The 1904 Puck cartoon “More Rough Riding” shows President Roosevelt galloping the GOP elephant through a crowd of opponents.
ROOSEVELT TRIED TO PROLONG HIS 1903 summer vacation, recognizing that once he returned to the capital, there would be “mighty little letup to the strain.” It was “as lovely a summer as we have ever passed,” he told Corinne, “the happiest, healthiest, most old-fashioned kind of a summer.”
Of all the Roosevelt children, only nineteen-year-old Alice was absent, choosing to spend most of July and August with her fashionable friends in Newport, Rhode Island. This decision rankled her father, who expressed distaste for her wealthy companions at the exclusive resort community. “I suppose young girls and even young men naturally like a year or two of such a life as the Four Hundred lead,” he fretted to a friend, perhaps mindful of his own youthful snobbery in preferring to associate only with other gentlemen at Harvard. “But I do not think anyone can permanently lead his or her life amid such surroundings and with such objects, save at the cost of degeneration in character,” he added, revealing how far his attitudes had changed. “I have not a doubt that they would mortally object to associating with me—but they could not possibly object one one-hundredth part as much as I should to associating with them. . . . For mere enjoyment, I would a great deal rather hold my own in any congenial political society—even in Tammany.”
The rest of the children blissfully entertained themselves, their siblings, and their cousins with picnics, hikes, and sailboat rides. Fifteen-year-old Ted Junior and thirteen-year-old Kermit were delighted to be home from boarding school at Groton. Eleven-year-old Ethel, who had boarded during the week at the National Cathedral School, happily assumed the role of “little mother” to her younger brothers, Archie and Quentin. “She is a great comfort to them,” Roosevelt contentedly remarked, “and they are great comforts to her.”
Nothing Edith accomplished as first lady compared with the uncomplicated joy of long summer days with her husband at their family home. Edith “looks so young and pretty,” Theodore beamed to Emily Carow. Both relished this time alone, riding horses together through the woods, carrying lunches and books with them on picnic excursions, and rowing to the end of Lloyd’s Neck, where they “watched the white sails of coasters passing up and down the Sound.”
Their tranquil family escape came to an end with the season. As soon as Roosevelt returned to Washington, he was bombarded by delegations of party officials, senators, and congressmen. Only thirteen months remained until the presidential election. “Whether I shall be re-elected, I have not the slightest idea,” he admitted. “I know there is bitter opposition to me from many different sources. Whether I shall have enough support to overcome this opposition, I cannot tell.” While large and enthusiastic crowds at every stop of his summer tour confirmed the president’s unprecedented popularity, the American people did not control the nomination process in these days before the direct primary. Machine politicians and party bosses—the very men Roosevelt had opposed throughout his career—determined the candidates, and their selections were then endorsed by the very same financial interests he had antagonized during his two years as president. The public might applaud his anti-trust policies and his intervention in the coal strike, but the big businessmen whose contributions sustained the Republican Party had become, in Roosevelt’s words, “determined foes.”
“The whole country breathed freer, and felt as if a nightmare had been lifted when I settled the anthracite coal strike,” Roosevelt explained to the British historian George Otto Trevelyan, but although public memory of the crisis quickly dissipated, “the interests to which I gave mortal offense will make their weight felt as of real moment.” Roosevelt had not forgotten how the same web of political and financial interests had stymied his hope for a second gubernatorial term after he had defied the party with his franchise tax bill and his stubborn refusal to retain Boss Platt’s corrupt friend, Lou Payn, as superintendent of insurance. Then, Republican bosses had retaliated by attempting to bury him in the vice presidency; now, he feared, they would deny him the nomination for president.
Roosevelt understood perfectly that party leaders would vastly prefer the Republican Party chairman Mark Hanna, “flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone,” who had cemented the party’s alliance with the corporations. Hanna had only to “pass the word along,” William Allen White observed, and within ten days “the politicians in the Republican party would leave the president.” While Roosevelt had successfully established some of his own men in various state positions, the national organization remained firmly in Hanna’s control.
The president’s best hope lay in the fact that “reform was in the air.” All over the country, White noted, “little Roosevelts were appearing in city halls, county courthouses, statehouses and occasionally were bobbing up in Congress.” In Toledo, Republican reformer Samuel Jones had been elected mayor over the determined opposition of the Hanna machine. In Cleveland, Hanna’s nemesis, reform Democrat Tom Johnson, was serving a second term as mayor. A newly formed Municipal Voters’ League in Chicago, led by Republicans William Kent and George Cole, was engaged in a bitter fight against the entrenched corruption fostered by Charles T. Yerkes, the tycoon whose life Theodore Dreiser later fictionalized in his Trilogy of Desire. Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging “war on the railroads that ruled his state.”
THESE ROUSING STORIES WERE DRAMATICALLY told in Lincoln Steffens’s spectacular series on municipal and state corruption: “Shame of the Cities” and “Enemies of the Republic.” Focusing national attention on these local battles, Steffens inspired reformers in other cities to address the corruption that plagued every level of government. His series played a significant role in toppling old bosses, bringing a new generation of Roosevelt-type reformers to positions of power in cities and states across the nation.
As ever, the idea for the acclaimed series had originated with Sam McClure. Returning to the office in late 1901 after several months abroad, McClure encountered Steffens, then serving as managing editor, seated at his desk. “You may be an editor,” McClure huffed dismissively, “but you don’t know how to edit a magazine. . . . You can’t learn to edit a magazine here in this office. . . . Get out of here, travel, go—somewhere. . . . Buy a railroad ticket, get on a train, and there, where it lands you, there you will learn to edit a magazine.”
With McClure’s support, Steffens embarked on an odyssey. For the better part of three years, he called on people in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, and Madison. “My business is to find subjects and writers, to educate myself in the way the world is wagging, so as to bring the magazine up to date,” he explained to his father. “I feel ready to do something really fine.”
Following up on McClure’s persistent interest in political corruption, Steffens interviewed city editors, political bosses, crusading district attorneys, and reformist mayors. In each city, he uncovered an invisible web of power linking political bosses to both the criminal world below and the business community above. His investigations convinced him that the misgovernment of American cities would furnish abundant material for a fascinating series, featuring portraits of the bosses and the men who were fighting to expose their corruption. “If I should be entrusted with the work,” he told Tarbell, “I think I could make my name.” His conjecture proved accurate: The Shame of the Cities, the six-part series that began in late 1902, made him an international celebrity.
Everywhere he went during his first weeks of travel, the same questions stirred conversation. Everyone was speculating on the future of a young district attorney named Joe Folk and the investigations he had undertaken in St. Louis. His curiosity aroused, Steffens took a train to St. Louis and, in a lobby corner of the Planters Hotel, met with the idealistic district attorney who was just beginning to lay bare pervasive corruption within the Democratically controlled city council and Board of Aldermen. Mistakenly assuming Folk would be “safe,” the Democratic bosses had nominated this “smiling, even-tempered man of thirty-three” for the district attorney post.
The story Folk told fascinated Steffens from the start. An obscure notice in a local newspaper first caught the attorney’s eye: a sizable quantity of cash had been deposited in a respected St. Louis banking house with the intention “of bribing certain assemblymen to secure the passage of a street railway ordinance.” Folk decided to follow up on the report, even though “no names were mentioned.” Suspecting that the legislation in question was a recent bill benefiting the Suburban Railway Company, he pieced their scheme together and issued dozens of subpoenas to assemblymen, councilmen, and the employees and management of Suburban Railway. Evaluating his list to determine who would most likely fold under pressure, he summoned the company president, Charles H. Turner, and the lobbyist rumored to have brokered the deal, Philip Stock.
Turner and Stock were notified that they had three days to cooperate. Facing indictment for bribery and prosecution “to the full extent of the law,” they both “broke down and confessed.” The ordinance in question, Turner told Folk, would have increased the value of his company by $3 million. To secure its passage, he had first approached Colonel Edward Butler, the longtime boss of St. Louis. When Butler demanded $145,000 to distribute among the assembly members, Turner hired Stock on his promise to get the bill passed for a mere $75,000. As swiftly as that amount was deposited into the bank, the legislation proceeded smoothly. A court decision quickly overturned the franchise ordinance, however, and the Suburban Railway Company refused to turn over the money, claiming it had not secured the franchise. Legislators threatened to sue Turner and Stock, insisting that the money “was theirs because they had done their part.”
During this contentious interchange, the newspaper leak occurred. The testimony of Turner and Stock led to numerous confessions, along with the convictions of eighteen municipal assembly members. Folk’s investigation eventually revealed that a precise schedule of bribery had been devised, specifying the price of obtaining wharf space, a side track, a switchway, a grain elevator, and so on. “So long has this practice existed,” Steffens was told, the members had “come to regard the receipt of money for action on pending measures as a legitimate perquisite of a legislator.”
Indefatigable Folk would not be content until he felled “the greatest oak” in this forest of corruption. Colonel Butler, the man who had been saved from indictment in the Suburban scandal simply because he had demanded more money than the company would pay, had controlled nominations and elections in the city for years, becoming a multimillionaire through his schemes. “It was generally understood that he owned Assemblymen before they ever took the oath of office,” Steffens wrote, giving him absolute control of legislation and the power to negotiate with businessmen seeking regulations, rulings, or ordinances. When Folk found two members of the Board of Health willing to testify that Butler had promised each of them $2,500 to sign off on a garbage contract, he put the swaggering boss on trial. Folk uncovered documents proving that once the contract was approved, Butler was due to receive over $200,000. In a dramatic closing statement before the jury, Folk argued that the state itself was on trial: “Missouri, Missouri. I am pleading for thee, pleading for thee.” Colonel Butler was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.
After hearing Folk’s account, Steffens contacted McClure and Phillips to inform them that he had found an article for the magazine and the person to write it—a local reporter named Claude H. Wetmore. The subject thrilled McClure, but when the first draft arrived, he was displeased that names and places, essential to authenticate and validate the story, had been omitted. Under McClure’s guidance, Steffens drafted a new version of the article so that every statement was a matter of record. The names of legislators who fled the state were accompanied by details of their eventual arrests and confessions. A comical anecdote emerged of one House of Delegates member “so frightened while under the inquisitorial cross-fire that he was seized with a nervous chill; his false teeth fell to the floor, and the rattle so increased his alarm that he rushed from the room without stopping to pick up his teeth, and boarded the next train.” Satisfied with the revision, McClure proposed the evocative title “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” The article, with Wetmore and Steffens listed as co-authors, was a smashing success, prompting the publisher to build an entire series around municipal corruption that would accompany Ida Tarbell’s work on corporate corruption.
A newspaper article condemning malfeasance in Minneapolis drew McClure’s attention, prompting him to focus Steffens’s next project on the Minnesota city. There, testimony before the grand jury had revealed a system of police corruption similar to that Steffens had witnessed in New York during the days of the Lexow Commission. In return for police protection, a host of illegal establishments that included gambling operations, unlicensed saloons, and opium dens paid regular weekly fees. These spoils were divided between the Democratic mayor, his henchmen, and the police captains, all carefully recorded in ledgers each week. After befriending Hovey C. Clarke, the courageous foreman of the grand jury, Steffens received permission to photograph pages from these ledgers. “Your article is certainly a ‘corker,’ ” McClure enthused after reading the first draft. “We’ll call it ‘The Shame of Minneapolis,’ ” indicating the piece should be framed as a colossal battle between one crusading individual and the corrupt establishment. “You have made a marvelous success of your Minneapolis article,” he assured Steffens. “We fellows are so busy pushing things through that we don’t stop to tell each other how much we think of each other’s work. But I take this moment to tell you.”
The piece, printed in the famous January 1903 issue, made headlines across the country. “Mr. Steffens’s stirring story should be read everywhere,” advised Outlook magazine, “for it strikes at the very heart of both of the twin stupidities which dull the conscience of American municipalities—the optimism which says that all is so good that nothing need be done, and the pessimism which says that all is so bad that nothing can be done.” The Arizona Republic ardently proclaimed that by exposing corruption in St. Louis and Minneapolis, McClure’s magazine was“doing a public service,” prodding people to conclude that similar corrupt networks were in scores of other cities not yet “overtaken by a wave of reform.”
Steffens giddily recalled a train ride during which he overheard men in the washroom and dining car exclaiming over his story and his writing. The article was a surpassing success: “The newsstand had exhausted the printed supply; subscriptions were coming in; and the mail was bringing letters of praise.” Citizens across the country invited him to their localities, promising scandals more sordid than those described in Minneapolis and St. Louis. He proudly told his father that as he entered a New York gentleman’s club, members stood and applauded. With lavish promises, a London editor had tried to woo him from McClure’s, while a cigar manufacturer even asked permission to christen a cigar after him, with his portrait on the box lid.
Flush with success, Steffens was anxious to scientifically test his “dawning theory” that corruption originated from the top, not the bottom, that it “was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social.” He suspected that in every case, the web of corruption radiated out from the captains of industry—the big businessmen running gas and electric companies, street railways, and other public service corporations—who would do anything necessary to acquire lucrative franchises and privileges.
Wary of “philosophical generalizations,” McClure feared that Steffens would invariably tint his observations or arrange facts to confirm his theory that businessmen were always to blame. He insisted that Steffens present “facts, startling facts” that would involve the reader one step at a time in his detective work. While Steffens chafed to move on to Chicago or Philadelphia, McClure insisted he return to St. Louis to pursue the story in more detail. “The disagreement became acute,” Steffens recalled; “it divided the office.” At moments like this, Ida Tarbell was indispensable. “Sensible, capable, and very affectionate, she knew each one of us and all our idiosyncrasies and troubles,” he noted. She would sit the fractious parties down, “smiling, like a tall, good-looking young mother, to say, ‘Hush, children.’ ” A compromise was reached: Steffens would return to St. Louis, “stick to facts,” and only afterwards proceed to any city he desired.
McClure’s stipulation that Steffens must follow up in St. Louis proved most fortuitous. In the months since the first article had appeared, a series of events revealed the corruption in Missouri to run far deeper than either Folk or Steffens had suspected. When Colonel Butler’s conviction reached the Missouri Supreme Court on appeal, the decision was reversed. All the aldermen cases were overturned as well. Steffens discovered that over the years Butler had directed the nominations not only of legislators but also of justices on the very bench that heard the graft cases on appeal. Indeed, the presiding justice publicly called for Folk to leave Missouri, implying that his exposures were ruining the reputation of the state. More dispiriting still, when the next election arrived, the citizens of St. Louis blithely kept the Butler ring in power. All the felons were back in the assembly, undaunted by the initial round of convictions.
Though McClure was again delighted with the substance of Steffens’s article, he was less impressed with its structure. “Your narrative lacks force,” he chided, suggesting that the tale should move forward with inexorable momentum and culminate in the shocking circumstance that Butler and the convicted aldermen remained in office, continuing to enact laws and reap profits. “I am telegraphing you to come East,” McClure added, insisting, “You must be here with me when you are working out the article.” The finished installment, which McClure entitled “The Shamelessness of St. Louis,” once again proved a stunning success. The pride and conscience of St. Louis had finally been kindled; on the city streets, 200,000 people sported “Folk for Reform” buttons. “Your article is bearing fruit,” Folk told Steffens, observing, “Every number of your March edition has been sold here and there is still a great demand for them.” Finally, people rallied to support Folk’s cause. Throughout the city, Folk Clubs were organizing. “The State is commencing to speak,” Folk happily reported. “The permanent remedy is in the hands of the people and someday they will apply it. I believe the public conscience is more alive to the situation today and the cause of civic righteousness brighter than for many years.”
“I must tell you how tremendously I am pleased with your achievements,” McClure generously reassured Steffens in June 1903. “I know of no young man who has such a splendid opportunity of work in front of him as you have.” Furthermore, the publisher grandly instructed his reporter to inform Folk that he was “the candidate of McClure’s Magazine at the present moment for President in 1908.” McClure’s closing remark revealed his awareness of the massive influence his publication exerted on the American conscience: “I believe,” he flatly told Steffens, “we can do more toward making a President of the United States than any other organ.”
After St. Louis, Steffens traveled to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, perfecting the interview technique that allowed him to elicit a great deal of information by sharing the little he already knew. He regaled Pittsburgh’s boss with tales of how his counterparts in Minneapolis worked. He delighted reformers in Chicago with stories of how Folk had uncovered corruption in St. Louis. He spent hours “just chew[ing] the rag” with the old boss of Philadelphia, fascinated by his rise to power. In conversations with a couple of “wise guys” in Minneapolis, he described the famous burglars and con men he had known in New York. “Thieves, politicians, business men, reformers, and our magazine readers,” he commented, “all assumed that I had what I was trying to get: knowledge.” His demeanor shrewdly implied that he already knew their secrets, he explained, so “they might as well talk.” Steffens’s gift of drawing out his subjects soon became the stuff of legend. William Randolph Hearst considered Lincoln Steffens “the best interviewer he ever met,” and the New York World’s Herbert Bayard Swope “looked up to him as a demi-god.”
As Steffens expanded the scope of his inquiry, he became increasingly convinced that corruption in municipal politics was not “a temporary evil” engendered by the need for profitable new transportation and electrical facilities in explosively thriving young cities. Older cities, too, were rife with such dishonesty. Nor could it be attributed to Republicans or Democrats or to the presence of large immigrant populations under the sway of political bosses. Philadelphia, with the largest native population of any major city, suffered an epidemic of corruption. In every city, he now confidently argued, business interests were responsible. He had documented them “buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York.” Corruption, it seemed, was the hallmark of the age—an age in which “public spirit became private spirit, public enterprise became private greed.”
When the articles were collected into the book entitled The Shame of the Cities, Steffens was hailed as a moral prophet come to save the republic from sin and a worthy descendant of abolitionist agitator William Lloyd Garrison. Across the country, Lincoln Steffens was lionized as “a new kind” of journalist altogether. “Instead of having his news and his editorial on separate pages,” one critic noted, “Steffens welds the two into one so that the fact and the meaning and the portent of it strike you simultaneously.” According to The Outlook, Steffens had “correctly diagnosed the characteristic disease” of the age—“the itch to make a little more money by illegitimate means than can be made by legitimate industry.” Rather than examine the abstract political and legal structures of city charters, William Allen White observed, Steffens had ventured “into the wards and precincts of the towns and townships of this land [in order to] bring in specimens of actual government under actual conditions.” These articles, another critic remarked, “have done more to awaken the American conscience to civic duty than anything else written in many years.”
Immediately upon completing his series on the cities, Steffens embarked on an equally ambitious study of the states. Wherever he had sought to track “the political corruption of a city ring,” he had found that “the stream of pollution” was part of a statewide watershed. Although he could have chosen “almost any State,” Missouri seemed the logical starting point. As Joe Folk had learned when his cases were overturned, “the System was indeed bigger than St. Louis; it was the System of Missouri.” The state constitution prescribed a governor, a legislature, and a judiciary, he remarked, but “this paper government has been superseded by an actual government”—a network of legislators, bosses, and party leaders answering to the state’s major industries.
In addition, an investigation in Missouri would bolster Joe Folk’s bid for governor on the Democratic ticket. He would be “appealing his case to the people” on a bold platform “that corruption is treason; that the man, who, elected to maintain the institutions of a government by the people, sells them out, is a traitor; whether he be a constable, a legislator, a judge, or a boss, his act is not alone bribery but treason.”
Returning a third time to St. Louis, Steffens again joined with Folk to reveal a sweeping bribery scheme that stretched from the president and agent of the Royal Baking Powder Company, to the House and Senate combines, to the lieutenant governor. Published under the title “Enemies of the Republic”—another one of McClure’s “brilliant reductions of a complex situation to slogan size”—the article prompted a new round of vehement editorials across the country. Crediting Folk’s work as district attorney, the New York Times called Steffens’s piece “a striking article” that illuminated the situation “with the utmost plainness,” implicating “prominent men in politics and in business” in “specific instances of bribery, defining the purposes, and stating the amounts, the givers, the takers.” The Times concluded by calling on the public to condemn such pervasive dishonesty. “When Americans really agree that corruption is treason,” the editors argued, “the traitors will be punished, not legally alone, but as [Benedict] Arnold was, by the insufferable and blasting scorn of his fellow-men.”
Folk’s fight for the Democratic nomination tore the state wide open, but Steffens’s articles had built the district attorney into such a heroic figure that the party did not dare reject him. “Your last article was magnificent and came in just in time to be of tremendous service,” a grateful Folk told Steffens. “You ought to be here and see how the people can run things when they take a mind to,” he observed, having witnessed the effect of the article on the public; “my faith in the plain people has not been misplaced.” They had achieved a stunning victory, Folk happily noted, “when one thinks of the mighty power arrayed on the other side, the great corporations, the boodlers, the gamblers, a gigantic political machine, every professional politician in the State.” This “bloodless political revolution,” he continued, could never have been accomplished without the indefatigable work of Steffens and the support of McClure.
After Missouri, Steffens pursued investigations in five other states. In Wisconsin, he told the story of “Fighting Bob” La Follette. Soon after La Follette’s election as governor, it became clear that his real adversaries were the corrupt leaders in his own Republican Party, who had “fixed” the legislature to kill his reform measures and “discredit him with defeat.” The failed legislative session taught La Follette that he had to outmaneuver the bosses, creating an organization of his own to beat the system and install trustworthy men in the legislature. This conflict was still raging when Steffens arrived in Wisconsin. “To have you turn your searchlight on Wisconsin politics is better than anything our guardian angel could do for us—on earth at least,” La Follette’s wife, Belle, confided to the reporter.
Appearing a month before the election, Steffens’s article applauded the young reformer’s struggle against an entrenched system, asserting that his “long, hard fight” offered the people of Wisconsin a chance to make their government work for the common good rather than private interests.“La Follette’s people think it has turned the scale in his favor,” Steffens informed his father, “but the other side is howling at it and at me. It has sold out the magazine already.” Governor La Follette not only won reelection but finally “met a friendly legislature,” comprised of men who had“gone through the fire” with him and would readily enact his reform measures to regulate the railroads, institute the direct primary, address workmen’s compensation, and establish tax reform. “No one will ever measure up the full value of your share in this immediate result,” an exultant La Follette wrote Steffens. During reelection campaigning, La Follette witnessed the impact of Steffens’s article “everywhere,” even “out on the farms, away back among the bluffs and coulees of the Mississippi,” noting a distinct “difference” in his reception before and after its publication. “The article settled things,” he said. “It was like the decision of a court of last resort.”
“THE PRESIDENT HAS BEEN VERY interested in your articles,” Roosevelt’s secretary informed Steffens on August 24, 1903. “He wishes to inquire if you cannot come down here some time to see him.” A week later, Steffens joined Roosevelt for lunch at Oyster Bay, renewing a friendship somewhat chilled by Steffens’s frequent carping that the president compromised too readily with conservatives in his efforts to move legislation forward. Throughout his complicated relationship with Roosevelt, Steffens worked to maintain his distance “as a political critic,” keeping personal affection separate from professional judgment. For his part, Roosevelt managed to overcome his occasional irritation with Steffens in order to maintain a mutually advantageous alliance.
During lunch, the two men spoke of Joseph Folk and his great fight against the Missouri bosses. Shortly thereafter, Steffens followed up with a letter urging the president to meet with the young reformer. “He is a Democrat, but only as you are a Republican, and in motives and purposes you and he would be in perfect accord,” the journalist reassured him, adding, “you can get from him a great deal of information about essential facts, and all honestly given. Mr. Folk has gotten no little of his inspiration from you.” Roosevelt readily agreed to send a letter of invitation to the young district attorney through Steffens. “I wonder if you realize what a fundamental gratification such a letter will be to this man who has gone a long while along a lonely road with all big men against him,” Steffens appreciatively replied to the president.
When Folk appeared at the White House, Steffens related to his father, “he and the President, Democrat and Republican, became confidential at sight, and the President thanked me for bringing Folk to his notice.” Writing to a Missouri Republican, Roosevelt later proclaimed that though Folk headed the Democratic ticket, his nomination represented “a complete destroying of the old corrupt machine, and the success of the movement for honesty and decency.” He assured the politician that “it would be better for the republicans to endorse his nomination instead of making any nomination against him.” Such a step would not only demonstrate “a spirit of true citizenship,” the president continued, but would “be wise policy on our part.”
The Missouri Republicans ignored Roosevelt’s advice, choosing to nominate Cyrus P. Walbridge, a conservative businessman who had been mayor of St. Louis. Although concern for the general Republican ticket in Missouri kept Roosevelt from publicly supporting Folk, he refused to endorse Walbridge and was delighted when William Allen White penned a ringing editorial endorsement of Folk in the Emporia Gazette. In plain language, White charged that those who voted against the honest Democrat Folk would be voting “with the boodlers, and their victory, whether it is republican or what not, will be in reality a victory for boodle.” He reminded Missouri’s citizenry that “parties are means for good government and not its ends,” insisting that “it is better to be a bolter to a party than a traitor to a state.” White’s editorial made headlines across the nation and threw Missouri Republicans into what The Washington Post described as “a state of violent excitement, to use a mild phrase.”
Folk ran a superb campaign, gaining enough votes from independents and reform-minded Republicans to override the corrupt Democratic machine and win the election by over 30,000 votes. “It must make you feel good,” Folk later wrote Steffens, “to know the important part you had in bringing about these results.” He reiterated the profound obligation he felt toward the reporter and his magazine for their role in the upset victory.
Folk was not alone in recognizing the publication’s growing influence. McClure’s, the monthly periodical Arena proclaimed, was “one of the greatest moral factors in America.” Having “discovered that the first step toward curing an evil is to make it known,” the magazine had become “a powerful exponent of the national revolt against corrupt and oppressive methods in business, in finance and in government.” Month after month, its pages contained “must-read” pieces, spurring a national conversation on contemporary issues.
Just a few years earlier, one critic observed, McClure’s was “distinctly literary in its character, and its content was given over exclusively to reviews, essays, stories and poems.” Both format and function had since undergone a dramatic and influential metamorphosis: “The daily newspaper gives the facts as they occur from day to day, with editorial comment thereon, but it is left for the magazine to come along afterwards with a summary of these facts and their relation to one another.” When vital issues were treated with depth and insight, people began “thinking for themselves, and a thinking people, if honest, will seldom go wrong in the end.”
AWARE OF MCCLURE’S BURGEONING POLITICAL clout, Roosevelt invited Sam McClure himself to lunch at the White House on October 9. Steffens joined them for dinner, and the three men talked until midnight. Roosevelt offered to furnish the sources and documents for a potential series of articles outlining his struggles with the trusts and the unions. In the end, however, McClure preferred to continue with Steffens’s series on corruption, focusing on a pitched battle being fought in Ohio between a group of young reformers and the Old Guard, led by Mark Hanna. Steffens was energized by the prospect, recognizing that Hanna remained the sole person who could snatch the nomination from Roosevelt—and that if he succeeded, the Republican Party would turn its back on reform.
A preliminary skirmish against Hanna earlier that spring had turned to Roosevelt’s advantage. Stirring up trouble, Ohio’s senior senator Joseph Foraker had introduced a resolution endorsing Roosevelt’s 1904 candidacy at a state convention assembled to nominate candidates for state office in 1903. The development placed Hanna in a bind. As Republican National Convention chairman, he did not want to preclude all other candidacies—including his own—at such an early date, yet he would need administration support to promote his bid for a second Senate term in the fall. In light of his position, Hanna told Roosevelt he felt obliged to oppose the premature endorsement. He did not think it proper for a state convention to “assume the responsibilities” of the following year’s national convention. “When you know all the facts,” he concluded, “I am sure that you will approve my course.” Roosevelt delayed his reply for twenty-four hours. Seeking advice from friends, he ultimately decided that “the time had come to stop shilly-shallying” and inform Hanna that he “did not intend to assume the position, at least passively, of a suppliant to whom he might give the nomination as a boon.”
“Your telegram received,” Roosevelt finally responded. “I have not asked any man for his support. I have had nothing whatever to do with raising this issue. Inasmuch as it has been raised of course those who favor my administration and my nomination will favor endorsing both and those who do not will oppose.” Roosevelt’s curt message left Hanna little choice. “In view of the sentiment expressed,” Hanna telegraphed back, “I shall not oppose the endorsement of your administration and candidacy by our State Convention.”
The publicized exchange of telegrams humiliated Hanna. “It was surrender, unequivocal and certain,” declared a California paper. Headlines across the country proclaimed the older man’s loss of power: “Hanna Backs Down to Roosevelt and Takes Water Like a Swan”; “Hanna Obeys the President’s Wishes.” Roosevelt tried to mitigate the sting with a personal letter. “I hated to do it because you have shown such broad generosity and straightforwardness in all your dealing with me,” he told the senator, proceeding to offer justifications for his actions. “I do not think you appreciated the exact effect that your interview and announced position had in the country at large. It was everywhere accepted as the first open attack on me.” Before closing, he confirmed his intention to attend the wedding of Hanna’s daughter in Cleveland a few weeks later and expressed hope that the two of them could have “a real talk—not just a half hours chat” while he was there.
But the damage was already done. The tense interchange had intensified Hanna’s reluctance to publicly endorse Roosevelt’s candidacy, fueling supporters’ confidence that Hanna would eventually announce his own candidacy. That fall, Hanna launched “the most arduous and exciting stumping tour of his career,” rallying the conservative Ohio base behind his chosen slate of candidates for the state legislature. The results were “an overwhelming personal victory” for Hanna, assuring his own reelection to the Senate. The landslide victory, “almost unique in American politics,” constituted proof that Hanna was once more “Boss of the Republican party” and Roosevelt “a discredited leader.”
“There is alarm in the Roosevelt camp,” a Canton, Ohio, newspaper reported. The spectacular showing by Hanna’s conservative wing of the party in the Ohio elections, coupled with the defeat of Roosevelt’s reform ticket in New York, appeared to signal “the turning point” in the president’s career: “Unless Mr. Roosevelt can retrieve his fortunes in a Napoleonic manner,” the Omaha Evening World-Herald predicted, “the dual elections in Ohio and New York will mark the time that saw the tide begin to ebb from Theodore Roosevelt.” The president himself was particularly disturbed by reform mayor Seth Low’s defeat in New York. “The wealthy capitalists who practice graft and who believe in graft alike in public and in private life, gave Tammany unlimited money just as they will give my opponent,” he grimly told a friend.
Reports multiplied of telegrams and letters of support arriving “by the bushel” in Hanna’s office, beseeching him to rally Republican opposition to Roosevelt and build a steady, conservative platform that would foster prosperity and cultivate the pro-business policies begun under McKinley. “It is agreed by leaders of the party that the distinguished gentleman may now have the nomination for the asking,” one editorial stated flatly, further suggesting that “Roosevelt may well be apprehensive. The vast following of McKinley will be found back of the Ohio Senator and this together with his own strength will certainly be potent enough to overcome any opposition at the national convention of his party in 1904.”
Compounding these difficulties, a campaign financed by the corporations to discredit the president began to gain traction. The Union Pacific’s E. H. Harriman dispatched hundreds of letters claiming that Roosevelt had “lost his popularity in the far west” and suggesting that without that region’s support, he would be a weak candidate. Criticism of Roosevelt converged on “the general idea that he [was] impulsive, erratic and not to be counted on.” Stories were circulated to emphasize his dangerously irresponsible, capricious nature. One disgruntled southerner, still aghast at Roosevelt’s dinner invitation to Booker T. Washington, relayed an anecdote of particularly maniacal behavior. “We have a wild boy in the White House,” he dismissively observed, painting the president as incompetent and immature: “The other day Roosevelt set out in his yacht from Oyster Bay in the teeth of a hurricane and against warning and advice, and nearly wrecked the vessel before he got to safety; and as he paced up and down the plunging deck and the wild winds blew his coat-tails over his head, there in his pocket was a six-shooter, just as if he were still a boy playing a game out on the plains!”
Rumormongers speculated that Senator Lodge was now “worried lest Hanna should come out at the eleventh hour as a candidate, and wrest the nomination.” Roosevelt himself was said to fear that there was “a plot brewing” designed to “rob him of the prize at the last moment.” White House lunch guests were reportedly queried about whether there was “any prospect of Hanna getting the delegates” in their respective states, a line of questioning that indicated genuine apprehension on Roosevelt’s part.
AMID THIS DISCORD, LINCOLN STEFFENS’S foray into Ohio politics could not have been more fortuitous for Roosevelt. The reporter explained to his father that he was “hoping to get Hanna,” and that by unmasking the powerful Ohio boss, he might affect the presidential election just as he had transformed the prospects of Joseph Folk. “If I am to have so much influence,” he wrote, “I want to make it a power for the possible and worth while.” Before embarking on this project, he would return to the capital “for a short confab with the President.” To be sure, “Roosevelt may be beaten,” Steffens warranted, “but he will not be beaten without some pretty stiff fighting,” and in that battle for reform, he added, with both accuracy and characteristic grandiosity, “we expect to deal some of the heaviest blows.”
Steffens spent five weeks in Ohio talking with newspaper editors, politicians, bosses, and citizen groups in Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, and Cincinnati. “Hanna is my villain this time,” he informed his father in late January 1904. Acknowledging that the piece was “pretty rough” on the senator, he nevertheless maintained that “it’s true and may do good.” Hanna might have considered himself “above the danger mark,” added Steffens, but a close examination of his career revealed many troubling, even criminal aspects.
The piece depicted Hanna as a businessman who had entered politics for the sole purpose of gaining special privileges for his street railway system. To secure advantages, Steffens explained, Hanna systematically “degraded the municipal legislature” through campaign contributions and outright bribery. Success only inflamed his ambitions. “He wanted to have a President,” Steffens wrote, so he engineered the “spontaneous demand” for William McKinley and backed him with the largest campaign fund ever raised. Then Hanna resolved to become a U.S. senator. Since the votes were cast by the state legislature in 1898, Steffens reported, “legislators were kidnapped, made drunk and held prisoners,” bribed and threatened with revolvers; in the end, unsurprisingly, Hanna emerged victorious. Steffens concluded that the system Hanna established in Ohio was“government of the people by politicians hired to represent the privileged class . . . the most dangerous form of our corruption.” And this malignant operator “was the choice of big business and bad machine politics for President of the United States.”
Steffens had nearly completed the first draft of his exposé when Hanna was stricken with typhoid fever. While his doctors hoped for a full recovery, they admitted that “the senator’s advanced age and rheumatic conditions [made] the case a more serious one than in a younger man.” When Roosevelt was informed of Hanna’s illness, he walked over to the Arlington Hotel, where the senator and his wife occupied a large suite. “For some inexplicable reason, this affected him very much,” Roosevelt told Elihu Root. After the president left, Hanna asked for paper and pen. “My Dear Mr. President,” he wrote. “You touched a tender spot, old man, when you called personally to inquire after me this a.m. I may be worse before I can be better, but all the same, such ‘drops’ of kindness are good for a fellow.” Always gracious at such times, Roosevelt quickly responded: “Indeed, it is your letter from your sick bed which is touching—not my visit. May you very soon be with us again, old fellow, as strong in body and as vigorous in your leadership and your friendship as ever.”
Hanna’s condition unexpectedly worsened in the days that followed. His temperature shot up to 104 degrees. He developed a congestive chill and the doctors administered strychnine to stimulate his heart. More than fifty correspondents and dozens of congressmen and senators crowded the lobby of the hotel, awaiting news. Steffens also waited, Hanna’s precarious condition having left the fate of his article hanging. “The illness of Hanna leaves me in the air,” he reported to his father. For a short time, the old senator seemed to rally, asking if the barber could come in to give him a shave. “Today he is better,” Steffens wrote on February 14. Although the crisis seemed to have passed, the fever had not yet crested. “Tomorrow,” Steffens predicted, “should decide his fate.” Indeed, the following day Hanna’s pulse rate dropped precipitously, and that evening, after “a brave struggle,” he died at the age of sixty-six.
Without Mark Hanna, pundits agreed, “all talk of any real opposition to the nomination of President Roosevelt seems to have ended.” Lacking the voice of a potent conservative leader to challenge the incumbent, open resistance to Roosevelt within the party crumbled.
“Of course, Hanna’s death knocks out Steffens’ article entirely,” the managing editor Albert Boyden told Ray Baker. “It’s tough luck!” After six months passed, however, Steffens found a way to revive the story. While his material on Hanna would provide the sordid backdrop of Ohio’s boss rule, his focus shifted to the fierce contest in the state between a new generation of reformers and the Old Guard. Calling his piece “A Tale of Two Cities,” he dramatically juxtaposed two municipal governments: Cleveland was led by Tom Johnson, the street railway tycoon turned radical reformer; and Cincinnati remained in thrall to George Cox, a corrupt party boss and longtime ally of Mark Hanna. Cleveland, he concluded, was “the best-governed city in the United States, Cincinnati, the worst.”
Steffens’s lengthy analysis appeared in the midst of Tom Johnson’s uphill campaign for a third term as mayor. The well-documented and admiring portrait of Johnson’s tenure, one observer noted, “appeared just in the nick of time to turn the tide.” The reform mayor won reelection by the largest margin he ever achieved and attributed much of his success to Steffens. “My feeling for you, my dear old fellow,” Johnson wrote the reporter, “is stronger than that of blood.”
That same year, machine politicians were defeated in a number of cities. “The day of the American boss is past,” proclaimed the Baltimore Herald. “Few men in the country,” declared another publication, “have done more to bring to pass last Tuesday’s defeat of municipal bosses than S. S. McClure and Lincoln Steffens.” Letters of praise flooded the McClure’s office. “To you, more than any one individual,” one writer told McClure, “belongs much of the credit for this week’s rout of the grafters. You were one of the first to grasp the real significance of the evil and to inaugurate its comprehensive exposure.” It was a rapturous moment for Sam McClure, who had a protective passion for his magazine “very much like what the lioness has for her cubs.”
“The story is the thing,” McClure responded, when asked to account for the achievement of his publication. “When Mr. Steffens, Mr. Baker, Miss Tarbell write they must never be conscious of anything else while writing other than telling an absorbing story.” As his authors began their research, he explained, they knew they had months—or even years—to complete the investigation and “mold it into a story palpitating with interest.” The magazine’s reputation as an instrument of reform, he insisted, was “due solely to its effective method of telling the truth, of giving stories vital interest.” Had his writers begun with preconceived notions, they could not have so persuasively carried readers through their own process of discovery nor produced such visceral reactions to the unfolding narratives. “We were ourselves personally astonished, personally ashamed, personally indignant at what we found,” Baker recalled, “and we wrote earnestly, even hotly.” The more the public learned, the more engaged people grew by every facet of the complicated struggle for reform. “Month after month,” Baker remarked, “they would swallow dissertations of ten or twelve thousand words without even blinking—and ask for more.”
If corrupt businessmen, politicians, or labor leaders took offense to the detailed scrutiny of their motives and means, the Minneapolis Tribune noted, their hostility should be considered both “a medal of honor” and “an inspiration,” irrefutable evidence “that something is being accomplished.” Many decades hence, The Independent predicted, “when the historian of American literature writes of the opening years of the century, he will give one of his most interesting chapters to the literature of exposure, and he will pronounce it a true intellectual force.”