Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism. Simon and Schuster. 2013. 892 pages.
Theodore Roosevelt is a national icon. Rough Rider, San Juan Hill, national parks, the Panama Canal, Teddy bears, etc. The man is carved into Mount Rushmore, for god’s sake. There is a room next to the Oval Office named for him (and his cousin Franklin) — the Roosevelt Room (which I learned watching The West Wing).
But Taft who?
William Howard Taft, hardly known and mostly for being portly apparently, followed TR as president after serving as Governor of the newly “acquired” Philippines and as Secretary of War (before we more euphemistically and less honestly renamed it Secretary of Defense). He was a judge who three times turned down appointments to the US Supreme Court because he was more greatly needed elsewhere (the first time when he was not yet 45), before finally accepting the role of Chief Justice at age 64. Taft appointed twice as many justices as TR, and created the Oval Office, himself saved lands for the public trust, and spent a career more progressive than Roosevelt only to be beaten by him from the (opportunistic) left.
Roosevelt loved war; Taft preferred diplomacy and peace. Roosevelt loved the adoration of crowds; Taft preferred to work in quiet. Roosevelt dreamed of being president from yearly years; Taft had to be talked into it (and turned down SCOTUS appointment to run).
The men were best friends for much of their lives, mutual advisors and collaborators (Taft was in Roosevelt’s cabinet and “acting president” when TR was away); but then Taft gave credit for his own presidential victory equally to TR and to his brother Charlie Taft. Roosevelt couldn’t stand sharing the win and their relationship cooled into a years-long estrangement.
Doris Kearns Goodwin in The Bully Pulpit wonderfully weaves threads among Roosevelt, Taft, Edith and Nellie, the women who held them up, and the leading journalists who shaped two presidencies.
The era of “muckrakers” is often spoken of in pejorative ways, but by her telling these reporters — Ida Tarbell, Roy Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, William Allen White, plus Jacob Riis, Upton Sinclair and others — were vital in exposing the abuses of robber barons and corporate monopolies, the implications of tariffs, the scandal of bankers, and the reality of the insidious “boss” system of American politics that kept power contained and kept the people of the nation unaware and uninvolved. The relationship between press and president was, for a time, a vital force for policy development and marketing.
She introduces each from childhood, tracing their love of politics or journalism to its roots in each case, then building to the “golden age” from McKinley’s assassination to Wilson’s election — from 1901-1912, the age she identifies as the era of Samuel McClure and McClure’s Magazine, which informed a whole nation and spawned other, less glorious efforts.
Increasingly as I read, I thought Taft has gotten short shrift from American history — a thoughtful and principled man whose policies I didn’t always agree with, but whose demeanor and methodical approach seemed very much like Jimmy Carter. Though a stellar jurist and beloved by all who ever met him, Taft's presidency was less powerful than it might have been because a) he followed the bluster of TR; and b) just a few weeks after his inauguration his wife and partner Nellie — with whom he had spent so many young adult hours and day deliberating world affairs and on whom he had relied for encouragement, and who wanted the presidency more for him than he had for himself — had a stroke which left her unable to speak. His tending to her in the midst of delicate negotiations with Congress over his key policy ideals compromised his success and put an early mark on his presidency. While he would surely have wanted to be successful in his presidential leadership, it always seemed that Nellie mattered more (which is kind of refreshing). His style was so unlike TR that he was often thought to be disengaged from the fight, which wasn’t altogether true.
In contrast, I couldn’t read TR’s political, pre- and post-political affairs without imagining Donald Trump — the larger-than-life-ness, the grandiosity, the playing to public imagination or lack, the opportunistic policy initiatives, the desire always for a fight, the willingness to split the party to suit his own need for ego stroking. In describing a labor dispute, and warned “that he would almost certainly fail if he tried (to intervene); and that he would injure his prestige and perhaps sacrifice his political future if he essayed to step outside the role of his constitutional duties” Kearns notes that “Roosevelt would not be confined his precedent or bound by fear of failure.” In 1912, judging his hand-picked Taft a failure (or perhaps more dismal out of the limelight than could bear) he sought to unseat the incumbent Taft and claim a third term for himself. During a primary season in which Taft won the nomination, Roosevelt claimed fraud loudly and and often, hoping to overturn the results. His inability to accept defeat led him to split the party and become a nominee another way, a move that defeated Taft but failed to produce an enduring Progressive Party or much at all in the win column in 1912, and opened a path to the election of Woodrow Wilson.
There is a great deal of American history that I learned in school only by dates and heroes. The nuances and relationships are way more interesting and offer more insight into the kind of nation we’ve become a century later — still plagued by robber barons and scandalous bankers, still unable to provide food and housing to all our people, and still led by egos and backroom deals that undermine our experiment in democracy.
Kearns is a top-grade story teller and meticulous researcher. You’ll learn something and you’ll be entertained in the learning.