hospital in Chicago, where chest surgeons would determine if they needed to operate to remove the bullet. “There are only three possible dangers,” Roosevelt explained to reporters when he reached Mercy Hospital, “pleurisy, pneumonia, and blood poisoning. If we can get safely past these three there isn’t a thing in the world to prevent me from resuming my campaign.”

  President Taft was at the Hotel Astor in New York to attend a banquet in honor of his cabinet when the head of the Associated Press approached his table with news of the shooting. “All over the room conversation died down,” the New York Tribune reported; “whispers of ‘Roosevelt!’ and ‘Impossible!’ were heard.” The dinner guests got up from their tables to rush to the telephones. Later that night, Taft issued a short statement to the press, and the following morning he sent a sympathetic telegram to Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson offered to suspend his campaign while his opponent remained hospitalized, but Roosevelt swiftly declined his offer: “The fight should go on to its conclusion, just as it would in case of battle,” he argued, “even though the commanding general might be struck down.”

  Edith Roosevelt had been enjoying a musical comedy in New York when she received word of the attack on her husband. She left the theatre and straightaway made arrangements to travel to Chicago the following day, accompanied by Theodore Junior, Ethel, and the family doctor, Alexander Lambert. “It’s the best news I’ve heard since I got here,” Roosevelt said. Edith took command as soon as she reached the hospital, consulting with the medical staff, limiting visits, and making sure that her husband followed the doctors’ orders. “He has been as meek as a lamb since the Boss arrived,” noted the New York Times correspondent. Despite Roosevelt’s pleas to let more people into his room, she insisted that he needed rest. “This thing about ours being a campaign against boss rule is a fake,” he said with chagrin. “I never was so boss ruled in my life as I am at this moment.”

  By the following Saturday, doctors determined that the danger of infection was past, that the bullet was lodged “outside of the rib” and could most likely “be allowed to live there permanently.” The Colonel’s color and appetite had returned, though his broken rib continued to make it painful to breathe. So long as he remained “in absolute quiet” for several days, the hospital medical staff agreed to release him after the weekend. By Monday morning, he was cleared to leave. An ambulance transferred him to his railroad car, where he slept and read until the train reached New York.

  “I am in fine shape,” he reported to Bamie a few days later. Though his wound remained “open” and the doctors would not allow him to return to the campaign trail, the indomitable Colonel still hoped to make one final appearance at Madis
on Square Garden at the end of October, the week before the election.

  The shooting forced the cancelation of scores of campaign events, yet the dramatic attack upon the stalwart and stoic former president had rekindled the nation’s empathy, and speculation swirled about how it might reshape the election. “Encouraging reports are coming in from all over,” Ethel Roosevelt noted to Bamie; “things look better for us than they ever have.” While immense crowds continued to cheer Governor Wilson at every stop of his final campaign tour, a Democratic speaker at an Oakland rally articulated the worst fears of the Wilson camp. “The bullet that rests in Roosevelt’s chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency,” he said. Taft recognized the difficulty of anticipating the political impact of such an event. With his usual equanimity, he took a more philosophical approach to the furor. “What effect the incident will have on the election,” he remarked, “is difficult to conjecture.”

  SPECIAL PRECAUTIONS WERE TAKEN TO protect Roosevelt from “the rush of the crowd” as he made his way to Madison Square Garden on October 30 to deliver his “farewell manifesto.” At dinner with Edith and Dr. Lambert earlier that evening, the Colonel had expressed surprise that the simple journey to the city had fatigued him, but he “looked to the excitement of the moment to carry him through.” Aware that his voice had not “regained its accustomed power,” he was anxious to begin speaking as soon as he took the stage. Catching sight of him, however, the audience of 16,000 poured forth a spontaneous and emotional tribute for forty-two minutes, despite Roosevelt’s best efforts to dampen the crowd.