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

“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.”

While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action.

He answered somewhat impatiently that I was entirely mistaken (as in fact I was) about there being merely a political ring,” for the “inner circle” was, in truth, a miasma, an enormous knot of “big businessmen, and the politicians, lawyers, and judges who were in alliance with and to a certain extent dependent upon them, and that the successful man

national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press.

“Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,” Henry Demarest Lloyd

Grievances had to be given specific objects, and these the muckraker supplied. It was muckraking that brought the diffuse malaise of the public into focus.

“Before there could be action, there must be information and exhortation.