“Bigger Than His Party,” a Roosevelt cartoon in Puck magazine, May 7, 1902.
ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 1, 1903, Roosevelt embarked in high spirits upon the longest tour ever taken by a president—a nine-week transcontinental journey by train that would cover 14,000 miles across twenty-four states and territories. Freed from the vexations of dealing with Congress, he jauntily doffed his hat and waved to the hundreds of cheering well-wishers gathered at the Sixth Street station to see him off. As he boarded the train, he turned to offer parting advice to George Cortelyou, whom he had appointed head of the new Department of Commerce and Labor. “Look out for the trusts,” he chuckled. “I hate to leave you here alone with those dreadful corporations, but I can’t very well help it. Be careful of them and don’t let them hurt you while I am away.”
The specially equipped train, reportedly among “the handsomest ever placed on the tracks by the Pullman Company,” consisted of six cars. The lush, mahogany-finished Elysian would be the president’s home throughout the trip. This “traveling palace” boasted three state rooms, a kitchen staffed by expert chefs, a private dining room, an observation parlor, quarters for the servants, and a rear platform from which to address crowds gathered at little stations along the way. The remaining cars included spacious quarters for the president’s guests, stenographers, and Secret Service crew, a sleeping car housing reporters and photographers, and a dining car.
Invited to accompany the presidential party, the naturalist John Burroughs described the train’s progress north and west through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and Montana. The president “gave himself very freely and heartily to the people,” he noted, his arrival sparking a festive spirit in each village and town. Whenever Roosevelt spotted a group of men or women waving from a distance, he raced out to lift his hat and return the greeting. He never saw such exchanges with the public as inconvenient or intrusive. Burroughs recalled an occasion when the president was lunching as the train passed by a small schoolhouse where the teacher had ushered her students outside. Clutching his napkin, Roosevelt raced to the platform. “Those children,” he said, “wanted to see the President of the United States, and I could not disappoint them. They may never have another chance.”
Recognizing that people would come “to see the President much as they would come in to see a circus,” Roosevelt also surmised that in many small towns the train—rather than the president—was the marquee attraction: “The whole population of the plains now looks upon the Pullman sleepers and dining cars,” he told John Hay, “just as Mark Twain describes the people along the banks of the Mississippi as formerly looking at the Mississippi steamers.” Nonetheless, he was convinced that “besides the mere curiosity there was a good feeling behind it all, a feeling that the President was their man and symbolized their government and that they had a proprietary interest in him.”
Jostled by frantic crowds as he made his way to crude bandstands erected along the route, Roosevelt never betrayed impatience or irritation. Since active campaigning by a presidential candidate was still considered distasteful, this extended tour represented his best chance to gain “the people’s trust” before the coming election. Determined to connect with the people, Roosevelt radiated nothing but delight as he accepted an array of bizarre gifts that included an infant badger, a lizard, a horned toad, a copper vase, an Indian basket, two bears, a horse, and a gold inlaid saddle. Through it all, Roosevelt maintained good humor and gratitude. In Butte, Montana, when presented with a foot-high three-handled silver loving cup capable of holding sixteen pints of beer, he graciously exclaimed, “Great heavens and earth!”
Before embarking on the tour, Roosevelt had prepared a half-dozen policy speeches, each addressing a specific issue—the trusts, the tariff, the Navy, the Philippines, and the Monroe Doctrine. “These were not epoch-making addresses,” William White explained. Neither “particularly original” nor profound, they were structured with two simple goals in mind: to outline his policies in straightforward language and to establish an emotional rapport with his audiences.
The further he moved from “the thick of civilization,” the more expansive and at ease the president appeared. When he talked informally to “rough-coated, hard-headed, gaunt, sinewy farmers and hired hands,” Roosevelt proudly told John Hay, he was “always sure of reaching them” with simple language that his Harvard friends would judge “not only homely, but commonplace.” Despite “all the superficial differences,” he remarked, “down at bottom these men and I think a good deal alike, or least have the same ideals.”
Newspapermen began to compile the aphorisms they termed “Roosevelt Gems”—pithy sayings about citizenship, character, and ordinary virtues that he repeated time and again to the great pleasure of his audiences: farmers in Aberdeen, South Dakota, whistled approval when he declared that no law could ever be framed to “make a fool wise or a weakling strong, or a coward brave.” They cheered when he compared the qualities desired in the best kind of public servant to those displayed by a good neighbor or a trustworthy friend—“a man who keep[s] his word and never promise[s] . . . what he knows cannot be done.” Oregonians nodded in approval when he affirmed, “I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.” Indianans cheered the now familiar Roosevelt adage “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Such “sudsy metaphors,” which reportedly dripped “like water from a clothesline,” reached the hearts of citizens at every stop along the way.
It was during this western tour that Roosevelt began to test the phrase “a square deal”—the slogan that would come to characterize his entire domestic program. In a speech the previous summer he had called for “a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor.” Now, he began to flesh out what this really meant for particular segments of the populace. In Arizona, he spoke of the Indians in his regiment: “They were good enough to fight and to die, and they are good enough to have me treat them exactly as square as any white man. . . . All I ask is a square deal for every man.” In Montana, he expressed a similar sentiment about the black troops who fought beside him in Santiago. Still later, he elaborated on the concept, applying it to his policy regarding labor and capital. The appeal of the slogan was immediately evident; even advertisers along the president’s route appropriated his phrase, headlining “A Square Deal” in their copy. A real estate company in Butte, Montana, began its pitch with Roosevelt’s words: “We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.”
Reaching Yellowstone, Roosevelt bid a temporary farewell to the news-papermen, who were instructed to stay behind. Accompanied by John Burroughs, he intended to relax for two weeks, to watch birds and simply observe rather than hunt game—the herds of elk, antelope, and black-tailed deer. Roosevelt had stayed with the older man in his log cabin three years earlier, striking Burroughs then as “a great boy,” filled with inexhaustible energy. “He climbed everything on the place,” the naturalist recalled with mixed awe and dread. “He shinned up tree after tree, running his arms into every high-hole’s and woodpecker’s nest, while I stood on the ground below shuddering and waiting for him to fall.” Their stay at Yellowstone convinced Burroughs that the presidency had altered Roosevelt little: he remained “a man of such abounding energy and ceaseless activity that he sets everything in motion around him wherever he goes. . . . Nothing escaped him, from bears to mice, from wild geese to chickadees, from elk to red squirrels; he took it all in, and he took it in as only an alert, vigorous mind can take it in.”
These invigorating days in Yellowstone and a subsequent camping trip in the magnificent forests of Yosemite with the founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, deeply impressed Roosevelt and informed the tone of his speeches during the remainder of the trip. Turning from trusts and the tariff, he increasingly focused on the importance of preserving the country’s national heritage from exploitation. He arrived at the Grand Canyon as a great contest was raging over whether to preserve the landmark as a national monument or open it up to mining for precious metals. “Leave it as it is,” he urged his countrymen. “The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. . . . Keep it for your children, your children’s children and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American . . . should see.” Deeply moved by this “great wonder of nature,” the president resolved to ensure the designation of the Grand Canyon as a national park. “If Roosevelt had done nothing else as president,” Douglas Brinkley has observed, “his advocacy on behalf of preserving the canyon might well have put him in the top ranks of American presidents.”
When the presidential party reached the California coast, Roosevelt took a special detour on a narrow-gauge road into the San Lorenzo Valley, home to a majestic grove of giant sequoias. “I am, oh, so glad to be here,” he exclaimed. “This is the first glimpse I have ever had of the big trees.” At Stanford University the next day, he exhorted his audience “to protect these mighty trees, these wonderful monuments of beauty.” It seemed a desecration to turn “a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates” into house siding or decks or porches. While many would hold that practical progress should trump aesthetic value, Roosevelt argued, “there is nothing more practical, in the end, than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions in mankind.”
The vital role of these massive redwoods, “the great monarchs of the woods,” was confined neither to their commercial value nor to their natural beauty. The primary object of his overall forest policy, Roosevelt insisted, was “not to preserve forests because they are beautiful—though that is a good in itself—not to preserve them because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness—though that too is a good in itself,” but rather, to conserve them in order to guarantee “a steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, water” that would foster the growth of prosperous communities. Contrary to the prevailing view, Roosevelt foresaw that our natural resources were not inexhaustible. Destructive lumbering practices had already “seriously depleted” the forests. In clear language, he delineated the causal connection between forest protection and water conservation: forests absorb water and slow the melting of snow in the spring; they prevent the rain from “rushing away in uncontrollable torrents”; they “regulate the flow of streams.” In every watershed, forests help determine the amount of available water that can transform a wasteland into “a veritable garden of Eden.”
In speech after speech, Roosevelt lauded the passage of the 1902 Reclamation Act, which, for the first time, made substantial federal funds available to construct dams, reservoirs, and other irrigation projects in the West. Intended to open “small irrigated farms to actual settlers, to actual home-makers,” the legislation stipulated that tracts of land larger than 160 acres would be ineligible for federally sponsored irrigation. In this way, the government sought to ensure that speculators would not commandeer the program’s benefits. “We do not ever want to let our land policy be shaped so as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to others,” Roosevelt asserted. America’s forests and waters must “come into the hands, not of a few men of great wealth, or into the hands of a few men who speculate in them, but be distributed among many men, each of whom intends to make him a home on the land.”
Of the five irrigation projects under way in the spring of 1903—in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona—the most prominent was a huge masonry arch dam in Arizona’s Salt River Valley. When Charles Walcott, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, announced on April 18 that the government had selected the Salt River Valley for its first big enterprise, a banner headline in the Arizona Republican hailed the decision: THE DAY OF DELIVERANCE IS AT HAND. The reservoir created by the project, later christened the Roosevelt Dam, would be, excepting the work being done on the Nile, “the greatest in the world.” Designed to irrigate 200,000 acres, the dam promised to “make the community near Phoenix [with a population then of 25,000] one of the most prosperous in the country.”
The estimated cost of the five projects would total $7 million, which settlers would then repay to the government over a ten-year period. Once completed, Roosevelt predicted, these irrigation projects would more profoundly impact the entire western region over the next half century than“any other material movement whatsoever.” He could already envision “a new type” of settler throughout the West who could build homes, roads, businesses, schools, and places of amusement, populating bustling towns and cities that might one day contain “a million inhabitants.” Moreover, an arable, enticing West could alleviate some of the social evils caused by overcrowding in the East.
Century magazine suggested that Roosevelt’s decision to highlight issues of conservation, irrigation, and preservation would have an “educational effect upon the people,” fostering a new determination to protect “the western wonderlands,” expand national parks, and institute a sustainable, scientific approach to managing the nation’s wilderness areas. Any action to safeguard forest lands was usually delayed until the end of a president’s term, the journalist noted, but Roosevelt would not hesitate “to throw the full force of his influence” behind legislation that would halt “the ruinous waste of the great national forests.”
From California, the president’s train headed north to Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, before veering east for the long trip home. Roosevelt had delivered 265 speeches, once addressing nine crowds in a single day. He had participated in countless parades, endured long banquets (and gained 11 pounds), met with all manner of local officials, dedicated monuments, and attended military reviews. Sustained by the enthusiastic reception all along his travel route, he returned, according to Edith, “as fresh and unworn as when he left.”
Roosevelt had scarcely settled into the White House when reports surfaced of possible governmental corruption over the Salt River reservoir. Objections and accusations swirled around the choice of Salt River for the government’s inaugural project. During congressional debates over the Reclamation Act, talk of making desert lands in the public domain “blossom like a rose” abounded; ultimately, the government hoped to open these revitalized lands to individual settlers at a small cost under the Homestead Act. Yet given that almost all the land in the Salt River Valley was already in private hands, such settlements represented a glaring problem. For twenty years, private funds had irrigated the valley; unlike the four smaller projects, this reservoir would “irrigate no public lands, but only those in private ownership, vastly increasing, of course, their value.” Indeed, the irrigated lands would likely quadruple in value when the government completed its work. To further complicate matters, some of the tracts—undoubtedly held by speculators—covered upward of 10,000 acres, many times the established limit of 160 acres. Opportunities for corruption seemed boundless.
AS ROOSEVELT STRUGGLED TO ADDRESS the complex situation in Arizona, he turned to Ray Baker for insight and counsel. Ever since Baker’s early biographical sketch had caught his attention, Roosevelt had followed the reporter’s career, occasionally sending him short notes commending his “excellent” work. He had read Baker’s now famous January 1903 article on the brutality between union men and the scabs who had continued to work during the coal strike, and gauged the public reaction to Baker’s gripping investigative piece. Despite his firm support of trade unions, Roosevelt strongly believed that members who engaged in violent acts such as Baker described should be held accountable. “We intend to do absolute justice to every man,” he repeatedly proclaimed, “whether he be capitalist or wageworker, union man or nonunion man.”
While Baker shared this conviction, he had initially hesitated when McClure suggested he study the violence perpetrated against non-striking miners. He was loath to provide “ammunition for mere stupid opposition to all labor organizations” or to compromise the labor leaders he had come to know and respect over the years. Furthermore, the coal strike had erupted during his second leave of absence from the magazine as he began long-postponed work on his novel exploring the nation’s grave social and economic plight. Baker had finally moved from New York to East Lansing, a quiet hamlet near the campus of Michigan State College where his father-in-law still taught biology. He calculated that his savings would last at least a year. The change delighted his wife tremendously, drawing their three children close to their grandparents and reuniting her with childhood friends.
Baker would “never . . . forget the feeling of joyful independence” as he settled into his new home and commenced work on his novel. On his study wall, he hung portraits of Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy, and his own father. He tacked favorite quotations to the back of the desk, which, he noted with satisfaction, was “the first desk I ever had that was big enough . . . where I could spread out my elbows and work as long as I wanted to without interruption.”
“I actually thought my future was settled!” Baker recalled of the brief respite. “I did not count sufficiently upon S. S. McClure.” Eager to keep his gifted young reporter, McClure had contacted him in October 1902 as the coal strike was escalating. The magazine, he generously proposed, would pay a weekly stipend throughout the year, while Baker would have to work only six months. The rest of the year he would be free to pursue his own writing, which McClure’s would publish on liberal terms. “So the serpent in my new Eden!” Baker ruefully jested, the proposition too tempting to reject.
Baker had just arrived at the magazine’s New York office when he received word that McClure wanted him in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where the coal strike was coming to an end. McClure himself had traveled to the coal region shortly after his summer vacation in Europe, joining dozens of reporters, writers, and publishers gathered to cover the historic strike. Recognizing that the press was saturated with stories about the terrible coal-field conditions that had precipitated the five-month strike, McClure sought a different aspect of the story. Despite the abysmal conditions, some miners had kept on the job, refusing to support their fellow strikers, even at the risk of violent reprisal. “What sort of men were they?” McClure pondered. The story of “the scabs” was yet untold, and McClure felt that no one was better suited to investigate the matter than Ray Baker.
When they met at the Hotel Sterling at the corner of River and Market Streets, the buoyant McClure presented his idea to Baker. The young writer was less sanguine, explaining his concern that so long as public opinion “was generally hostile to labor unionism,” it must be emphasized that the strikebreakers’ plight was “only one aspect of a highly complex problem.” But the longer he considered the proposal, the more curious he grew about the 17,000 out of roughly 140,000 miners who persisted in working. Baker had always been intrigued by the motivation of the few who went against the many, and in the end, to McClure’s delight, he agreed to stay in the coal region for a month or more to talk with these men and learn why they refused to support the union.
With the same exacting impartiality that marked his investigation of the Pullman strike, Baker sought out people on all sides of the “scab” issue. He talked with the miners in the kitchens of their homes and descended with them down the shafts into the mines, taking note of the “low wages, company houses, company stores, poor schools, wretched living conditions” in the collieries. He sat in on union meetings where “the scabs” were bitterly denounced and interviewed John Mitchell, whom he found “singularly steady-headed” in the wake of the turbulent strike. In hotel suites thick with cigar smoke, he discussed the conflict with fellow writers and radical leaders, including Henry D. Lloyd and Clarence Darrow. Armed with a range of opinions, he spent weeks with scores of non-striking miners, talking with them and their families, eliciting their perspectives of the realities that led to their decision to continue working even under such treacherous conditions.
“What men I met during those fiery weeks!” he recalled. “What stories they told me: what dramas of human suffering, human loyalty, and human fear.” McClure was thrilled with Baker’s letters from the field. “Don’t, my dear boy, be afraid of space,” he urged; “we can give this thing all the space it requires, all the articles it requires. I am glad you have struck such a rich mine.” A week later, McClure wrote again. The New York Sun had devoted two columns that day to a sermon delivered in Brooklyn on the subject of “the feuds in the coal-fields, the bitterness between union and non-union men, the uncompromising hatred” opening “wounds that only death can heal.” Baker’s subject had “become the most important question of the day,” McClure reassured him. “I am going down to go over the material with you yourself,” he added. “You have done magnificently!”
Baker completed his piece, which McClure titled “The Right to Work,” just in time for inclusion in the landmark issue. At Baker’s insistence, an editor’s note preceded the piece to clarify the magazine’s support for labor unions. Although the magazine would continue to advocate for the nation’s workingmen, the editor explained, the public “is beginning to distinguish between unionism and the sins of unionists, as it is between organized capital and the sins of capitalists.” By illuminating the individual lives of the strikebreakers, Baker also stressed in his opening, he intended neither to challenge “the rights of labor to organize” nor to question “the sincerity of the labor leader.” Instead, he simply wanted to offer a detailed “series of case histories” exploring why these men “continued to work in spite of so much abuse and even real danger.”
The story of John Colson dramatically illustrated the divisive impact of the strike within mining families. An engineer from the small town of Gilberton, Pennsylvania, Colson enjoyed “the best position at the colliery.” Although not a member of the union, he initially went out with the strikers. But with no prospect of a settlement after several months, he took a job at a distant colliery while his wife remained at home with the children. The moment spies determined that Colson had gone back to work, his wife was targeted for retaliation: stores would not serve her; former friends repudiated her in the streets; neighbors pelted her with rocks. When she tried to move, no teamster would help her. A mob finally tracked down Colson himself, beating him so badly that he was mistakenly listed among those murdered during the strike. After talking with Colson and his wife, Baker went to visit Colson’s elderly parents in Mahonay City, four miles away. Mrs. Colson spoke with pride of her sons, all miners, all union members who had faithfully maintained the strike. She discussed her eldest son, John, reluctantly. “He might better be dead,” she declared, “for he’s brought disgrace on the name. He deserved all he got. He wasn’t raised a scab.” Never again would the family acknowledge him. “The strike,” Baker wrote, “had wholly crushed all family feeling.”
Baker’s reporting illustrated how, all too often, lifelong friendships, like familial bonds, became casualties of the conflict. A strong believer in unions, one miner, Hugh Johnson, nonetheless considered this strike, the second in two years, a bad idea. Although he voted against it, he remained out with the strikers until he could no longer afford to pay his family’s living expenses. As soon as he returned to work, troubles began: his daughter was fired from her job as a teacher, his son harassed at school, and his wife prevented from buying food and supplies at the local stores. One night, a mob chased and threatened to kill him. “All these things,” Baker observed, “were done by his neighbors and friends, among whom he had lived an honorable life for years.”
As the strike dragged on, the level of violence escalated. One telling example involved James Winstone, a respected community leader. Winstone, too, had argued against the strike but stayed out to support his fellow workers. Informed that he did not qualify for assistance from the union relief fund because he owned property, Winstone finally returned to work. In late September, only a few days before the strike was settled, he was clubbed to death by three longtime neighbors. Such stories, Baker insisted, constituted “only a few among scores, even hundreds, of similar tragedies of the great coal strike.”
Baker returned to East Lansing after completing the article “on fire with the wealth of new material, new characters and, above all, new understandings of the human elements” involved in the labor struggle. He happily anticipated sitting at his desk to work on his novel “gloriously all winter long.” As January turned to February, however, he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Clippings arrived from all over the country praising his article. “Everything has borne out the truthfulness and value of the article you wrote,” McClure congratulated him. His case histories had dramatized a vital aspect of the conflict—the price paid by non-striking miners—better than anything else written. McClure sought to entice him with the prospect of an entire series on labor.
Baker found himself making scant headway on his novel, unable “to write fiction when the world seemed literally on fire with critical, possibly revolutionary, movements in which [he] was deeply interested.” Putting the fiction aside, he returned to New York, where “a powerful new interest, a common purpose” was energizing the McClure’s office. The enthusiasm generated by the magazine’s critical and popular success was palpable. “I doubt whether any other magazine published in America ever achieved such sudden and overwhelming recognition,” Baker proudly remarked. “We had put our fingers upon the sorest spots in American life.”
The staff members at McClure’s had always worked closely, even while pursuing diverse interests. Now that their respective investigations into the problems of modern industrial society substantially overlapped, they eagerly read one another’s works, often suggesting further lines of inquiry. Tarbell’s disclosures of John D. Rockefeller’s illegal activities resonated with Steffens’s endeavor to trace political corruption to the captains of industry. Tarbell looked to Steffens for an understanding of the invisible web that linked businessmen to politicians, politicians to judges. Indeed, the intensity of these reciprocally informing projects and the sense of camaraderie in a momentous cause affected Baker profoundly. “I have wondered,” he later wrote, “if there could have been a more interesting editorial office than ours, one with more of the ozone of great ideas, touch-and-go experimentation, magic success.” This rare formula, he noted, owed as much to rigorous and honest feedback as to affectionate support. “We were friends indeed, but we were also uncompromising critics of one another.” Forty years later, Baker still considered John Phillips “the most creative editor” he had worked with in his entire life. “He could tell wherein an article failed and why,” he recalled; “he could usually make fertile suggestions for improving it; he was willing to give the writer all the precious time he needed for rewriting his story.”
The office itself, now situated just east of the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street, reflected the collaborative ardor of McClure’s staff. The walls in the hallway were a mosaic of original artwork designed for pages of the magazine. Mementoes from individual articles decorated each writer’s office. They even had special names for one another: McClure was “the Chief,” Steffens was “Stef,” and Ida M. Tarbell was affectionately dubbed “I-dare-m.” In her office, she proudly displayed a framed note from Finley Peter Dunne: “Idarem—She’s a lady but she has the punch.” No one, Baker said of Tarbell, lived “so warmly in the hearts of her friends.” Never had he known “a finer human spirit,” “so generous, so modest, so full of kindness, so able, so gallant—and yet with such good sense and humor.”
The exhilarating atmosphere in the office persuaded Baker to accept the Chief’s suggestion and embark upon a series of labor articles. “Why bother with fictional characters and plots,” he told himself, “when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true: and characters so powerful, so fresh, so new, that they stepped into the narratives under their own power?”
THE PRESIDENT’S REQUEST FOR BAKER’S help in uncovering possible corruption in Arizona reached the reporter in Chicago, where he was researching the first of five lengthy articles on various aspects of the labor problem. As the celebrated series unfolded, Roosevelt would frequently reach out to Baker for advice and counsel on labor issues. In the summer of 1903, as Roosevelt labored to assess the contentious Salt River situation, he recalled a more obscure series on the Southwest Baker had written for the literary Century magazine the previous year. Like Roosevelt, Baker recognized the transformative potential of irrigation. Using language close to Roosevelt’s heart, Baker described riding through miles of desert with “no sign of living creatures,” only to discover a green stretch of well-watered acreage “with rows of rustling cottonwoods, the roofs of home, and the sound of cattle in the meadows. A wire fence was the dividing line: on this side lay the fruitless desert; on the other green alfalfa, full of blossoms and bees, brimming over the fences.” The sight, Baker proclaimed, “was something to stir a man’s heart.” “My dear Mr. Baker,” Roosevelt wrote on June 25, explaining his dilemma and soliciting Baker’s guidance. “As you know, I am especially concerned over the irrigation project. At times I hear rumors of crookedness in connection with the Government irrigation work, especially in Arizona. I have been utterly unable hitherto to get any definite statement in reference thereto. It has occurred to me that you may be able privately to tell me something about this.”
Baker swiftly responded, promising to share all the information gleaned concerning the Salt River project. He had, in fact, returned to Arizona earlier that spring, contemplating another irrigation article. Moreover, he had been present at the meetings when Charles Walcott of the U.S. Geological Survey delivered his decision in favor of the Water Users Association in Salt River, and had spent time on an alfalfa ranch in order to “get at the exact sentiment of the people.” Though he had witnessed no overt corruption, Baker had little doubt that something was wrong; promoters of the Water Users Association, “backed by the government officials,” relied on “overbearing” methods that were “suspicious in the extreme.” He assured the president that he would gladly call at the White House when he returned to Washington the following week.
“I suppose that the Government officials you speak of must be in the Geological Survey,” Roosevelt replied, adding that “in public life as in private life a man of the very highest repute will occasionally go wrong.” Still, he recognized that accusations and rumors are readily fabricated, and in such cases “it is most desirable that their falsity be shown.” Some criticism of Walcott was undoubtedly political—fueled by Republicans upset with projects recommended in Democratic states, as well as senators and congressmen in the Rocky Mountain region furious over the choice of Arizona (still a territory without representation in Congress). Regardless of the origins, Roosevelt insisted that if Walcott “or any other Government official has gone wrong in Arizona I am more anxious than any other man can be to get at it.” He requested that Baker do him the favor of stopping first to see Gifford Pinchot at the Forestry Division and then joining him for lunch at Oyster Bay. “If there is any kind of ground for believing in fraud of any sort by Government officials,” he concluded, “I want to consult with you as to the best way of setting men to work so as to be sure of our getting the proof.”
Baker was thrilled by the prospect of working closely with the president either to uncover corruption or to dispel malicious career-destroying rumors. “I was so eager to help,” he recalled, “that I got together a large package of notes and memoranda—also maps and pictures—and a veritable article of several thousand words on which I spent several days of hard work, setting forth in detail the exact situation in the Salt River Valley as I had seen it.” He took another day to compile a memorandum on the coal fields, just in case Roosevelt ventured to discuss labor issues as well. “I was determined to be fully prepared,” he explained, “to give the President of the United States several hours of sound enlightenment and instruction!”
Baker’s study of the situation in Arizona convinced him that the government’s choice of the Salt River Valley was perfectly justified. “If ever men worked miracles,” he wrote, it was in Salt River. Sustained by private capital, neighbors had cooperated for decades to dig ditches and build canals in order to divert water. From inhospitable desert, they had wrested three cities replete with electric lights, fine hotels, schools, and churches—all shaded by mature trees and bordered by thriving and productive “orchards of oranges, almonds, olives, and figs.” After seven years of insufficient rainfall and reckless deforestation, however, the “implacable desert” was closing in again: homes were reluctantly abandoned as orchards died, fields withered, and land values plummeted. Without the infusion of vast government capital to build a great reservoir, this once-thriving valley would perish. Baker carefully considered how two related factors complicated the situation: vast tracts of land were already under private ownership, and unscrupulous developers might lure more people into the valley than the water project could supply.
On the morning of July 15, Baker boarded a train at Long Island City. En route to Oyster Bay, where the president was spending the summer, he ran into an old Chicago acquaintance, Herman Kohlsaat, publisher of the Record-Herald. Treasury Secretary Leslie Mortimer Shaw and Charles J. Bonaparte, a noted attorney who was investigating postal fraud for the Justice Department, also joined them aboard the train. Upon arrival, the four men crowded into a horse-driven public carriage for the three-mile journey to Sagamore Hill.
“The President lives very simply,” Baker informed his father. “I thought as I drove over from the station what some modern German or English worthy might say on entering the president’s grounds & seeing no guards or military anywhere about.” A maid ushered the guests into the library to wait for the president. “Robust, hearty, wholesome, like a gust of wind,” he soon burst in, wearing knee-length breeches and an old coat.
The company at lunch included members of the Roosevelt family and the president’s old friend Jacob Riis. Theodore Roosevelt, Baker observed, “takes an extraordinary interest in life, gets pleasure out of everything. His mind seems to leap upon every question with boundless enthusiasm.” The president first addressed the alleged postal corruption, assuring Bonaparte that he desired an exhaustive investigation. “I don’t care whom it hurts,” he assured Baker; “we must get to the bottom of these scandals.” Shifting the conversation to Arizona, he reiterated that his irrigation development must benefit the individual settler rather than the wealthy landowner or speculator. Baker understood the difficulty of realizing this intention, but a recently promulgated regulation promised to guide the project in that direction. The government had announced that landowners possessing more than 160 acres must put their extra acreage “on the market at reasonable prices” or receive no water from the reservoir.
Unaware of these developments, Roosevelt suddenly turned to Baker: “Who is the chief devil down there in the Salt River valley?” Baker was momentarily unsure how to respond to such a query. When he hesitated, “the President burst into a vigorous, picturesque, and somewhat vitriolic description of the situation, implying that if he could catch the rascals who were causing the trouble he would execute them on the spot.” Baker was taken aback by Roosevelt’s simplistic diatribe, “but when I tried to break into the conversation—boiling inside with my undelivered articles and memoranda (one of which I tried to draw from my pocket)—the President put one fist on the table beside him, looked at me earnestly, and said: ‘Baker, you and I will have to get together on these subjects.’ ”
Startled by Roosevelt’s pugnacity, Baker and the guests adjourned to the library after lunch. “As the time drew near for leaving,” Baker recollected, “I began to wonder when the President would ask me for the information upon which I had spent so much time and hard work. I had my heavy brief case in hand when I went up to say good-bye—and my grand plans for enlightening the Government of the United States vanished in a handshake.”
Despite the self-deprecatory tone of this account, Baker’s meticulous research, later passed on to Gifford Pinchot, eventually proved invaluable. His conclusion that government agents were doing everything possible to carry out the president’s purposes in a complex situation cleared Charles Walcott of suspicion. In a letter to Baker, Pinchot expressed great satisfaction that Baker had arrived at his vindicating assessment despite his initial suspicions.
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, THEODORE ROOSEVELT received an advance copy of Baker’s exposé on the corrupt relationship between Sam Parks, the powerful boss of New York’s builders’ union, and the Fuller Company, the leading contractor in the city. The president quickly penned a long note to the reporter: “I am immensely impressed by your article. While I had known in rather a vague way that there was such a condition as you describe, I had not known its extent, and as far as I am aware the facts have never before been brought before the public in such striking fashion.”
Lincoln Steffens had provided Baker with the basis for this first extended study of the role labor racketeering played in the rise of the trusts. Investigating municipal corruption in Chicago and New York, Steffens had unearthed evidence that large building contractors were colluding with corrupt labor bosses to force smaller contractors out of business to eliminate competition. When he shared this material with his colleague, Baker spent months pursuing his own investigation. This research culminated in the stunning charge that the Fuller Construction Company was providing a regular salary to the union leader.
In “The Trust’s New Tool—The Labor Boss,” Baker focused on one disturbing question: While the great building strike of 1903 paralyzed construction through all of Manhattan, why did one firm, the Fuller Construction Company, keep on building? In answer, Baker laid out evidence that for years, the Fuller Company had paid Sam Parks to look after its interests.
Baker traced Parks’s ascent from railroad brakeman to bridge-builder, from “walking delegate” of the Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union to un-disputed boss of the Board of Building Trades. The board, comprised of the walking delegates who represented workmen in each of three dozen unions affiliated with the building industry, was designed to protect the interests of its members. In theory, Sam Parks was simply a paid agent for his union, receiving the same salary as an ordinary workman in his trade. In reality, Baker tracked him “riding about in his cab, wearing diamonds, appearing on the street with his blooded bulldog, supporting his fast horses, ‘treating’ his friends.” How reminiscent, Baker grimly observed, “of the familiar, affluent aldermen or police captains of our cities building $50,000 residences on salaries of $1500 or less.” Indeed, the more he studied the situation, the more parallels emerged between Sam Parks and the Tammany chief Richard Croker.
A half-decade earlier, the Fuller Construction Company had arrived in New York from Chicago; “starting with no business at all,” it had swiftly risen to become the “greatest construction company in the world, with the largest single building business in New York, and important branches in Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.” Behind the Fuller Company, Baker found a familiar cast of characters—Charles Schwab represented the steel industry; Cornelius Vanderbilt the railroad industry; and James Stillman, president of Rockefeller’s bank, the financial industry. “A gigantic hand had reached into New York,” Baker observed, echoing Tarbell’s description of Standard Oil’s stranglehold on the oil region, “the hand of the Trust.”
Baker’s article also detailed the events ultimately leading to Parks’s arrest. “Curiously enough,” he remarked, “the Fuller Company brought Sam Parks from Chicago when it came.” The flamboyant labor boss proved helpful in a variety of ways. Offering no explanation to fellow union members, he unilaterally called strikes designed to cripple Fuller’s independent competitors. “Worse still,” Baker observed, “strikes were often accompanied by a demand for money” before they could be settled. Rumors of blackmail, bribes, and pocketed spoils had circulated for years before District Attorney William Travers Jerome finally indicted Parks. In discovery, Jerome learned that Parks had approached the Hecla Iron Works, threatening to call a strike unless he was paid $1,000. After the company balked, the ensuing strike lasted for several weeks, costing the company $50,000 and keeping over a thousand men out of work. Only when Hecla agreed to Parks’s extortion—paying double the amount originally demanded—did the walkout end. When the $2,000 check surfaced, endorsed by Parks and cashed by the Fuller Company, the district attorney finally had sufficient grounds to arrest the labor boss.
Roosevelt told Baker that his exposé illustrated with graphic urgency “the need of drawing the line on conduct, among labor unions, among corporations, among politicians, and among private individuals alike!” The president noted sardonically that “the organs of Wall Street men of a certain type are bitter in their denunciations of the labor unions, and have not a word to say against the iniquity of the corporations. The labor leaders of a certain type howl against the corporations, but do not admit that there is any wrong ever perpetrated by labor men.” Baker’s even-handed investigation and subsequent critique of both labor and capital dovetailed with Roosevelt’s own approach. The president invited Baker to the White House to discuss the matter further. “When I get back East again,” Baker replied, “I shall be more than pleased to accept your invitation.” Roosevelt’s commendation, he continued, made him “feel more strongly than ever that there is here a great duty to perform; to bring out these conditions clearly and fairly and above all, truthfully.” Furthermore, he added, “Mr. McClure is giving me the best medium in this country to do so.”
McClure and Phillips were delighted with the widespread commentary engendered by Baker’s labor pieces. The Wall Street Journal printed a fierce editorial condemning corporate corruption and demanding change: “When the corporations have their paid agents in the trade unions as they have their paid agents in the legislatures, and in the executive councils of great parties, the necessity for reform in corporate management is clear. . . . The only way the trusts and the labor unions can hope to stand long without harsh restrictive legislation is to play square with the people.” And when Harvard professor John Brooks publicly endorsed Baker’s analysis, college students across the country flocked to hear the man considered “the greatest reporter” in the country.
“You have gone into a splendid field of material and you are getting the mastery of it,” Phillips wrote to his rising star, claiming that “before you are through with this you will know more than any one else about labor questions in America.” Steffens congratulated Baker on the greatest triumph “a man can have with a pen,” maintaining that the Parks piece had “made both sides see themselves as they are.” He confessed his own difficulty in writing after reading Baker’s article, finding himself oppressed by a “yellow streak” of jealousy that left him “burning with shame.” He finished with a question at once rueful and admiring: “Ever catch yourself at mean thinking? I guess not. I envy you your perfect honesty.”
Baker followed up this success with “The Lone Fighter,” a biographical piece on the union leader Robert Neidig, who had worked for years to combat Parks’s pernicious influence. Initially, his struggle seemed futile; just as the political bosses kept their power because only a small minority of the public attended party primaries, so despotic union leadership endured when but a small percentage of union members attended meetings. The majority, Baker explained, “were tired at night and wanted to go home and play with their babies.” Neidig, a steel builder with a wife and children, decided early on to take his union responsibilities in earnest. He never missed a meeting and gradually built up a following. At election time, however, Parks exercised the full power of his corrupt machine. “We hear of repeaters and purchased votes,” Baker reported, “even of fraudulent ballots and fraudulent counts.” Neidig was “threatened with personal violence, with loss of his job, and even with expulsion from the union.” Nothing, it seemed, could break the labor boss’s hold on the union, not even his indictment.
Nevertheless, Neidig refused to abandon his efforts to build an honest union, and Baker’s detailed revelations about Parks helped turn the tide. “The ‘lone fighter’ is not alone,” one correspondent observed, “when there are other lone fighters to act at the same time with him.” One union member confessed to Baker that before reading the article, he had considered Parks “a true and faithful officer of our Union” and repeatedly supported him in elections. He considered Baker’s piece “by far the best exposition of the causes of the present Labor troubles” and recommended that it “be placed in the hands of working-men” everywhere.
Robert Neidig gratefully assured Baker that his “splendid” exposé had “done more to weaken Parks and Parksism than any article that has been published.” Within the union itself, its impact had been tremendous. Members finally understood “the wrong that had been done them” and were ready to take action. “To you belongs a large part of the credit,” Neidig commended, concluding that “an excellent prospect” now existed of overthrowing Parks and reorganizing “the Union on a sound and honest basis.”
“My present work interests me very deeply,” Baker reported to his father. “It seems almost as if I had a mission to perform—to talk straight out on a difficult subject.” With justifiable pride, he noted that between his own work and that of Tarbell and Steffens, his magazine was “probably doing more now in stirring up the American people than any other publication ever did before.”