This cartoon, “An Off Day in the Jungle,” imagines how Roosevelt, on safari in Africa, heard the news that Gifford Pinchot had been ousted from the Forest Bureau.
DURING TAFT’S FIFTY-SEVEN-DAY ABSENCE FROM Washington, a latent animosity between Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s closest ally in the conservation crusade, and Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger, Taft’s choice to replace Garfield, flared into open discord. The conflict quickly escalated beyond the confines of “a mere personal squabble” into “a matter of state.” With Roosevelt’s allies falling in behind Pinchot, and Taft defending Ballinger, the controversy would pit the East of America versus the West, corporate interests against public rights, developers against conservationists—until all the divisive factions at play in the confrontation between Pinchot and Ballinger were framed as the opening volley in the battle for the 1912 presidential nomination. Noting the great dissatisfaction among progressives with the administration’s actions on both conservation and the tariff, the New York Times cited the comment that if Roosevelt toured the country upon his return from Africa, “there would be such a fire behind him by the time he got across the continent that nothing could stand in front of it.”
Contention over the regulation of waterpower had initially set Ballinger and Pinchot at odds. Near the end of his term, President Roosevelt had delivered a dramatic message to Congress on the future of hydroelectric power: America, he pronounced, was on the verge of a momentous development—the electrical transmission of waterpower over large distances. Although supplies of oil, gas, and coal would eventually be exhausted, hydroelectric power offered a source of renewable energy. The industry was “still in its infancy,” yet Roosevelt warned that an “astonishing consolidation” had already occurred. Thirteen large corporations, led by General Electric and Westinghouse, controlled more than one third of the waterpower then in use. Unless potential power sites still owned by the government were leased to developers on terms consistent with “the public interest,” the hydroelectric industry would follow the path of the oil industry: a great monopoly would develop, eradicating competition and dictating the price citizens paid for electricity in their homes and businesses. “I esteem it my duty,” Roosevelt had concluded, “to use every endeavor to prevent this growing monopoly, the most threatening which has ever appeared, from being fastened upon the people of this nation.”
With time running out on his administration, Roosevelt, together with Garfield and Pinchot, had come up with a plan. Acting without congressional authorization, Garfield issued executive orders to withdraw from private development more than 1.5 million acres of land situated along sixteen rivers in half a dozen western states. These protected lands included hundreds of thousands of acres with little connection to waterpower sites, but “there was no time,” Pinchot explained, “to make detailed surveys.” Under the pressing circumstances, the blanket withdrawal assured safety for the actual power sites. Roosevelt later justified these withdrawals, along with other controversial executive actions, arguing that the president “is the steward of the people, and that the proper attitude for him to take is that he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.”
Within three weeks of assuming his post as the new interior secretary, Richard Ballinger restored the vast majority of Garfield’s withdrawals to the public domain. A lawyer and former judge, Ballinger believed that the previous administration had acted illegally in making wholesale withdrawals without congressional authorization or even the requisite data to determine potential locations for hydroelectric development. Once the proper surveys were completed, he would ask Congress for legislation to protect the actual sites. Meanwhile, conservation efforts should not restrict legitimate development in the states of the Far West. Developers and businessmen in that region had long excoriated Roosevelt’s conservation policies as a socialistic threat to “traditional western individualism.” So many tracts of public land had been temporarily withdrawn from settlers and private developers, one critic sarcastically noted, “that a man could ride from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean and his horse need not once step a hoof outside government land.”
While Taft considered himself a Roosevelt conservationist and recognized the vital work of Garfield and Pinchot, he fundamentally agreed with Ballinger’s insistence that problems had to be resolved “on the basis of law.” He would never endorse the cavalier attitude that “the end justified the means.” In Taft’s estimation, the “sweeping declaration of executive authority” used to justify the withdrawals misconceived “the entire theory of the Federal Constitution” which delegated specific powers to each of the three branches. “It is,” he declared, “a very dangerous method of upholding reform to violate the law in so doing; even on the ground of high moral principle, or of saving the public.” The Constitution granted Congress “the power to dispose of lands, not the Executive.” Indeed, Taft believed that Roosevelt’s conservation reforms would have been “further along” had he “taken a different way.”
Ballinger’s restoration orders provoked indignation among progressives, who feared that monopolies would grab thousands of invaluable water sites before the completion of the surveys. “Stop Ballinger,” pleaded an editorial in the Des Moines Daily News. “Mr. Taft stop him! In the name of justice, if he is blind, see for him! If he is callous, feel for him! If he is without power to estimate the awfulness of this crime, think for him!” While more conservative commentators lauded the shift away from Roosevelt’s “cowboy methods,” progressives, educated by the former president to both the importance of conservation and the treachery of monopoly, reacted with outrage. “Attention! Land Thieves and Natural Resource Grabbers,” the Tacoma Times announced: “Game is Soft Again.” Under Roosevelt, the Tacoma Times declared, “any doubt about the power of the chief executive to make withdrawals of public land was resolved in favor of the people.” Taft’s administration had resolved the doubt “in favor of the predatory interests.”
Gifford Pinchot was on an extended speaking tour in the West when Ballinger reversed Garfield’s withdrawals. Returning to Washington in April 1909, he discovered “what was going on” and immediately called on President Taft. Largely uninvolved with conservation efforts during his years in the cabinet, Taft regarded Pinchot as an exemplary public servant but possessed of a fanatical strain, all too ready to attribute evil motives to anyone who opposed his ideas. Furthermore, Taft believed that Pinchot’s intimacy with Roosevelt had endowed him with power far beyond his official responsibilities as the head of a single bureau in the Department of Agriculture. For two days running, Taft listened closely as Pinchot “protested as vigorously as [he] knew how against Ballinger’s action,” explaining why the restorations threatened public interest. “To his honor,” Pinchot later said, Taft called in Ballinger and directed him to halt any further restorations and again re-withdraw any such “lands as were actually valuable for water-power purposes.” Greatly relieved, Garfield maintained that Pinchot’s intervention had forestalled disaster.
But Ballinger’s concessions under pressure from the president did little to allay Pinchot’s suspicions or satisfy the progressive press. “Everything is not yet altogether serene,” the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican reported. It remained to be seen whether the waterpower trust had capitalized on the “golden opportunities” provided by Ballinger’s original restoration orders. In the absence of facts, rumors abounded. In May, the Philadelphia Press reported that “five million acres of publicly owned land” were being turned over to corporate interests. The continuing antagonism between Ballinger and Pinchot provided fodder for drastic speculation: some papers predicted that Ballinger would have to resign, others that Pinchot was on his way out. The future seemed equally murky to the protagonists themselves: “Was Conservation really in danger?” Had the president “gone over to the Old Guard?”
In early August, the controversy came to a head at the National Irrigation Conference in Spokane, Washington. As thousands of delegates from across the country poured into the Armory to discuss and debate reclamation, forests, waterways, and conservation, journalists predicted an open clash between Pinchot and Ballinger, both of whom were among the speakers. On August 9, the day before Pinchot was set to speak, the staff correspondent for the United Press released a sensational attack on Ballinger, claiming the secretary had used “one excuse or another” to delay Taft’s re-withdrawal order, enabling General Electric, Guggenheim, and Amalgamated Copper to grab a total of 15,868 acres in Montana, including power sites worth millions upon millions of dollars. “This is a true story,” the reporter contended, “of how the birth right of a great state” was lost to monopoly. “Richard Achilles Ballinger, stand up!” demanded the Spokane Press the next day. “You are accused of grave misadministration of your high office.” Through Ballinger’s actions, the state of Montana has been “eternally delivered into the hands of the power trust,” the indictment continued. “President Taft cannot do anything about it now.”
These spectacular charges set the stage for Gifford Pinchot’s speech, which was widely construed as a direct attack on the embattled secretary. “The purpose of the Conservation movement,” Pinchot declared at the outset, “is to make our country a permanent and prosperous home for ourselves and for our children and for our children’s children.” Pinchot “threw down the gauntlet” before Ballinger, stating “unequivocally” that a great waterpower trust was “in process of formation,” aided by “strict construction” of the law, which inevitably championed “the great interests as against the people.” The struggle over waterpower, he contended, was simply another chapter in “the everlasting conflict” between “the few” and “the many.” This statement unleashed “a storm of applause,” as did Pinchot’s testimonial to Theodore Roosevelt. “I stand for the Roosevelt policies because they set the common good of all of us above the private gain of some of us,” he reiterated, “because they recognize the livelihood of the small man as more important to the nation than the profit of the big man. . . . And I propose to stand for them while I have the strength to stand for anything.” When he finished, the 1,200 delegates “cheered him for fully five minutes,” clapping their hands and stomping the floor in “the wildest reception” accorded to any of the conference speakers. Later that day, Pinchot wrote to inform Taft of the “deplorable fact” he had just discovered, that monopolies had seized valuable waterpower sites in Montana “after the restoration and before the second withdrawal.”
The delegates looked with “breathless interest” to Richard Ballinger’s response to both the newspaper charges and Pinchot’s speech. When the interior secretary stood at the podium the next day, he merely read a “routine dissertation on public-land matters,” as if “the conflict” with Pinchot and the furor over his policies “had never been born.” Furthermore, he declined to remain for questions after his prepared remarks, as every other speaker had done. “He picked up his hat,” one reporter noted, “hustled into a waiting automobile, and hurried to his hotel.” Former California governor George Pardee openly denounced Ballinger’s decision to flee. “I have been in public office and have been criticized,” Pardee derisively observed. “I do not object to it. A public official should be willing to be criticized. An agent of the people of this country should be called to account.” Raucous cheers broke out in the hall along with rhythmic shouts of “Hit ’em again.”
The United Press reporter who broke the story pressed Ballinger for an interview at his hotel. Refusing to “grant an audience,” Ballinger finally agreed to talk by phone. “The dope you put out is all wrong and false,” he began. When the reporter claimed to have records and maps substantiating the charges, Ballinger grew testy. “I’ll have no conference with you,” he responded, terminating the call. When another reporter “questioned and quizzed” the secretary about his actions, Ballinger became equally truculent. “See here. You don’t understand this thing,” he bellowed. “You are hindering the development of the West.”
“Mr. Ballinger’s silence is not reassuring,” the San Francisco Call editorialized. “The country wants to know whether Ballinger is secretly fighting the policy of conservation.” When Ballinger eventually put out a statement, he simply repeated that his decisions were fully warranted and his actions unreasonably maligned. “Gross misrepresentations have been sent out,” he declared. “Criticisms have been pretty severe from some quarters, but knowing that I am absolutely right in the position I have taken, I have paid no attention to them. In time it will be shown beyond a doubt that my course has been absolutely right.” In both his private and public life, Ballinger maintained, he had “always believed” in the tenet of “nonpublicity,” confident that his actions would be vindicated “by the results accomplished.”
Ballinger was, in fact, eventually able to prove that the Montana land grab story was riddled with error from start to finish. Only four tracts of 40 acres each were actually involved in the restoration, a total of 158.63 acres. Reporting the figure of 15,863 acres, the correspondent hadmisplaced the decimal point. Moreover, detailed surveys revealed that not a single valuable water site was contained in the restored land. Two of the tracts “did not touch the river at all,” the third “touched the river only in its extreme corner,” and the fourth had never been included in the Garfield withdrawals. Finally, not one of these entries had moved to actual patent. Pinchot eventually acknowledged that he had been mistaken when he charged that “monopolists had grabbed off” valuable waterpower sites in Montana. By then Ballinger had lost the public battle; the impression that he had betrayed Roosevelt’s conservation policies was widespread. The controversy between Pinchot and Ballinger had “assumed a certain symbolic importance,” with the chief forester advocating for the public and the interior secretary representing the corporations.
THE DISPUTE OVER WATERPOWER WAS soon “completely overshadowed” by dramatic developments in what was called the Cunningham coal scandal. Pinchot brought such grave allegations against the interior secretary that it was “taken for granted” that “either one side or the other must make good,” leaving the other in abject humiliation. Capturing headlines for months, the scandal and ensuing congressional investigation would eventually become “the driving wedge,” which “slowly but surely” created an unbridgeable “chasm” between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.
Details of the coal case, “a slumbering volcano” in the Interior Department over the previous three years, first became public at the same Spokane conference that escalated the waterpower story. Louis R. Glavis, a twenty-seven-year-old field investigator for the General Land Office in the Interior Department, had approached Pinchot in desperation, fearing that the department, under pressure from Ballinger, was on the verge of handing over 5,000 acres of potentially rich coal land to a syndicate headed by a Seattle developer, Clarence Cunningham.
As the special agent assigned to investigate the validity of land claims in Alaska, Glavis had gradually accumulated evidence suggesting that Cunningham, acting as the agent for a group of wealthy clients, had acted illegally when he staked his thirty-three claims. The Alaska land laws, designed to protect small farmers and prevent monopoly, limited each individual to 160 acres. Individual settlers, who paid small fees for the land, were required to prove they were acting “in good faith,” on their own behalf, when they staked claims for land. From the outset, Glavis believed, the Cunningham group had agreed to consolidate their claims “into one property,” which would be “operated for the joint benefit of all.” Indeed, he had uncovered a document proposing to give a Morgan-Guggenheim Company half the stock in return for $250,000 in cash investments to develop the coal property. Before completing his investigation, however, Glavis had been pulled from the case. Upon learning that the Land Office had scheduled a hearing on the Cunningham claims, half of which lay within the Chugach National Forest, he had turned to the chief forester for help.
Most troubling of all, Glavis reported, Ballinger had been “closely identified” with the members of the Cunningham group at various stages of the claims process. When Ballinger was land commissioner, he had shared all departmental correspondence on the case with Cunningham and had, at one point, actually ordered the claims to patent, pulling back only after an urgent telegram from Glavis. Then, in the summer of 1908, after leaving his post as land commissioner and returning home to Seattle, Ballinger had met with members of the Cunningham group, who had retained him as their “legal representative” before the government. Ballinger’s actions, Glavis continued, flouted a three-decades-old ruling that no government employee could “act as counsel, attorney, or agent for prosecuting any claim against the government” within two years of leaving employment. Finally, when Ballinger returned to public service as interior secretary, he had urged the department to decide the Cunningham claims without further delay.
After hearing Glavis’s account, Pinchot dispatched an urgent letter to Taft. “I advised him to lay the whole matter before you without delay,” he told the president. Immediate action was in order, Pinchot warned, because “many persons” already knew of “various parts” of the story and it would soon become “impossible to prevent its becoming public.” Before Glavis even reached the “Summer Capital” in Beverly, in fact, sensational articles began to appear. “Ballinger Mixed in Alaska Frauds,” headlined the Salt Lake Tribune. The fact that Ballinger had accepted fees from Cunningham during the year between his service as land commissioner and his return to Washington as secretary drew particular attention. Glavis reportedly had “a whole trunk full of documentary evidence” that would lead to the indictment of Ballinger and several other high officials in the Interior Department. It was later revealed that the publicity wing in the Forestry Bureau had leaked these reports.
When Glavis met with the president on August 18, he handed him a detailed statement on the coal case and his allegations against Ballinger. The following day, Taft discussed the charges with Attorney General George Wickersham, who was vacationing nearby. Wickersham reviewed the Glavis statement and “made notes upon his reading.” The two men talked again the following afternoon and determined that Taft should forward the Glavis report to Ballinger and request a written reply. The president instructed Ballinger to answer each of the charges, “especially concerning [his] relation as counsel to the persons interested in the Cunningham coal claims.” Taft “quite distinctly” recalled that Ballinger had told him the previous year that because of his “professional relation” with the Cunningham group, he had turned the case over to Assistant Secretary Frank Pierce; beyond that, he remembered little else about the situation. He would appreciate a written explanation “as full as possible.” Taft also requested written statements from Frank Pierce and the chief of Field Service, H. H. Schwartz, under whom Glavis had worked.
The Interior Department officials responded quickly, providing a vigorous defense of Ballinger. Pierce insisted that Ballinger “has had nothing to do with these Cunningham cases since he became Secretary,” adding that any “blame or criticism . . . should fall upon [him] and not upon the Secretary.” Schwartz asserted that Glavis’s decision to seek help from the Forestry Department was utterly unnecessary: at that juncture no one in the Interior Department was suggesting “issuance of patents, but only expedition of hearings.” And based on the evidence already accumulated, the hearings would likely have resulted in an adverse decision to the claimants.
Meanwhile, Ballinger continued to toil over his own response. Asked about the allegations by the press, he remarked only that he intended “to kill some snakes.” On September 4, he completed his 10,000-word document, taking up each one of the Glavis charges in turn. Before becoming land commissioner, Ballinger testified, he had no personal knowledge of the Cunningham claims, though as a twenty-year resident of Seattle he had developed friendships and acquaintances with a number of the claimants. He acknowledged that at one point he had clear-listed the claims, based upon a favorable report from another special agent. Upon receiving Glavis’s telegram, however, he had acted immediately to stop the patents. The patents were still being held up when he left the land commissionership.
Ballinger did concede that in the summer of 1908, Cunningham had come to his house simply to complain of his treatment by Glavis. Cunningham told Ballinger that at one of his meetings with Glavis, he had allowed the agent to read a journal documenting each stage of the claims process. He claimed that Glavis had stolen one of the pages, which he was using out of context to demonstrate an illegal intent to consolidate. Cunningham argued that Glavis had interpreted the document incorrectly. When Cunningham learned that Ballinger would soon travel east, he asked him to carry an affidavit to Interior Secretary Garfield presenting his point of view. Ballinger gave the affidavit to Garfield, but the secretary told him that the claims would never be upheld unless the group was willing to apply under a recent law that forgave early signs of consolidation but severely limited the amount of money that could be raised to develop the property. Ballinger advised Cunningham accordingly. For his services and traveling expenses, Ballinger reported, he received $250. Since he had never been retained as a “legal representative,” he argued, there had been no violation of the long-standing rule which, at any rate, applied only to monetary claims against the government. Furthermore, he labeled the charge that he had furnished Cunningham with departmental correspondence relating to the case a pure fabrication.
On Labor Day, September 6, Ballinger hand-delivered his written statement to Beverly, along with “several satchels full of documents.” Oscar Lawler, the assistant attorney general assigned to the Interior Department, accompanied him. They joined the president for lunch at the Myopia Hunt Club, where Taft was scheduled to present victory cups for the annual horse show before a crowd of 5,000. That evening, Ballinger and Lawler conferred with the president for several hours. Taft later reported that he stayed up until three o’clock, “reading the answers and exhibits.” When he reconvened with Ballinger and Lawler the following evening, the president had already determined that the Glavis report contained no hard evidence that Ballinger was dishonest, disloyal, or incompetent. “The cruel injustice which has been done to [Ballinger] makes me indignant,” Taft declared. He told Lawler that he “was very anxious to write a full statement of the case,” explaining his reasoning to the public. But because he was scheduled to leave in one week for his two-month tour around the country and still had a half-dozen speeches to write, he asked Lawler to prepare a draft statement “as if he were president.”
The following Sunday, Wickersham and Lawler returned to Beverly with Lawler’s draft. Taft asked Wickersham to spend the rest of the day reviewing the entire record. He continued to work on his own statement, using Lawler’s draft as a starting point. After a second reading, Wickersham told Taft that he saw nothing in the record to incriminate Ballinger. Finding Wickersham “in substantial accord” with his own views, Taft completed his own statement and directed the attorney general to embody his notes and oral statement in a written analysis, to be filed with the documents. He should date the analysis prior to the publication of the president’s statement, Taft continued, to demonstrate that his decision had been buttressed by the attorney general’s “summary of the evidence and his conclusions.”
Taft issued his statement on September 13, in the form of an official letter to Ballinger, which he furnished to the press as he boarded the train to begin his 13,000-mile journey. Having examined the documents, Taft wrote, he had concluded that the Glavis charges embraced “only shreds of suspicion without any substantial evidence to sustain his attack.” Though he believed that “Glavis was honestly convinced of the illegal character of the claims in the Cunningham group, and that he was seeking evidence to defeat the claims,” the record revealed an inordinate delay on his part. The claimants were entitled to a speedy hearing, which was all the Interior Department had requested. As for the charges against Ballinger himself, it was clear that since becoming secretary, he had “studiously declined to have any connection whatever with the Cunningham claims.” Glavis was aware of this fact, Taft charged, along with several other pieces of exculpatory evidence, but “in his zeal to convict,” he had not provided “the benefit of information” that might place the suspect transactions in a different and more favorable context. A subordinate who believes “his chief is dishonest,” Taft asserted, has a responsibility “to submit that evidence to higher authority”; an employee who levels charges founded only on “suspicions” and “fails to give to his chief the benefit of circumstances within his knowledge that would explain his chief’s action as on proper grounds,” however, can no longer be trusted. He therefore granted Ballinger’s request for “authority to discharge Mr. Glavis” for disloyalty to his superior officers in “making false charges against them.”
By his own standards of jurisprudence, the president’s precipitous decision to declare Ballinger innocent and Glavis guilty was seriously flawed. Taft had provided Glavis no chance to respond to Ballinger’s countercharges, or even to see the documents upon which they were based. He had judged Glavis guilty of “misrepresentation,” “suppression,” and “culpable delay,” without “an opportunity to be heard in his own defense.” The president of the United States had questioned the young investigator’s integrity, condemned his character, and broadcast his severance from public service to the nation at large.
The press greeted the president’s statement as a victory for Ballinger and a defeat for Pinchot, who had pushed Glavis forward. “The Ballinger adherents threw their hats in the air and shouted that it is all over,” the New York Tribune reported. “The Pinchot camp remained grimly silent and muttered threats in strict confidence.” Correspondents speculated that Pinchot’s resignation was imminent. Yet the chief forester’s departure was the last thing Taft wanted. He fully understood that the public would interpret Pinchot’s exit as evidence of the administration’s opposition to Roosevelt’s conservation policies.
To forestall “hasty action” on Gifford Pinchot’s part, Taft wrote him a warm, personal letter. “My Dear Gifford,” he began, “I write this to urge upon you that you do not make Glavis’ cause yours.” His decision to uphold Ballinger and discharge Glavis, he explained, was reached only after a careful study of documents Pinchot had never seen and carried no adverse judgment on his chief forester; on the contrary, “I have the utmost confidence in your conscientious desire to serve the Government and the public,” and “I should consider it one of the greatest losses that my administration could sustain if you were to leave it.” When a public servant had been so “unjustly treated,” as Ballinger, he wrote, “it is my duty as his chief, with the knowledge I have of his official integrity and his lack of culpability, to declare it to the public.” In the name of “teamwork,” he hoped Pinchot and the members of the Forestry Bureau would refrain from further public argument with the Interior Department. “It is most demoralizing,” the president concluded, “and subversive of governmental discipline.”
After several conferences with Taft, Pinchot agreed to remain at his post. The president, in turn, promised to issue a statement of support for Pinchot to counter the reigning impression that “in holding Ballinger up,” he was condemning his chief forester. “Never at any time,” Taft said, had he “intended to reflect upon Mr. Pinchot.” He also authorized publication of an excerpt from his personal letter, in which he assured the forester that he would deem his resignation “one of the greatest losses” his administration could endure. Pleased that a temporary truce had been established, Taft was nevertheless apprehensive, certain that Pinchot remained “as fanatical” as ever “in his chase after Ballinger.” He feared Pinchot had reached “a state of mind” that would “lead to a break” at some point. “He is looking for martyrdom,” Taft told Wickersham, “and it may be necessary to give it to him; but I prefer to let him use all the rope that he will.”
Taft’s instincts were correct. Pinchot had no intention of relinquishing the fight. Indeed, he was already engaged in a conspiracy to deliver the Glavis report to leading muckraking magazines. “I have been thinking this miserable business over,” Assistant Forester Overton Price had written Pinchot three days after the president’s dismissal of Glavis, “and this is the way I see the thing. . . . First, the most effective publicity possible to the Glavis side, and the Garfield side, of the case, preferably, in a special issue of a clean national magazine. . . . Second, a congressional investigation with an honest man at the head of it. . . . Third, a President discredited by the people and by the man who made him President.” Pierce promised that he would attend to all the work himself, without directly implicating Pinchot. “Don’t let them cloud the issue by laying yourself open to any charge of direct insubordination. . . . I can do a great deal without getting fired; that isn’t your job. You have got a much bigger job.”
In the weeks that followed, Overton Price and Alexander Shaw, the Forestry Bureau’s legal officer, spent many hours with Glavis, determining how best to publicize his allegations. Price and Shaw later conceded that “as employees of subordinate rank” in the Agricultural Department, they were engaged in highly “irregular” conduct. Nevertheless, they believed that by exposing the head of the Interior Department, they would forestall the “grave and immediate danger” of losing invaluable public lands. In September, Price and Shaw met for six hours with Garfield, “going over in detail” every aspect of the Glavis report. Shaw then aided Glavis to transform his bureaucratic report into an accessible and engaging publishable article. As they prepared the piece, the Forestry Bureau leaked more material to the press, stimulating further criticism of the interior secretary. Such machinations within his administration were not lost on William Taft. “Pinchot has spread a virus against Ballinger,” he told Nellie, “and has used the publicity department of his bureau for the purpose. He would deny it, but I can see traces in his talks with many newspapermen on the subject, who assume Ballinger’s guilt, and having convicted him treat any evidence showing that he is a man of strength and honesty as utterly to be disregarded.”
In late October, Glavis was introduced to Norman Hapgood, the publisher of Collier’s. Another magazine had offered $3,000 for the piece, but Glavis refused payment for work he considered a public duty. Hapgood “read the article that night and accepted it the next day,” proceeding immediately with plans for publication. No attempt was ever made to contact Ballinger or anyone within the Interior Department to verify the details or documents underlying the allegations.
Published in Collier’s on November 13, the Glavis article renewed “the newspaper frenzy” that had temporarily subsided in the aftermath of Taft’s September statement. The piece was carefully phrased throughout; Glavis later claimed he never intended to depict Ballinger as venal—he simply wanted to stop the exploitation of Alaska coal lands. Yet the headline blatantly placed Ballinger at the center of a ring of corruption. “The Whitewashing of Ballinger,” read the streamer. “Are the Guggenheims in Charge of the Department of the Interior?” Section headings within the article extended the implication: “A Leak in the Land Office,” “Ballinger Pushes Trial When Government Is Not Ready,” “The Alaska Coal Lands Are in Danger in Ballinger’s Hands.” The potential purchase of coal lands by the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate, which was already in possession of vast copper mines, smelters, steamship lines, and railroads in the West, raised the specter that one company would control all “the natural resources of Alaska.”
With this invocation of monopoly, “the muckrake periodical press took off in full cry.” Glavis was likened to Ida Tarbell, a dogged investigator fighting to expose corruption at the highest levels. While some of the ensuing articles reflected serious research, others, as Roosevelt had warned in his celebrated rebuke of the “Muckrake Man,” simply repeated the most sensational rumors as fact. A piece by John Matthews in Hampton’s charged that Taft himself was “a party to the conspiracy.” Citing “circumstantial evidence,” Matthews concocted the tale of a deal purportedly conceived at the 1908 Republican Convention, which would allow J. P. Morgan “on behalf of the Morgan-Guggenheim combination to name the Secretary of the Interior,” with the assurance that once Ballinger was in place, “the Alaska coal grants” would be approved.
Ballinger refused to give a detailed statement in response to such distortions and outright slander. Instead, he launched a virulent attack on “literary apostles of vomit,” who “imagine they can invent calumnies and pure fabrications so rapidly as to preclude reply.” He labeled Matthews’s charges “so asinine” they did not merit a rejoinder. “I have felt so thoroughly conscious of the justice of my position,” he told the editor of the Spokesman-Review, “that I have felt assured that the public would ultimately understand the truth without the necessity of my entering upon a campaign of publicity.” Taft, too, shied from the controversy, maintaining that both Ballinger and Pinchot were committed to Roosevelt’s conservation policies, despite their divergent approaches to carrying them out.
When Ballinger released his first annual report to Congress on November 29, the chorus of outrage seemed to still. The report displayed a liberal stance on every issue, garnering widespread praise from conservationists. Even Pinchot and Garfield conceded that Ballinger had come out “in favor of all the things we fought for.” While Pinchot dismissed Ballinger’s motivation as “the goodness of a bad boy recently spanked,” he predicted that “the whole controversy will pass quietly away, with the net result that Ballinger is forced completely over on to the Conservation side,” leaving “the Administration . . . stronger for Conservation than it otherwise would have been.”
More than anyone, Taft wanted the contentious ordeal to end. Ballinger, however, saw only one route to restore his honor and reputation: a full congressional inquiry into the activities of both his department and the Forest Bureau. For months, he had silently gathered ammunition, evidence that not only vindicated his own actions but implicated Pinchot and his subordinates in manufacturing malignant attacks. Aware of Taft’s reluctance, Ballinger told the president “that the situation had become intolerable to him.” Unless Taft consented to a congressional investigation, he would resign.
Friends and family urged the president to accept Ballinger’s resignation and move on, but Taft felt compelled to defend his beleaguered cabinet official. Aware that an inquiry would prolong the struggle, overshadow his legislative program, and potentially compromise his administration, he nevertheless insisted that he would be “a coward or a white-livered skunk” if he deserted “an honest man” who had been subjected to venomous newspaper attacks. He had hoped that “the whole affair was a tempest in a teapot which soon would simmer down.” Instead, leaked information fueled sensational headlines. Faced with Ballinger’s ultimatum, the president agreed to the request for a congressional probe.
On December 23, after a series of conferences at the White House, Richard Ballinger sent a letter to Washington State’s Republican senator Wesley Jones, demanding a complete investigation into the charges leveled against him. He petitioned that “any investigation of the Interior Department should embrace the Forest Service,” as there was “reason to believe that the pernicious activity of certain of its officers has been the inspiration of these charges.” Later that day, Senator Jones introduced a resolution asking the government “to transmit to Congress any reports, statements, papers, or documents” relating to the Glavis charges and the president’s letter of exoneration. A special investigative committee, comprising six members from each House, was convened.
Pinchot’s supporters feared that “all the power of the administration” would be deployed to secure “a packed investigating committee,” groomed from the start to “glaze over the evidence against Ballinger,” punish members of the Forest Bureau for leaking government files, and discredit Pinchot “before the people.” A Washington “insider” warned Robert Collier that he had acquired “secret information” suggesting that once the committee had “whitewashed” Ballinger, the interior secretary would sue Collier’s “for a million dollars on the ground of slander.” Collier called Pinchot, Garfield, Hapgood, and Henry Stimson, Garfield’s legal adviser, to an “emergency council of war” in New York. They agreed that Glavis needed an experienced lawyer to represent him at the hearing. Hapgood suggested Louis Brandeis, the prominent Boston attorney (and future Supreme Court justice). Collier’s proposed to pay the jurist $25,000 “to conduct the defense.” Brandeis readily accepted, beginning at once to pore over thousands of pages of documents.
Gifford Pinchot pursued a more public defense, delivering a speech in New York that attracted unprecedented attention. Framing his struggle with Ballinger as a battle “between special interests and equal opportunity,” the chief forester declared conservation “a moral issue,” a question of social justice. “Is it fair that thousands of families should have less than they need, in order that a few families should have swollen fortunes at their expense?” he asked. Pinchot, Taft told Horace with grave irritation, was “out again defying the lightning and the storm.” While Ballinger was “busily engaged” in the practical endeavor of “drafting laws” to protect the public lands from exploitation, Pinchot was “harassing the wealthy” and “championing the cause of the oppressed.” The outcome of this battle within the administration was undecided, however. “Will Pinchot remain the St. George and Ballinger the dragon?” Taft worriedly mused. “I don’t know. Let us see.”
IN JANUARY 1910, WITH THE congressional investigation imminent, the National Tribune reported that both “the Ballingerites and the Pinchotites” were stockpiling ammunition. The Pinchotites were initially expected “to be on the defensive,” working to deflect evidence that the Ballinger camp had gathered “to prove them as plotting against the Interior Department and as furnishing material for the muckraking magazines.” When the time came for Ballinger’s cross-examination, however, the Pinchotites were projected to gain advantage. “It will be a hot old political time,” theTribune predicted, relishing the controversy. “It remains true today as it was in the days of [the Roman emperors],” Current Literature observed, “that a gladiatorial combat is the quickest way to ensure tremendous public interest.”
Surmising that the Ballingerites would “bring out, piece by piece, various bits of testimony” to shine “the worst possible light” on the Forest Bureau’s involvement with Glavis, Pinchot decided “to lay our hand on the table, tell in advance all the facts, and assign the exact reasons for everything that had been done.” He requested a report from Price and Shaw detailing their involvement in the release of “official information” about Ballinger and the Cunningham case. On January 5, three weeks before the hearings, he transmitted their report, along with his own commentary, to Senator Dolliver, Republican chair of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. Pinchot acknowledged that Price and Shaw had violated “the rules of official decorum” but argued that “their breach of propriety” was insignificant in comparison with “the imminent danger that the Alaska coal fields still in government ownership might pass forever into private hands with little or no compensation to the public.” Appeals through official channels had failed. A final petition to the White House had been derailed by Taft’s “mistaken impression of the facts,” resulting in his decision to remove Glavis, “the most vigorous defender of the people’s interests.” Both Price and Shaw had “acted from a high and unselfish sense of public duty,” intentionally choosing “to risk their official positions rather than permit what they believed to be the wrongful loss of public property.”
Archie Butt was with Taft when news of Pinchot’s letter to Congress reached the White House. “One trouble is no sooner over in this office than another arises,” Taft declared in frustration. Though he regarded the letter “as a piece of insubordination almost unparalleled in the history of the government,” the president realized that by dismissing Pinchot, the man most pivotal in securing Roosevelt’s conservation legacy, he risked alienating Roosevelt himself. “I believe [Taft] loves Theodore Roosevelt,” Butt attested, “and a possible break with him or the possible charge of ingratitude on his part is what is writhing within him now.” Taft told Butt that no decision “had distressed him as much.” As he weighed the consequences that afternoon, he looked to Butt “like a man almost ill.” Discussing the matter with his cabinet, Taft learned that Pinchot had not cleared his letter with his boss, Agriculture Secretary James Wilson. The president sent for Senator Root, who initially warned against firing Pinchot. An examination of the correspondence, however, changed Root’s mind: “There is only one thing for you to do now, and that you must do at once,” he advised. Later that night, Taft directed Wilson to fire Pinchot, Price, and Shaw.
“The plain intimations in your letter,” Taft wrote Pinchot, “are, first, that I had reached a wrong conclusion as to the good faith of Secretary Ballinger.” Yet Pinchot “had only seen the evidence of Glavis, the accuser,” and had no knowledge of the documentary evidence submitted to the White House. “Second,” the president continued, Pinchot suggested that without public exposure, “the Administration, including the President,” would have patented “fraudulent claims” to Alaska’s rich coal lands. “I should be glad to regard what has happened only as a personal reflection, so that I could pass it over and take no official cognizance of it. But other and higher considerations must govern me.” The people “placed me in an office of the highest dignity and charged me with the duty of maintaining that dignity and proper respect for the office on the part of my subordinates. . . . By your own conduct you have destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate.”
After this painful decision, Butt reported, Taft “looked refreshed and even fairly happy.” The Washington papers generally agreed that the president “could have followed no other course,” for Pinchot’s letter “was too flagrant an offense to be overlooked.” Pinchot, one editorial suggested, was “suffering from the same malady that overtook Mr. Glavis, a swollen idea of his own importance.” It seemed initially that Pinchot’s dismissal would precipitate little furor. In fact, Taft’s own message on conservation policy two weeks later garnered universal praise. “Quite as admirable a message as Mr. Pinchot could have written,” pronounced the New York World. The New York Tribune found the address “peculiarly satisfactory,” noting Taft’s “specific and practical” promotion of “new legislation to govern the disposal of the public lands.” It was evident from his tone, The Outlook agreed, that Taft remained fully committed to “the Roosevelt policies.” Furthermore, the appointment of Henry Graves to replace Pinchot clearly demonstrated Taft’s commitment to preserve the nation’s forests. Graves, the head of the Yale School of Forestry, was “a personal friend of Mr. Pinchot” and a widely respected conservationist.
Theodore Roosevelt was in the Congo when a runner brought him news of Pinchot’s dismissal. “I cannot believe it,” he wrote Pinchot. “The appointment in your place of a man of high character, a noted forestry expert, in no way, not in the very least degree, lightens the blow.” Roosevelt would refrain from any overt criticism of his successor, but he offered Pinchot his sincere support and hoped later to discuss the whole matter in detail. “I do wish that I could see you. Is there any chance of your meeting me in Europe?” Overjoyed to hear from Roosevelt, Pinchot decided to set off as soon as he had completed his testimony before Congress.
First, however, the former forester was determined to use the hearings to vindicate his actions and crush Richard Ballinger. After his dismissal, hundreds of supportive letters and telegrams arrived from across the country urging him to continue the fight. “The people have faith in you, by the million,” one telegram read. Freed from the constraints of office and all duties as a subordinate, Pinchot became “general-in-command of the anti-Ballinger forces.” Together with Garfield and Collier, he spent hours with Louis Brandeis, helping to prepare Glavis for the witness stand and reading through the mass of material provided by the administration for documents that would buttress their case. Glavis handled himself well on the stand. The National Tribune reported that he had presented his case “in the most convincing way.” For those anticipating fireworks, however, the early phase of the inquiry proved “a keen disappointment.” In the absence of hard evidence of corruption on Ballinger’s part, the investigation seemed to show “the existence of a quarrel rather than a scandal.”
Public interest in the hearings heightened when Gifford Pinchot took the stand. He “opened with a heavy volley,” flatly charging that Ballinger had “been unfaithful to his trust, disloyal to the President and an intentional enemy to the conservation policy.” Had the interior secretary not been checked by “the public clamor against him,” invaluable public lands would have been lost forever to the special interests. “The imperative duty before this country,” Pinchot declared, “is to get rid of an unfaithful public servant.” After this impressive start, however, he failed to substantiate his dramatic charges. Taft was relieved. “Pinchot has distinctly discredited himself by his thundering,” he told Horace, “and then falling down altogether in respect to his specifications.” Horace agreed that Pinchot had “proven nothing at all.”
After Pinchot left the stand, the hearings became “so tedious,” the Arizona Republic editorialized, “that auditors are unable to remain awake.” The public was quickly becoming bored with the complex issue and even with Louis Glavis, “of whom it had never heard before and of whom perhaps it will never hear again.” The “waning interest,” the paper predicted, would soon take the controversy off the front page. “Besides the baseball season is fairly under way,” and “the public eye” is turning toward Reno, Nevada, where “The Battle of the Century” was scheduled to take place: the heavyweight fight between the challenger, African-American Jack Johnson, and the reigning champion, Jim Jeffries.
Many years later, Louis Brandeis acknowledged that they had not unearthed anything “really decisive” at that point in the investigation. He returned once again to the mountain of documents that the Taft administration had delivered to Congress. The committee had requested the data upon which the president had based his September 13 decision to exonerate Ballinger and dismiss Glavis, and Brandeis focused particularly on the attorney general’s 85-page report, dated September 11. Brandeis read the detailed report “ten, fifteen, twenty times,” and “saw that it was not a hastily thrown together patchwork but a carefully prepared unit,” so meticulously compiled that it seemed unlikely to have been generated in the brief interval after Taft met with Glavis. Brandeis “was certain that something was wrong, but he had to prove it.” In several instances, he finally discovered, the report referenced facts and events that were not known or did not take place until weeks after September 11. The administration was claiming a document that did not exist at the time as the basis for the president’s decision.
Brandeis revealed his discovery to Collier’s Norman Hapgood and asked the editor to come to the hearings on April 22. On that day, Brandeis called Ballinger’s assistant Edward Finney to the stand. He had designed a line of questioning that would make Finney realize that the predating had been discovered and asked Hapgood to monitor the expression on Finney’s face during the proceedings. At lunch, Hapgood confirmed that Finney had appeared cognizant of his peril; Brandeis sharpened his questions when the session resumed, finally introducing into the record incidents mentioned in the September 11 report that had not yet occurred. He intimated that the document had been prepared after the fact “to make it appear” as if Taft had possessed more substantial documentary evidence when he passed judgment. Prevented by the rules of the investigation from issuing a subpoena to Wickersham, Brandeis leaked the story to the press. Attorney General Wickersham initially refused comment but eventually wrote to Congress that he had, indeed, backdated the report.
As the National Tribune observed, backdating documents was common practice in government. Had administration officials acknowledged the actual chronology when they sent the documents to the Congress, “there probably would have been no unfavorable comment.” Their failure to do so invited speculation that they had falsified records in a deliberate attempt to deceive Congress and the country. The revelation revived interest in the hearings, accentuating “an attitude of suspicion” toward Ballinger, Wickersham, and Taft himself.
IF THE LENGTHY WICKERSHAM REPORT had not served as the basis for Taft’s decision, Brandeis queried, what did? It turned out that the lawyer had known the answer for months, though he had bided his time before springing his discovery of the Lawler memo. In February, Brandeis had met with twenty-four-year-old Fred Kerby, one of the two stenographers who had taken Lawler’s dictation. After the publication of Taft’s celebrated letter the previous September, Kerby had “noted the similarities between the two documents,” recognizing sections with identical wording.
Kerby agreed to meet Garfield and Brandeis at Pinchot’s house, where he recounted the facts about preparing the memo. He recalled that Lawler, “in constant consultation” with various interior officials, including Ballinger, had written and revised the memo a half-dozen times. It was midnight on Saturday when the final version was completed. The rough drafts were “laid in the grate and a match put to the pile.” Lawler placed the final memo “in his brief case” and joined Ballinger in the secretary’s carriage. The two men then drove together to the station, catching the “Owl” to New York, where Wickersham would receive the memo to bring to Beverly. Kerby, still employed at the Interior Department and newly married, “asked that, if possible, they avoid calling [him] to testify.” Brandeis promised that he would try to “get the facts into the record through cross-examination of Ballinger and thus compel production of the Lawler document.”
In early March, Brandeis sent a letter to the attorney general and the Interior Department, requesting production of “the so-called memorandum prepared by Mr. Lawler at the request of the President.” Department officials claimed they had searched the files, but it could not be found. A second request in April met with a similar response. Brandeis suspected that they were deliberately withholding the memo, aware that it might cast a shadow on the fairness of Taft’s decision to exonerate Ballinger and dismiss Glavis.
When Ballinger took the stand, Brandeis directed a series of questions designed to extract information about the Lawler memo. Brandeis noted that in Ballinger’s opening statement he had failed to mention that Lawler had accompanied him to Beverly. When Ballinger claimed he did not consider it “of any material moment,” Brandeis pressed him further, asking if it was “not a matter of moment in view of the part that [Lawler] subsequently played?” Ballinger continued his evasive responses as Brandeis turned his questions to the contents of his companion’s briefcase. Under repeated questioning, Ballinger said that Lawler had “a grip with some clothes in it,” but he wasn’t sure what else it contained. Finally, he acknowledged that Lawler had brought the president a memorandum, covering “a sort of resume of the facts.” Ballinger appeared intensely nervous as the cross-examination persisted, his foot beating “a restless tattoo on the floor.” At one point, he turned in anger toward Brandeis, calling his line of questioning “an insult.” Ballinger refused any further questions that bore on the president’s actions.
Having “exhausted all channels” to introduce the Lawler memo, Brandeis returned to Fred Kerby. Fully aware that he would compromise his career, Kerby agreed to give a public statement describing the preparation of the memo. In his written statement, Kerby explained that he had known of Lawler’s instructions to prepare a memo which Taft could use as a draft for his own opinion. He identified “certain portions” of the president’s published letter that had been drawn from Lawler’s draft, though the passages he cited were not substantial. He never suggested that Lawler had actually dictated the president’s letter. To the contrary, he said that the draft had been “specifically” prepared in triple space to leave room for revision. The headlines accompanying the young stenographer’s statement told a different story, however: “Ballinger Accused of Preparing Taft’s Letter of Exoneration,” announced the Washington Times. “President’s Statement Giving Secretary Clean Bill Almost Identical in Verbiage with Notes in Shorthand Note Book which was Ordered Destroyed.”
When the story broke on the afternoon of May 14, Taft was on the golf course. Ballinger and Lawler went at once to Wickersham’s office, where they suddenly “found” the missing Lawler memo and sent it to the committee. This unexpected discovery “a few minutes after the Kerby story was printed, will go down in history,” the Washington Times charged, “as one of the most remarkable coincidences of all time.” Few questioned Ballinger’s immediate dismissal of Kerby, but the secretary was widely criticized for his venomous public statement that charged the young stenographer with “treachery” and claimed that he was “unworthy” of public trust.
On Sunday, Taft finally took up the matter personally. He wrote a public letter to Senator Knute Nelson, chair of the investigating committee, describing in full detail the circumstances under which he had prepared his September 13 letter. He acknowledged that he had, indeed, asked Lawler for a draft statement, but insisted that the resulting memo “did not state the case in the way [he] wished it stated.” It was filled with criticisms of both Pinchot and Glavis, which the president “did not think proper or wise to adopt.” In the end, while he found the references to the documents helpful, he incorporated only a few general statements. “The conclusions which I reached were based upon my reading of the record,” Taft maintained, “and were fortified by the oral analysis of the evidence and the conclusions, which the attorney general gave me.” Desiring to have a full record of the circumstances reach the public, he had asked Attorney General Wickersham to incorporate his findings into “a written statement,” backdated to September 11 and filed with the record. Occupied with other matters, Wickersham had not completed his analysis and summary until late October.
The press praised both the president’s “manly” assumption of responsibility for the predating of the attorney general’s summary and his characteristic candor in narrating “the sequence of events from his meeting with Glavis to his exoneration of Brandeis.” A line-by-line comparison of the Lawler memo and Taft’s letter corroborated the president’s testimony that he had used only a few “unimportant” statements from the memo. “There was absolutely nothing wrong,” the Chicago Record-Herald observed, “in instructing a subordinate to prepare an opinion.” Nor was it questionable to use that opinion as a first draft, as was “done every day in public and private offices.” Nonetheless, the press generally agreed that “the people who had charge of the management of the Ballinger-Pinchot investigation for the administration” had “simply blundered to the limit.” Why did Wickersham wait to acknowledge the predating “until he was cornered?” Why was Ballinger so evasive on the witness stand? Why was the Lawler memo initially withheld from the committee? Why did Wickersham go to such lengths to conceal it? Why, if Kerby simply stated the facts that Taft himself later acknowledged, did Ballinger “fly into a rage” and call him a traitor? Each incident “came as a startling revelation,” observed the San Antonio Light and Gazette; taken together, they “shattered the last vestige of confidence in the good faith” of those involved. Many were also dismayed by the serial dismissals of those who opposed the administration: first Glavis; then Pinchot, Price, and Shaw; and now Kerby.
When the hearings came to a close in late May, “the puzzled, unsatisfactory verdict” was that Interior Secretary Ballinger had “done nothing illegal.” The Washington Post observed that “not a single fact has been produced to show that he was even derelict in duty, much less corrupt.” Yet, as dozens of editorials pointed out, that finding could not restore the public confidence he had lost. “Rightly or wrongly,” a midwestern newspaper declared, “the great mass of the American people have come to look upon him with deep distrust.”
Reflecting widespread sentiment, the Indianapolis Star called on Ballinger to resign. “His presence in the cabinet is a drag upon the administration,” the Emporia Gazette concurred. “He cannot be blind to the extraordinary courage which his chief has displayed in standing by him.” He should voluntarily lift “the burden” which the president had “carried long and unflinchingly.” The Outlook asserted that Ballinger could no longer “be regarded as a trustworthy custodian” of the public lands.
An indignant Ballinger announced that he had no intention of stepping down. He had done nothing wrong and therefore was fully “justified in remaining at the head of his department.” Charley Taft tried to convince his brother to let Ballinger go, but the president refused. “Life is not worth living and office is not worth having,” Taft maintained, “if, for the purpose of acquiring the popular support, we have to do a cruel injustice or acquiesce in it.” The press, he believed, had “unjustly persecuted” a good man. The storm of criticism had “broken” Ballinger’s health. He looked two decades older than when he joined the cabinet. Taft deemed it his presidential duty to stand by his controversial interior secretary until Ballinger himself chose to leave.
Nine additional months would pass before the secretary decided to resign. During that time, Taft and Ballinger finally succeeded in securing congressional support for a measure granting the president legal authority to withdraw public lands from private development. Backed by the new law, Taft’s withdrawals in four years “almost equaled that of Roosevelt” in seven. Conservationists hailed Taft’s appointment of Walter Fisher, head of the National Conservation League, to replace Ballinger. “His entrance into the Government service will unquestionably meet with strong public approval,” Gifford Pinchot said. “I speak with confidence for we have been working together for years.”
The damage to the president’s political fortunes had been done, however. While some respected the loyalty the president had shown to his cabinet secretary, progressives believed that Taft should have dismissed Ballinger at the first sign of unfaithfulness to conservation causes. A president had “no right,” they argued, to put his own feelings above “the public welfare.” The bitter struggle had consumed the attention of the country for more than a year. Reformers’ faith in the president, already weakened by the tariff struggle, had plummeted. The split in the Republican Party appeared irreparable.
“IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY BREAKING Up?”—Ray Baker’s provocative title—headlined the first in a series of influential articles in The American Magazine in the winter and spring of 1910, designed both to chronicle and aid the growing insurgent movement within the party. For nearly three weeks, Baker traveled through what he called “the skirmish lines in the Insurgent territory—Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin and Indiana.” He met with the rebels who had fought against the tariff and criticized Ballinger—Murdock of Kansas, Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, La Follette of Wisconsin, Clapp of Minnesota. Plans were evolving to run insurgent candidates against conservative Republicans in every district, even if the intraparty struggle ended up rewarding Democrats.
By wresting power from the Old Guard, the progressives aimed to regulate the economy in the interests of the many as opposed to the interests of the few. Although Roosevelt had occasionally “dragooned” the Congress into supporting progressive policies through outside pressure, the party organization remained in conservative hands. Western insurgents intended to finish the job Roosevelt had begun. The conflict within the Republican Party was no longer regional. When Baker traveled to New England, which gave “at first a decided impression of political quietude,” he discovered that insurgency, while less developed in the East than in the West, was “following close behind.”
From New England, he proceeded to Washington, just in time to witness the insurgents’ unexpected triumph over Speaker Cannon. After failing to unseat Cannon the year before, the insurgents had regrouped around a resolution to divest the Speaker of his autocratic grip on the party. Capitalizing on a moment during a sparsely attended all-night session, George Norris of Nebraska introduced a resolution to rescind the Speaker’s authority to appoint the Rules Committee. Instead, the entire House would elect the members of this most powerful body. The long debate that followed was “tense and dramatic.” Everyone understood that Joseph Cannon was “fighting the fight of his life for his political future and the integrity of the party machinery.” On the afternoon of March 19, Cannon “met his Waterloo.” Forty-three insurgent Republicans cooperated with 150 Democrats to pass the resolution. Though Cannon would retain his position, his reign would never again be absolute.
“A real revolution is underway,” an emotional Baker told his father, “and it will not stop until government by trusts & special interests is wiped out.” In the months that followed, Baker continued to popularize the progressive cause. In a “case study” of Rochester, New York, home of the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, a towering figure in the Social Gospel movement, Baker “noted with pleasure the existence of a strong religious element working successfully within the reform movement.” This progressive uprising gave John Phillips what he had long been searching for—a central focus for the magazine. “We are naturally the insurgent magazine,” he told William Allen White, “and we want to make The American Magazine more and more expressive in this movement.” He hoped that White would help sustain the movement for reform by following Baker’s lead with a series of “vigorous, stirring” political articles. He encouraged White to do anything possible to make the magazine “the organ and mouthpiece of the great liberal movement. This seems to me our opportunity.”
White responded immediately to Phillips’s request. Kansas was host to a dramatic battle for control of the statewide party. As precinct leader and state committeeman, White had been lining up insurgent candidates to run against standpatters at every level. He believed the Republican Party was doomed unless it changed from within. White strove to vividly articulate for readers the insurgents’ vision of what the Republican Party stood for, even as he endeavored to gain control of the political machinery—through the institution of direct primaries, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. Only an informed and empowered populace could truly win the battle to regulate and control capital in the interests of the country as a whole.
Ida Tarbell, too, lent her “powerful pen” to the insurgent cause. Unlike White, she never engaged directly in politics. Profoundly disappointed by the Payne-Aldrich tariff, which she considered “as hopeless a failure as a tariff could well be,” she embarked on a new series designed to reveal how “the same old circus, the same old gilded chariots, the same old clowns” had managed once again to hoodwink America. Her only solace, she later wrote, came from the “rousing challenge” Republican progressives had issued to the Old Guard. She was thrilled by their new style of debate, which, her colleague Ray Baker noted, replaced “the hazy generalities on the advantages of a protective tariff” with a detailed presentation of facts and evidence akin to the muckrakers’ investigative skills. During the long legislative struggle, Tarbell asserted, these insurgents had“crystallized into one of the most vigorous and intelligent fighting bands that had been seen for many years in Congress.” Their struggle would be fierce, she knew. Political pandering to special interests did not end with the tariff; the same intellect that “argues and fights for a Ballinger” is furious when a railroad rate is questioned and “can be counted on to support anybody’s privilege.” It was against these “ways of thinking,” prevalent in every realm of life, that progressives were fighting.
John Phillips heralded Tarbell’s critique of the recent tariff-making process with a trenchant editorial: “The popular judgment of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Bill grows more severe with each passing month,” his piece began. “It is a bogus revision, and every man of sense knows that we will get no permanent settlement of this matter until a genuine, searching, informed revision has been made. He knows that by shirking this duty the Taft Administration has lost the country years of time. Here is the real basis of the anti-Taft sentiment—the good reason for insurgency.”
While united in their support of the insurgents, the magazine’s team differed in their opinion of William Howard Taft. John Phillips had been ambivalent about the new president from the beginning. “I thought that Taft might stand still,” the editor remarked in September 1909. “I didn’t think he’d go backwards.” Five months later, Phillips observed that disappointment with Taft had kindled a newfound respect for Roosevelt, even among those who had “opposed him.” The fact that the former president had never even tried to revise the tariff nor spoken out once against Cannon’s regime “mattered little to the insurgents.” His “crusading spirit” trumped any details of his actual policy. Tarbell had been more hopeful about Taft at the start, but turned against him with a vengeance when he signed the flawed Payne bill and then compounded his mistake by proclaiming it the best tariff ever passed. “Taft is done for, I fully believe,” she told White. “Not a man of discernment, but what shakes his head over him.”
William Allen White was slower than his colleagues to abandon faith in the president, still hoping in the spring of 1910 that Taft would succeed in getting his legislative agenda through Congress. White reminded Taft that the insurgents had been his allies in the fight for regulatory reform and postal savings banks. “But they will not work with Senator Aldrich and Mr. Cannon,” he warned. “So an unhappy situation has arisen. The people have begun to confuse you with the leadership.” Taft responded to White as he did to previous suggestions that he break with the Republican leadership. The idea that he could make enemies of the men with power over the fate of his legislative program made no sense. “I have confidence in the second judgment of the people based on what is done rather than what is proclaimed or what is suspected from appearances,” he asserted, “and if I can make good in legislation, I shall rely on fair discussion to vindicate me.”
On May 21, 1910, three weeks before Theodore Roosevelt’s scheduled return from his African adventure, President Taft invited William Allen White to lunch. News of the invitation sparked hope among insurgents, who felt Taft had “foolishly and needlessly linked his fortunes” with men and influences at odds with the need for action. If the president truly listened to White, he would realize that the best chance of securing his legislative program lay with the growing band of insurgents, not the regulars.
“I could not have asked more courtesy, more consideration, more cordial hospitality,” White reported after the meeting. For the first time in months, Taft told White, Nellie “had come to the table at the White House.” The first lady had listened with attention, although it seemed to White that she suffered from “a curious amnesia.” The reporter repeatedly tried “to steer the conversation” toward the insurgency, but Taft refused to take the bait. The two men talked of art and architecture, of movements in Europe and “everything under the sun but politics.” They moved to a sunny porch after lunch and continued to talk. “We had a most amiable time,” White reported, but he departed with the dispiriting conviction that he had come on “a fool’s errand.”
Of all the journalists at that time, Ray Baker had the most profound understanding of Taft’s character and personal style. In January 1910, as the Ballinger hearings were getting under way, he began research for a lengthy assessment of the embattled president. “I trust you are gathering some gorgeous material on Taft,” Phillips wrote. “The time is getting ripe. Everybody comes in with the same story”—they sense that the White House is occupied by “a jelly fish” incapable of real leadership. “The material is rich, and is getting richer. Somebody is going to make a bomb out of it one of these days,” the editor predicted; “we want to be the fellows in charge of the fireworks.” Refusing to succumb to pressure, Baker in “The Measure of Taft” produced a remarkably balanced piece, which revealed the president’s considerable strengths along with his troubling weaknesses.
He began by noting that despite the progressives’ disenchantment, the people by and large regarded the president with warmth. “There is one thing of which no popular criticism of a public man can wholly rob us,” Baker maintained, “and that is our own vivid personal impression of him. We like him, personally, or we don’t like him.” And the public liked Taft. They appreciated the simple pleasure he took in walking about town, stopping in stores to chat with proprietors, visiting friends in their homes and hotels. They applauded his decision to hold receptions for visiting schoolchildren. While congressmen complained that he was wasting too much time shaking hands with the never-ending groups that deluged Washington during Easter break, Taft was adamant: “If these young visitors want to see the President, it is virtually their right.” People everywhere were taken with his humble and accessible manner. “A mighty cheer swept across the crowd” at the Nationals’ ballpark when the president, “with his good, trusty right arm,” threw out the first ball for the first time in history and then chose to sit with ordinary fans instead of heading for the presidential box. “All his life long, Mr. Taft has been thus impressing the men he met with the charm of his personality,” Baker noted. “Men have liked him instinctively, and they have not only liked him, but they have admired and respected his high ideals.”
But the same “personal charm” that had propelled Taft to the presidency ultimately proved “dangerous” to him, Baker concluded. For far too long, his amiable nature had kept him from the rough-and-tumble of politics, from the need to fight for himself and his convictions. Had he come into the White House when McKinley first arrived, “when the Republican party stood like the Rock of Gibraltar,” he might have sailed through his term “with smiling serenity”; instead, he found himself embroiled in a war within his party that threatened to rupture friendships and divide families. “In a war,” Baker proclaimed, “the chief thing is to fight.” The temperate Taft was ill-equipped to take up arms.
The most alarming trait Baker discerned in the president was his inability to accept honest criticism. Taft acknowledged that twelve years on the bench, the one place relatively “free from severe criticism by the press,” had done little to prepare him for the onslaught from newspapers and magazines. Rather than accept that “criticism may spring from an honest difference in principles,” the president sought to discredit the publications, implying that their critiques sprang from self-interest or malice. They were angry at him, he insisted, for proposing to increase second-class postal rates and for failing to lower the tariff on wood pulp, both measures that would hurt their bottom line.
Taft’s loyal supporters further amplified this defensive, even paranoid stance toward the press. One proponent argued that the magazine writers had been “arrayed against” the administration “from the first,” disseminating poison with their insidious literary tricks. This diatribe drew a powerful response from Sam McClure. Though McClure’s empire was merely a “skeleton” of what it had once been, his words still carried weight. “In the first place,” McClure argued, “the administration did not have the magazines against it from the start.” On the contrary, the press was “eager to support him.” Indeed, McClure’s had sent George Kibbe Turner, one of its best writers, to the White House to conduct a wide-ranging interview with the president. The resulting piece, which attracted a large readership, was presented entirely in Taft’s words, affording him an open platform to explain his views on every contentious subject. “I have trained most of the successful writers, on public questions, for the magazines in this country, and I know their methods and their quality as probably no other man living,” McClure justifiably stated; no journalists could be found who “write with greater sincerity or who are more eager to get the truth.” Taft’s troubles, McClure concluded, stemmed from his own actions: first, the tariff and the Winona speech had spread across the landscape “like a frost”; then “the Alaska business” had begotten the president’s relentless defense of Ballinger, “an unnecessary struggle against the people’s wishes.”
Roosevelt had learned little of Taft’s troubles while he was in Africa. He had received an earful from Gifford Pinchot, however, when the latter came to see him on the Italian Riviera in mid-April. Pinchot arrived at Roosevelt’s villa in the early morning, remained for lunch, and then accompanied the former president on a long trek over the Maritime Alps. Months earlier, Pinchot had enumerated Taft’s failings in a letter, condemning the new president’s decision to surround himself with corporate lawyers, his alliance to Cannon and Aldrich, his surrender of executive powers to Congress, and, most damningly, his appointment of Richard Ballinger. “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up,” Pinchot had written, “and there is a general belief that the special interests are once more substantially in full control of both Congress and the Administration.”
Pinchot carried with him a half-dozen letters from fellow progressives, all confirming his own estimate of Taft. Senator Dolliver spoke with sadness of his “disappointment” that the president had “lost the opportunity and wasted the prestige” Roosevelt had bequeathed him, warning that the corporate tyranny would triumph “unless a way could be found to overthrow the present management in Congress which is now the guardian of the President’s opinions.” Albert Beveridge provided a devastating narrative of Taft’s first year as president. “The people at first received the President with good expectations,” he informed Roosevelt, “then with tolerance, then with faint distrust, then with silent opposition and now with open and settled hostility.” More telling than such general criticisms, however, was Pinchot’s personal story of his acrimonious struggle with Ballinger. “We had one of the finest talks we have ever had,” Pinchot eagerly relayed to Jim Garfield. Reporters, noting Pinchot’s smile when he returned to his hotel, declared that “no event in Roosevelt’s entire trip” held more political significance than this day-long conference.
In a grim letter to Henry Cabot Lodge that same day, Roosevelt expressed his first open disappointment in the course of his successor’s presidency: “You do not need to be told that Taft was nominated solely on my assurance to the Western people especially, but almost as much to the people of the East, that he would carry out my work unbroken; not (as he has done) merely working for the same objects in a totally different spirit, and with . . . a totally different sense from that in which both I and the men who acted under my word understood it.” Many now believed, Roosevelt lamented, that he had “deceived them.” Still, “a good chance” remained that Taft could recover. “Everybody believes him to be honest, and most believe him to be doing the best he knows how.” But for the moment at least, the former president would follow the course Lodge had prescribed and “keep absolutely still about home politics.”
In preparation for Roosevelt’s mid-June homecoming, Ray Baker wrote an ominous speculative piece entitled “The Impending Roosevelt.” “As the fight deepens both sides are seen listening sharply for the first clashing sounds of the returning warrior,” Baker noted. “He is more popular now than he was when he sailed for Africa.” Despite his absence from the political scene for over a year, Theodore Roosevelt remained “the most interesting, amusing, thrilling figure in America.” Would he endorse the Taft administration? Would he join the insurgent rebellion? “One thing may be set down as absolutely certain,” Baker concluded. “Roosevelt will act. Roosevelt always acts. . . . And when he acts no stage smaller than that of the nation will serve him; he is of continental size.”