“More and more each year we have felt about us the pressure of tremendous forces,” Amos Pinchot, a prominent Progressive, wrote in a 1912 pamphlet called “What’s the Matter with America.” “Our country is going through a terrific period of unrest. Something is wrong. . . . Where starts the mighty river of discontent that is destroying our respect for government, uprooting faith in political parties, and causing every precedent and convention of the old order to strain at its moorings?”
A century ago, when the First World War and all the other horrors of the twentieth century were still over the horizon, the Progressives were convinced that the country was in a dire state. They understood American life before the Civil War to have been simple, provincial, agrarian, and self-sufficient. Nobody had quite anticipated that the Union, once preserved, would quickly become a roaring industrial power, with a national economy, mass immigration, big cities, an imperialist foreign policy, and—for the Progressives, most significant of all—very big, very powerful businesses that seemed to dominate national life. As Pinchot put it, “we have permitted an uncontrolled industrial oligarchy to assume, and use for its own purposes, a tremendous and arrogant power.”
Between the assassination of William McKinley, in 1901, and the nomination of Warren Harding, in 1920, there were four straight Presidential elections without a major candidate who, by the standards of the day, would have been considered conservative. On the political spectrum of their time, the Progressives were in the center, not on the left. They had no respect for the leading Democrat during the first part of the era, William Jennings Bryan, whom they viewed as a nostalgist engaged in a hapless quest to re-create the country he had known in the rural Midwest. The Progressives were modernizers, social-science enthusiasts, technicians. They generally preferred big, new, national institutions to small, traditional, local ones. They were liberals, not radicals, and they felt threatened by left-wing agitation, of which there was vastly more then than there is now.
The Progressives were also moralists. They talked and wrote about their political work as a struggle between good and evil. They loved the idea of purifying things that were unclean, corrupt, or tainted—from germ-infested urban tenements to political graft to predatory business practices. They saw it as their mission to curb the power of big business and machine politics in order to restore true democracy in the United States. And their legacy was an alternative structure of government agencies (the Federal Reserve Board, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration), universities, professions, news organizations, foundations, and so on, all of which they regarded as bulwarks against the industrial oligopolies.
Today, it’s natural for liberals who are feeling dispirited and stymied by their conservative opponents to look back nostalgically at the Progressive Era, a time when liberalism looked muscular and triumphant. Its alpha figure, Theodore Roosevelt, appears to have been a big part of the reason. Doris Kearns Goodwin, in a 2011 appearance on “Meet the Press,” had advice for President Obama: “There is a model for him in Teddy Roosevelt. Similar time to ours: squeezed middle class, up-and-down gap between the rich and the poor.” Teddy Roosevelt, she said, understood that people wanted fairness, and found a way to talk about it.
When Goodwin said that, she must have been deep into writing her new book, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism” (Simon & Schuster). She is too disciplined to make explicit comparisons to the present in the book, but it’s infused with a sense that the story she tells may hold lessons for us. Back then, capitalism had generated a wave of miraculous changes in everyday life—railroads, electric lights, telephones, automobiles—and raised the over-all standard of living, but it had also opened up a large gap between rich and poor and caused a great deal of suffering, social unrest, corruption, and dislocation. Companies based on new technologies were acquiring monopoly power and using it to drive smaller players out of business and to disadvantage consumers. All this sounds familiar, right? Goodwin’s story is about how a super-aggressive President and press were able to take on these problems, marshal public opinion, and restore the balance between market and state. In the book’s preface, Goodwin writes, “It is my greatest hope that the story that follows will guide readers through their own process of discovery toward a better understanding of what it takes to summon the public to demand the action necessary to bringing our country closer to its ancient ideals.”
The kind of history that Goodwin writes is different from the history that’s produced by most academic scholars. It’s popular history, which is a sort of journalism about the past: the story and the characters are the key elements, and the argument is secondary. For Goodwin, the main challenge would not have been to come up with a new interpretation of the Progressive Era; it would have been to make a book about Theodore Roosevelt feel fresh when he has already been the subject of countless biographies—and for good reason. T.R. is an ideal biographical subject: he wrote copiously; he was almost pathologically active, not only as a politician but also as an adventurer and an explorer; he experienced an unusual number of dramatic twists of fate; and he lived in an interesting time. He was incapable of blandness in word or deed.
In her previous book, “Team of Rivals” (2005), Goodwin figured out an ingenious way around an even more difficult version of this problem—writing about Abraham Lincoln—by focussing on three members of Lincoln’s Cabinet: Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and William Seward. Lincoln was never far offstage, but he didn’t have to be put through all the usual biographical paces. Her solution to the Teddy Roosevelt problem is somewhat similar: she has added one major individual character, William Howard Taft, and one collective one, the élite of the Progressive Era press corps, mainly the writers and editors associated with McClure’s Magazine.
There’s little new information in “The Bully Pulpit,” but Goodwin has done a thorough job of going through a lot of manuscript collections and stitching together a coherent narrative from a wide variety of sources. “The Bully Pulpit” proceeds at a stately clip, in clear though not memorable prose, explaining details and context as they arise. One of the challenges of writing Presidential biography is that the Presidency itself is usually devoted to complex legislative and political maneuvers and long-forgotten disputes. As colorful as Roosevelt was, his Presidency was devoid of war or severe crisis and preoccupied with economic regulation. “The Bully Pulpit” uses the personal relationship between Roosevelt and Taft as its narrative mainspring, and the relative unfamiliarity of Taft to invigorate Roosevelt’s story.
Roosevelt and Taft were as lengthily and intimately connected as any two Presidents who weren’t related by blood. Born a year apart, they were both children of the American upper class. Taft’s father, a prominent lawyer in Cincinnati, served as Attorney General and Secretary of War in the Grant Administration. Roosevelt’s father was a New York businessman rich enough so that his son was raised on the assumption that he would never have to earn a living. (Both Roosevelt and Taft produced children, grandchildren, and, in Taft’s case, a great-grandchild who also served in high government positions.) Taft was a member of Skull and Bones, at Yale, Roosevelt of the Porcellian Club, at Harvard. Both went into government early. They met in the early eighteen-nineties, when Taft was Solicitor General and Roosevelt was U.S. Civil Service Commissioner. For them, Washington was a very small town, and Goodwin lovingly re-creates its atmosphere of large houses run by small armies of servants, nearly nightly dinner parties, workdays interrupted for midafternoon horseback rides and golf games, discussions of Tolstoy, and weeks-long vacations. Right away, Taft and Roosevelt became the best of friends, though their wives didn’t like each other, and their careers were interwoven as each rose very high very quickly. Roosevelt was only forty-two when, in 1901, he became President, after McKinley’s assassination. He and Taft seem to have written each other hundreds of letters.
Both were Republicans by inheritance, and, as Goodwin presents them, in their youth both absorbed their party’s pro-business creed. (Taft was a student of William Graham Sumner, the Yale professor who coined the term “social Darwinism.”) When Roosevelt and Taft first met, nobody in politics was using the term “Progressive.” Yet, like many Republicans of their background and instincts, they became uncomfortable with their party’s domination by Senate grandees like Nelson Aldrich and Mark Hanna, who so completely shared the views of men like John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan that it wasn’t necessary to cut them in on the deal, as it was for many lesser politicians. Roosevelt, at least, had an aristocrat’s contempt for “the mere money-getting American,” and both he and Taft thought that they could save their party by aligning Republicans with the growing sentiment that the government should play a bigger role in the economy. To their minds, they were reformers. Among Progressives, though, there were consequential debates over what reform consisted of. Goodwin presents many of these disagreements as she goes along, but, because her focus is so powerfully on people and their relationships as motivating forces of history, she leaves the too simple impression that all one needs to know about the Progressives is that they pushed back against big business.
To the extent that Goodwin wants to make an argument, rather than tell a story, it’s about political communication, not the substance of Progressivism. In her account, Progressivism couldn’t have succeeded without the support of a handful of the nation’s leading journalists. (They became known as the “muckrakers”—although Roosevelt coined that term in a speech denouncing another journalistic faction.) If you’re a journalist who worries about the profession today, these chapters are pure bliss. You meet a coterie of journalists who are gifted both as investigators and as writers—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, William Allen White—and lucky enough to be working for a magazine edited by a genius, S. S. McClure, who gave them all the time and money they needed to produce ambitious feats of reporting. Their stories about corporate, labor, and political corruption appeared in multiple installments, made them famous and their magazine rich, and triggered the passage of historic reform legislation. At a time when the U.S. population was a quarter of what it is today, and far less educated, McClure’s had a circulation of four hundred thousand. Roosevelt spent plenty of time cultivating its name-brand journalists, as well as notables like Jacob Riis, Richard Harding Davis, and Upton Sinclair, who weren’t on the McClure’s staff. He’d ask their advice on crucial matters, suggest improvements on advance copies of their work, travel with them, send them drafts of his speeches, even provide them with carte-blanche access to all the officials of his government. Between 1903 and 1905, the McClure’s journalists played essential roles in one of the Roosevelt Administration’s highest achievements: the regulation of railroads and the meatpacking and patent-medicine industries.
The heyday of McClure’s ended quickly. The main culprit was what sounds like bipolar disorder on McClure’s part—he conducted a flagrant extramarital affair and made wildly ambitious plans to expand his business. In 1906, the core staff left to start another magazine, The American, which they had to sell a few years later. By then, Roosevelt’s conservative Republican enemies, emboldened by a promise he had impulsively made not to run for reëlection in 1908, were denying him any significant further victories.
Roosevelt had the kind of personality often found in the very best politicians: a combination of flamboyant self-involvement and political caution. It’s what yielded the kind of exciting but middle-seeking rhetoric that Goodwin urged President Obama to copy. Roosevelt craved fame and power; as a young man, he wrote to his sister, “I fear that only a very mild & moderate success awaits me.” He had little sense of personal privacy. (Reporters joined him every day while a barber shaved him.) He often struck people as a boy in a man’s body; he would invite new acquaintances to wrestle and box with him, or to fight with wooden swords, or to climb trees. His rhetorical flourishes often included invocations of violence, including jocular threats to have his opponents killed. But he never cut off relations with the Republican bosses who disapproved of his attacks on the misdeeds of business, and he grew dismissive of allies who turned from reform to socialism. He liked to point out that Lincoln had accomplished more in the struggle against slavery than the abolitionists had.
Taft was utterly different—affable rather than aggressive, loved rather than feared. He tried valiantly to exercise and diet, but even his own family couldn’t help thinking of him, as we do, in terms of his substantial bulk. Although much of the story of his rise is taken up by his contemplation of an endless series of job offers, he was not overtly ambitious. His father, Alphonso, his wife, Nellie, and Roosevelt had to push him relentlessly to accept executive-branch jobs. (His natural home was the judiciary, which is where he wound up, as Chief Justice.) His 1908 Presidential campaign was essentially engineered in a private meeting between Nellie and Roosevelt, to which Taft was not invited. When he finally declared his candidacy, he did so with an oddly inverted statement: “I am not foolish enough to say that in the improbable event that the opportunity to run for the great office of President were to come to me, I should decline it, for this would not be true.”
Roosevelt and Taft’s beautiful friendship created a mutual political disaster. Roosevelt was able to install Taft as his successor but soon became dissatisfied in ways that should have been predictable. Each man felt personally slighted by the other, and a major breach arose when Taft fired Gifford Pinchot—Amos’s brother, and a close friend of Roosevelt’s—as Chief Forester for being too ardently conservationist. Soon the ex-President found the incumbent President insufficiently Progressive. Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912, and, when that failed, he founded the Progressive Party and ran for President as its standard-bearer. Except for Eugene Debs, of the Socialist Party, all the Presidential candidates in 1912—Roosevelt, Taft, and the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson—considered themselves Progressives, and the enmity between Roosevelt and Taft delivered a substantial victory to Wilson. (Taft was the only Republican nominee for President ever to finish third.)
The Roosevelt-Taft relationship would seem to be natural material for a grand tragedy. Unfortunately, Taft doesn’t make anywhere near as interesting a character as Roosevelt. Unspooling his life’s story, Goodwin, who looks for the good in her main characters, has to resort to passages like this, about his term as Secretary of War: “It was quickly evident that Taft’s innate diplomacy and administrative acumen would bring a jovial, effective leadership to the department.” The result is a dual biography whose subjects are genuinely connected but, literarily as well as corporally, unevenly weighted.
The title of Goodwin’s book conveys her thesis that Roosevelt was politically more effective than Taft because of his superior communication skills. And the space she devotes to the muckrakers is meant, in part, to show that the enormous attention that Roosevelt lavished on a few favored journalists was an essential element in his winning elections and passing legislation. Taft certainly showed little interest in coöpting the McClure’s crowd, and he was generally far less concerned than Roosevelt was with broadly disseminating his ideas. Goodwin reminds us that Taft’s first Presidential address was only three hundred and forty words. But, to judge from Goodwin’s own copious evidence, it wouldn’t have made much difference if Taft had spent more time cultivating the press or polishing his speechifying, because he was not a natural politician in so many other ways.
Nor is it helpful to think of Roosevelt and Taft as two men with identical views, different merely in style. Although perfect intellectual clarity is a luxury that Presidents can’t afford, they ended up differing significantly on the all-consuming subject of their time, government’s relationship to business. Roosevelt’s muckraker speech—he lifted the resonant metaphor from “The Pilgrim’s Progress”—was a response to David Graham Phillips’s “Treason of the Senate” (published not by McClure but by William Randolph Hearst, a Roosevelt enemy), which had assailed Nelson Aldrich and other leading Republicans. Roosevelt may have tangled with these people, but he had never broken with them. During his 1904 election campaign, Roosevelt received large contributions from J. P. Morgan and other corporate villains of the day. And the speech wasn’t merely an exercise in political prudence. It had an animating idea, which was that the problem the Progressives faced was not the excessive power of business but corruption. “The danger is not really from corrupt corporations; it springs from the corruption itself, whether exercised for or against corporations,” Roosevelt said. “So far as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form of a fierce discontent with evil, of a determination to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or politics, the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy life. If, on the other hand, it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against appetite, of a contest between the brutal greed of the ‘have nots’ and the brutal greed of the ‘haves,’ then it has no significance for good, but only for evil.”
McClure’s, at the height of its influence, made a point of publishing exposés not just of business but also of labor unions and political parties. Like Roosevelt, it targeted bad guys in all realms, not just business. Conversely, the main reason that Taft fired Gifford Pinchot was that Pinchot shared Roosevelt’s crusading zeal. Crusading made the judicious, procedural Taft uncomfortable. It is difficult to make a lasting form of governance out of the moralizing impulse, much as it animated both Roosevelt and the muckrakers. What mattered is how their instincts—and Taft’s different ones—worked their way into a program.
Within a few years, a new set of Progressive luminaries had emerged, who were more interested in manifesto-writing than in investigative journalism. Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, of The New Republic, and Charles Van Hise, the president of the University of Wisconsin—all of whom had mutually admiring relationships with Roosevelt—looked to the new regulatory agencies and federal commissions to create rules for big corporations and trusts, and to punish them for bad behavior. But they did not take issue with their bigness itself, and they opposed breaking up the trusts. In “The Promise of American Life,” Croly wrote that the “economic power” of Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and the railroad tycoons James Hill and E. H. Harriman “has been just as much earned by substantial service as was the political power of a man like Andrew Jackson; and if our country is to continue its prosperous economic career, it must retain an economic organization which will offer to men of this stamp the opportunity and the inducement to earn distinction.” Lippmann’s book “Drift and Mastery” (1914) opens with a chapter mocking the muckrakers for being anecdotal and for lacking a detailed program. “It is impossible to say that muckraking was either progressive or reactionary in its tendency,” Lippmann wrote. Roosevelt was so taken with the work of Lippmann and Croly that he wrote, “No man who wishes seriously to study our present social, industrial, and political life with the view of guiding his thought and action so as to work for national betterment in the future can afford not to read these books through and through and to ponder and digest them.” His enthusiasm makes sense: their version of the Progressive idea fitted with his idea that big business shouldn’t be thought of as bad unless it misbehaved. It entailed establishing an equipoise between big business and a national government, staffed by people as formidable in their way as the business tycoons were in theirs, that could exercise countervailing power as needed.