On December 6th, 2011, Barack Obama took the unusual step of journeying to a small town in the heart of Middle America to deliver an address in which the US president hoped to lay out a more populist agenda for his coming re-election campaign. Neither the town, Osawatomie, in Kansas, nor the theme of the address, the vast and growing inequality in the United States and what, if anything, government should do about it, was a coincidence. For Osawatomie was where Theodore Roosevelt gave his “New Nationalism” speech, in which the former president – he had left office a year earlier – excoriated the power of wealthy special interests and demanded a greater role for government in ensuring that the average American was able to enjoy equal economic and political opportunity.
The decision of President Obama to use “the bully pulpit” of the presidency to make the case that the free market cannot solve all of the nation’s problems brings to mind a number of issues that have been at the forefront of American political discourse for more than a century. What is the proper role of government in a modern capitalist society? To what extent should the president and not Congress or the courts or the main political parties drive the national agenda? And what role should the press play in shaping or defining that agenda?
All of these issues are brought into relief in Doris Kearns Goodwin's magisterial work The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism. (In the edition published on this side of the Atlantic, Taft's name is deleted from the title.) In this epic historical biography Goodwin not only chronicles the lives of the book's two chief protagonists, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, but also chronicles the extraordinary lives of a group of journalists who played a key part in helping to launch and shape the progressive era, the so-called muckrakers of McClure's Magazine, whose investigations into political corruption, unsafe working conditions, monopoly and other issues are an equally important part of this story.
The book begins somewhat traditionally, with an examination of the early lives of Taft and Roosevelt. Here we learn a good deal about their essential qualities and evolving friendship. But then, in almost Dickensian fashion, Goodwin weaves in the lives of Samuel Sidney McClure, the founder of the celebrated magazine, and his “big four” – Ida Tarbell, Ray Baker, William Allen White and Lincoln Steffens.
This plunge into the careers of the journalists at the heart of McClure's provides the reader with a vivid understanding of the critical issues at the heart of the progressive era. It also lays bare the almost symbiotic relationship between Roosevelt and these pioneering journalists, whose calls for reform and investigations of various issues helped bolster, and in some cases make possible, Roosevelt's breaking up of some entrenched monopolies and passing of reform legislation.
Investigative skills
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book, in fact, involves the extent to which Roosevelt used their investigative skills to craft his reform agenda. It was Ida Tarbell's exposé of Standard Oil, for example, that created the political environment for Roosevelt to launch his anti-trust assault against JD Rockefeller's oil giant.
Nor was Roosevelt’s use of the journalists’ work something he did at a distance. Indeed, Roosevelt met and corresponded with the likes of Baker, White and Steffens frequently. Thanks to this close association, Baker was able to provide the crucial arguments that stood behind the all-important Hepburn Act of 1906, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to set maximum rates for the railroads. William Allen White provided Roosevelt with a window on Middle America and helped orchestrate the successful promotion of Taft as the president’s handpicked successor in 1908. Ironically, White was also involved in Roosevelt’s later decision to break with Taft, helping the former president draft the Osawatomie address of August 1910, which as well as launching his New Nationalism set the stage for Roosevelt’s pursuit of a third term in opposition to Taft in 1912.
Roosevelt also had an important, and at times complicated, relationship with Steffens. They first met when Roosevelt was a New York police commissioner and Steffens was at the New York Evening Post. As its first police reporter, Steffens provided Roosevelt with information about the workings of the department, including the rampant corruption in its ranks. Thanks in part to this help and publicity, Roosevelt was able to reduce the amount of corruption, and it was from this point that Roosevelt's reputation as a reformer – highlighted by his midnight prowls of the city in search of illegal activity – first gained significant national attention.
Roosevelt's collaboration with Steffens would continue through his governorship of New York, when Roosevelt counted on Steffens to provide the public with a balanced assessment of his efforts to push reform laws through the state legislature. By the time Roosevelt had been sworn in as president, in September 1901, Steffens had joined the ranks of McClure's, where he wrote a series of brilliant articles on the corruption and "boss rule" that plagued nearly all major US cities and many state governments. Steffens's work on municipal and state machine politics greatly impressed Roosevelt, who, in an unprecedented move, offered to help Steffens with his recently launched effort to uncover federal corruption.
As a journalist Steffens had never shied away from criticising Roosevelt, who, unlike many politicians, seemed to relish criticism. But this latest series, Goodman notes, unsettled the president, partly as Steffens seemed to have become somewhat disillusioned with the mere passage of individual reform laws. What was needed now, he argued, was change to more directly address the structural inequality that allowed business interests to maintain power at the expense of the people. Steffens increasingly viewed as counterproductive Roosevelt’s willingness to make political concessions to get reform legislation through Congress. Nor was Steffens the sole voice from the left to argue that Roosevelt was, as Goodman puts it, “compromising in his efforts to remedy the abuses of capitalism”.
Impatient for reform
Angered by the crescendo of progressive voices that were impatient for more profound reform, Roosevelt argued that Steffens and his colleagues failed to understand the practical realities of leadership: the importance of timing, the need to move one step at a time. Frustrated, Roosevelt used the 1906 Gridiron dinner and a subsequent address to lash out at some reporters' tendency to fixate on the "sensational, lurid and untruthful", like the Muck Rake man in Pilgrim's Progress who could look no way but down.
Although Roosevelt insisted that he was not going after the investigative journalists whose work was “indispensable” in the fight against corruption, his speech, Goodwin notes, was widely seen as an indiscriminate attack on all reform journalists. Hence the president had inadvertently, as one commentator noted, “put into the hands of every trust magnate, every insurance thief, and every political corruptionist a handy weapon which will be used . . . for their defense”.
Having provided conservatives with such a powerful image with which to discredit McClure's and other investigative publications, Roosevelt, the one figure who helped inspire and launch investigative journalism, now contributed greatly to its slow demise as a force in progressive politics.
Indeed, it was not long after Roosevelt's muckraker speech that a stunned publishing world learned that the core journalistic team at McClure's was leaving. The magazinewould struggle along for some years after this, and three of the "big four" would help launch a new publication that they hoped would rival the investigative standards of their former home, but things were never quite the same from this point.
Goodwin closes the book with an examination of the Taft presidency and the dramatic events that led to Taft’s and Roosevelt’s “parting of the ways”. Roosevelt’s disappointment with Taft’s decision to fire Gifford Pinchot, the head of the US Forest Service, because of the controversy surrounding the latter’s struggle with the interior secretary forms the more familiar part of this story. But so too does Roosevelt’s vehement attacks on the courts, which he argued had become increasingly obstructionist and undemocratic. For the trained jurist and more moderate Taft, it is this issue, more than any other, that makes him determined to prevent Roosevelt securing the 1912 Republican Party nomination.
Indeed, by the end of the book Taft emerges as something of a hero, albeit an unsung one, whose integrity, lack of ego and simple humanity stand in contrast to Roosevelt, whose supreme confidence and drive for office ultimately destroy the profound, and largely forgotten, relationship between these two men. Roosevelt is by far the more colourful and, in many respects, more important figure, both in the book and in the period Goodwin is describing, but by chronicling his rise and fall in part through Taft’s eyes we get a far more complete and accurate picture of both Roosevelt and his age.
This is a beautifully written and well-researched book, indispensable for anyone who wishes to gain a better understanding of the all-too-familiar struggle between wealth, government, the people and the press both today and in the United States of the early 20th century.
David B Woolner, resident historian of the Roosevelt Institute, co-edited FDR's World: War, Peace and Legacies and FDR and the Environment.
