CHAPTER EIGHT

“Like a Boy on Roller Skates”

Theodore Roosevelt at work in the Navy Department, Harper’s Weekly, May 7, 1898.

ON MAY 6, 1895, LINCOLN Steffens was relaxing with fellow reporters on the front steps of the newsmen’s building across the street from police headquarters when a shout from veteran police reporter Jacob Riis heralded the story of the day. Theodore Roosevelt had been sworn in as police commissioner earlier that morning at City Hall. Accompanied by the three other board members, he was approaching his new headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street in the heart of Little Italy.

As the foursome came into view, Steffens noted that the new commissioner surged past the other gentlemen, “head forward, jaw set and looking straight and sharp out of his big round glasses.” Roosevelt greeted Jacob Riis, a friend of several years, with exuberance. “Hello, Jake,” he exclaimed, then continued to race up the stairs, signaling for all reporters to follow. “T.R. seized Riis, who introduced me,” Steffens recalled, “and still running, he asked questions: ‘Where are our offices? Where is the board room? What do we do first?’ ”

As agreed, the first order of business was to elect Roosevelt president of the four-man board (comprising two Republicans—Roosevelt and Frederick D. Grant, son of General Ulysses S. Grant—and two Democrats—West Pointer Avery D. Andrews and lawyer Andrew D. Parker). With this accomplished, Roosevelt pulled Riis and Steffens aside into his office. “It was all breathless and sudden,” Steffens recalled in The Autobiography, “but Riis and I were soon describing the situation to him, telling him which higher officers to consult, which to ignore and punish; what the forms were, the customs, rules, methods. It was just as if we three were the police board.”

Roosevelt could not have found two more valuable tutors than Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens. For nearly twenty years, Riis had covered police activities for the New York Tribune and the Evening Sun. An immigrant from Denmark, he had landed at Castle Garden the same year that the cosseted eleven-year-old Roosevelt docked in Manhattan after his family’s Grand European Tour. For three years, Riis had scraped together a living doing everything from carpentry and peddling to hunting and trapping. Finally, he found an opportunity to pursue his “life-work” in journalism, initially serving for several years as a general reporter. At the age of twenty-eight, he was assigned to the police department, where he remained for most of his professional life. “Being the ‘boss reporter’ in Mulberry Street,” Riis later wrote, was “the only renown I have ever coveted or cared to have.” The years spent covering fires, murders, and robberies in the immigrant slums fostered a keen awareness of the devastating conditions confronting families in these tenement districts. “The sights I saw there,” he recalled, “gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something.”

In newspaper exposés, Riis described overcrowded, unsanitary tenements with insufficient light and air, often the properties of absentee owners who neglected “repairs and necessary improvements.” Riis had witnessed these conditions in the course of his daily work as a police reporter. Although he documented the same criminal incidents that fellow journalists covered, his perspective was unique. “Only Riis wrote them as stories, with heart, humor, and understanding,” Steffens remarked, and “beautiful stories they were . . . for Riis could write.” When he narrated a suicide, fire, or outbreak of disease, Jacob Riis took down every detail of the building or the city block where it occurred, relentlessly pursuing the negligent landlords, holding them responsible for the abhorrent conditions and threatening further stories until the problems were redressed. “Why,” he asked, “should a man have a better right to kill his neighbor with a house than with an axe in the street?” “The remedy,” he concluded, “must proceed from the public conscience.”

How the Other Half Lives, Riis’s first book, was published in 1890. This visceral account traced the daily struggles he witnessed in the Italian tenements, the Jewish quarters, and the Bohemian ghetto. Riis guided readers to fetid corners of the city they had never visited—to Mulberry Bend, Bandit’s Roost, and Bottle Alley. The catchy title, Riis modestly acknowledged, had contributed to the book’s phenomenal success. “Truly, I lay no claim to eloquence,” he noted, “so it must have been the facts.” Humility notwithstanding, readers were captured by the power and empathy of the writing. “I cannot conceive how such a book should fail of doing great good, if it moves other people as it has moved me,” wrote the critic James Russell Lowell. “I found it hard to get asleep the night after I had been reading it.”

Theodore Roosevelt had read How the Other Half Lives while he was civil service commissioner. Calling it “both an enlightenment and an inspiration,” he was convinced the book would “go a long way toward removing the ignorance” of comfortable New Yorkers about the hardships confronting their less fortunate neighbors. Furthermore, he was hopeful that Riis’s disclosures would help engender a new spirit of reform. Roosevelt found the tone of the writing particularly admirable, lauding the manner in which Riis revealed social ills without stridency, never descending into “hysterical” negativity or “sentimental excess.”

When intrigued by the work of a writer or journalist, Roosevelt often endeavored to establish a personal connection; he called on Riis at the Evening Sun. Finding him out of the office, Roosevelt left a card, with a succinct message that he had read the book and “had come to help.” Riis had long tracked Roosevelt’s progress from his days as a young silk stocking legislator “exposing jobbery, fighting boss rule,” and “rattling dry bones” disinterred from the city’s closets. “I loved him from the day I first saw him,” Riis later wrote. Over the course of Roosevelt’s tenure as police commissioner, this affection and mutual respect would intensify until Roosevelt regarded Riis as “one of my truest and closest friends.”

Roosevelt later recalled “two sides” of his role as police commissioner: first, the daily work of managing the police department; second, the opportunity to use his position, which also encompassed membership on the health board, to make “the city a better place in which to live and work for those to whom the conditions of life and labor were hardest.” To comprehend the practical possibility for real change, Roosevelt relied on Jacob Riis. “He had the most flaming intensity of passion for righteousness,” Roosevelt recalled.

Never a “mere preacher,” he was among the few whose convictions proved a touchstone to action. In Riis, Roosevelt found a man “who looked at life and its problems from substantially the same standpoint” as he did: a moderate reformer seeking to rectify social ills through moral conviction and suasion.

ROOSEVELT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE INTELLECTUAL Lincoln Steffens was more complex. They shared an irrepressible self-confidence, an immense curiosity, a driving ambition, and a sharp intelligence. Later, as Steffens entertained more radical ideas and began to question capitalism itself, Roosevelt lost patience with him. During the decade of Roosevelt’s boggling ascent from commissioner to governor and then president, however, they enjoyed a rich friendship that benefited both men substantially. After only four months’ acquaintance, Roosevelt gave Steffens an enthusiastic letter of recommendation. “He is a personal friend of mine; and he has seen all of our work at close quarters,” Roosevelt assured Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. “He speaks at first hand as an expert.”

While Steffens later acknowledged that he might have overstated his influence in claiming that he and Riis functioned as working members of Roosevelt’s police board, he maintained that the statement had truly reflected his “state of mind.” So willing was Roosevelt to bring the two journalists into his inner circle, so candid was he in admitting ignorance about his new job, that both men naturally assumed the aura of “wise” mentors to the newcomer.

Steffens had begun his job on the police beat with the simplistic belief that if good men replaced dishonest men at the top of the organization, corruption would be defeated. Only after two years—through numerous days spent with the crusading Dr. Parkhurst and months of coverage devoted to the sensational Lexow Committee hearings documenting the relationship between Tammany Hall and the police department—would Steffens fathom a vast entrenched system of police corruption that would not yield so easily to reform.

Steffens’s initial interviews with Dr. Parkhurst began with a series of deceptively innocent questions, a technique that developed into his mode of operating. For what reason, when gambling enterprises and houses of prostitution were illegal, did the police officers of the law allow them to exist? Why were some saloons permitted to stay open beyond the designated hours while others were not? “With astonishment” Steffens learned that pervasive, systematic bribery allowed those businesses willing to pay Tammany Hall’s substantial monthly charge to operate unmolested, while those who refused to furnish protection money were closed down.

New police recruits were forced to pay Tammany a fixed fee for their appointments. The fee was well beyond the means of most, but every officer understood he would make the money back with plenty to spare once inside the system. Policemen who secured the confidence of Tammany were promoted, though each advancement required hefty additional fees. “One police captain,” Steffens told his father, “has confessed to having paid $15,000 for his promotion and said that, though he had to borrow the money,” he was able to repay his debt within two years. With each higher rank a policeman attained, his percentage of the blackmail fund grew. Superintendent Tom Byrnes had amassed what was then a sizable fortune of $350,000, while his chief inspector, Alec “Clubber” Williams, could not explain the unusual size of his bank account when forced to testify before the Lexow Committee.

Observers would later credit Steffens’s success as a journalist to his “supreme gift of making men tell—or try to tell—him the truth.” He always seemed able to coax people to “explain themselves,” even when their explanations implicated rather than vindicated them. After the Lexow Committee hearings, Steffens approached Captain Max Schmittberger, a pivotal witness who had made “a clean breast” of everything. As the two men became friends, Schmittberger explained how, as an “honest” young policeman, he had been drawn into “the whole rotten business.” The substance of these long conversations would prove most instructive when Steffens later recounted them with Roosevelt. Immersed so gradually in the venality of the department, Schmittberger never realized the shamelessness of his actions until the Lexow Committee called upon him to testify. After many hours with Schmittberger, Steffens concluded that he was “on the square,” a decent man entangled in a crooked system. He persuaded Roosevelt to keep him on the force, a decision resulting in both a trusted ally and an insider who could teach the new commissioner things he could never have learned alone.

Joseph Bishop, the Evening Post’s editorial writer to whom Steffens had initially carried his letter of introduction, noted that Roosevelt opened the battle for reform wielding the same weapons he had used in his previous fights against corruption: “full publicity, strict enforcement of the law, and utter disregard of partisan political considerations.” Like Steffens, Bishop was “in almost daily confidential conference” with Roosevelt during his tenure as police commissioner. “There began between him and myself,” Bishop recalled a quarter century later, “a close personal friendship which continued unbroken throughout his career, growing steadily in mutual confidence and affection with time.”

At his first press conference, Roosevelt announced that henceforth appointments and promotions would be made on merit alone: “No political influence could save a man who deserved punishment and none could win an unworthy promotion.” The police force had heard such rhetoric before, but they soon began to realize the unique weight of Roosevelt’s pledge. Within three weeks of his swearing-in, he summoned Superintendent Byrnes and Inspector Williams to his office and forced them to resign. These stunning departures broadcast clearly that the reform police board “would spare no man” in its campaign to root out corruption.

Genuine reform, however, hinged upon the patrolmen on the beat. Riis suggested that Roosevelt accompany him on a series of unannounced inspections between midnight and sunrise to determine whether the officers on the beat were faithfully safeguarding their designated posts. Concealing his evening clothes beneath a long coat and donning a floppy hat to obscure his face, Roosevelt set out with Riis at 2 a.m. from the steps of the Union League Club. Over the next three to four hours, they would follow a route mapped out in advance by the veteran reporter to encompass a dozen police patrol areas. If he found an officer dutifully patrolling his beat, Roosevelt patted him on the back; but those whom he discovered sleeping or enjoying a meal at an all-night restaurant were summoned to appear before him as soon as the department opened that morning. One startled policeman was chatting with a prostitute when Roosevelt confronted him and asked him to account for himself. Not recognizing the commissioner of the New York City Police, the officer belligerently replied: “What’s that to you? Shall I fan him, Mame?” The woman nodded in agreement. “Sure, fan him to death.”

The police reporters all attended the morning roundup when the delinquent men appeared before the commissioner. “A sorrier-looking set of men never came to police headquarters,” Steffens reported in the Evening Post. The New York Sun provided details of the new commissioner’s midnight forays with the dramatic headline: “Roosevelt on Patrol: He Makes Night Hideous for Sleepy Policemen.” Under Bishop’s guidance, the editorial page praised the “patrolman hunt” as “the beginning of a new epoch.” Roosevelt continued his surprise inspections on subsequent nights with different companions, including Steffens, the celebrated reporter Richard Harding Davis, and the novelist Hamlin Garland.

These predawn missions attracted press attention across the country. “Police Commissioner Roosevelt finds that he can secure more information in one night,” observed the San Antonio Daily Light, “than he would in a year in broad daylight.” As tales of his unorthodox maneuvers spread, Roosevelt became an alluring subject for cartoonists, spawning caricatures of startled policemen cowering at the sight of an enormous set of teeth and round, metal-rimmed eyeglasses. “A pair of gold-mounted spectacles is a mark of authority more to be feared in police circles,” one reporter quipped, “than the biggest badge that ever glittered on a uniformed coat.” Roosevelt relished seeing his caricature. “Few men,” he remarked, “live to see their own hieroglyph.”

“These midnight rambles are great fun,” Roosevelt admitted to Bamie, “though each meant my going forty hours at a stretch without any sleep.” Riis and Steffens guided him through sections of the city he had never explored. “It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowded tenements,” Roosevelt conceded, “and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.” Progress was slow, but with the attention Roosevelt helped focus on conditions in the most abject neighborhoods, the city eventually “tore down unfit tenements, forced the opening of parks and playgrounds.”

Conversations with Riis and Steffens convinced Roosevelt that the only way to pry out what Riis described as “the tap-root” of corruption in the police force was through strict enforcement of the law requiring that saloons be closed on Sundays. Passed by the state legislature nearly four decades earlier to satisfy rural constituents, the Sunday law had warped into a massive vehicle of police and political blackmail. In more than 10,000 saloons operating in the city, owners and managers understood that so long as they continued to make monthly payments to the police and politicians, they were free to flout the statute on the Lord’s Day, often the most lucrative day of the week. If they refused or fell out of favor with Tammany, they were promptly shut down and arrested for violating the law.

Roosevelt fully anticipated the political fallout of rigorously enforcing a law both unpopular and immensely lucrative. “The corrupt would never forgive him,” remarked Steffens, “and the great mass of the people would not understand.” For the workingmen of the city, the saloon was a place to drink with friends, play cards, and shoot pool on their only day off. Roosevelt sympathized with the statute’s critics, allowing that it “is altogether too strict.” Until the legislature changed the law, however, he was responsible for enforcing it fairly and squarely. Still, he deliberated long and hard before taking action. “Is there any other way,” he implored Steffens and Riis, “to do the work I was sent here to do?” Assured that no alternative existed, he resolutely targeted June 23, 1895, to commence a new policy of regulation that would harbor “no protected class.”

Each Sunday proved dryer than the one before. By the third Sunday in August, Roosevelt and Riis combed the city and discovered more than 95 percent of the saloons shut down. Those that took the risk of remaining open operated “to a most limited extent,” with no money changing hands for the privilege. “The tap-root” of corruption had been extracted. “The police force became an army of heroes,” Riis noted, at least “for a season.”

As expected, Roosevelt’s uncompromising enforcement policy drew forth violent resentment. “I have never been engaged in a more savage fight,” Roosevelt told Lodge. Vitriolic telegrams flooded his office: “You are the biggest fool that ever lived”; “What an ass you have made of yourself”; “You have wrecked the Republican Party.” Reports surfaced that a box containing dynamite had been sent to the commissioner’s office. Though it proved a hoax, “the next bomb,” warned the World, “will be deposited in the ballot-box in November and be loaded with popular indignation at his uncalled-for, unjust, discriminating, oppressive and superlatively foolish execution of the Sunday excise law.” Rumors circulated that both the Republican bosses and Mayor Strong were dissatisfied with the new commissioner. “Roosevelt is like a boy with his first pair of skates,” one prominent Republican boss lamented, “and the Republican Party is sure to be held responsible for what he does.”

“This was a fight after Roosevelt’s own heart,” remarked Joseph Bishop. When he received a mocking invitation to what promised to be a massive parade protesting his policy, the commissioner astounded the organizers by accepting. Along the parade route more than 150,000 cheering people were gathered, standing “in windows, on steps and poles and wagons, and even lampposts. . . . There were gilded floats, decorated and peopled in a manner most pleasing to the eye,” reported the World, “and long lines of men in shining uniforms and all the glitter and splendor of mounted paraders.” As more than 30,000 marchers paraded along Lexington Avenue, there was Roosevelt, the signal object of derision, smiling and waving for hours from the reviewing stand.

The commissioner “laughed louder than any one else” as the scathing banners and placards came into view: “Send the Police Czar to Russia”; “Rooseveltism is a farce and a humbug.” Sighting one banner emblazoned with the words: “Roosevelt’s Razzle Dazzle Reform Racket,” he asked the bearer if he could keep the banner as a souvenir. “Certainly,” replied the man. “That is the best yet,” Roosevelt chuckled, pointing to a wagon entitled “The Millionaire’s Club.” The float sported three gentlemen in frock coats and tall hats, with one bearing “a striking resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt.” The trio sipped champagne at a “private club,” while at the rear of the wagon a mock arrest of a beer-drinking laborer was staged. “That is really a good stroke,” Roosevelt burst forth with admiration.

Even the New York World, which had been “shrieking with rage” against Roosevelt, conceded that the crowd was delighted by his appearance: “It looked almost as if the whole affair were in his honor, and the long lines to whom he bowed, took off their hats in salute.” All along the way, marchers shouted, “Bully for Teddy!” and “Teddy, you’re a man!” His ability to turn the tables, to relish his protracted self-mockery in public, was compressed into the headline of a Chicago newspaper: “Cheered by Those Who Came to Jeer.”

Good feelings soon faded, however, when Roosevelt announced that, despite his thorough enjoyment of the festivities, “a hundred parades . . . would not make me change the position I have taken.” As the November 1895 elections approached, Roosevelt feared that his unpopular stance on the Sunday closing law might usher in a revival of Tammany. The Republican bosses “are on the verge of open war with me,” Roosevelt told Lodge, adding that Mayor Strong “has actually been endeavoring to make me let up on the saloon, and impliedly threatened to try to turn me out if I refused! It is needless to say that I told him I would not let up one particle; and would not resign either.” The city elections confirmed Roosevelt’s worst misgivings. The Tammany slate routed the Republican slate, and the Republican bosses placed the blame squarely on Roosevelt’s uncompromising policy. Rumblings from the state legislature in Albany suggested machinations afoot to sweep him out of his job.

Open dissension in the bipartisan police board multiplied Roosevelt’s woes. “Thinks he’s the whole board,” grumbled Democrat Andrew Parker. “He talks, talks, talks, all the time,” Parker complained to the Evening Post’s Joseph Bishop: “Scarcely a day passes that there is not something from him in the papers about what he is doing . . . and the public is getting tired of it. It injures our work.” In defense of his friend, Bishop replied, “Stop Roosevelt talking? Why you would kill him. He has to talk. The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy’s mind. . . . I don’t know as he will ever outgrow it. But with it he has great qualities . . . inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness and devotion to good government.” Parker “said nothing further,” Bishop recalled, “and we parted rather coldly.” Parker’s hostility toward Roosevelt eventually congealed into hatred, and the structure of the bipartisan board allowed him to paralyze Roosevelt’s further ambitions for reform. Not surprisingly, the newspapers delighted in the running feud, likening the battle between Roosevelt and Parker to “armed combat.”

During these trying days, Roosevelt’s growing family provided indispensable respite. “His wife and children gave him,” one friend observed, “a kind of spiritual bath that sent him back to the city refreshed and ready for what might come.” Roosevelt spent two or three nights in town at Bamie’s pied-à-terre on Madison Avenue, but during the rest of the week he commuted by bicycle and train from the loving home Edith had created at Sagamore Hill. Their five children, now ranging in age from eleven to two, inhabited a world far removed from the intrigue and animosity of his public career. “Their gay doings, their odd sayings,” one family friend, Hermann Hagedorn, remarked, “cleansed him of the smoke and the grime of the battle.”

When forty-year-old Bamie stunned the family by announcing her engagement and marriage to naval officer William S. Cowles, Theodore and Edith rented her Madison Avenue apartment for the winter months. While Edith preferred the domestic seclusion of Sagamore Hill, city life allowed her to provide the children with wider social and cultural opportunities, including lessons at Mr. Dodsworth’s, the dance school she had adored as a young girl.

Despite the restorative presence of his family, Roosevelt seemed “over-strained & over-wrought” to Lodge, who confided in Bamie that Theodore’s “wonderful spring and interest in all sorts of things is much lowered. He is not depressed but he is fearfully overworked & insists on writing history & doing all sorts of things he has no need to do. He has that morbid idée fixe that he cannot leave his work for a moment else the world should stop.”

The 1896 presidential contest between McKinley and Bryan provided a welcome outlet, allowing Roosevelt to leave behind his multitude of problems in the city, traveling through the state and country to stump for the Republican nominee. While he had passionately hoped that his friend Speaker Tom Reed would be the candidate, he campaigned vigorously for the Republican ticket. He retained serious reservations about McKinley, whom he considered to have “a chocolate éclair backbone,” but convinced himself that the Republican fight against the Democrats was crucial for the soul of America. If victory came to Bryan and the mob of populists and socialists “who want to strike down the well-to-do, and who have been inflamed against the rich,” the United States would face “years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American Republic.”

Beyond his overwrought dread of a Democratic triumph, Roosevelt also determined that lending his energetic voice to McKinley’s campaign represented his best hope for regaining the confidence of the Republican bosses. He spoke before huge audiences everywhere he went. “The halls were jammed,” he reported to Bamie, “people standing in masses in the aisles.” His adventures in New York, captured in stories, headlines, and cartoons across the nation, had made him a compelling, national figure. Roosevelt capitalized on this interest and his efforts did not go unrecognized. “He gave all of his time, all of his energy, and all of his towering ability to the work of the campaign,” recalled Republican National Committee member Albert B. Cummins.

McKinley’s victory resulted in Roosevelt’s appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy, providing a graceful exit from his mounting troubles as police commissioner. His departure left both Riis and Steffens downcast. Indeed, Jacob Riis considered the two years he spent with Roosevelt on Mulberry Street “the happiest by far” of his entire career. “Then was life really worth living,” he recalled, confessing that once Roosevelt departed, he “had no heart in it.” Beyond his personal despondency, Steffens for his part feared that “reform was beaten.” And in short order, “Tammany did come back.”

Still, the impact of Roosevelt’s vigorous tenure would not be forgotten. “The end of the reign of Mr. Roosevelt is not the end of Rooseveltism,” Steffens wrote in the Evening Post, predicting that his impress would exert “an active influence in the force for a generation at least, till the youngest ‘reform cop’ is retired.” Even after Roosevelt became a national hero during the Spanish-American War and was elected governor of New York, Steffens deemed his controversial reign as police commissioner “the proudest single achievement of his life,” insisting that no other challenge “called for so much courage, energy, labor or brain and will power.” Steffens would also leave Mulberry Street in short order to serve as editor of New York’s oldest newspaper, the Commercial Advertiser, yet the relationship established with Roosevelt would flourish in the years ahead.

Just as Roosevelt’s three years in the New York Assembly had taught him to work with colleagues far removed from his cloistered patrician background, so his two years as police commissioner in New York City had deepened and broadened his outlook on social and economic issues. Jacob Riis had introduced him to the realities of immigrant life in the slums, though Roosevelt found it hard to relinquish his conception of the poor as people who had “failed in life.” He had walked through ill-ventilated, dilapidated tenements where wealthy landlords used every legal device to evade regulation and responsibility. Observing this widespread failure to rectify conditions, Roosevelt recalled, “I became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether business men or lawyers, judges, legislators, or executive officers, who seek to make of the Constitution a fetish for the prevention of the work of social reform.”

The mentoring of Riis and Steffens and the intimate exposure to the hardships confronting the city’s poor had begun to work a marked change in Roosevelt, loosening the “steel chain” of conservative opposition to government intervention in the economic and social processes that had been his birthright.

THE FRENETIC PACE AND STRESS of Roosevelt’s years as New York police commissioner stand in perfect counterpoint to William Howard Taft’s ruminative, congenial eight-year-tenure on the circuit court. Two decades later, Nellie would reflect that Taft savored his work on the federal bench“more than any he has ever undertaken,” more than his years as governor general of the Philippines, secretary of war, or president. “Perhaps it is the comfort and dignity and power without worry I like,” Taft told his brother Horace.

Life on the circuit ideally suited a man of Taft’s gregarious temperament. Traveling to Cleveland, Toledo, Memphis, Nashville, Detroit, and Louisville, he quickly made friends in every city that comprised the Sixth District. Though he missed Nellie and the children when he was away from Cincinnati, he delighted in the camaraderie of the circuit. His daily letters home describe a continuous round of banquets and receptions hosted by leading members of the bar, as well as invitations to private clubs. “I have been in court every day from nine until five o’clock and I have been out every night to dine and have not tumbled into bed any night before twelve o’clock,” he wrote to Nellie from the Russell House in Detroit, concluding, “I have had no trouble with sleeping except for want of time.” In Memphis, he described a ball at the Tennessee Club, a meeting of the Shakespearean circle, and a banquet he attended. “The Bar here is said to be the finest in the circuit,” he told Nellie. “Certainly it is a most delightful body of men.” He was equally enchanted by three evenings at the palatial Lake Shore home of the Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna.“They have eight bedrooms besides those required for his family,” he explained to his wife, “and he gives house parties lasting a week when he has twenty or twenty five guests at a time.”

In these most agreeable settings, Taft was totally at ease, sharing stories, drinks, and conversation. While Roosevelt’s indomitable, often contentious nature stirred discord with colleagues at both the Civil Service Commission and the police board, Taft enjoyed warm professional relationships from the outset, bonding effortlessly with his fellow circuit justices, William R. Day and Horace H. Lurton, both of whom would eventually sit on the Supreme Court—the former appointed by Roosevelt, the latter by Taft himself.

No one on the circuit was more widely respected or better loved than Taft. “He is absolutely the fairest judge I have ever seen on the bench,” a fellow attorney remarked. Countless stories circulated of his kind and even-handed actions in the courtroom. When a prosecuting attorney persistently hectored a witness who had already disclosed his shame of being illiterate, Taft brought a quick end to the attorney’s line of questioning: “Stop that!” he admonished. “You have brought out that this man cannot read; that is enough. I will not have you humiliate this witness any further, because it has no relation to the case.” In another incident, an inexperienced lawyer had filed a badly drawn petition on behalf of a young girl whose foot had been severed in a railroad accident; Taft edited the document himself, knowing that otherwise the railroad attorney would easily secure a dismissal of the case.

The work itself was intellectually challenging, requiring him to reach decisions and write opinions on far-reaching issues regarding labor strikes, injunctions, workplace injuries, street railways, and monopolies. He was allowed the time necessary to study cases thoroughly, reviewing precedents and refining his positions. Most important, he was able to draft, revise, and edit his decisions “over again and again” until he had honed the language to his satisfaction. His opinions earned the admiration of lawyers across the nation, building a reputation that bolstered his dream of one day sitting on the Supreme Court.

Presiding on the bench through the turbulent 1890s, Taft was called upon to adjudicate a number of highly controversial cases that shadowed the rest of his career. The most noteworthy, In re Phelan, had boiled over from the 1894 Pullman strike. While the strike stirred turmoil in Chicago, Frank Phelan, an authorized representative of Eugene Debs, arrived in Cincinnati to organize railway employees in Ohio and Kentucky for a general boycott of all Pullman trains. With the Cincinnati Southern Railroad nearly paralyzed by the boycott, the company’s manager successfully petitioned the court for an injunction, enjoining Phelan from inciting workers—who themselves had no grievance against the Pullman Company—to join a strike preventing the flow of interstate traffic. When Phelan defied the injunction and union members continued to stop trains, Taft issued a warrant for his arrest.

Taft told Nellie, who had taken the children to Canada for that summer of 1894, that the case worried him more than any other. Each day, newspapers carried sensationalized accounts of the tumult in Chicago, claiming that mobs were “holding that city by the throat.” Like Roosevelt, Taft feared that demagogic leaders had resolved “to provoke a civil war” and that some of the agitators would have to be killed “to make an impression.” Dozens of marshals were posted throughout Cincinnati in anticipation of similar violence. When news broke of Phelan’s arrest, Taft received death threats. His decision was loudly denounced at raucous meetings held throughout the city, and his courtroom was ominously crowded with strikers. “I hate the publicity that this brings me into,” he complained to Nellie, explaining that his days were occupied “trying to say nothing to reporters.”

The mayor of Cincinnati and the chief of police tried to persuade Taft to draw out the trial until the tumult and bloodletting in Chicago had subsided, but with Phelan under arrest and his sympathizers packing the court “to suffocation,” Taft’s sense of duty obliged him to move the case forward. After hearing the arguments on both sides, he spent two long nights writing his opinion, just managing, he told Nellie, to have “the last sentence copied when twelve oclock struck, the time fixed for its announcement.” Attired in the silk judicial robe he donned for important occasions, Taft took almost an hour to read out his long opinion.

At the core of his argument lay the same distinction he had drawn in Moore’s & Co. v. Bricklayers’ Union between a legal strike and an illegal secondary boycott. He began by emphasizing that the employees of the railroad “had the right to organize into or to join a labor union which should take joint action as to their terms of employment.” With strong language, he clearly delineated the vital role of unions in industrial society: “It is of benefit to them and to the public that laborers should unite in their common interest and for lawful purposes,” Taft began, further explaining that “if they stand together, they are often able, all of them, to command better prices for their labor than when dealing singly with rich employers. . . . The accumulation of a fund for the support of those who feel that the wages offered are below market prices is one of the legitimate objects of such an organization.” Furthermore, Taft recognized the legitimacy of union leadership and their right to maintain solidarity. He explained that officers of a union might order members “on pain of expulsion from their union, peaceably to leave the employ of their employer because any of the terms of their employment are unsatisfactory.”

Had Phelan arrived in Cincinnati to protest a wage cut by the Cincinnati Southern and “urged a peaceable strike,” Taft maintained, “the loss to the [railroad] would not be ground for recovering damages, and Phelan would not have been liable to contempt even if the strike much impeded the operation of the road.” In this case, however, “the employees of the railway companies had no grievance against their employers.” Nor did they have cause to obstruct the Pullman Company, which had nothing to do with their compensation or working conditions. Phelan, therefore, had conspired to bring about an illegal boycott. Taft found him guilty and sentenced him to six months in jail.

Lost in the ensuing uproar, Taft’s clear and forceful defense of labor’s right to strike was perhaps the most definitive pronouncement on the subject to that date. Nine years later, when the Wabash Railroad issued an injunction against the striking Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and Firemen, the labor union relied on Taft’s statement on labor rights to dissolve the injunction and win their case.

Yet Taft’s failure to explicate his decision more fully to reporters and his refusal to court public opinion left him vulnerable to charges of an anti-union bias. As police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt had faced similar accusations from labor leaders following repeated arrests of union picketers involved in violent scuffles with employers and scabs. Unlike Taft, however, Roosevelt had responded with aplomb, realizing that such charges must not go unanswered. At the suggestion of Jacob Riis, Roosevelt had invited union leaders to meet at a beer hall and speak to him, not “as Police Commissioner, but just as plain ‘me.’ ” During a three-hour exchange of views, Roosevelt had insisted that no genuine friend of labor could condone violence. When the marathon session came to a close, the union audience “applauded him to the echo.”

While Taft lacked Roosevelt’s political savvy and press connections, his advocacy for the workingman and desire for an even-handed policy in a rapidly industrializing nation made his nascent progressivism increasingly evident. Following the Phelan controversy, two additional railroad cases demonstrated Taft’s support for the cause of labor. The swift expansion of railroads in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had generated a shocking increase in accidents causing death or severe physical harm to industrial workers. Statistics revealed that annually “one railroad worker in every three hundred was killed on the job,” while one out of fifty American laborers sustained an injury. In an era when courts consistently favored property rights over individual rights, railroad employees found it nearly impossible to recover damages. Under the doctrine of assumed risk, railroad attorneys successfully argued that employees assumed all risk of injury, even if railroad negligence was involved. In some cases, railroads demanded that employees sign formal contracts releasing the company from liability in the event of injury or death.

In the case of Voight v. Baltimore, Taft held the Baltimore Railroad liable for permanent injuries to a worker. Although the man had signed a contract agreeing to hold the railroad harmless, Taft held that this document did not divest the company of responsibility to employees in the case of negligence. The conservative Supreme Court reversed Taft’s ruling, citing the sanctity of contract, but he would later be vindicated when in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law specifically outlawing such oppressive contracts.

Taft further challenged the doctrine of assumed risk in the Narramore case. A recently passed Ohio law required railroads to install safety devices that would protect workers from getting caught in guard rails and frogs—switch mechanisms that allowed a train to cross from one track to another. One brakeman was working on the tracks when his foot became stuck in an unsecured frog. Unable to escape as the train approached, he suffered horrific injuries, including the loss of one leg. The federal district court heard his case, but refused damages on grounds that Narramore had assumed the risk when he continued to work despite his knowledge that the frogs lacked safety devices. Taft reversed the lower court decision, arguing that any safety law would be “a dead letter” if companies were permitted to defend themselves in this way. In the years ahead, injured employees successfully cited Taft’s ruling, allowing them to receive damages when the hazards of their employment resulted from a corporation’s failure to meet safety regulations.

Of William Taft’s hundreds of rulings in the 1890s, the most consequential involved an anti-trust suit against the Addyston Steel and Pipe Company, which had joined with five other cast-iron pipe manufacturers to fix prices under a contract of association. Since the 1890 passage of the Sherman AntiTrust Act, corporations had openly defied the law’s restrictions against combinations in restraint of trade. Anti-trust suits brought in pro-business state courts were invariably lost, and monopolies continued to grow. In the 1895 Knight case, the Supreme Court delivered what seemed a death knell to the Sherman Act, refusing to break up a sugar company that controlled 98 percent of the country’s sugar refineries.

When Taft received the government’s case against the Addyston Company combination on appeal in 1898, it was widely assumed that he would follow the lower court’s ruling and dismiss the suit. Instead, he held that the association was indeed an attempted monopoly designed “to give the defendants power to charge unreasonable prices.” Taft’s order for the association’s dissolution made national news, emboldening those who fought to stay the growth of colossal combinations. The New York Times headlined the importance of the decision: “Iron Pipe Trust Illegal: The First Case in Which Manufacturing Combination Had Been Found Guilty.” Enumerating the facts of the pipe case, the New York World suggested that “precisely the same things are true of hundreds of other trusts, and they can be smashed if the people’s attorneys and the courts will do their duty.” Still, there was little concerted action against monopolies until 1902, when President Roosevelt brought suit against the Northern Securities Company, a giant holding company combining three railroads in an attempt to control rail prices throughout the Northwest. Roosevelt’s suit relied, in part, on Taft’s opinion in the Addyston Pipe case.

These were productive, invigorating years for William Taft, who also agreed to serve as dean of the new Cincinnati Law School, where he was teaching two courses. “The deanship is going to involve considerable work,” he told Nellie, “but I think I can systematize it.” He was elected president of the Cincinnati Civil Service Reform Association and was overjoyed to be made a trustee of Yale College, where he regularly presided over reunions with his fellow Bonesmen. Indeed, the only drawback of his burgeoning reputation was the increasing number of invitations to deliver speeches at banquets and meetings.

“I wish I could make a good speech,” he confided to Nellie before a banquet in Memphis, “but I fear it must be desultory and haphazard.” Another disappointing performance in Grand Rapids, he confessed with chagrin, had left “a bad taste in my mouth but I am used to that.” Nellie tried to buoy his confidence, reminding him that whenever he spent time in preparation, he invariably found “something to say that is worthwhile.” When he agreed to address the annual meeting of the American Bar Association in Detroit at the end of August 1895, he promised Nellie that he would work on the speech for an hour every day and would submit drafts to her throughout the summer. “I shall use you as my merciless but loving critic,” he assured her. Still, when he saw “the prominent names” of the other speakers, including Supreme Court justice David Brewer and Harvard professor James Thayer, it made him “tremble lest I shall make a fizzle of mine.”

That same summer, Horace spent a month with his brother at Murray Bay in Canada, where Will and Nellie had expanded a small cottage into “a happy summer home.” The little resort village of Murray Bay, situated on the St. Lawrence River one hundred miles north of Quebec, had become a gathering place for the entire Taft clan. In the early days, Charles Taft recalled, the “whole cargo of Tafts,” twenty-one in all, shared a six-room house, with thin partitions dividing the rooms. Eventually each of the brothers had purchased or rented cottages of their own, all within easy walking distance of one another, the golf course, the tennis courts, the river, the hills, and the small village.

Horace recalled that although Taft’s weight had ballooned by 1895 to 280 pounds, he maintained a preposterous schedule with unflagging vitality: “He played eighteen holes on a very hilly golf course in the morning, came home, ate his lunch, read his mail, and then went down to a tennis court, where he played a rather elephantine game,” after which he went rowing on the river until it was time for a picnic supper. One night, Horace found Howard Hollister, Will’s old friend, stretched out on the sofa. Asked about plans for the next day, Hollister laughingly replied, “The Lord knows. I doubt whether I shall live till tomorrow. I have been following Bill around today.” Provided his weight did not become so onerous as to impede his activities, Taft was able to jest about it. Horace remembered sitting with Harry and Will in an overcrowded theatre with narrow seats. “Horace,” Will said, “if this theater burns, it has got to burn around me.”

During these years, Nellie Taft, originally reluctant to leave Washington, had immersed herself in the civic life of Cincinnati. She instituted a current events salon where she and her friends studied the administration’s Hawaiian policy and the Chinese exclusion question, reading congressional debates and legal briefs. She attended the theatre regularly, took music lessons, and published an essay on Schumann. She also resumed her leadership role in promoting access to early education for the city’s children, an advocacy that resulted in the kindergarten movement.

Despite her eclectic pastimes, Nellie found time to undertake the enormous project of founding the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which gave its first concert series in 1895, with nationally recognized Frank Van der Stucken conducting. Previous orchestral associations had failed, but with the permanent dedication of a new Music Hall, Nellie was determined to create a symphony orchestra to rival those in Boston and New York. As president of the Orchestral Association, she raised funds, organized committees to sell subscriptions and advertising space, and negotiated contracts for the conductor and musicians, working with their labor union to protect local musicians against foreign imports. She even managed to persuade the major railroads to offer reduced rates for out-of-town passengers attending concert performances and inaugurated a series of free summer concerts.

Taft was immensely proud of Nellie’s work with the orchestra. He kept up with every detail, encouraging her through difficult days and exulting at her great success. “My love for you, Dear, grows each year,” he remarked. “This is not the enthusiasm of the wedding journey but it is the truth deliberately arrived at after full opportunity for me to know.” He ardently defended Nellie when her mother charged that she fancied herself “the new woman,” citing her unseemly public pursuits and the fact that she had borne but two children (though a third, named after Taft’s brother Charley, would be born in 1897). Yet, in some ways, Nellie Taft did represent the new woman. She continued to frequent German beer halls, enjoyed smoking, played cards for money, followed the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, and was among the first in her hometown to wear a short skirt.“It is so delightful that I shall live in it,” she told Will. “It makes me feel very young and frisky to be so unencumbered.” Her manner may have seemed unorthodox to some, but the mutual affection and admiration she shared with her husband allowed her to pursue diverse interests even as she raised healthy, intelligent, confident children.

During his fruitful years on the bench, Taft’s friendship with Roosevelt continued to grow. While still civil service commissioner, Roosevelt visited Cincinnati to deliver a lecture and attend a dinner at the St. Nicholas Hotel in honor of their mutual friend Bellamy Storer. During his stay, Roosevelt collaborated with Taft to create the Civil Service Reform Club in Cincinnati, to which Taft was elected president. In the years that followed, Taft worked hard to nominate and elect candidates committed to reform. The two men also met in Washington and New York for lunches, dinners, and long conversations about advancing their reform cause. On one trip to New York, Taft was disappointed when a previous engagement prevented him from dining with Roosevelt. “I should have much preferred to go to the R’s,” he wrote to Nellie, “because I wanted to have a full political talk with R.”

The vision of reform shared by Roosevelt and Taft was still far removed from the Populists’ call for fundamental economic change. Yet their experiences as police commissioner and circuit judge had awakened both to the harsh circumstances confronting the nation’s working poor and sensitized them to the avarice and power of industrial interests. As social and economic issues increasingly consumed each man’s attention, both were beginning to question the laissez-faire doctrine that had guided them since their days in college.

Neither Roosevelt nor Taft could have anticipated that an insurgent rebellion against Spanish rule on the small island of Cuba would soon redirect their energies, and alter both their destinies.

THE POST OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY of the Navy proved difficult to secure for Theodore Roosevelt. Taft and Lodge lobbied intensely for his appointment and were joined in their campaign by Maria Storer, a prominent Washington socialite whose husband, Bellamy, had contributed $10,000 to a private fund so that McKinley could retire his debts. The new president was hesitant to appoint the young New Yorker. “I want peace,” he told Maria Storer, “and I am told that your friend Theodore—whom I know only slightly—is always getting into rows with everybody. I am afraid he is too pugnacious.” When Taft pressed Theodore’s case, McKinley remained unconvinced. “The truth is, Will, Roosevelt is always in such a state of mind,” he replied. Roosevelt’s friends refused to give up. “Judge Taft, one of the best fellows going, plunged in last week,” Lodge reported to Roosevelt. He enlisted the help of both John Addison Porter, his fellow Bonesman at Yale, who would soon become the president’s secretary, and Myron T. Herrick, one of the president-elect’s closest Ohio friends. “Give him a chance to prove that he can be peaceful,” Maria Storer begged. McKinley finally relented, though Taft later speculated that “more than once, when [Roosevelt] was joining with those who demanded war with Spain and almost attacking the Administration for not declaring it, I think McKinley wished he had been anywhere else than where he was.”

Even before assuming his post in the Navy Department, Roosevelt had insisted that he “would rather welcome a foreign war.” He feared that Americans had lost their “soldierly virtues” in the race for material gain and were becoming “slothful, timid,” and sedentary. “The victories of peace are great; but the victories of war are greater,” he maintained. “No merchant, no banker, no railroad magnate, no inventor of improved industrial processes, can do for any nation what can be done for it by its great fighting men.” While McKinley, who had “seen the dead piled up” at Antietam, prayed for peace, Roosevelt, who had never seen combat, absurdly romanticized war. “Every man who has in him any real power of joy in battle,” he blithely wrote, “knows that he feels it when the wolf begins to rise in his heart; he does not shrink from blood and sweat, or deem that they mar the fight; he revels in them, in the toil, the pain and the danger, as but setting off the triumph.” No sooner had Roosevelt settled into his office in the Navy Department than he “became convinced” that war with Spain over Cuba was imminent.

For more than two years, Cuban freedom fighters had engaged in a guerrilla war against their Spanish occupiers. Spanish authorities had retaliated by imposing martial law throughout the island, incarcerating nearly a third of the Cuban population in unsanitary concentration camps without sufficient food, water, or medical treatment. Led by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, yellow journals carried daily, often exaggerated reports of Spanish treachery that aroused humanitarian outrage. These concerns combined with economic interests in the island to fuel jingoist sentiment in favor of intervention. In November 1897, Roosevelt confided to a friend that he recommended going to war with Spain “on the ground of both humanity and self-interest,” also citing “the benefit done to our people by giving them something to think of which isn’t material gain.”

Working under the elderly Navy secretary, John Davis Long, Roosevelt did everything in his power to prepare the U.S. Navy for war. During the long summer months when his boss vacationed in New England, Roosevelt exercised a “free hand” to purchase guns, ammunition, and supplies. He generated war plans, scheduled additional gunnery drills, stocked distant supply stations with coal, consulted Captain Alfred Mahan about the need for new battleships, and succeeded in having Admiral George Dewey placed in command of the Asiatic Fleet. “I am having immense fun running the Navy,” he boasted to Bellamy Storer.

Henry Pringle notes that “it is not easy to draw a line between Roosevelt’s anxiety to build up the navy, which was legitimate preparedness, and his lust for war.” In a comical stream of letters, Roosevelt repeatedly urged Secretary Long to prolong his vacation. “There isn’t the slightest necessity of your returning,” he told Long on June 22, 1897. “Nothing of importance has arisen.” More obviously solicitous a fortnight later, he wrote again: “You must be tired, and you ought to have an entire rest.” Three weeks later, he recommended that Long “stay there just exactly as long as you want to. There isn’t any reason you should be here before the 1st of October.” If Long had any thought of ending his vacation, Roosevelt reminded him that he was fortunate to avoid Washington and the hottest summer in memory.

In January 1898, McKinley agreed to station the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor as “an act of friendly courtesy” to the Cuban people. Steadfastly, however, he continued to resist mounting pressure for intervention. Then, on February 15, the Maine exploded, killing 262 Americans. Though the cause of the explosion was never determined with certainty, Roosevelt immediately labeled the sinking “an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards,” declaring that as prelude to war, he “would give anything if President McKinley would order the fleet to Havana tomorrow.”

THE VERY MORNING AFTER THE explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor, Ida Tarbell was scheduled to meet with Army chief General Nelson Miles, the subject of a planned McClure’s article. Upon hearing the news, she assumed her appointment would be canceled. “It seemed as if the very air of Washington stood still,” she recalled. But when she arrived at his office, she was surprised to find that “the routine went on as usual.” She would long admire “the steadiness of General Miles” during those troublesome hours, as orderlies periodically interrupted their interview to deliver updated casualty reports.

In the weeks that followed, Tarbell “vacillated between hope that the President would succeed in preventing a war and fear that the savage cries coming from the Hill would be too much for him.” While Roosevelt derided McKinley’s insistence upon a thorough investigation, Ida respected the president’s “suspension of judgment” until it could be determined if the blast was an accident or sabotage. Her esteem for McKinley’s restraint was matched by her disgust at Roosevelt’s “excited goings-on,” which she witnessed during her frequent appointments with General Miles—the departments of War, Navy, and State then being housed together in the Old Executive Office Building. While others worked with steadfast composure to address the crisis, Roosevelt “tore up and down the wide marble halls,” she contemptuously recalled, “like a boy on roller skates.” War had not yet been declared, yet “already he saw himself an important unit in an invading army.”

Though Tarbell was later drawn to the compelling energy of Roosevelt’s “amazing” personality, her initial assessment of his unseemly, overwrought avidity for war was wholly accurate. “I am more grieved and indignant than I can say at there being any delay on our part in a matter like this,” he told his brother-in-law, William Sheffield Cowles. “A great crisis is upon us, and if we do not rise level to it, we shall have spotted the pages of our history with a dark blot of shame.” He had no patience with President McKinley, whose “weakness and vacillation” he considered “even more ludicrous than painful.” He summarily rejected all who argued against intervention, dismissing any possibility of legitimate objection. “The only effective forces against the war are the forces inspired by greed and fear,” he categorically proclaimed, “and the forces that tell in favor of war are the belief in national honor and common humanity.”

As Tarbell feared, the “warlike element” on the Hill, the yellow press, and an aroused public sentiment exerted a combined pressure that proved “too much” for McKinley to resist: “He steadily grew paler and thinner, and his eyes seemed more deep-set than ever,” she noted. On April 11, 1898, he finally summoned Congress to authorize armed intervention in Cuba. Two weeks later, the United States formally declared war against Spain. Later that same day, Secretary Long cabled Admiral Dewey to “proceed at once to Philippine Islands,” using “utmost endeavor” to attack the Spanish fleet.

That Dewey was equipped to win the famous Battle of Manila Bay was largely due to Roosevelt’s exertions months earlier. As acting secretary, he had ordered the squadron to Hong Kong at the beginning of the year. “Keep full of coal,” Roosevelt had cabled Dewey when Long was out of the office: “In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast.” Indeed, Taft later asserted, “if it had not been for Theodore Roosevelt, we would never have been in a position to declare war, for it was he and only he who got from Congress sufficient ammunition to back any bluff we might make with actual play.”

The war marked a turning point in the lives of Roosevelt and Taft, and signaled a transformation in the nature of McClure’s magazine. “In all its earlier years,” Tarbell explained, the publication had sought “to be a wholesome, enlivening, informing companion for readers.” It strove to provide “an eager welcome” to newly discovered fiction writers and poets, introducing recent inventions in science, while illuminating “the best of the old” in its extended series on Napoleon, Lincoln, and the Civil War. In the spring of 1898, however, McClure jettisoned plans for the June issue to create a special war edition, which, in the months ahead, led to “a continuous flow of war articles.” Tarbell was assigned to cover McKinley’s White House, Baker to analyze how the press reported the war, and White to gauge the heartland’s response to the president’s call for 125,000 volunteers. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were recruited as correspondents from the warfront. “The editors of McClure’s Magazine, in common with thousands of other American citizens, have to face new conditions and new interests,” McClure told his readers. “We hope to obtain a record that will have absorbing human and dramatic interest,” he explained, “and one that will prove to be of permanent historical value.”

The shift from historical research to current affairs had a profound effect upon Ida Tarbell. She had contemplated returning to Paris after completing her Lincoln series, but realized, she later wrote, that she “could not run away to a foreign land” and become “a mere spectator.” Her new assignment allowed an intimate perspective on the hard choices confronting McKinley: “I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service,” she recalled, “of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it?” While others inflamed public sentiment with sensational reports, Tarbell relied upon documentary evidence and dozens of interviews with cabinet officers, White House staff members, congressmen, and senators; using these sources Tarbell analyzed the pressures brought to bear upon McKinley in those two months between the destruction of the Maine and his decision to intervene. She revealed a president who struggled gallantly for a peaceful resolution until he was finally overwhelmed by the popular call for war. Her absorbing portrait of the political and psychological strains on a president in wartime created an enduring new model of political journalism.

McClure’s also afforded Ray Baker the opportunity for a novel investigation of the newspaper industry itself—a definitive analysis of the unprecedented torrent of news generated by the Cuban conflict. This extensive war coverage, which vastly increased newspaper circulation, was considered “a triumph of the new journalism.” College-educated reporters and writers with literary ambitions vied to be dispatched as correspondents. Newspapers spent anything necessary to scoop their rivals. Baker calculated the daily costs incurred by publications that maintained scores of correspondents in both Cuba and Florida: he added up rental fees for the private vessels carrying messages from Havana to Key West; he discovered covert signals indicating the receipt of important intelligence; he followed waiting cabs from the wharf to offices where the messages were cabled to New York; he computed the expense of every transmitted word. “It is a little short of stupendous, the amounts of money being spent in getting up a newspaper which sells for a penny,” he told his father. In fact, Arthur Brisbane, the editor of the New York Evening Journal, later remarked that had the war not come to a swift conclusion, his paper and many other major dailies would have collapsed into insolvency.

In “When Johnny Went Marching Out,” William Allen White described the nationalistic zeal that swept the country with the declaration of war. “Populists stopped watching the money power, Republicans ceased troubling themselves over repudiation, Democrats forgot the deficit,” he observed. The indelible marks of regionalism were all but obliterated as northerners and southerners joined to fight under the same flag. “A simple but great emotion, that of patriotic joy, was stirring the people,” White felt, “and they moved as men move under stress of strong passion.” Children who once staged skirmishes between cowboys and Indians now waged war against the Spanish, adopting “Remember the Maine!” as their rallying cry. Immense crowds greeted the trains rushing soldiers to the front: “Everywhere it was flags: tattered, smoke-grimed flags in engine cabs; flags in buttonholes; flags on proud poles; flags fluttering everywhere.”

While McClure’s special war issue mirrored popular fascination with the Spanish conflict, a concluding article, “The Cost of War,” sounded a compelling cautionary note. The generation who lived through the Civil War, the journalist George Waldron tellingly observed, “have not been the most ardent to join in the clamor for war. They know the havoc it wrought, and are not eager to repeat the experience. The thousands slain in battle, the tens of thousands afflicted with wounds which often resulted in death after days of agony, the losses of relatives and friends, the anxious waiting for news, the want and distress of body and mind following in the train of warfare, all have left impressions so vivid that thirty-three years of peace have not sufficed to wear them away.” And beyond the social and emotional toll, Waldron calculated that the financial outlay of the Civil War “would have bought the freedom of every slave, and left enough to pay all the peace expenses of the Federal Government for half a century. The divided nation expended money enough during the struggle to supply every man, woman and child with ample food for the entire four years.”

This balance of vivid, responsible war coverage and comprehensive analysis made McClure’s one of the most respected magazines in the country. With a circulation now approaching 400,000, the pressroom and bindery had to operate “day and night” to meet increased demand. The advent of the Spanish-American War fueled the magazine’s evolution toward a new role, a crucial engagement in American society. “Having tasted blood,” Tarbell recalled, “it could no longer be content with being merely attractive, readable. It was a citizen and wanted to do a citizen’s part.”

DURING THE WINTER AND EARLY spring of 1898, as the country moved inexorably toward war, Edith Roosevelt was gravely ill. She had never recovered from the birth of her fifth child, Quentin, the previous fall. “For weeks we could not tell whether she would live or die,” Roosevelt told a friend. Finally, in early March, doctors diagnosed a massive abscess in a muscle near the base of her spine. A dangerous operation was performed that would require many weeks of slow recovery. During this same spring, ten-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., underwent treatment for what appeared to be “kind of a nervous breakdown.”

Despite the fragility of his family, Roosevelt later acknowledged, he could not forgo the opportunity to go to Cuba. “You know what my wife and children mean to me,” he told Archie Butt, “and yet I made up my mind that I would not allow even a death to stand in my way; that it was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring-rod in every family. I know now that I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to have answered the call.”

Roosevelt was offered a position as colonel but wisely requested to serve as a lieutenant colonel under his friend Leonard Wood, an Army surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient. The press found the story of the so-called Rough Riders irresistible from the start—a volunteer regiment in which cowboys, miners, and hunters served on an equal footing with Ivy League graduates, Somerset Club members, polo players, tennis champions, and prominent yachtsmen. And no journalist was better suited to cover Theodore Roosevelt and his colorful regiment than Richard Harding Davis, a war correspondent so legendary “that a war hardly seemed a war if he didn’t cover it.”

Indeed, at the outset of the war, Richard Harding Davis enjoyed far wider recognition than Theodore Roosevelt himself. The son of the feminist novelist Rebecca Harding Davis, thirty-four-year-old Richard was a man of many talents—an award-winning correspondent, best-selling fiction writer, successful playwright, and editor of Harper’s Weekly. His handsome face and athletic physique had adorned countless magazine covers as Charles Dana Gibson’s ideal exemplar of masculine beauty. “We knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States,” the novelist Booth Tarkington remarked, “but we infinitely preferred Davis’s. . . . Of all the great people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see.”

Roosevelt and Davis first met in New York in 1890. After reading “Gallegher,” the short story that made Davis a household name, Roosevelt invited the young author to dinner at his sister’s Madison Avenue home. Two years later, they encountered each other at a dinner party hosted by members of the British legation. This time, a caustic interchange was sparked by Roosevelt’s recent Cosmopolitan essay deriding rich Americans who evinced a “queer, strained humility” toward Englishmen and failed to take pride in their own statesmen, soldiers, and scholars. Rebuked by Davis, who affected an aristocratic British accent and admired British customs, Roosevelt later reported the testy exchange to his friend James Brander Matthews. “He apparently considered it a triumphant answer to my position to inquire if I believed in the American custom of chewing tobacco and spitting all over the floor,” Roosevelt noted sarcastically, continuing to insist that “I did; and that in consequence the British Minister, who otherwise liked me, felt very badly about having me at the house, especially because I sat with my legs on the table during dinner.”

Any resentment either man might have harbored swiftly dissipated in the first days of the Spanish-American War. No public figure of the time understood better than Roosevelt the importance of cultivating reporters. As with Steffens and Riis, Roosevelt granted Davis unusual access. Writing from the headquarters of the Rough Riders, Davis assured his brother that his situation was “absolutely the very best . . . nothing they have they deny us.” Davis realized from the start that the Rough Riders were likely to provide the most picturesque story of the war. “This is the best crowd to be with—they are so well educated and so interesting,” he reported to his father. “To-day a sentry on post was reading ‘As You Like It,’ and whenever I go down the line half the men want to know who won the boat race.” Indeed, he concluded, “being with such a fine lot of fellows is a great pleasure.”

Roosevelt also forged a relationship with the New York Journal’s best known correspondent, Edward Marshall. The two men had met in New York when Roosevelt was police commissioner and Marshall was Sunday editor of the New York Press. In 1893, Marshall served as the secretary of the Tenement House Commission, which brought him into close contact with Roosevelt. Like Davis, Marshall managed to write successful novels, short stories, and plays in his spare time. For a time, he edited the Sunday World, but when the war broke out, William Randolph Hearst engaged him as a war correspondent.

Both Davis and Marshall accompanied the Rough Riders during their first engagement at Las Guásimas, a confusing ninety-minute battle conducted in a dense tangle of tall grass and twisted brush. Las Guásimas was situated at the intersection of two trails on the way to Santiago de Cuba, an inland town where the Spaniards were known to be concentrated. As the Rough Riders made their way along the steep trail, they encountered fierce fire from an enemy they could not see. Within minutes, a half-dozen men were killed and nearly three dozen wounded. Marshall recorded a defining moment as Roosevelt “jumped up and down,” his “emotions evidently divided between joy and a tendency to run,” as he awaited Wood’s order to lead his troops across a cut wire fence and into a thicket on the right.

Marshall’s description continues to recount Roosevelt’s pivotal transformation from idealistic, romantic warmonger to composed, levelheaded soldier: “Ushering a dozen men before him, Roosevelt stepped across the wire himself, and from that instant, became the most magnificent soldier I have ever seen. It was as if that barbed-wire strand had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he stepped across it he left behind him . . . all those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often caused him to be justly criticized in civic life, and found on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness, the calm judgment, the towering heroism, which made him, perhaps, the most admired and best beloved of all Americans in Cuba.”

Before long, a bullet tore through Marshall’s spine. “He was suffering the most terrible agonies,” Davis recalled, yet he “was so much a soldier to duty that he continued writing his account of the fight until the fight was ended.” Doctors doubted Marshall would live. He suffered permanent paralysis and the amputation of one leg but survived to write the regimental history of the Rough Riders and to be presented with a medal for valor by Theodore Roosevelt. Davis, too, was honored with a medal for bravery under fire. In the midst of the ambush, the intrepid reporter had picked up a carbine and begun firing at the Spaniards. “If the men had been regulars I would have sat in the rear,” Davis explained to his family, “but I knew every other one of them, had played football, and all that sort of thing, with them, so I thought as an American I ought to help.” When the Spanish finally retreated, Roosevelt promised to make Davis a captain in his unit, informing the Associated Press that “no officer in his regiment . . . had ‘been of more help or shown more courage’ ” than Richard Harding Davis.

The Las Guásimas skirmish prepared Roosevelt for the decisive battle of the conflict the following week. Large Spanish forces were massed along the ridgeline of two large hills. The Rough Riders were ordered to march on Kettle Hill, while the regulars attacked San Juan Hill. With Roosevelt in the colonel’s customary position at the back of the column, the troops advanced slowly under a hail of bullets. Mounted on horseback, Roosevelt suddenly charged toward the front, rallying his men and propelling them onward. When he reached the head of the regiment, he was a short distance from the Spanish rifles. “No one who saw Roosevelt take that ride expected he would finish it alive,” Davis reported. “As the only mounted man, he was the most conspicuous object in the range of the rifle-pits. . . . It looked like foolhardiness, but, as a matter of fact, he set the pace with his horse and inspired his men.”

Watching Roosevelt “charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone,” Davis marveled, “made you feel that you would like to cheer. He wore on his sombrero a blue polka-dot handkerchief . . . which, as he advanced, floated out straight behind his head, like a guidon.” Roosevelt’s dauntless leadership, and the unit’s remarkable esprit de corps, galvanized the men to storm the hill with near-reckless abandon. The Spaniards were forced to retreat.

Jacob Riis was at his Long Island home when the morning paper blared the Rough Riders’ triumph. For days, he and his wife had rushed to get the paper, eager to confirm that their friend Roosevelt was alive and well. At last, on the Fourth of July, the anxiously awaited report arrived, detailing the successful charge under a hail of Spanish fire. “Up, up they went in the face of death,” the story read, “men dropping from the ranks at every step. The Rough Riders acted like veterans. It was an inspiring sight and an awful one. . . . Roosevelt sat erect on his horse, holding his sword and shouting for his men to follow him” until they gained the summit at last.

“In how many American homes was that splendid story read that morning with a thrill never quite to be got over,” mused Riis. Taking their cue from Davis’s account, the newspapers portrayed a battle in which Roosevelt “had single-handedly crushed the foe.” He quickly found himself the most popular man in the nation. The war burnished Davis’s reputation as well; critics reckoned his writings among the very best of the war. “Except for Roosevelt,” Davis’s biographer Arthur Lubow observes, “no one had a better war.” The Spanish surrendered thirteen days later. By the middle of August, four months after the war began, Roosevelt and his Rough Riders were on their way to a triumphal homecoming.

Jacob Riis was with Edith Roosevelt in Montauk, Long Island, when the ship bearing the Rough Riders came into shore. Although Edith had fully recovered from her operation, she had lived in constant anxiety, steeling herself against possible loss. “These dreadful days must be lived,” she told Corinne in June, “and whatever comes Theodore and I have had more happiness in eleven years than most people in long lives.” She understood that she must show strength “for the sake of the children,” resolutely assuring her husband, “I do not want you to miss me or think of me for it is all in a day’s work.” Never again, after her unfortunate efforts to dissuade him from an 1894 mayoral run, would Edith interfere in her husband’s career decisions. Only with his safe return could she acknowledge the terror she had suffered.

As the bedraggled troops marched down the pier—some limping, others on stretchers, a number stricken with yellow fever—reporters noted that Roosevelt “looked the picture of health,” the only man disembarking who “gave no evidence of having passed through the tortures of the Cuban campaign.” He “bubbled over with spirits,” the World observed. Asked how he felt, Roosevelt responded with characteristic verve: “I’m in a disgracefully healthy condition. I feel ashamed of myself when I look at the poor fellows I brought with me.” He momentarily fell silent, then added: “I’ve had a bully time and a bully fight. I feel as big and strong as a bull moose. I wish you all could have been with us.”

S. S. MCCLURE, WHO HAD identified Roosevelt as a man to watch more than a year before the battle at San Juan heights, was now especially eager to pursue an extended biographical piece on the returning hero. The first editor to commission an in-depth profile, McClure chose Ray Baker for the task.

Like Ida Tarbell, Baker had felt misgivings about the war, initially remaining hopeful that “the sober judgment” of the people would prevail over the yellow journals “to keep the nation from any bloodshed.” Before long he found himself swept up in the adventure of the war. “War excitement here runs a great deal higher than it does at any other place I’ve seen,” he reported to his father from New York. “Bulletins are displayed all over the city and the street before them is always filled with jostling crowds.” He clearly recollected “the thrill” when he was asked to write a series of war articles, including the character sketch of Theodore Roosevelt.

Baker had met Roosevelt briefly twice before, at the Hamilton Club in Chicago and again at Roosevelt’s Mulberry Street office in New York. “It was the personality of the man that chiefly attracted me,” he recalled. Never before had he encountered such vitality or such inimitable “concentration of purpose.” Entering Roosevelt’s large office in the police department as a previous visitor departed, Baker noted with astonishment that “in the few seconds that I took to reach his desk,” Roosevelt had picked up a book about the culture of Sioux Indian tribes and appeared totally engrossed in the work. “It is surprising,” Roosevelt explained, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.”

Researching the Roosevelt piece, Baker spent substantial time with his subject. Roosevelt invited him to the “roomy, comfortable house” at Sagamore Hill, where the host’s “prowess as a hunter” was abundantly evident “in the skins of bears and bison, and the splendid antlers of elk and deer.” More impressive to a man of Baker’s scholarly and artistic bent, the library was “rich” with works of history and literature, and the wide front veranda afforded “a view unsurpassed anywhere on Long Island Sound.” The two men spoke at length about Roosevelt’s childhood, his days in the legislature, his experiences in the Wild West, and the challenges he faced in the Civil Service Commission and police department. Roosevelt expressed his growing disgust for the predatory rich, “the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune.”

From Oyster Bay, Baker journeyed with Roosevelt to Camp Wikoff in Montauk, where the Rough Riders were still in quarantine to prevent a further outbreak of yellow fever. “I talked with a number of officers and troopers in Mr. Roosevelt’s regiment,” Baker wrote, “and I found their admiration for their colonel to be boundless. ‘Why, he knows every man in the regiment by name,’ said one. ‘He spent $5,000 of his own money at Santiago to give us better food and medicine.’ ”

The finished article profiled “a magnificent example of the American citizen of social position, means, and culture devoting himself to public affairs.” In every phase of Roosevelt’s life, Baker detected a “rugged, old-fashioned sense of duty,” the legacy of a civic-minded father who “had great strength and nobility of character, combined with a certain easy joyousness of disposition.” In Roosevelt, Baker discerned a “rare power of personal attraction,” a man possessed of “immense vitality and nervously active strength.” Writing to his father as he completed the piece, the journalist predicted that Roosevelt could well be “president of the United States within ten years.”

“I want to thank you for the article in ‘McClure’s,’ ” Roosevelt wrote Baker. “It has pleased me more than any other sketch of my life that has been written, and especially because of the way in which you speak of my father.” In the years ahead, the friendship between the politician and reporter would have significant consequences for progressive policy. “I was to write about him many times afterward,” Baker later reflected, “not always so uncritically.” Nevertheless, Roosevelt generally took the reporter’s criticisms in good stride. Personal loyalty was “one of his finest characteristics,” Baker observed. “Once a friend with him, always a friend, and a warm friend, too.”

In the months that followed, Baker was commissioned to write on a staggering array of subjects. McClure had an intuitive feel for “what was really interesting to people,” Baker recalled. And nothing fascinated the reading public more at the end of the nineteenth century than the spectacular “outpouring of marvelous new inventions and scientific wonders”—the automobile, the incandescent lightbulb, the moving picture, the radio, the phonograph. His peregrinations even took Baker on a voyage to the bottom of the sea, in the most amazing invention “since the days of Jonah”—a submarine boat. He visited automobile manufacturers to assess two competing vehicles: the electric car and the gasoline-powered car. The electric vehicle, Baker concluded, was much quieter, “simpler in construction and more easily managed.” Acknowledging that it “could run only a limited distance without recharging,” he envisioned a string of festive roadhouses where car owners could relax as their batteries charged.

McClure’s uncanny sense for “the new,” Baker believed, bordered on genius. No sooner had he got wind of an Italian inventor experimenting with wireless telegraphy than he dispatched Baker to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. There, Baker was among the first to witness Guglielmo Marconi’s historic reception of signals from across the Atlantic. Straightaway, Baker produced “the first fully verified account of the new invention and its revolutionary possibilities.” Informed that the world’s largest steamship was under construction by the Hamburg-American line, McClure sent Baker to Germany. There he remained for six months and completed twelve additional articles, including a long interview with the illustrious German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who was “one of the few thinkers of Europe who supported the theories set forth in ‘that extravagant book,’ the Origin of Species.”

Yet, although Baker continued to invest great effort in crafting thorough and polished articles, he was becoming unraveled and despondent. “My life was being ordered,” he felt, “not by myself, but by other people; not for my purposes, but for theirs.” His reputation was steadily growing, but the focus that gave meaning and clarity to his work had begun to elude him. “I have been spreading too much, trying to do the impossible,” he explained. “It seemed to me that I was no longer doing anything of any account. I was not more than half alive.” Broken in health and profoundly depressed, Baker decided to resign from McClure’s and move with his family to the countryside. There, he hoped to commence work on a serious novel that would tackle the struggle between capital and labor, an issue of vital interest since his first days as a reporter.

Baker’s colleagues at McClure’s fought hard to prevent his departure. Ida Tarbell repeatedly reminded him of McClure’s “affectionate interest” and warm feelings. “I cannot think for a moment of your severing your connection with our house,” John Phillips told him. “I believe that you can do better than you have ever done and I believe that we can help you to that end.” McClure raised his salary by a large margin, made the increase retroactive, and proposed that he take a long break with his wife and young family at the magazine’s expense. He encouraged Baker to recover himself fully, urging, “Do only what you yourself want to do, get well physically, and we’ll talk it over when you get back.” The generosity “quite bowled me over,” Baker wrote. “What good friends they were.”

Intent on getting “as far away as possible from New York,” Baker withdrew to the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona. “At first,” he recalled, “the desert wastes, the great bare mountains, the wild and rocky arroyos seemed forbidding and even hostile.” In time the rugged beauty of the desert exerted a restorative power. Riding for hours in the warm winter sun “across bare ridges and open spaces,” Baker enjoyed a “sense of freedom” unknown since his childhood. He delighted in the sight of jackrabbits bounding before him, small desert creatures darting into their holes, birds sheltering under the cacti. For the first few weeks, he deliberately refrained from writing, opting for more physical pursuits. “I rode or tramped to weariness every day. I ate prodigiously. I slept soundly.”

As his mind cleared and his strength returned, Baker tried to make sense of his breakdown. “I began again to write in my neglected notebooks, trying to understand what all the things I saw and thought and felt might really mean,” he recorded. There could be no return, he realized, to the pioneer days of his youth. The frontier had vanished in a teeming urban landscape marked by a fierce battle for survival, voracious competition, and a hurried pace of life. “This being true, what am I to do about it?” he mused. “What is my function as a writer in a crowded world,” he wondered, endeavoring to reconcile his artistic inclinations with popular demands—“that is, a writer not wishing merely to amuse people, but in the practice of his art, to make them see and think.”

Reviewing his own inclinations and abilities, Baker determined that he was “not a leader, not an organizer, not a preacher, not a businessman,” and probably not a novelist. “I was a reporter,” he reflected. “I had certain definite gifts for seeing, hearing, understanding, and of reporting afterward what I had seen and heard and, so far as might be, what I understood.” This realization hastened his return to McClure’s, where he focused his journalistic skills on the economic issues that interested him most intensely, employing his gifts “to help people understand more clearly and completely” how they might “live together peaceably.” True to his ambition, in the years that followed, Ray Baker would produce a series of landmark articles on labor and capital that would play a pivotal role in shaping public sentiment toward the development of a progressive public policy.

LINCOLN STEFFENS, WHO HAD NOT yet left the Commercial Advertiser for McClure’s, joined the throng of friends and reporters at Montauk to greet Roosevelt upon his return from Cuba. They buttonholed Roosevelt, Steffens reported, and “one by one they whispered to him: ‘You are the next Governor of New York.’ ” Drawing Steffens aside, Roosevelt sought his gauge of the situation. “Should I run?” Aware that the Colonel was debating aloud rather than posing a question, Steffens nevertheless offered a resounding “yes” and, furthermore, predicted victory.

Political conditions in New York were not so simple, as Roosevelt well understood. Without the support of Senator Thomas Collier Platt, head of the state Republican machine, he would never secure the Republican nomination. Although Platt detested reformers like Roosevelt, the powerful old boss was in a bind. The party’s image was seriously damaged in the aftermath of an exposé of corruption in the current Republican administration in Albany. The hero of San Juan was perhaps the antidote, the sole candidate who could save the party from defeat in the fall.

Steffens and his reformer friends in the Citizens’ Union and the Good Government Clubs believed Roosevelt could outwit the Republican machine by running as an independent. Two leading reformers made the pilgrimage to Montauk to offer Roosevelt the independent nomination. “Take an independent nomination, and the machine will have to support you,” they maintained. “You are of us, you belong to us. If you don’t, you are a ruined man.” With the machine weakened, reformers believed that this was the moment to crush Platt. “He’s down now,” they crowed. “One more blow will end him.” Steffens himself had long since forsworn allegiance to either party, convinced both were irredeemably dishonest. “I am not a Republican,” he told his father. “I am also not a Democrat. I am a mugwump or independent.” He believed that the independent vote represented the best hope for dismantling the system of governmental corruption, perpetuated by machine control of both the Democratic and Republican parties. If Roosevelt won as an independent, his victory would fundamentally alter the political culture of New York.

Roosevelt disputed Steffens’s analysis. Even in the unlikely event of victory without the organization’s endorsement, he would still have to work with the legislature in order to accomplish anything, and the legislature was absolutely controlled by the machine. “I’m a practical man,” he insisted. If the Republican nomination were offered to him, he confided to Steffens, he would happily accept and work to reconcile disillusioned independents with the Republican Party, proving that “good public service was good practical politics.” His goal was “to strengthen the party by bettering it,” to build a decent progressive record for the good of both the state and the Republican Party.

Never content until he had exhausted every angle of a matter, Steffens pressed Roosevelt for further elaboration. Would he approach Platt or wait for the boss to make an overture? “What’s the difference?” Roosevelt countered: “Can you see how it matters whether I call on Platt or Platt calls on me? I can’t.” He had small patience for points of etiquette: “I have to see the leaders. I want to, anyway. . . . I mean to go as far as I can with them. Of course I may have to break away and fight, and in that case I will fight hard, as they know.” To the question of whether he would initiate a meeting with Platt, Roosevelt replied confidently. “Yes I’ll see him now,” he told Steffens, “and I’ll see him after election; I’ll see him when I’m governor.”

Accordingly, on September 17, 1898, four days after the Rough Riders were mustered out of service, Roosevelt went to meet with Platt at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Emerging from their session, Platt announced that he would support Roosevelt for the nomination. Later the same day, a machine spokesman declared that “Roosevelt most positively will not accept the independent nomination” for governor. “Oh, what a howl there was then!” Steffens recalled. Reformers felt betrayed, certain that a deal had been struck, that in return for Platt’s endorsement, Roosevelt had agreed to reject the independent nomination. Rumors surfaced that the Colonel had bowed before the boss. One newspaper suggested that he had “received with becoming meekness the collar that marks him serf and regular, and that all talk of a people’s candidate is rubbish.” Democrats leaped at the opportunity: “Rough Rider Roosevelt made a charge up the backstairs of the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” the Democratic paper jeered, adding that on this occasion, unlike his famous charge up San Juan Hill, “he was taken prisoner.”

Platt relished being portrayed as “the master mind playing with the simple foolish soldier, who could lead a regiment into the jaws of death, but could not alone stand up against a domineering politician.” Asked what had transpired in the meeting, the old boss cryptically remarked that “the conversation was interesting and satisfactory.” Realizing that these “damning words” would convince independents that a sordid deal had indeed been struck, Roosevelt invited Steffens to his sister Corinne’s Madison Avenue house for a confidential conversation. “He was pacing, like a fighting man, up and down the dining room,” Steffens recalled. “His pride up, his jaw out, and his fist clenched,” Roosevelt insisted that no deals had been made, no concessions exacted outside a reasonable promise to consult regularly with the organization and consider their views concerning decisions and appointments. Repeatedly, he emphasized that not “one iota of his independence” had been yielded.

The following day, Commercial Advertiser readers perused “an inspired account” of the secret meeting with Platt. Steffens revealed that “no one asked or even suggested to the Rough Rider” that he reject the independent nomination, a decision which was the Colonel’s alone. Upon shaking hands with Platt, Steffens reported, Roosevelt made his position clear. “Before you say anything, Mr. Platt,” he declared, “let me say this: that if I accept the nomination of the Republican organization I will stand with the ticket. Any support that is not for the rest of the ticket I will not seek, and an independent nomination of myself without my colleagues I will refuse. Now I am ready to listen.” Roosevelt had concluded, Steffens explained, “that he would be unable to accomplish as much as he would wish unless he had a majority of the legislature. To insure that, he must do all in his power to discourage separate tickets that would divide the Republican vote for legislators.”

While Steffens’s account of the meeting satisfied some independent reformers, many who would naturally have been Roosevelt’s allies sulked on the sidelines and refused to help in the canvass. Grudgingly admitting that they would probably have to vote for him against Augustus Van Wyck, the Democratic candidate chosen by Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker, they remained disaffected. “It is hard,” they complained, “and we cannot advise others to follow our example.”

Encumbered by such grumbling, doubt, and rancor, the campaign got off to a cold start. “It looked as though defeat were ahead of Mr. Roosevelt,” Steffens reported, “and he was bitterly disappointed.” Unwilling to accept failure without putting forth his utmost effort, Roosevelt demanded a statewide push. Machine leaders, who customarily controlled the entire campaign, initially resisted his requests; candidates rarely took the stump on their own behalf. Amid troubling reports of widespread apathy in the final weeks, however, the bosses realized that “the Rough Rider personally would have to win it, for he alone would be able to warm the rank and file to enthusiasm. So Mr. Roosevelt was allowed to go his way.”

“He stumped the State up and down and across and zigzag,” Steffens wrote, “speaking by day from the end of his special train and at night at mass meetings, in the towns and cities.” Immense crowds greeted his train at every station along the way. “The fire and school bells rang,” the New York Times reported, “and the children were dismissed from the schools so that they could see the hero of San Juan. Cannon fired and a band played, while the people cheered.” Some spectators were disappointed, puzzled by their first impression of the Colonel. Newspaper accounts of his startling exploits in Cuba had led them to imagine a colossus, “seventeen feet high and his teeth a foot long.” Nevertheless, his old friend William O’ Neil reflected, when Roosevelt began to speak, his “presence was everything. It was electrical, magnetic.” Before he was done, listeners discovered “that indefinable ‘something’ which led men to follow him up the bullet-swept hill of San Juan.”

Jacob Riis joined Roosevelt as the train sped home from the western part of the state during the final night of the canvass. Over a belated midnight supper, they debated the “probable size” of the impending triumph or defeat. Riis predicted a Roosevelt victory margin of more than 100,000 votes. Roosevelt was less sanguine, believing that if he won, it would be by a mere “ten or fifteen thousand votes.” While they sat together at the table, a knock was heard on the door, “and in came the engineer, wiping his oily hands in his blouse, to shake hands and wish him luck.” Roosevelt rose, grabbing the engineer’s hands with eagerness. “I would rather have you come here,” he assured the man, “than have ten committees of distinguished citizens bring pledges of support.” Roosevelt, Riis noted with admiration, was “genuinely fond of railroad men, of skilled mechanics of any kind, but especially of the men who harness the iron steed and drive it with a steady eye and hand through the dangers of the night.” The engineer’s enthusiasm seemed to Riis “an omen of victory.”

When the votes were tallied the following day, Roosevelt’s forecast proved more accurate than Riis’s projection of sweeping victory. He had been elected governor by a relatively narrow margin of fewer than 18,000 votes.

As Steffens contemplated Roosevelt’s successful campaign, he recalled the yardstick set forth by his reform-minded political science professor at Berkeley. “Young gentlemen,” he had told the class, “you can get the measure of your country by watching how far Theodore Roosevelt goes in his public career.” An honest man trying to work in a dishonest system, Roosevelt would never survive the machine politicians, the professor mournfully predicted.