Welcome to the book show, A Celebration of Reading and Writers.
I'm Joe Donaue.
This is an off-the-shelf edition of the book show in partnership with Northshire Bookstore
in Saratoga Springs, New York and recorded before a live audience.
Though it's a surprise winning Arthur Doris Kern's Goodwin writes about America in the
late 1880s in her latest The Bullie Pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and
the Golden Age of Journalism.
If I was up a previous book on Abraham Lincoln, team of rivals.
The book is about the gilded age.
As Roosevelt used the bully pulpit of the presidency to put pressure on unchecked American
industry, Attackel's Roosevelt and his handpicked successor Taft, who together shook the foundations
of the Republican Party and steered it toward a new unexpectedly progressive direction.
But the bully pulpit also offers profiles of the women behind the presidency and the
journalists whose exposés of corruption who helped establish new federal regulations.
It is a great pleasure to welcome Doris Kern's Goodwin to this week's book show.
Wow, thank you.
What a pleasure to have you.
Thank you very much.
A delight to have you here.
You know, here's the problem with what you do.
You don't write enough.
When we get a book, we get 900 pages.
That's good.
That we like.
But in between, I assume you're going as fast as you can.
It does take a long time.
The problem always is that I choose presidents about whom so much has been written.
So I can't just write a biography of Teddy Roosevelt or a biography of Abraham Lincoln or
FDR.
I need to expand the cast of characters so that it can be a fresh approach, which means
that this one is like seven different characters, eight or nine.
Roosevelt was Eleanor and Roosevelt in the home front.
Lincoln was the whole team of rivals.
And it takes a long time to do these quintuple or sex double or octagonal, taco biographies.
But I love it because it means that you're in the middle of an era and by having more
voices, you can get contrast to the main leader and you get the women in there, which I always
care about.
So it takes me.
I'm very slow.
I've talked to David McCullough about this about there's a process of writing the book,
but then the process of thinking about the book.
And I would think the way you approach your books and finding that hook, especially with
subjects that have been written about so much, that that thinking process must take an
awful lot of the time.
Well, you know, it's interesting when I was writing the Lincoln book, I thought at first
I'd write about Avan Mary.
And it took me two years to realize that Mary couldn't carry the public side of the story,
the same way that Eleanor Roosevelt had.
I thought maybe with confidence I'd done Franklin and Eleanor, I could do Avan Mary.
And I didn't want to just write about their marriage.
I wanted to write his about his presidency in the Civil War.
So it was then that I began to look into soot and chase and stand and the team of rivals.
So that one, thinking, it took the wrong path before I got to the right path.
For some reason, on this book, early on, I got interested in Taft knowing very little
about him when I started, but knowing, of course, that he had succeeded Teddy and then ran
against him in 1912.
And I started reading the letters.
I always go to primary sources as much as I can.
Even in the early stage of resource, letters are the treasure for a biographer.
I don't know what's going to happen 200 years from now.
We'll have so much stuff about us.
We'll see us in three dimension.
We'll know what we walked and looked like and talked.
But we won't have that handwritten letter written at the end of a day or a diary.
And so after those 400 letters between the two, I realized, oh my God, they had a real
friendship so that the rupture was more heartbreaking.
And then eventually, when I realized that the difference between the two in terms of leadership
had to do with Teddy's being able to use the bully pulpit, love the press, love the job,
Taft being an extraordinarily good man, didn't love the job, didn't know how to use the press,
didn't understand the bully pulpit.
That's when the journalists became big characters in the book.
The parallels, of course, are not explicit in the narrative of the book, but obviously
they're there.
And how conscious are you of those as you're writing?
Well, it's interesting.
People tease me that somehow the books that I write have present day application.
For example, when Obama put Hillary Clinton into Secretary of State, just as Lincoln had
put suiting, I must have been thinking about a team of writers.
When I started the book, I didn't even know who Obama was.
When I started the Lincoln book, it's just that my book takes so long that somehow history
cycles back.
So in this case, I'm not sure even that seven years ago, it was as clear that the gap
between the rich and the poor would be such a defining issue as it has become and what
it clearly was at the turn of the 20th century.
I mean, what makes the two eras, I think, parallel is that what produced the economic turmoil
at the turn of the 20th century was a reaction to the industrial age.
You had a whole change in the economy.
Before that, you had people living mostly on farms.
Now they were coming to the cities.
You had millionaires who were suddenly being created by these huge corporations that were
swallowing up little businesses and you had the monopolies growing.
You had ordinary people squeezed and you had lots of labor strife and a real feeling that
the country was falling apart.
And I think the digital revolution, the technological revolution and the modern day has produced
some of those same strains in terms of big companies that merge and acquisition, if that's
the word, acquisition and have acquisitions and a feeling that ordinary people are being
squeezed in the way that they were not maybe post World War II period.
So there does feel a similarity.
I think the funniest similarity, though, is I was reading at the turn of the 20th century,
there was a whole rise of nervous disorders in the country because the pace of life was
quickening so much.
The telegram replacing the letter, people moving to the city with the sounds of city not
being with much solace, the same sounds of the country and local newspapers having these
horrible stories from all around the world.
Then you think of today and the pace of life as quick and a thousandfold.
So I suspect we're living in the time of nervous disorders again.
What brought you specifically to this age of progressive politics?
I think I'm always drawn to the eras where there is a public who is active in concerning
themselves with bringing America closer to its ancient ideals.
I mean, certainly the Civil War was one of those eras when they were fighting to end the
curse of slavery from this land.
And World War II, another extraordinary decade.
When FDR talks about sub-generations, have a rendezvous with destiny, if I'm going to
live in another era, I'd rather live in an era when the country is really mobilized
to care about public life.
And similarly, the progressive era has always fascinated because it wasn't just the journalists,
it wasn't just Teddy Roosevelt, the churches, the settlement house workers, academic universities,
they were all trying to figure out how do we make better what's happening in our country.
If I have to live in one of those eras, I'd much rather live in that kind of an era rather
than the 20s or the 70s or the 80s, or maybe even now when we seem so paralyzed to know
what to do about our country's ills.
Let me ask you this question as a historian with what you just said in mind and talking
about the parallels.
And that is, I guess there's two ways that we can look at it, which is one, these things
are cyclical or two, we don't learn from our mistakes.
Yeah, one really wishes that what history is in my judgment is the struggles and triumphs
of the people who went before us, we have to hope we can learn from them.
And when I think back to the fact that what I really think of myself as a storyteller
and think of the days before print when people would sit around and there'd be oral storytelling
around a fire and the wisdom and counsel of one generation would be passed down to the next.
And you really have to hope that if you read history, there are things you can learn from
it or else we're all on our own and it's crazy.
We learn from our parents, we learn from our grandparents, so we should be able to learn
from the people who dealt with problems before.
And in this particular instance, I mean what Theodore Roosevelt understood, as you said
at the very beginning, was that unless his Republican party began to address the problems
of the industrial age, the fact that workers didn't have any compensation, the fact that
children and women were being exploited in the factories, that there were unsanitary conditions,
that there were drugs flooding the market without any kind of regulation and that these
big companies were swallowing up these little companies, that the party itself would fester.
And indeed he said the country would fester and be troubled if indeed there were two parties,
one representing the rich and the other representing the poor people and that somehow the country
had to pull together.
And when I think still about the paralysis in Washington right now and the inability
to get something done and one of my guys, I think of them as my guys because I've lived
with them for so long, but Sam McClaur, the head of this famous magazine, in the end he
said there's no one left but all of us.
And when I think about what's wrong with Washington right now, I'm convinced that it's the money
that's the poison in the system, the amount of time these characters spend, raising funds,
dialing people and then being dependent on the special interests.
In fact, Teddy coined the phrase special interests and he understood that the only way to get
at the special interest then that had control of the government was to use the bully pulpit,
another term, he was great at slogans.
I mean he even gave Maxwell House the slogan good to the very last drop.
But speak softly, carry a big stick, special interests, bully pulpit meaning that the
president has a platform that he can use to educate the country and to tell people
in his judgment what's right and what's wrong, that's the pulpit size of it, side of it.
And the question today is, is the bully pulpit as powerful as it once was?
And I worry that it itself is not because there's so many people now as their own little
bully pulpit, before the president even finishes a speech, the pundits are out there, the media
is divided, you might only be listening to the cable network you like to listen to the
president's speech so you'll hear the criticism or the praise of it before it finishes.
And then even if you listen, probably breaking news comes in 10 minutes later and our attention
is so distracted, it's harder to have that common conversation that Teddy Roosevelt was
able to have during his time when he talked about the trust or the corruption or the need
for legislation to soften industrialism.
With the subtitle of the book being the golden age of journalism, you focus on McClaurs.
What was it about McClaurs that you wanted to focus on?
Because it would seem to me that Ida Tarbelle would be hard to ignore.
I love Ida Tarbelle.
I mean, here's, there are four journalists at McClaurs who are legendary still.
Ida Tarbelle, Ray Standard Baker, William Allen White and Lincoln Stephens.
And they are probably the best journalists in one place at one time ever in the history
of journalism.
But Ida Tarbelle especially fascinates me because here's a woman growing up in her age
where at the time when she's 14 years old, she decides and prays to God, never let me take
a husband because she worries that she will never have a chance to exercise her talents
if she gets married in that age.
And she'd seen her mother who had once been a teacher who wanted to go on to higher education.
And her father who owned an independent oil company in Northwestern Pennsylvania and
was doing really well was then sabotaged by John D. Rockefeller.
And so the mother had to take care of the family, their economic situation failed.
And she becomes the only woman at Allegheny College in her freshman class.
Eventually becomes a writer.
And when she gets to McClaurs finally, he tells her, I want you to write about the trusts,
the monopoly.
But Teddy Wells about and McClaur both understood that it was too abstract.
He was going to understand what was wrong with these growing companies.
So he said, you must write about the mother of trusts, standard oil.
And at first she was nervous about it because she was afraid she'd be biased.
But she was such a good reporter and historian that she went to both sides of the question.
But eventually she made people understand by doing a biography of John D. Rockefeller that
he had used unfair and illegal means to gain what he had.
And she was then considered the Joan of Arc.
She took two years to research her study.
It was 20,000, 30,000 words long, each article for an entire year.
Where would that ever happen today?
People were so excited about what she was writing that they demanded that something be done
about the monopolies.
In fact, it was a funny article in the paper where somebody who said John D. Rockefeller
was willing to pay anybody an amount of money to marry her and take her on a trip around
the world.
Wish she could never come back.
But how can you resist that kind of a person who was willing to sacrifice what might have
been for her a happy family because she thought at that time that women didn't have the
choice easily to have both a career and a family?
In writing about the relationship between Taft and Roosevelt, how much did you know going
in about the strength of the relationship and ultimately what essentially is a really
bad breakup?
I must say I knew so little about it.
And I could tell when I started reading the letters, which started really when they
were in their early 30s, Taft was solicitor General Teddy was commissioner of civil service,
and they somehow felt allied in part because they were both young reformers, even then
in the Republican Party against the corruption and the political bosses in the cities.
And they started writing to each other, having lunches, having dinners together, even when
Taft went off to the Philippines as governor general and Teddy was vice president and then
president.
They continued this kind of dialogue.
And then the more I read about, not just the letters, but about the experience of the
two of them when Taft came to be in Teddy's cabinet, he was the most important person in
his cabinet.
Teddy would go off on these weak long trips, month long sometimes hunting trips, getting
bare.
I mean, it's inconceivable to think about today.
And then whistle stop tours around the country, which was great.
The train was, it's not just romantic, but these presidents who used the train like Harry
Truman later did, they get to the people.
They're at village stations.
They're waving along the way.
This one moment where Teddy is waving frantically at a group of people and he says to a friend,
it seemed like a really cold reception until he realized it was a herd of cows that he
was waving.
He just waved and waved and waved.
So when he would go on these trips, reporters would say to him, well, what's going to happen
while you're gone?
And he'd say, oh, don't worry, Taft is sitting on the lid.
And then when he decided that he wasn't going to run again in no way, he could have run
again.
There was no legal limit against the two terms, but he had made this terrible promise
as he later said he would have cut out his wrist and his tongue not to have said it,
that he thought seven and a half years which he would have served from McKinley's assassination
to 1908 was the two term tradition.
And so he chose hand picked Taft to be a successor, ran his campaign, constantly giving him advice.
Don't just answer William's Jennings Bryan, attack him.
Hit him hard.
Smile always you beloved guy.
I know what you're like when you smile.
The only thing he probably didn't do with Taft was to give him his song, which was get
on a raft with Taft, which would be a very dangerous thing to do right there.
But anyway, then he wins the election and he's so excited that Taft has won.
And then he goes off to Africa to give him space and he comes back and he hears from his
progressive friends that Taft has betrayed him.
It was not really that.
It was just that Taft didn't know how to bring the sides of the Republican Party together.
It was rupturing even with Teddy being there, it would have been harder.
And I think also Teddy just itched to get back into public life.
He loved being president.
He loved being in the center of things.
His daughter, Alice once said, he really wanted to be the bride at the wedding and the baby
at the baptism and the corpse at the funeral.
So anyway, he gets back in the race and then it's a brutal race, that race in 1912 when
they both run against each other for the nomination.
And it comes to Taft and his personality and even Roosevelt talks about him being lovable
and amiable and jovial.
And in reading the book, you get an idea that a question, which is, is it possible to be
too nice to be president?
I think there's something to that.
I mean, I think that he had loyalty, for example, to one of his cabinet officers who he
should have let go earlier, who had been seen as anti-conservationist, even though it was
more complicated than that.
But he said, I would feel like a skunk or something.
I don't think that's the right word.
I forget what is a trouble when these books take seven years.
You don't even remember what you said five years ago.
But anyway, he said, I'd feel like a skunk if I let him go.
So he kept him on too long.
And there is a certain sense in which he always wanted to be a judge.
And being a judge was much more suited for his temperament because you could deliberate
on your decisions long.
He was very slow at coming to decisions.
In fact, he put things off as a procrastinator.
He envied that Teddy always did things right away.
In fact, I've tried to learn from Teddy Roosevelt because when he had to do a speech or an article,
he would do it right away.
So he wouldn't worry about it.
Think of how often we worry about the things that we haven't done.
And you just, the amount of time you spend worrying about what you should have done two
weeks ago would be a lot of gain time.
But tap procrastinated.
So he waited too long for his speeches.
And then they weren't right.
And he knew how to speak as a judge rather than a politician.
And he just didn't understand the press.
I mean, as a judicial person, you didn't have to deal with the press.
Finally, finally, he gets his life's desire when he becomes Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court in the last decade of his life.
I was so happy for him.
And he said it was the happiest day of his life.
And we can talk maybe about the women because the reason he took that road toward politics
rather than just sharing had a lot to do with his wife, Nelly.
And the wives, both wives, play very large roles in the book.
And are very much reflective of their husbands.
But there's a similarity between the two as well.
Yeah.
What really interested me about the two women is that they were both absolutely indispensable
to their husbands and had really loving and strong marriages.
But they each had a very different attitude toward what they wanted for themselves.
Edith Roosevelt had come from a wealthy family and her father then lost his shipping business
and became an alcoholic.
They lived right near Teddy Roosevelt's mansion.
So she and Teddy were friends from the time they were little kids.
In fact, when he went off to Europe for a year-long trip in 11, he was crying at leaving
eight-year-old Edith behind.
They danced together at Cattillians.
They went sailing together in the summer.
She was best friends with his sister.
And even when he went to Harvard, he brought her up as his girlfriend.
Then something happened after his sophomore year at their summer house.
They had an argument and a break.
And he said it was a break in our intimate relations.
And then he went back to Harvard in his junior year and fell in love at first sight with
a Boston businessman's daughter, Alice Lee, and married her right after he graduated
devastating for Edith.
But she put on a good face as she had had to do before when her own family's fortune was
falling apart.
And then Alice, he comes up to the state legislatures up here with Alice.
And then she gets it goes into childbirth and dies two days after giving birth to their
first child.
And then he goes to the badlands in great depression, thinking he'll never marry again.
The light has gone out of his life.
But he begins to get out of the depression through the love of the open spaces, where in
some ways he worked 12 hours a day as a ranch hand.
And somehow he decided that he could come back to the east coast again and he finds Edith
again and they have this long, joyous marriage.
But because of the disordered family situation she had, she wanted nothing more than to give
him a family.
She didn't care about being a politician's wife.
All she wanted was to give him a sanctuary and a still point for his incredibly manic
energy, which is exactly what he needed.
On the contrary, Nelly Heron Taft had grown up as an adolescent in Cincinnati, so much wanting
to do something with her life.
Her father sent her brothers to Harvard and Yale, but not her.
And she wanted to get on for higher education, but she couldn't, but she became a teacher.
And she vowed, like I did, that she would never marry until she meets Will Taft, who promises
her that he will be and she will be his partner.
So she's the one who loved politics from the time she was little.
At those big turning points in his life, she persuaded him that he really could be a politician.
And he did really well at every stage along the way until he reached the presidency.
And I'm not at all convinced that the real thing that happened to him was not just his temperamental
unsuitability for that number one position.
Nelly had a devastating stroke only two months after his presidency began.
She was doing great as First Lady.
In fact, there was a New York Times article saying she was the most activist First Lady ever.
She cared about working women.
She brought the cherry trees to Washington.
She created free concerts in a free municipal park that she created.
And then they won a presidential yacht.
She fainted, collapsed.
She had a stroke.
She eventually was able to walk again, but she could never talk in connected sentences again.
And he spent hours with her just teaching her to say,
glad you are here or happy to be with you so she could be at the receptions with him.
And the country never knew how bad this stroke was.
And the amount of time they said he looked like a stricken animal that he spent with this woman.
He loved so much who could never be his partner again,
could never strategize with him again, took him down a different path in his presidency than he might not have gone.
Did it have an effect on Roosevelt and his relationship with Taft, do you think?
It did in a peculiar way.
And this is one of those things when you, with these people, you want to shake them and say,
don't you understand what's happening?
So for example, Teddy is off in Africa and Edith and her children are not invited very often to the White House.
And they blame Nelly and they blame Taft because they didn't know the extent,
the country didn't know how bad things were for her.
So they feel they've been slighted.
They write to Teddy in Africa and say, we haven't been invited to a lot of things.
He's carrying that anger back.
And it's the same way I remember when I was writing Eleanor and Franklin and my kids used to hear me in my room saying,
Eleanor, just forget that affair he had so many years ago.
He loves you or Franklin, just be nicer.
She's a little sensitive sometimes.
Well, that's the way I just wanted to say, Teddy, don't you understand?
And finally, Taft told him about how deep the thing was.
But by then the hurt and the anger had begun to develop.
When the Lincoln film came out, you were on our show and we talked.
And one of the things we discussed was how long Lincoln stayed with you after the book was done.
Are these characters still very much with you?
Oh, there's no question.
I mean, if you've lived with them and I really do wake up with them in the morning, go to bed with them at night.
That's why I could never write about somebody that I didn't fundamentally feel respect and affection for.
Of course, they're going to have parts of their lives that you're disappointed in or even get angry with as every human being.
But I have to feel that overwhelming sense of respect and affection to start.
And that means it's hard to let them go.
I remember when I moved my books about Franklin and Eleanor from my study to make room for Lincoln.
I felt like I was betraying Franklin somehow.
And then I had to move Lincoln away.
Well, actually had to build, we had to build in our, what was a three car garage library to make room for the Lincoln books.
And then now I have to start, you know, thinking about Taft and Teddy and Taft instead of Lincoln.
I sometimes think that it's the best profession in the world to live with these dead presidents.
The only problem is that in the afterlife there's going to be a panel of all the presidents that I've ever studied.
And every single one is going to tell me every single thing I got wrong about them.
And the first person to scream out will be Lyndon Johnson saying,
how come that damn book on the Kennedys was twice as long as the book you wrote about me?
So...
Doris Kerns, Goodwin's latest is the bully pulpit.
Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, in the golden age of journalism.
It is published by Simon and Schuster.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show.
You can email us at book at wamc.org.
And you can listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org.
Sarah Liduke produces our program.
And this off the shelf edition was recorded in Saratoga Springs, New York,
and partnership with Northshire, bookstore.
Northshire.com.
Book Marcus for next week, and thanks for listening for the book show.
I'm Joe Donnier.
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