The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Author: Visit Amazon's Doris Kearns Goodwin Page | Language: English | ISBN:
141654786X | Format: EPUB
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Description
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: In an era when cooperation between the national media and the US government seems laughable, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s timely 100-year look backward explores the origins of the type of muckraking journalism that helped make America a better country. Focusing on the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, William Howard Taft--one-time colleagues and friends who later became sworn foes--Goodwin chronicles the birth of an activist press, which occurred when five of the nation’s best-ever journalists converged at McClure’s magazine and helped usher in the Progressive era. At times slow and overly meticulous, with a lot of backstory and historical minutiae, this is nonetheless a lush, lively, and surprisingly urgent story--a series of entwined stories, actually, with headstrong and irascible characters who had me pining for journalism’s earlier days. It’s a big book that cries out for a weekend in a cabin, a book to get fully lost in, to hole up with and ignore the modern world, to experience the days when newsmen and women were our heroes. --Neal Thompson
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In this hyperpartisan era, it is well to remember that a belief in an activist federal government that promoted both social and economic progress crossed party lines, as it did during the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. Goodwin, the acclaimed historian, repeatedly emphasizes that fact in her massive and masterful study of the friendship, and then the enmity, of two presidents who played major roles in that movement. Roosevelt, unsurprisingly, is portrayed by Goodwin as egotistical, bombastic, and determined to take on powerful special interests. He saw his secretary of war, Taft, as a friend and disciple. When Taft, as president, seemed to abandon the path of reform, Roosevelt saw it as both a political and a personal betrayal. Taft, sadly remembered by many as our fattest president, receives nuanced, sympathetic, but not particularly favorable treatment here. But this is also an examination of some of the great journalists who exposed societal ills and promoted the reforms that aimed to address them. Many of these muckrakers, including Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, worked for McClure’s magazine. This is a superb re-creation of a period when many politicians, journalists, and citizens of differing political affiliations viewed government as a force for public good. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This author’s new book has been greatly anticipated; much prepublication discussion has occurred; and reader interest will be intense. --Jay Freeman
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- Hardcover: 928 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (November 5, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 141654786X
- ISBN-13: 978-1416547860
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
A bully pulpit is a position sufficiently conspicuous to provide an opportunity to speak out and be listened to. Teddy Roosevelt coined this term and lived by it to set the direction of the 20th century with regard to role of the Presidency versus the capitalist elite. This wonderful book frames the man's character by presenting Roosevelt as a man making a stance by enforcing the Sherman Act of 1890 (an antitrust law) that was basically over looked while the big business bosses established their vast monopolies & power in the late 19th to earlier 20th century. Roosevelt a New York upper-class milieu confronts his fellow upper class rival J.P. Morgan by braking up his trans- ocean stream ship & railroad line thereby enforcing the Sherman Act. Typically monopolists caught bending this law were addressed behind closed door deals rather than on a national public stage. Roosevelt's and his people took the fight to Morgan & won a Supreme Court decision.
You will read about the friendship & common cause between two Republican comrades that wish to reform and clean up corruption in politics. William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt both emerge as Progressive Republicans and soon become friends. Taft came from a privileged back ground as well, but had a mild manner wishing to please family versus Teddy's driven ambition to confront and change America. Roosevelt brings Taft along as his Secretary of war then supports him as his successor.
Ms. Goodwin has cleverly developed the story of these two men by showing the path of Taft as President to push congress to reform big business through regulatory amendments and measures to enforce them, while Roosevelt who regretted not pursuing another term wishes to take action on child labor and women's work issues.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a very popular historian, whose last work Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln was widely acclaimed, and therefore I was expectant of another such achievement in this new book, but it just wasn't for me.
The research is extensive, the notes on primary sources exhaustive, the writing style is, as with all her work, excellent, but the book is too much. I can't help but think of a George Harrison song, Long Long Long.
The first one hundred fifty pages are bios of TR and Taft, and their families. There is nothing new here. There have been so many works on Roosevelt, and I felt that Edmund Morris covered his early years best in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Modern Library Paperbacks). While the information is good, it is too much.
The writing concerning the "golden age of journalism" is good and an important part of the story of our nation's reform from more than one hundred years ago.
The relationship between Taft and TR is the most interesting of the book, and that part moved quickly, and the differences in style and personality are nicely portrayed, but the inclusion of so many things from the journalism side just cluttered up the work. The book would have been less cumbersome and more interesting if the focus had been on the two men, with the journalism portion given only a supporting role.
In the end, the split between the two great men ushered Woodrow Wilson into the White House.
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