It Was Fun, the Struggle
The Bully Pulpit
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster, 2013
"Do you not think it is a disgusting spectacle, two fat bawling men giving each other the lie all over creation and screaming to be President?”
So complained wise old Helen Choate Bell in 1912 as she was bombarded everywhere by newspapers and placards and pamphlets crying up the election contest between former president Theodore Roosevelt and incumbent William Howard Taft. Mrs. Bell was something of a Boston institution - "as sharp a knife as we've got in the kitchen," as her dear friend Oliver Wendell Holmes was wont to say - a familiar figure lugging armloads of books to and from her beloved Atheneum, revered for her sharp insights even though she never published anything (one hopeful Boston editor sent her a parcel of the latest poetry books hoping for a review; thinking them all tripe, she sent them back with a note that said "I forgive you"), so it's not surprising that even in the midst of her irritation, she unerringly spotted the key pathos of this particular election: not that each of those fat bawling men was screaming to be president, but that they were "giving each other the lie" while they did it. The personal element was what caught her attention (and, because she was a Yankee through and through, aroused her distaste) - the main political contest, between Taft and former Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson, hardly struck her as worthy of mention. Even after Wilson had won, she would only sniffingly comment that he looked like he should be bound between covers and shelved somewhere inaccessible.
Something of her same dramatic prioritizing seems to be written into the DNA of Roosevelt and certainly Taft studies ever since. They might start out purporting to be biographies of their respective subjects - Roosevelt the fiery reforming Republican president, Taft his faithful friend, cabinet proxy, and eventual hand-picked successor for the 1912 Presidential term Roosevelt had rashly promised he wouldn't seek himself - but they inevitably degenerate into the story not of a political party in crisis but of a friendship torn in two. There's hardly ever been a Roosevelt study that doesn't end up devoting a disproportionate amount of space to this personal rift, and there's never yet been a Taft biography that wasn't completely hijacked by it. You can almost hear Woodrow Wilson chuckling about it still, down in Hell.
The narrative hijiacking happens mainly because it's such a good story - it hits so many perfect dramatic notes: the two men were very different temperamentally, Roosevelt brash and passionate, Taft subdued and deliberative, and yet they were the best of friends for years, with Taft appreciating Roosevelt's lightning-rod instincts for public crusading and Roosevelt appreciating Taft's unassuming sagacity in unraveling complicated conflicts. They were even dissimilar physically in dramatically pleasing ways: Roosevelt liked to hike around Rock Creek Park in downpours of driving sleet; Taft favored napping (and was very good at it, even having once famously slept through a ferocious typhoon in the Philippines). Roosevelt filled his eight years as President with much ringing rhetoric against malefactors of great wealth - railroad tycoons, robber barons, trust-fund plutocrats, and the like - and when the 1908 election season rolled around Roosevelt decided to stick to his spur-of-the-moment promise not to run again and so settled on Taft to carry forward his entire agenda.It all seemed to work, at first. Since he had the full public support of the most popular President since Andrew Jackson, Taft won the election handily, and he and his imperious, sharp-tongued wife Nellie moved into the White House. But once Taft was no longer Roosevelt's subordinate, he stopped acting like he was, and uncomfortable rifts began forming almost at once - first over little matters like White House staffing and cabinet appointments, and then gradually over political philosophy itself.
Taft's thinking had always been more conservative and methodical than Roosevelt's, and although in four years as President he advanced more progressive reforms than Roosevelt had managed in eight (except of course for the Sixteenth Amendment Taft added to the Constitution, which was a nakedly illegal Federal cash-grab then and remains one today). his frequent compromises on issues Roosevelt considered vital increasingly enraged the former President ... to the point where Roosevelt formed his own Progressive political party, determined to beat both Taft and Wilson in the 1912 election, thereby re-taking control of what he referred to as the "bully pulpit" of the presidency, the unequalled position from which to spearhead political change.Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin takes that term as the title of her densely-researched and utterly absorbing new book, and when I saw the cover of The Bully Pulpit, featuring mustachioed close-ups of those two fat bawling men screaming to be president, I thought: here's the old story again. It's been forty years since William Manners wrote his T.R. and Will: A Friendship That Split the Republican Party, so it's time for a retread.
Which is always wrong thinking when it comes to a writer as thoughtful as Goodwin. Just as her hugely popular Team of Rivals could easily have been just another political biography of Abraham Lincoln but was much more, so too The Bully Pulpit rapidly unfolds into much more than yet another retelling of the tempestuous Presidential Election of 1912. The key is in the book's subtitle: "Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism," which only very slightly refers to the heyday the US press corps had with the campaign itself - great as that heyday was, what with all three candidates being so easily caricatured in print and especially in cartoon (when Roosevelt left office, one such cartoon showed the hack political artists of the day sobbing in misery that their easy meal ticket - the prince-nez, the teeth, the celebrated "big stick" - was leaving town).
No, the real focus of that subtitle - and of the book itself - is the tight-knit cadre of journalists who took advantage of rising literacy rates and a burgeoning magazine market to write fire-breathing progressive pieces of a factual complexity and a literary quality previously unseen in American history. The scrappy bravery and camaraderie of these reporters - writers like William Allen White, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, John Phillips, and Ida Tarbell - is the real story of The Bully Pulpit, and Goodwin presents that story at the front of her stage while the famous Roosevelt-Taft saga is often relegated to the background.Goodwin's group of reforming reporters, engaged in what one of them called "a happy, struggling, fighting world in which, we believe, good people are coming out on top," was initially assembled by S. S. McClure, an erratic but inspiring Irish-born publisher and talent-spotter who established McClure's Magazine as a venue for a new kind of journalism that was long-form and deep-background, carefully researched and masterfully written, as far from the dashed-off penny press journalism of the day as possible. He attracted a wide variety of first-rate writers through a combination of charm and vision, and Goodwin shines at showing her readers the thrilling world he created and briefly kept in motion:
By 1906, Sam McClure was considered among the ten most important men in America. His gifted writers operated more like an intimate team, an extended family, than the staff of a magazine. For Ida Tarbell, now in her twelfth year at McClure's, the magazine provided freedom, security, and comradeship. “Here was a group of people I could work with, without sacrifice or irritation,” Tarbell later reflected in her autobiography.“Here was a healthy growing undertaking which excited me, while it seemed to offer endless opportunity to contribute to the better thinking of the country.” Ray Baker felt the same way, recognizing the “rare group” McClure had assembled – all “genuinely absorbed in life, genuinely in earnest in their attitude toward it, and yet with humor, and yet with sympathy, and yet with tolerance." The magazine was“a success,” Lincoln Steffens recalled. "We had circulation, revenue, power. In the building up of that triumph we had been happy, all of us; it was fun, the struggle.”
A combination of personal and financial factors eventually prompted McClure to let that fantastic team fritter away, and many of its members went on to found The American Magazine and continue the kind of norm-challenging journalism - dubbed "muckraking" by Roosevelt - that had brought them together in the first place. There was "nothing so stimulating," Baker wrote to his father, as creating a new periodical "resting in complete confidence upon one's friends, devoted to what one considers high purposes, each sacrificing to the limit for the common cause."That cause wore many faces - tariff reform, interstate commerce protections, clean food and water legislation, and half a dozen other hot-button issues of the day - but always it had one essence: to hold corporate powers and senatorial cabals in the land accountable for their misdeeds, or rather, to stir the reading public to hold them accountable. In this struggle they had a greater champion than they could have hoped for in Theodore Roosevelt and a better champion than they knew in William Howard Taft, but their principal support was always each other, and Goodwin perfectly captures not only the ardent zeal that moved these people but also the plain old love of living - as when they added to their ranks the great journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne, author of the hugely popular "Mr. Dooley" syndicated column:
When Phillips and Tarbell persuaded Finley Peter Dunne to join the group, Baker was thrilled: “Everything amused him! We were youthful and dead in earnest – and he was wise.” Dunne proved himself a great companion, who “loved so much to talk” that he could entertain his office mates for hours. “He had a wide knowledge of men and their ways," Tarbell recalled. Whenever conflict arose within the team, "Mr. Dooley" could be relied upon to lighten the heavy mood.
Such mood-lightening could also be provided in-house on occasion:
As managing editor, Albert Boyden "made it his business" to foster camaraderie among his writers and contributors to the new magazine. At his fourth-floor walk-up on Stuyvesant Square, he hosted regular dinners for a revolving group of novelists, artists, politicians, and scientists. “What talk went on in that high-up living room!” Tarbell recalled. “What wonderful talks we heard!”
Of course, the old familiar Roosevelt-Taft story is too powerful to shunt aside completely. Just as Lincoln very often dominated the story of his cabinet, so the triumphs and trials of these two remarkable men very often pushes aside the reporters who so often wrote about them (brought forward in time and handed this book, not one of them would complain - the first thing newshounds learn is deference to news). Goodwin, a veteran biographer of presidents, creates indelible and lovingly nuanced portraits of both Roosevelt and Taft, and she expends a good deal of effort investing complexity in the wives of both men as well. Mrs. Roosevelt is not here the angelic cipher she so often seems in other TR biographies, and the characterization of Nellie Taft is nothing short of a revelation: it makes a very convincing case that an intelligent and unapologetically strong-willed woman has been serially simplified by her husband's biographers.The vividness of this version brings home all the more sharply the tragedy of the massive stroke she suffered shortly after Taft took the White House. Briefly she was completely incapacitated, and even when it became clear that her life wasn't in immediate danger, the damage was still catastrophic: at first she could neither walk nor speak and seemed not to understand her surroundings. Taft settled her into their new summer home in Beverly, Massachusetts, but Goodwin is right to stress that he was devastated:
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.
(Goodwin deftly re-creates the incredibly touching scene of the President of the United States ignoring government work in order to sit by his wife's bedside and patiently teach her how to speak: "Now, please, darling, try and say 'the'–that's it, 'the.' That's pretty good, but now try it again.")In her innumerable publicity turns on radio, TV, online, and the printed page, Goodwin has stressed the parallels between the politics of her book and the politics of the present day - a fractured Republican party, a complacent populace, a new breed of muckrakers, and so on. It's a valid enough parallel, but it's a shame of a tactic; the past doesn't need the present to make it interesting, especially in the hands of a writer like Goodwin herself. In The Bully Pulpit she's taken Mrs. Bell's "disgusting spectacle" and breathed new life into every corpuscle of it. The result is a book of which even the old Brahmin biddy herself would have approved.
Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.